Seabrat's WoW Blog

Ding Dong the King is Dead!

2010-11-14T12:30:00.005-05:00

That's right; the Red Devils snuffed the Lich King! Actually, this was our second kill - the first having occurred while I was on vacation. We had cleared up to LK each week since that first kill, but either failed to down him, or never managed to get another group together. This time, all the planets were properly aligned and we assembled a group with the sole intent of killing the Lich King.

It wasn't a one-shot, not at all. But it was very impressive and inspiring to see each of our attempts go significantly better as our team pulled together and finally executed a perfect kill! I am confident that the Red Devils will continue into Cataclysm as a successful raiding guild.

On a more personal note, I managed to achieve 100,000 kills just before the release of Patch 4.0! This was a milestone in my PvP career and as it turns out, a very timely one. Patch 4.0 has not been kind to hunters in terms of PvP. While hunters have not generally been a feared class since "vanilla" WoW, this latest version has made us extraordinarily easy to kill. The switch from large mana pools to the much smaller focus with its very limited regeneration has rendered us toothless in PvP. Blizzard seems to be confident that balance will be restored with our new abilities at the 85 level cap, but they have been so wrong so often that we hunters are highly skeptical. Most posts on the current beta seem to confirm we have good reason to be. Perhaps it is time to dust off my druid and learn to play all over again?

Just Another Night in ICC

2010-05-05T14:37:00.010-04:00

Tuesday - raids reset and the Red Devils actually show up for the 25-man raid! Not by a huge margin this time, we only had a couple of extra players in our wait list tonight. We decided not to extend last week's lockout and started another fresh run this week. Other than a minor trash problem at the onset, you would have actually thought we knew what we were doing. Our hit list included Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide (in spite of my premature pull) and the Blood Prince Council… all one shot!

Then we took on Blood Queen Lana'thel and things went south in a hurry. We made a couple of half-assed attempts, but chaos was rampant. Tethered players neglected to run together, purple poopers ran through the raid and our carefully planned bite order was soon dropped in favor of pure panic and mind controlled players. This boss is gonna' take us a while to bring down in 25-man.

So, after two wipes we decided to go free Valithria Dreamwalker. Snyped and I were assigned to kite duty on Blistering Zombies (as usual), with Snyped assigned to the left side and me to the right. I was a little surprised to find him next to me as I was busily dragging my zombie out of the raid for execution, but that happens sometimes when we have to kite a long way before the zombie explodes. Odd that he didn't move back though… hey, why is he staying over here?? Oopsie, there goes our tank… and our healers… yikes - rot worms are on me! And… we wipe.

As we were running back, I whispered to Snyped, "You were on the wrong side!"
"No I wasn't"
"Yes you were, you were supposed to be on the left side."
"No I wasn't"

Hmmm… this was getting me nowhere, as usual. As we prepared for our second attempt, I asked our raid leader to clarify the kiting assignments. "Snyped on the left, Seabrat on the right" replied Xoroth. The next whisper I got from Snyped… "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" This is the respect I get as the raid officer - and from my very own "wingman" no less! At any rate, Snyped actually did the kiting on his "other" left that time, and we successfully set Dreamwalker free once again! It's always nice to end a raid with a win.

The Red Devils have had a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday raid schedule for quite a while now. We've also been plagued with poor attendance on every night except Tuesday. Over the past ten days or so, I conducted a poll of all our raiding members to establish what their availability would normally be for each night of the week. Based on the results of that poll, we are changing our raid nights to Tuesday and Wednesday, and dropping Thursdays and Sundays from our schedule. We hope that this change will encourage attendance on Wednesday and that back-to-back nights will provide better progression.

You can bet that I will be looking at attendance to see if people are showing up when they said they would, just like the famous Geico money eyes!

Putricide Goes DOWN!

2010-05-04T15:19:00.002-04:00

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Well, we finally managed to put the old Professor down in 25-man. And all it took was an increase in the ICC raid buff to 15%! No matter, I’ll take it any way we can get it!

We were hot that night and cleared both wings with only one wipe each on Dreamwalker and Putricide. Nice job, Red Devils!

Oh, Oh Dream Weaver…

2010-04-22T15:24:00.003-04:00

Holy smoke, it’s been two months since my last post! In that time, the Red Devils have made precious little progress in 25-man ICC. It took us a month to get past the Blood Prince Council, but the real problem has been attendance. Essentially everyone shows up for Tuesday’s raid and we have been starting fresh each week. By the time we get past Festergut and Rotface, our time is up for the night and very few show up for the rest of the week. As a result, we wind up running one or two 10-man groups and these have been much more successful in terms of progression. At least two groups are now working on the Lich King on a regular basis.

So, this week, we decided not to start fresh, reset the lock-out timer and picked up where we left off last week. We ran up and one-shot Festergut, Rotface, skipped Professor Putricide, took out the Blood Prince Council, and then focused on freeing Valithria Dreamwalker and succeeded on our first attempt!

Flush with confidence and full of ourselves having gone wipe-free for the night, we turned our attention back to Putricide. Apparently, our egos were writing checks we couldn’t cash and we proceeded to wipe nine times trying to off the old professor. We got close, by our standards, and hammered him down to 8% on several attempts. The raid damage was just too great for our healers to overcome and we called it a night.

I don’t know if we will continue the raid again next week (more progression), or start fresh (more gear). Many of our raiders are in dire need of the sanctification tokens that drop from Deathbringer Saurfang and he’s on farm status. We haven’t been as strict about those tokens as we have been with similar items in the past. As a result some players have three or more items from the sanctified set, while others of the same class have none. As the raid officer and loot master, this strikes me as a problem for the raid’s performance and unfair to some of our less fortunate raiders.

Bad News, Everyone - Putricide Didn't Make It!

2010-02-24T22:36:00.003-05:00

I know, I know... I said I prefer to write about our 25-man exploits, but this is just too good. The Red Devils put together an "elite" 10-man strike force and headed into ICC. We one shot everything on our way to Putricide. Ok, we wiped a few times on the old Professor, but we DID IT! We downed Putricide in 10-man!

Now, there are a lot of guilds for which this would be no big deal. But, for us, this was epic - congratulations, Red Devils!

The guilty party members are as follows (will each of you please stand as your name is called?):

Aniraa (holy priest and Guild Leader)
Azurstorm (nasty, stinky ol' rogue - did I mention he's a rogue?)
Bohb (warlock and sacrificial gnome)
Damac (she-man extraorinaire and dps leader)
Deathbringyr (deathknight tank and abom master)
Jellopuddin (deathknight tank and Putricide distracter)
Nyyx (tree-of-life druid and rezzer of the dead)
Seabrat (scrubby old SV hunter)
Snyped (even scrubbier MM hunter, though not so old)
Unkldiesel (dps warrior of smiting power)

Festergut and Rotface in Same Night!

2010-02-24T08:39:00.004-05:00

Good grief, it's been nearly two months since my last post! Unfortunately, that's because it's taken us that long to progress any further in ICC-25. Oh, we've done a little better in our 10-mans, but I prefer to write about the Red Devils exploits in 25-man instances.

In 10-mans, we've gotten Putricide as low as 10% and spent a few hours wiping on Blood Queen Latifah, but we can pretty regularly make it that far. In the 25-man version however... ohhh damn ... 25-man has been slow, slow, slow! That changed for us last night, when we marched in and one-shot everything up to, and including, Festergut!

After a short time-out for the official guild picture with Uncle Fester, we distributed the loot and raced over to see Rotface.

I was pretty jazzed, and was even planning on playing tag with the Professor, but Rotface wasn't quite the pushover for us that his brother Fester had been. And once our momentum was broken, it took us quite a few tries before we managed to put Rotface on the floor.

We did finally succeed, but it took up all our time for the night and we had to say goodbye without looking in on the Professor. We do plan to get back to him tonight, but Wednesdays often seem to present us with attendance problems.

Deathbringer Saurfang Brought to Justice!

2010-01-04T17:12:00.002-05:00

Woohoo, 2010 opened with a big bang for the Red Devils as we easily put Deathbringer Saurfang down for the count! We started with our first attempt as we had before, tanking him on the portal and attempting to knock the bloodbeasts off the ledge. This time, the skybreaker had despawned leaving open space where it once stood and we were hopeful our knockbacks would push them into open air. This turned out not to be the case, and the beasts hit an invisible wall allowing them to return to battle.

We abandoned that strategy on our second attempt, and tanked Saurfang on the steps where he spawns. This provided a lot more room for us to spread out and avoid chaining the blood novas. I also felt like we hunters had more room to kite them around our frost traps. We made sure one hunter on each side had assist so that the following macro allowed for focus fire on a specific target:

/cleartarget
/targetexact Blood Beast
/stopmacro [noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 4);
/cast Distracting Shot
/y Nuke {Triangle}!

The 4 is the raid symbol, just change it to get a different symbol (don’t forget to change the yell):
1 = {Star}, 2 = {Circle}, 3 = {Diamond}, 4 = {Triangle}, 5 = {Moon}, 6 = {Square}, 7 = {Cross}, 8 = {Skull}

If the other ranged dps on each side assist the marking hunter, those bloodbeasts go down fast, allowing everyone to get back on Saurfang as quickly as possible. It’s a dps race, so that’s very important. Once we got the assist part down pat, Saurfang was killed easily.

There was not a lot of loot in the chest, one mail belt with spellpower, and two Protector’s Mark of Sanctification (Warrior, Hunter and Shaman classes). Those that have been saving their Frost Emblems are drooling over the Tier 10 armor! As a hunter, I am not all that excited about the tier bonuses and chose to pick up some of the non-tier items first. I already have the Longstrider’s Vest (chest) and am looking closely at the Logsplitters (gloves) for my next upgrade.

This week, another wing of the Icecrown Citadel (The Plagueworks) is rumored to open up with three new bosses: Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide. Now I have heard all kinds of crazy rumors, like an average dps of 7,500 being needed to down Festergut. Taken out of context, that number means virtually nothing, and without some kind of serious dps buff I doubt many raiders can consistently hit that level of damage. But - it’s a big number that the ‘leet like to spout off simply for its intimidation factor.

Looking Back at 2009!

2009-12-31T18:40:00.010-05:00

Once again, the intrepid Red Devils have concluded another successful year of raiding! 2009 was a year of change, particularly for hunters. The Beastmaster spec was nerfed into oblivion and Survival became “the” spec for raiding hunters. We went from a shot rotation to a shot priority and managing cooldowns became the new skill to master.

The Red Devils successfully cleared Naxx, then eagerly jumped into the new raid content in Ulduar, the Argent Tournament and finally into Ice Crown.

The hunter community lost what I believe was our greatest asset, BRK . In a desperate bid to save his marriage and family, he quit WoW (cold turkey). So loved was BRK that Blizzard chose to immortalize him with an epic gun from Heroic 25-man ToC, the BRK-1000.

I found myself stalked by a hacker for a while, but was finally able to secure my account and get my grubby hunter mitts on an authenticator (every WoW player should have one!).

I even managed to cut the power to my house (again) and this time it was winter instead of summer. At least I got to use a chainsaw to do it! [insert man-like grunts here]

But enough of memory lane and on to our final raid of 2009, the Ice Crown Citadel! After a rather frustrating Tuesday night trying to down Marrowgar with a less than ideal group, it was decided to make a more serious attempt. This would require us to be more selective in our invites, even going so far as to leave some of our lower performing members on the bench in favor of higher performance non-guild players. Fortunately (surprisingly?) we actually had enough acceptable level guildies online and only pugged one spot. It was a night and day difference from the previous night. We one-shot Marrowgar and then downed Lady Deathwhisper for the first time in 25-man!

The gunship battle was a piece of cake, though it did get a bit hectic due to the lack of experience with the fight by some of the members. Then we found ourselves facing Deathbringer Saurfang. The raid leader decided to try a new strategy, tanking Saurfang on top of the portal near the ship. The idea was to use knockbacks on the Bloodbeasts when they spawned. Unfortunately, we had precious few players with any kind of knockback ability and we found ourselves struggling to control the Bloodbeasts. I observed several occasions where one of the critters would instantly zip right over the frost traps directly to a player (possibly a LOS bug) resulting in a chaotic scramble to get the damn thing under control. To make things worse, the ammo switching addon I use was malfunctioning and kept trying to drop the ammo with each switch. This seriously hampered my ability to turn and kite, an essential element of this fight for hunters.

We ended up making three attempts (not counting several resets when we ran back to the gunship) before it got late and we had to quit for the night. Nonetheless, I count the night as a huge success with three of four bosses down in the first wing of Ice Crown and a nice conclusion to the Red Devils 2009 raiding season!

Lord Marrowgar De-Boned by Red Devils!

2009-12-16T16:11:00.004-05:00

Uh-rah! The Red Devils have downed the first boss in the new raid instance; The Ice Crown Citadel! Lord Marrowgar is a four-headed, bony freak standing guard just past the entrance to the Citadel. Clearing trash just to reach him is a major pain, but Marrowgar himself spawns no adds.

He does, however, spit out cold blue flames at ranged players and impales them on a huge bone spike. You better hope your buddies aren’t pissed at you, because if you get boned they have to help you out, pronto! Then, just to make it interesting, he will yell out “Bone Storm!” and start whirling about chasing random players and spawning four more cold blue flame trails. As always in WoW, do NOT stand in fire, regardless of what color it may be! Fire is bad, mmkay?

Once Marrowgar gets all tuckered out from his bone storm, he seems to forget who he was mad at before and will attack whoever hits him first. Unless you are a tank, you might want to lay off him a little while until one of your tanks can get his attention again. The fight will resume as before, with cold flames and bone spikes, followed by another bone storm fit of rage. Keep going, make sure you de-bone your buddies and stay outta’ the fire. It won’t be too long before your happy little group of raiders will be picking through his pile of collapsed bones and finding some phat loot!

New Toys? For Me?

2009-11-19T14:02:00.001-05:00

I wouldn’t go so far as to say our attendance problems are over, but the Red Devils have managed to successfully acquire several of the more hardcore casual (casual hardcore?) raid members from another guild, Upper Echelon! Like most guilds, UE was having difficulty putting together a full raid group. One of our officers (Hilfer) approached them with the idea of a merger/acquisition and instead of being rebuffed, the idea was received warmly. We put together a test run of Ulduar on Sunday, followed by a successful Ony/ToC/Vault clear on Tuesday. Everyone was impressed with the performance of the UE members and the guild invites were issued!

This made a busy night for me, putting together the raid report, issuing invites and updating the guild records for the new members. Some of the new members from UE have a LOT of alts (all alts are welcome!) and the Red Devils keeps the name of the main in the guild note for each member. Everyone joins as an “Alt” rank, and mains are promoted to “Friend”. Promotions are done roughly every two weeks and are based on raid attendance over the past 60 days. Given the scarcity of raids in our recent history, our new members should quickly climb in rank as we raid more frequently now!

I use the addon “Chatter” which displays the name of the main character for alts in the chat window. This really helps me keep track of who’s who! With all the new members, that’s even more important now than ever.

Musings on Modern WoW Life...

2009-11-13T13:46:00.007-05:00

Ok, I know, I know… this blog has been comatose for weeks. It’s not that the Red Devils haven’t done anything; it’s just that we haven’t done anything new. Well, ok – we did clear the newly updated Onyxia, but I can’t say it was much of a challenge for us.

At this point we are able to clear Vault, Onyxia and ToC all in one night, which kinda’ leaves us with little else to shoot for on our other raiding nights. As a result, we are once again plagued with a lack of raiders logging in! A few of our more “hard core” members would like to fully clear Ulduar through Algalon, but now that the instance is considered outdated by many, we can’t get enough players together to make a serious attempt.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the shift that Blizzard has made in the game away from a raid focus to one of PvP (i.e. arena). The top end gear is no longer the coveted boss drops from endgame content; instead it is limited in availability to only the highest ranked arena teams.

So, what’s a WoW addict to do? PvP, my friend - battlegrounds galore! I have put together about the best PvP gear set that I can, outside of the current seasons arena gear (and arena matches are very painful for me). I just can’t seem to get together with a consistent team, so battlegrounds with a few friends is a lot more fun… usually. Some nights the Horde just romps all over us, but occasionally we can turn the tables and do it to them. Close battles are fun (win or lose), and steamrolling the Horde is always fun, but getting romped… not so much.

Is there anyone more despised by all other classes than a ret pally? This coveted position, once the domain of rogues, has been held for far too long by those bubble popping maniacs. Find one of these suckers guarding a base with a tree druid by his side and you better bring an army with you, buddy. You’re gonna’ need it to take that flag.

In other news, I have recently joined the ever swelling ranks of the unemployed. Given that situation, you might think I have a lot more time for WoW (and this blog). Sadly, that’s not the case. As official househusband of the Seabrat home, my duties are overwhelming! I buy the groceries, cook, clean, wash dishes and even (gasp) scrub toilets, all of which leaves me with precious little time for play. Speaking of which, I think I just heard the dryer beeping - signaling it’s time to get back to my new “job”.

Anub'arak Down… Colliseum Cleared!

2009-09-23T13:26:00.006-04:00

Dateline: September 20, 2009 - 10:53 pm

The Red Devils finally managed to scrape together a raid group and down the last boss for their first full clear of the Colliseum! And let me tell you, it was brutal! We had to pug the last few spots to get started. Even then we didn't enter the instance until 8:00 and our normal raid time is 7:00! As expected, the pugees didn't stick around very long. Fortunately they did stay long enough for more Red Devils to log in and we were able to replace them with guildies when they began to mysteriously DC after wipes. That was when we started making some real progress. Bottom line - I'm glad we filled with pugs rather than call off the raid. It worked out this time!

Snyped and I were placed on orb duty, which meant we spent a lot of time targeting and dropping them to the floor to create frost patches for the raid. While we both recognized the importance of this task, it seemed a waste of our higher dps, especially since the raid was having problems getting Anub'arak down quickly enough (that pesky enrage timer). Targeting the damn things was a problem, even with a macro which frequently targeted one behind us. Click targeting was a bigger pain, since you often would target something else even when clicking directly on an orb. And forget tab targeting - way too many other mobs! We stuck it out and tried to find a balance between "enough" frost patches and dpsing the boss.

So, we've cleared the Colliseum and are now eligible to commence with heroic mode. Given our random difficulties with all these bosses, we might be better served to committing to a few more regular clears. I suspect we will dive right in, though. That's just how we roll!

For me… it's moot. Mrs. Seabrat and I are headed to the Florida Keys on Saturday for two weeks of fun and sun. I'll post all the pics and info on my Team SeaBrat blog (http://seabrat.blogspot.com/) when we return. The latest patch (3.2.2) has presented me with difficulties logging in, which I know is probably due to one or more add-ons. That leaves me with only two potential raid nights before we leave for the Keys. I wish my guildies good luck in my absence and hope I have both a guild and a job when I return!

Twin Valkyrs and Faction Champs Downed!

2009-08-26T02:56:00.003-04:00

Last week, the Red Devils managed to defeat the Faction Champions (UHRAHH)! Unfortunately, their cowardly Horde corpses disappear after defeat, so no screen shot of that one. Anyway, the fight is more of a PvP battle than a typical PvE encounter. The Red Devils is a pretty good raiding guild, but not so experienced in PvP. Fortunately raid leader Xoroth is a PvP enthusiast and was finally able to come up with a strategy and lead us to victory. The solution, for us, was to focus CC on the healers and burn them down one at a time. Once the healers were down, and providing that few raiders had bit the dust, it was a drawn out affair of selecting another target for focus fire. The Horde champions cheat, of course, and their pets do not despawn when the master dies. Not only that, but they have a buff that reduces AoE damage by 75%, so you can forget those spells. Their warlock's Rain of Fire works just fine on us though. Cheaters!

We downed them again this week, but the fight remains very tough for us. It is complete chaos until the first couple of healers go down. That seems to be key for us. If we can get two down without many losses of our own, we seem to be able to finish. Diminishing returns on CC requires us to swap methods or players between targets. Freeze traps seem to do little more than proc Lock & Load while the trap is either dispelled or breaks very quickly.

This week we were able to bring down the Twin Valkyrs, the new boss in ToC... after we defeated the Faction Champions, of course. As the name implies, there are two; a light and a dark. A series of portals spawn around the arena, also light and dark, which you click to set your own "aura". You want to have the opposite aura of the one you attack, so get the light aura to attack the dark one. Floating orbs will occasionally spawn and scatter throughout the arena. Again, there are light and dark orbs. You want to run through the ones that match your current aura setting (buff) while avoiding the opposite (damage). To make things a little more chaotic, one of the twins will occasionally cast a shield (again, light or dark depending on which twin is casting) and this is where the confusion set in. Oh, and Michael Jackson made an appearance to perform "Black or White" on Vent. Thanks, Rentfn, but I can't hear the raid leader now!

Do we match our aura to the shield? Do we attack the caster or the opposite? What aura should each tank have? Is that different than the raid? What about the healers? Wait, what's my aura now? What should it be? Who do I attack? Where's the opposite portal? Augghh - I am SO confused! I wasn't the only one, either. Conflicting commands flew over vent, leading to multiple raid wipes. Eventually enough of us managed to figure it all out and we were able to adapt, improvise and overcome. My method? Assist Snyped, he seems to know what he's doing! Now if I only knew what his aura was...

Relax Vezax!

2009-08-17T14:11:00.007-04:00

The Red Devils have put ol’ crabby wormhead face down on the floor!

After several humiliating attempts at downing Thorim on previous nights, we marched back in last night and finally succeeded in releasing him from Yogg-Saron’s mind control. He thanked us for our efforts, and we didn’t mention how rude he and his cronies had been. We also seemed to have confirmed the bug mentioned on elitist jerks… charging into the arena at the start of the encounter seems to randomly disconnect some of the raid group! When everyone calmly walked onto the arena floor, we had no disconnects. Honestly, having a tank toy with the last mercenary standing while the rest of the raid waited for the DCers to log back in was getting a little tiring!

We now had unlocked the Keepers of Ulduar (again) and circled back around behind where Freya now stood. This was the tunnel down to General Vezax’s lair and we were going to pay him a little visit. We made short work of the guards at the entrance and clambered down the dilapidated hallway to the Descent into Madness. We successfully cleared the three groups of trash mobs and the two patrolling faceless horrors. Now we were ready to take on Vezax.

We had several in the raid that had never participated in this fight and raid leader Xoroth explained our strategy. Finally, it was announced that we would try this and our feral tank Arayia charged into battle. It wasn’t long before several players succumbed to shadow crash (gotta’ watch those, guys) and mark of the faceless (get the hell away from me with that)! Our numbers had been reduced enough that Xoroth announced we would continue “just for practice” instead of just wiping. Apparently the rest of our surviving members thought “to hell with that” and decided we would just go ahead and kill the son of a crab! As a result, we one-shot him!

At last, the Red Devils had managed to clear Ulduar down to Yogg-Saron. We gathered our troops into the small foyer in front of Sara. Xoroth explained the fight as we prepared ourselves for battle. We soon found ourselves overwhelmed by guardians! Stay away from clouds, ok? Clouds are bad! That particular bit of advice seemed to be ignored by far too many and guardians were spawning all over the place. The druid assigned to healing the center tank and DPS charged directly into those clouds! Repeatedly!

Eventually we fired him and assigned another druid to that duty, but we had lost our momentum. At 10:00 pm, it was decided to call it a night and extend the raid lockout time. We will be back this week to finish what we started… after we throw down on the new boss in Trial of the Crusader!

Palin a WoW Blog Reader?

2009-08-13T16:02:00.004-04:00

I was reviewing my visitors report and suddenly found several hits from Wasilla, Alaska. Is Sarah Palin a secret WoW blog reader? Inquiring minds want to know!

We can see that Guth (our resident Argentinian guildie) is NOT a reader!

Lord Jaraxxus Dethroned by Red Devils!!

2009-08-11T23:18:00.007-04:00

Ok, just to prove that last week was no fluke, the Red Devils ventured back to the Trial of the Crusader to face down the Northrend Beasts and the new boss, Lord Jaraxxus. Once again, we proved our mettle and emerged victorious from battle!

I wish I could say I know the Lord Juraxxas fight, and how we won it, but truthfully - I haven't a clue! I followed the directions shouted out on vent as best I could, but it was a little like the hokey pokey. Some buffs you run in, some you run out and others you just shake it all about. Anyway... we succeeded despite my woeful state of ignorance and besides... who am I to argue with success! So congratulations Red Devils and Battle On, Heroes!

Icehowl Down!

2009-08-07T01:10:00.016-04:00

Last week, the Red Devils defeated the first set of mini-bosses (Northrend Beasts) in the new raid instance, Trial of the Crusader! I say mini-bosses because there are three waves of them to be defeated before the battle is finally over.

The first of these is a massive magnataur, Gormok the Impaler, apparently smuggled in from Icecrown. He carries five Snobold Vassals on his back, each of which has a vial of fire that they toss into the raid (stay out of fire!) before leaping down upon a raid member’s back and opening up a can of whoop ass on them. If you are the lucky recipient of one of these critters, you can’t even attack him since he hops on your shoulders, latches onto the back of your neck and beats you over the head! If you are a caster, or worse… a healer, he pretty much limits you to instant casts only and frequently stuns you. It took a while, but we finally convinced our raid leader these things needed to be focused fired down ASAP (healers first, please). Even though they don’t do much damage, they need to be killed before Gormok is defeated. Otherwise, you will find yourself facing the next wave with Snobolds on your back!

The next wave is a pair of twin Jormungar worms, Dreadscale and Acidmaw. We found this slimy pair of miscreants the most challenging as they required more coordination within the raid. They take turns, with one being “grounded” and the other mobile. After a short period both burrow underground and when they emerge they switch roles. Each has a debuff they can apply to the raid; Acidmaw has a paralytic spray (green) which slows and eventually immobilizes any player afflicted. The only way to remove the debuff is to run to a player under Dreadscale’s burning spray (red). Generally only the tank and possibly any melee on Dreadscale are likely to have that debuff (which cannot be cleansed) so it’s important to know where Dreadscale is and not be too far from his tank.

It’s also important to remain spread out to minimize the number of players afflicted by the paralytic toxin from Acidmaw. And, just to make things more interesting, whichever worm is mobile also drops poison clouds along its path, much like Grobulus in Naxxramas. If you are familiar with the Red Devils and our all too frequent lack of positional awareness you can see how this fight might prove challenging. Everyone has to keep track of two bosses, two debuffs, avoid poison clouds (think fire) and the “red” tank! Eventually, we managed to learn these skills and defeated the two slugs in proper fashion.

This led us to the third and final mini-boss, Icehowl, a huge horned Yeti-like creature also smuggled in from Icecrown. Surprisingly, this was actually the easiest of the three encounters, as Icehowl is none too bright. Stay spread out in a circular perimeter around him as he is being tanked (hopefully more or less in the center). He has an arctic breath (bad, very bad, by the way) which freezes anyone caught in the cone and inflicts 20K frost damage over 5 seconds - hope you’ve been nice to your healers! Soon he will leap into the air and knock everyone back to the arena walls stunning them for a few moments. He uses this time to select a victim and focuses on them for a ferocious headbutt, which believe me – you do not want to receive!

Fortunately, everyone will recover from the stun and get an increased speed buff before Icehowl charges. You want to run to the side… away from the focused player, so keep track of where that is. This is easy to do because he is facing the person he is going to head butt and if that’s you, just pick a side and scoot! Unless you are afk, lagging by 3 seconds, or stuck on something, avoiding the charge is easy-mode. And here’s where the none too bright part comes in… if Icehowl misses his intended target, he smacks his head against the arena wall and knocks himself silly for 15 seconds! This is the time for revenge, so pour it on… he takes extra damage while stunned!

Icehowl is essentially a tank-and-spank, rinse-and-repeat fight. He does have a “frothing rage” buff which increases his attack speed and damage by 50%, but this can be dispelled by anesthetic poison or tranquilizing shot, so hunters and rogues do your part! Everyone… stay spread out, don’t bunch up, avoid his headbutt and you will defeat this knucklehead easily.

Ignis Soloed by Shadowpriest!

2009-07-28T22:38:00.009-04:00

Last night the Red Devils actually managed to put together a 25-man raid and even had a few people on the wait list! This was a big change from our latest experiences where we wait until 7:30 or 8:00 (our raid time is supposed to start at 7:00) and then have to call the raid due to a lack of numbers. We have been recruiting heavily and our Guild Leader (Aniraa) has done a yeoman's job of scouring recruitment sites looking for suitable new members. Her efforts appear to be paying off and I give her a big Red Devils salute. Thank you, Aniraa!

So, we now have some new members that are learning how the Red Devils work together. Given our performance last night, things are looking up for us. We were able to clear Vault of Archavon, then headed to Ulduar and successfully downed Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Razorscale, Ignis, the Iron Council and Kologarn before calling it a night. Not too bad! We only wiped while attempting to do the Iron Council in a hard mode. We made a few attempts, then fell back to the standard approach and easily downed all three Councilmen.

But, that's not to say we didn't have some close calls. In particular, we very nearly wiped on Ignis. Fortunately, we had one very savvy shadow priest (Hunterpayne) that was able to keep himself alive long enough to give the finishing blow to Ignis. Everyone else was face down on the floor! Take a look at the screen shot. There's Hunterpayne in the lower left with his battle bot winding up for another cast just in case Ignis decides to get back up again. The raid frames tell the story… we are all dead. Nice save, Hunterpayne and congratulations on soloing Ignis the Furnace Master!

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I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes…

2009-07-17T22:31:00.013-04:00

Hello, and welcome to another episode of “This Ain’t WoW”! Those of you over the age of forty may recognize the tag line for this article as the lyrics from the old Jim Stafford song. Even if you are under forty and never heard the song, you may still enjoy the story, so read on! Since very little has been happening within the guild lately, I am left with little else to put in my blog but my own personal stories. I hate to leave all two of my faithful readers with nothing new, so today’s story is about spiders. And my wife, Cheryl (Mrs. Seabrat). That's her on the left. The gross dude on the right is me.

My wife is a truly wonderful woman and I still haven’t figured out why she has stuck with me all these years, as she seems to possess above normal intelligence. She is spirited and adventurous, enjoys camping, fishing, scuba diving and the great outdoors. As a registered nurse working in a critical care unit, she often deals with things that would simply make me pass out. She just has one little phobia… spiders scare the crap out of her. This isn’t a big problem until one surprises her, then watch out! This normally calm and fearless woman begins to resemble an alley cat rubbed down with bacon grease and tossed into a pack of pitbulls.

So I am the designated spider wrangler in our house, which isn’t that bad since we don’t really have many of them around for me to deal with. Those we do have, however, tend to run pretty large. Typically these are wolf spiders, which don’t use webs to trap their prey. Instead they hunt on the move, much like a wolf and hence the name. Apparently, these dudes can live for three years (or more) and approach three to four inches in length.

Over the years I have rescued Cheryl from numerous occasions of impending doom from one of these threatening monsters. Usually this is accomplished using a newspaper or shoe with little drama or fanfare, their corpses scooped up and flushed down the toilet. I can’t simply toss them in the trash, as that would traumatize her even further knowing the creature was still in the house.

Now when I am in a raid with the Red Devils, I usually am focused on the game and Cheryl tolerates that pretty well. But, when spider duty calls I have to respond to her shrieks and deal with the little buggers IMMEDIATELY. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s always at the most inopportune moments. So, that’s just a heads up to my guildies as to what’s going on with Seabrat when he suddenly disappears!

Anyway, the extent of her fear of spiders was always pretty bad, but there was one particular occasion that turned it into full blown arachnophobia. And I remember it well, because it pretty much heeved me out, too! We were watching TV together when a large dark shape came skittering down the wall (that’s how these spiders move… they skitter), onto the floor and headed directly towards Cheryl. Now you have to understand that when it comes to spiders and Cheryl, there are only two directions a spider moves… directly away from her, or right at her. Of course, she spotted it long before it reached the floor and her panic level skyrocketed off the charts once it hit ground level and headed towards the two of us. I mean, she couldn’t really miss it. It was just about the biggest, fattest wolf spider I have ever seen. To her it must have looked like a watermelon with legs!

Fortunately, the spider’s true course was really more towards me and as a result I didn’t even have to get out of my chair (though Cheryl was already standing on hers) to deal with our intruder. Right foot up, right foot down, smoosh… end of story, right?

Except it wasn’t. I heard a shrill scream, a wooshing sound and then the front door slamming shut. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Cheryl had left the building. I don’t think her feet even touched the floor before she reached the door some 20 feet away. See, as it turns out, that spider was big, but it really wasn’t fat. It was in fact carrying 278,923 baby spiders on its body, of which about 278,900 were now scurrying about the floor! Adult wolf spiders skitter, the babies can only scurry. They can’t train skitter until they reach level 10 and these were definitely level 1 noobs.

I looked down in shock and awe at the ever-widening, dark, circular mass of writhing spiders as they attempted to flee. It really was pretty damn creepy – like something out of a horror film! I realized with sudden dread that I had better do something fast before they scattered too much, or I would soon have to buy a new house! Cheryl would never return to this one if I didn’t fix the problem quickly and completely. I commenced reapplication of both feet in a rapid right/left and up/down fashion. This not only allowed me to quickly annihilate the gathering troops, but also served to dislodge the hundred or so that had scurried up my legs. That second part was highly motivational for me as well and within a few minutes of furious white-boy dancing, I had succeeded in completely decimating their numbers to a few stragglers. These were dealt with individually, after which I surveyed the carnage.

There was a large, dark, roughly circular mass of spider parts and ichor on the floor surrounded by a few smaller specks scattered around the circumference. Thankfully there were no survivors. I checked my legs to make sure I had gotten rid of any potential stealthy surprises, then gathered up a broom, dust pan, spray cleaner and a few paper towels. As I was cleaning up the mess, the phone rang. It was Cheryl calling from the neighbor’s house asking if it was all clear. I told her I was just cleaning up and she could return home safely. This same girl that made it from her chair to the front door in less than 0.001 seconds took nearly five minutes to make the same journey in reverse. She would make one tentative step, then glance around nervously, certain that she would see a wave of spiders heading for her. Finally, she was satisfied that I had indeed secured the premises and returned to her chair.

I returned to my seat and glanced at Cheryl. She was still breathing heavily and visibly trying to relax. I picked up the remote and flipped over to the Animal Planet, one of her favorite channels. I was hoping for a nice show about cats or puppies, or even lions, tigers and bears (oh my). When luck ain’t with you, it just ain’t with you. The screen was immediately filled with the image of an enormous tarantula stalking along a banana leaf!

Rune Edge... Melee or Hunter Weapon?

2009-07-07T23:35:00.002-04:00

This is not my usual post, but I wanted to bring it up to both of my readers! Last night, we had a very nice two-hand sword drop in Ulduar... Rune Edge.

This was the first time it had dropped for us, and our melee classes were drooling over it. Given its stats, the hunters were drooling as well! I discussed our loot system in my last post, and when rolls were called one of our hunters won it. This caused immediate outrage among our melee, particularly the one who would have won if the roll had been restricted to melee only. I can quantify dps upgrades using the Hunter DPS spreadsheet from Elitist Jerks. Applying this to the hunter that won, it represented about +135 dps increase over his currently equipped Cryptfiend's Bite (worth about 300 dps given his current spec and our typical raid buffs) for an expected dps value of 435. We have a good solid hunter core group, and I keep a spreadsheet with gear upgrades for each of them, so I knew that this drop was one of the best in slots for a hunter.

Now, the reason I bring this up is that I would like some defensible input as to why hunters should have been prevented from winning this item over a melee class. I am not looking to prove myself right, rather I would like some well thought out responses regarding this issue. So please, tell me what you think!

Mimiron Disassembled by Red Devils!

2009-06-25T23:39:00.014-04:00

At last the Red Devils have successfully downed a new boss in Ulduar in our first progression run of the week. Our new schedule of Tuesday to Thursday has worked well for us, but Sunday continues to be a struggle to get enough players online. Or… maybe it was just a Father’s Day issue.

Anyway, having cleared up Thorim, Hodir and Freya on Wednesday, we were ready to dedicate the night to our newest challenge… Mimiron! I had been fortunate enough to have been part of a successful 10-man raid that cleared Mimiron and General Vezax, and even made a few futile attempts on Yogg-Saron on Monday. I knew what was awaiting us and was fairly certain we would spend the night wiping out on Mimiron. I was almost right, too. The Red Devils are quickly earning a reputation for being unable to down a new boss until threatened with a “This is our LAST attempt” warning from the Raid Leader. Last night was no exception and we successfully downed the V0-L7R-0N Combat System (the last phase of the Mimiron battle - and who makes up these names, anyway?) on our ninth and last attempt of the night!

Mimiron is an interesting fight and just getting to his room presented a challenge for those of us that are… how shall I say this? Less situationally aware? Reminiscent of the “frogger” slimes after Patchwerk in Naxx, patrols of bomb-bots skitter the perimeter around Mimiron’s chamber. They aren’t hard to avoid, really, but these things explode on contact and one-shot most players. Fortunately by the fourth or fifth attempt, nearly all of us learned to maneuver through the gauntlet successfully.

I was actually impressed with how quickly the raid was able to learn the various phases of the fight and we quickly made progress to the fourth and final phase. Once we made it to that point, it took only a few more attempts before we were successful. In fact, we very nearly won the eighth attempt, but had lost too many of our dps to finish him off. On our last attempt we still lost quite a few players to laser barrage and proximity mines, and our main feral tank (Lesi) twice to shock blasts. We recovered nicely and in just over twelve minutes we cranked out more than 35 million damage to defeat Mimiron!

DO NOT PUSH THE BIG RED BUTTON!

Wow Web Stats doesn’t parse the Mimiron fight properly, but World of Logs does. Actually, WWS has fallen behind in updating their parser for Ulduar and I have begun to rely on WOL more. I am more familiar with WWS and prefer the numeric breakdowns it provides for detailed analysis of individual performance. With a little more experience, I am sure I will learn to use WOL just as well.

This post would not be complete without a discussion of the Red Devils loot system and some of our members’ recent complaints in that regard. With the release of Wrath, the Red Devils developed and implemented a new and unique loot system using in-game rolls, combined with a modifier based on your rank in the guild.

Ranks in the guild are based on attendance in raids, with four possible ranks: Friend (<25%), Member (25 to <50%), Raider (50 to <85%) and Elite Raider (85%+). Promotions and demotions are issued every two weeks based on attendance over the past 60 days and players must maintain their attendance levels to keep their rank. This encourages our members to raid and provides them with higher rank (prestige) in the guild for continued participation.

Attendance is recorded based on time, with records kept every 30 minutes during a normal raid and 15 minutes during a “progression” raid. Players that show up on-time and ready get attendance credit, even if the raid is subsequently called off due to insufficient numbers. This system provides credit to the raid even on “wipe nights” when no bosses are downed, encouraging members to participate even on those difficult progression nights.

Ultimately, the only tangible reward for raiding comes in the form of LOOT. As I mentioned earlier, we use the in-game roll system (1-100) combined with a “roll modifier” based on rank. The Friend rank has a modifier of 0, Members have +20 added to their roll, Raiders +30 and Elite Raiders +40. This provides a strong bias for the higher rank members to win their rolls, while still providing a chance for everyone to win loot. The idea was to make the guild more attractive in our recruitment efforts, yet continue to reward our more active raiders with more loot. Recruiting and retaining talented players is crucial to a raiding guild’s success. We need to get them in the door and keep them in order to maintain our active membership at a sufficient level to form a 25-man raid.

But, guess what happens when a higher rank member loses their roll, in spite of the modifier? Whispers galore to one of the officers from the losing party, usually pertaining to how much more they deserved the loot than the winner. Sometimes even veiled threats of a /gquit are made, and occasionally they don’t even bother to be that subtle. Lately, this has been occurring often enough to raise the concern among the officers as to how appropriate our loot system is and if it is serving the guild in the capacity in which it was envisioned.

Personally, I think that it is. I will readily admit that I was not a big fan of the system when first presented to the guild. I had concerns similar to what others are voicing now – that it would allow too much loot to go to players of less benefit to the guild. Now, to me, a member’s benefit to the guild is measured not only by their skill, but also by their attendance in raids. We need people on-line and ready to raid on a consistent basis. We just don’t have the sheer numbers (yet) to always put together a full group for each scheduled raid night. A highly skilled member that shows up once a week is not as valuable (to me) as a lesser skilled one that is there every raid night.

Our loot system rewards attendance and an Elite Raider is nearly five times more likely to win over a Friend. But, that doesn’t mean the Friend can’t win. They can… and do. And there’s the rub for the guild at the moment. Should Friends be allowed to roll on loot? I think they should, but maybe we need to modify our system a bit. Perhaps limitations on what can be rolled on should be implemented. Time will tell, and many of our officers are beginning to voice their concerns over “deserving” vs. “random”.

Thorim Finished by Red Devils!

2009-06-18T23:42:00.009-04:00

With our recent attendance problems, the Red Devils have attempted to realign our raid nights to better fit the needs of the guild. This week, we tried dropping our Monday raid and replaced it with Wednesday giving us a revised schedule of Sunday, then Tuesday through Thursday. This week, at least, that seems to work and we conducted successful raids each night! As a result, we were able to attempt a little progression, having downed Ignis for our first kill last week. So last night, we found ourselves facing Thorim once again for the first time in three weeks.

Our only previous encounter with Thorim had occurred at the end of a fairly long raid night and was more of a “let’s see what this guy does” attempt rather than a serious effort. We made several attempts, but the arena group kept wiping before the sneak attack from the hall could be completed. Tonight was a fresh start with a better group composition. This time we kept the arena group better manned and assigned a smaller elite strike force to work their way through the hall and attack Thorim from behind. While this worked better for the arena group who had no problems standing up to the relentless onslaught of mobs emerging from the stadium seats, the strike force kept wiping before they could make their way to Thorim. It is essential for the strike force to complete their journey through the hall and force Thorim into the arena as quickly as possible. Otherwise, Thorim will enrage and wipe the entire raid.

Having been part of the strike force on our previous encounters, I knew we had the skills to complete the mission. This time however, I was placed in the arena – a totally different kind of encounter. Here the team is forced into the center of the arena in a fairly tight group to avoid electrocution from the perimeter sentry orbs. It’s a survival fight while awaiting the arrival of the strike force to rejoin us and start the battle with Thorim. For hunters, it’s an uncomfortable assignment and with nearly all targets too close for ranged combat, we are left with little more than traps and volley. Occasionally a Dark Rune Champion is tanked at sufficient distance to engage at ranged, but most of the fight is volley, volley, volley. If a hunter attempts to move away to get more range, he risks electrocution – not only for himself, but to the rest of the party as the charge jumps to multiple players!

After several attempts with the strike force constantly being overwhelmed, it became clear we were imbalanced. The raid leader, still cautious from our previous night with constant arena wipes, first tried swapping out some of the strike force players. Unfortunately, that group was just too small to be successful. Eventually, extra players were taken from the arena group and placed into the strike force to balance out the two groups. On our ninth attempt our strike force finally succeeded in pushing Thorim into the Arena and we had our first glimpse of combat with him. We quickly arranged ourselves into small groups surrounding Thorim to minimize the damage from his chain lightning hits. Still, we found ourselves too slow at moving away from the sentry orb that was charging and several of our small groups were wiped out by the ensuing lightning charge.

It took a few more tries before we were able to engage Thorim again, but our twelfth attempt was successful and the Red Devils handed out 28 million damage in just over eight and a half minutes to defeat Thorim and claim our rewards (phat loot)!

At this point, it was after 10:00 pm, and several of our raiders were about to turn into pumpkins. Rather than make a few half-assed attempts at Mimiron, we decided to call it for the night and head back to Dalaran. Sunday should give us our first shot at this new boss and given last night’s success, I imagine the Red Devils will be raring to go!

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Ignis Smoked by Red Devils!

2009-06-12T15:51:00.005-04:00

Well, to say the least, the Red Devils have been having attendance problems lately. Our normal raid schedule is Sunday through Tuesday, then Thursday. For the last few weeks, it seems that we have had to cancel more raids than we have been able to conduct. This has become a serious source of frustration to some of our more dedicated raiding members and an abundance of "conspiracy" theories have emerged. Personally, I think the lack of attendance has been due to the end of the school year, changes in members schedules and conflicts with their other (less important) committments rather than anything more sinister. I mean, come on people... where are your priorities?? Anyway, we've gone through these phases before and survived. But diehard raiders want to raid and become cranky when they don't get their regular "fix". Believe me, I understand and as the Raid Officer I hate to call off any of our regularly scheduled raids! But when only 15 or 20 people show up, I really don't have a choice. Well, I guess we could try to pug... no, I really don't have a choice.

In my time with the Red Devils, the guild has never had a large group of raiding members. Recruitment has always been very selective, and the general issue seems to be not having active raiding members sit out during a raid. The concern is that someone not getting a raid slot would then leave the guild. It's a valid concern, but one that is certain to cause cancellations when a couple of the "regulars" aren't able to attend. For example, last night our guild leader and her "betrothed-to-be", both part of our core raid group, were unable to attend due to a schedule conflict... something silly like her graduation. Entirely trivial and unimportant, but she's the boss, so what are you gonna' do?

But, I digress. The point is, we knew ahead of time that both of them would not be in-game and morale was low with lots of grumblings in guild chat about having to cancel yet another raid. 7:00 pm rolled around and I issued the usual guild chat message to "PST for a raid invite". We quickly gathered up 15 members, then waited as a few more trickled in. By 7:15, we had a total of 23 and Skittltz agreed to lead us into battle. We decided it was time to take on Ignis the Furnace Master, who we had been avoiding since our first skirmish with him weeks ago.

I truly hate the Ignis trash mobs, especially those damn tornados that they spawn! I seem to have difficulty discerning exactly where their "impact" area is. Not only that, but it seems like whenever one does catch me, it then follows me and keeps tossing me up in the air repeatedly. Last night I got tossed three times before I landed, but at least I only took fall damage once! Finally we were gathered in front of Ignis and Skittltz went through the fight explanation (and quite well, I might add). We had our warrior, Cincara, conduct the first pull and things went pretty well, considering many of us hadn't seen this fight before. Wipe city in just under three minutes.

Our next attempt, we had Fountainhead use misdirection to pull. He cast MD and ran forward to pull. WTF... why do I have the MD buff?? Fortunately for me, Fountain realized his error and didn't shoot. Hunters, please... there are several addons that will inform the raid of who is misdirecting and their target. Pick one and USE it! Or, at the very least add some yells to your MD macro so the raid knows who cast MD and to whom they applied it. We usually run with four hunters and coordinating MDs is a lot easier that way!

Oh well, since Fountain's MD was on cooldown, I did the honors and made Ignis mad at Cincara. This battle lasted about the same and we wiped again. Our third try, however, we managed to add resto-shaman extraordinaire, Lackadaisic! Woot... now we had 24 people in our raid! This time, Fountain pulled off his MD flawlessly, Ignis charged towards Cincara and the fight was on! We were heating up Constructs, pulling them into the water and smashing them down. Ignis scurried about breathing flames and making all kinds of boastful threats. He was grabbing people and stuffing them in his nasty old crotch pot, then scorching the ground around the rest of us. Six minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, poor old Ignis was no longer the Furnace Master, but an expired heap on the floor. The Red Devils had successfully defeated him for our first kill ever!

We continued our journey to pay both Auriaya and Hodir our respects, and though we didn't one-shot either of them, we were able to defeat them both before 9:30! We even managed to fill up our raid with a 25th member, Richard the Warlock, to help us bring the pain and win those fights. Then we had a decision to make... continue to Freya/Thorim, or stop for the night? A number of us voiced concerns that we didn't have the time to actually finish either of those two before 10:00 and downing the three mini-bosses before Freya might harm our chances at getting a full raid together on Sunday. Skittltz put it to a vote with a ready check and we elected to stop for the night. I remain hopeful that we will be back on Sunday.

An Eye Catching Lure... Seriously!

2009-06-02T00:38:00.016-04:00

This is not a WoW post, but... since this is my blog I can post whatever I want! Besides, this story will help you get to know me better and perhaps gain some insight as to why I am so twisted! So, sit back, grab a beer and let me tell you about a little thing that happened to me some 20 years ago...

I really love fishing. I always have. As a child, my father would take me out in his little tin boat and we would spend the day on the water. Really good times.

So, as I grew older, I continued fishing and even bought a nice little bass boat after graduating from college. It was the late 1980's and I would pick up my girlfriend after work on Fridays and head to the lake for the weekend. Like most young people, I lived for the weekend!

Living in the midwest, bass fishing was pretty much the only game in town and I pursued it with a passion. While it's not really a "contact" sport, it can sometimes result in injury. You know... the occasional hook puncture or fish spine injury. I've even witnessed people getting knocked out by flying insects while scooting across the lake at 60 mph, but that is another story. This one is gruesome enough!

My significant other (at the time) and I had gone to Stockton Lake in southwest Missouri for a weekend of camping and fishing. Nothing unusual about that, as we often chose Stockton for weekend trips. We spent Saturday fishing for both walleye and bass, but as the evening approached we focused on working topwater lures through flooded cedar trees in one of the creeks that fed the lake. I was throwing a black and white herring bone pattern Zara Spook, one of my favorite topwater plugs.

As the sun began to set, I removed my sunglasses since they were too dark to see through in the waning light. Fishing had been slow and we hadn't caught much the whole day. Working the plug past a cedar trunk, I was rewarded with a monstrous strike! This was a nice bass, about six pounds or so. I pulled the fish to the boat, putting as much pressure on the line as I felt I could. I didn't want this bass to make it down into all those branches beneath the surface! I nearly had the fish to the boat and had cleared the cedar tree when the plug suddenly came unfastened from the fish's mouth. The severe bend in the graphite rod, combined with the stretch in the monofilament line created a basic slingshot that hurled the lure directly into my face at approximately the speed of sound!

I had no time to react and felt the impact of the plug across my right eye. My vision blurred, then everything turned red. I was a little stunned, but shook my head hoping to clear the cobwebs. They didn't clear and I soon realized I had a Zara Spook attached to my face! I shook my head again while looking down, hoping it would fall free. It did not. I then tried gently pulling on the body of the plug, but my upper eyelid went with it. I glanced at my girlfriend and, based on her stunned and ashen look, realized I might have a problem. She looked as if she were about to pass out... and I was the one with the new "jewelry/piercing"! I was strangely calm and explained to her that she needed to keep it together as I was counting on her now. With a panic stricken look, she asked "What do I do?"

There was another boat fishing the same creek. I asked her to yell at them for help. She did, and it took a few moments for them to respond... "yeah, what do you need"?

"He has a hook in his eye!"

"Oh god... we'll be right there."

We were rescued by another kind couple. They approached our boat and I asked if they had any hook cutters. I really wanted to get this plug off my face. Sadly, though they said they often do have cutters, they did not have them with them now. They spent a moment examining the mess and quickly suggested that they pilot my boat back to the dock while I lay on the floor trying not to move.

Now, I have been on some very unpleasant boat rides... 32 hour trips home from offshore through 6 to 10 foot seas. In comparison, they weren't so bad as this one. Even though the water was relatively calm, and the distance short, riding in a small boat with a 6-inch plug with dual treble hooks embedded in your eye is not something I suggest anyone try. You can't really see anything and to say it felt like I had "something in my eye" would be an understatement.

A small crowd gathered at the dock after we arrived. Our rescuers helped guide me into the back of their SUV. One man in the crowd stepped forward saying "I'm a dentist. I can help". Really? Forgive me doc, but this problem is about two inches, two very important inches, north of your specialty. I laid back as he examined me, and have to say that the look on his face was not a confidence builder. "I can't do anything with this" he said, and he slunk back into the crowd.

We were headed to the emergency room, a place I have since become more intimately familiar with than anyone really should be. The closest was a small town called "Butler" (I believe). By the time I walked into the ER, I had been holding that damn plug against my face for about 2 hours. The admitting nurse took one look at me, turned pale and said "You will be next!"

I gave her my insurance card and she turned me over to a strapping young fellow who looked very competent, though a little young to be a doctor. He guided me onto the exam table and told me that the doctor would be right in. I was feeling a little better, now that I had made it to the ER. I would soon be fixed up good as new, right? As I lay there on the table, I saw the doctor as he entered the room.

There is a character actor that played in a lot of westerns in the 1960s and 70s. I don't know his name, but he essentially played the same role in all of them. Very scruffy and bearded with one eye always squinted, the other one just... wild. Usually played a drunk. Well, that's who had just walked in the door wearing scrubs and a stethoscope. "Hmmmmm", he grunted, "ain't seen nothing like this before". My confidence was plummeting to all time lows. "Looks like we are gonna' have to push that hook all the way through". Not words you want to hear when said hook is in your eye! Actually, you never want to hear those words, but through your eye? I mean, seriously... through my eye!??

I must have looked a little panicked and I have to admit, I probably wasn't wearing my best poker face. The doctor explained that the hook was not actually in my eye, but in my eyelid and embedded under the orbital brow. I can't claim to know what an "orbital brow" is, but I had a real good idea of where he meant. He went on to explain that they would numb the area, pull the hook out from under the bone and push it through the fleshy area above my eyelid so they could cut off the barb and remove the hook. I wasn't real enthused about this plan, but couldn't come up with any alternatives.

The doctor produced a hypodermic that was a foot long and a half-inch in diameter, or at least looked that way with my currently impaired vision. "This may sting a bit", he offered as he began stabbing me with this barbaric implement of torture just below my eyebrow and (thankfully) above my eye. I was ready to confess to the assassination of Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald AND Lincoln. Jack Bauer had nothing on this dude. Eventually, he got bored (or satisfied) with his efforts and promised to return in a few minutes after the anesthetic had time to take effect. I remain unconvinced that he was using anesthetic. Formaldehyde, perhaps, but not anesthetic. I thought my right eye was about to burst into flames and the left one was rolling around in sympathy. Now blinded, escape was simply impossible.

All too soon, Doctor Mengele returned with, I swear to God, the smallest pair of wire cutters I have ever seen in my life. I mean, they virtually disappeared into that paw he used for a hand. He grabbed hold of the base of the embedded treble hook and began twisting it savagely... at least from my point of view. The sharp hook point grated across the back side of the bone above my eye. I could feel (and hear) it. He eventually succeeded in freeing the point and began enthusiastically tugging it through my upper eyelid. "There it is" he exclaimed, as the point and barb popped through, at which point he produced those tiny wire cutters and attempted to cut the hook point off.

"Doc, those things are never going to cut through that hook" I said, gasping for breath.

"They're all we got" he replied.

He struggled with his left hand, his right, then both. Sweat dripped from his brow and, I have to admit, he gave it a real try. "Call Brian in here" he told the attending nurse as he panted for breath. Brian was the strapping young lad that had guided me onto the torture, err... exam table. While not completely excited at having an orderly performing this procedure, I was pretty sure that it couldn't be any worse. It took Brian both hands and no small amount of effort, but the sharp "ping" of the cutters severing the hook was of great relief to me.

The doctor handily extracted the remains of the hook and then examined my eye. He placed a patch over it and instructed me to see an opthamologist as soon as possible. Me... I couldn't wait to leave that place. Our rescuers drove us back to the dock and wished us well. I slowly piloted my boat back to our campground (in the dark... with one eye) and hit the sack.

Sunday morning dawned bright and early. My girlfriend and I discussed our options. She wanted to head home, but I really wanted to get some more on-the-water time in. She relented and I headed down to the boat. As I sat there in the bright sun, waiting for her to arrive, my eye began to throb and the wisdom of her words sounded vastly better than mine. I agreed to head home. We loaded the boat on the trailer and broke camp. She was driving, and as we motored up the interstate I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my eye. I pulled down the visor and opened the vanity mirror. It was my contact lens! God knows where it had been hiding, but I was able to remove it from my eye, and on examination found a small hole in the very center of the lens. The hook point had hit the lens, glanced off and traveled upwards under the eyelid. Had I not been wearing contacts, I am certain I would have lost my right eye!

Monday morning, I made an emergency appointment with an opthamologist. He examined me and told me "It's too late now, but you should have been placed in a dark room with both eyes patched. Your iris was torn loose from the bottom of your eye." He gave me some very dark glasses and told me to avoid bright sunlight. "You were very lucky" he said. I had to wear the dark glasses, even indoors, for a week.

In retrospect, I was very lucky. I still have good (correctable) vision and have suffered no ill effects. I always carry hook cutters now and they are capable of cutting any hook that I have... even the stoutest saltwater hooks.

Hodir Held Hostage - I Don't Think So!

2009-05-29T14:12:00.007-04:00

The Red Devils continued their plundering of Ulduar in grand style this week! Our most recent accomplishment was the defeat of Hodir, which was fairly easy compared to our previous battles with Freya. Speaking of which, on our last kill, her lethal Snaplasher managed to put me down for a dirt nap at the beginning of the fight. One dead 'brat, but the Red Devils managed to finish the job without me. That's the last time I try to help pound that thing down!

We wandered in to visit Hodir, but our first attempt was Fail City when most of the raid got frozen in the first deep freeze, including yours truly! Despite continuous haranguing from our resident "punk-adin", most of us did learn how to handle those freezes correctly. Our third try resulted in success and the Red Devils even earned an achievement!

After loot was distributed, we ran out to the main chamber for a group photo with the now much-more-friendly Hodir. You would think after all the daily quests we ran for his group in Northrend he would have been happier to see us!

Then... on to take out Thorim. Our strategy was to split into two groups, one (the melee) would stay in the arena and hold down the fort as the second (ranged) snuck up the back alley behind Thorim. While the sneak attack group was successful in battling their way through the tunnel, the arena group suffered catastrophic losses. This resulted in a massive ball of light flying through the tunnel and one-shotting those of us sneaking through. We kept trying to balance out the two groups, switching players around, but after seven tries, we gave up for the night.

It seems my last blog post with my loot-whining about hunter drops in Ulduar and Vault managed to appease the loot gods! They saw fit to bless me with Conqueror's Scourgestalker Handguards and Giant's Bane from Ulduar. This was followed by Furious Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets from Vault! I also went on an honor-point/badge spending spree and now have a very nice set of PvP gear. Now it takes those pesky ret-adins 5 seconds to kill me instead of 3... woot!

Freya Freed by Red Devils!

2009-05-20T00:46:00.018-04:00

So, the Red Devils have finally managed to defeat Freya and release her from her bonds. This statuesque babe is the first boss in Ulduar to really cause us to put more effort into our fights. Handling the waves of adds is the real problem here. There are three different types, and each requires a different strategy: Ancient Conservator, Three Elementals and Detonating Lashers. Oh, and all the while, Freya summons "Lifebinders Gift" which is a tree that needs to be nuked down immediately before it heals Freya. We weren't real quick on downing each wave before the next one was summoned and often found ourselves battling more than one wave at a time! With that many different types of mobs on the field, each with a different strategy, you can imagine how hectic things got!

Needless to say, there was a lot of yelling on Vent by various players as they became frustrated and a lot of contradicting instructions were shouted out. Eventually, we worked out the kinks and finally defeated all six waves of adds. At that point, Freya begins dropping land mines instead of calling more adds. Fortunately, these are relatively easy to avoid and we were able to bring her health down low enough to "release her" and win the battle. The adds are the real trick here, and it takes a lot of coordination to down them successfully. We really have to be on our toes for her, and I expect it will be some time before we can consider her to be on "farm" status.

We even managed to venture in and pay Hodir a visit. Unfortunately, our raid leader suffered a major melt-down during the pre-fight instructions and several raiders just gave up and left the group. Things went downhill rapidly, but we made a couple of attempts just to get the flavor of the battle. Hodir doesn't look to be nearly the challenge that Freya provides.

Unlike Naxxramas, hunter loot has been very scarce for the Red Devils in Ulduar. I have managed to pick up a set of shoulders (Iron-studded Mantle) and Saronite Mesh Legguards, but by-and-large we haven't had many hunter drops. Vault has been absolutely miserable to me, and I have yet to pick up ANY loot from my many forays into that instance!

Our resident hunter supreme, Fountainhead, continues to spank me like a bad pony in raids, and I still have not figured out how he does it! Consistently, this man out performs me by 300 to 1,000 dps on just about every fight. Gearwise, we are very similarly outfitted and on paper (The Hunter DPS Spreadsheet), I should be about 300 dps ahead of him. Whatever his secret is, I am glad to have him in our guild even if he does push me into the #2 hunter spot! It's good to have competition, and he certainly provides it for me!

Oh, by the way, I have found a new addon that seems to be very helpful in choosing which shots to use. Blizzard has successfully changed the hunter class to eliminate any actual shot rotation. We now have to deal with shot priority to maximize our dps. And, with each shot on a different cool down combined with the random Lock and Load proc, this is quite a challenge! Watcher provides a moving bar that shows your prioritized shots as they come off of cooldown. It can be a little distracting, and I am still learning to use it. The trick is to be able to see the shot icon while still maintaining situational awareness. It is one more thing to observe in an already cluttered battlefield, but I think the reward is worth the effort.

On a sadder note, the Red Devils recently lost one of our best raid performers. Since this is the second time this person has left the guild in search of greener pastures, it is unlikely he will ever be accepted back. Which is sad, really. While he was something of a challenge from a guild management perspective, he was truly one of our best in raids. Spartoss, I wish you well and hope you can find a guild that fits your expectations!

Ulduar: Two New Bosses Down

2009-05-03T22:57:00.005-04:00

Now that is the way to raid on a Sunday night! The Red Devils welcomed back our delinquent pally/DK, Guth, with open arms. With his DK (Hylden) in tow, we marched into Ulduar to pick up where we left off on Thursday... Kologarn. Of course, we had to reclear the trash to reach him, but accomplished this with little difficulty. We found ourselves face-to-face with Kologarn once again.

A few attempts were made before we developed a winning strategy. We would use the lines on the floor before him as a guide during the battle. Ranged would line up on the first line, the second line would remain open for eye-beam targeted members to use as an escape route. Strafing to the sides along this line would allow them to avoid the eye-beams as well as prevent damage to any bystanders. The third line would serve as the guide for our melee dps. While in theory this should work well, a few raiders appeared to panic and abandoning their guidline, dragged the eyebeam back into the raid. We regrouped and during the final discussion prior to the pull, I suffered an accidental discharge from my Envoy of Mortality. Unfortunately, the errant round struck Kologarn square in the face and his wrath was upon us before we were prepared. Another wipe, courtesy of Seabrat! Even my trusty pet, SeaWolf, was so embarassed that I had to summon her several times before she crept out from the corner in which she had hidden. I was instructed to keep the safety on until the pull had commenced.

We regouped, made our preparations and launched the assault on Kologarn, who exclaimed "NONE SHALL PASS!" "OH YES... WE... WILL!", we replied! Eye-beams were upon us and we skillfully kited them away from the raid. Rubble adds were summoned and our feral tank (Lesi) quickly scooped them up and pulled them to her corner where they were summarily dispatched. His right arm regenerated and stonegripped selected members of the group. We healed them as they were squeezed and quickly destroyed the right arm again. Kologarn pulled out every trick he had, and we countered them all. He had been defeated by the mighty Red Devils!

Crossing the bridge formed by Kologarns lifeless corpse, we ventured across the Shattered Walkway into the Observation Ring where we found Auriaya patrolling with her escort of four Sanctum Sentries (tigers). She looks... big. Those kitties don't look too bad, though. We prepared by taking out the guards on both sides of the landing, but got a little careless and managed to pull Auriaya and her brood in the process. Welcome to Wipe City, population... 25 Red Devils.

We regrouped and finished the job on the guards, then began discussing pull strategies. We tried hunter traps and misdirects. Didn't work... one of the Sentries would always pounce the hunter, killing him. We tried a tank pull, didn't work... everything targets the tank and he dies, insta-gibbed. Finally, we settled on using a DKs death and decay, with the offtank grabbing the kitties. That seemed to work pretty well, but we found ourselves in a bit of a scattered panic when Auriaya summoned her smaller Swarming Guardians. Seriously, this boss literally has kittens! A larger summon, the Feral Defender, is like a cross between a tiger and a tasmanian devil bothed amped up on PCP. That cat bounces around like it has a turbo-charged pogo stick equipped with no cooldown! And when you do finally manage to kill the damn thing, it leaves an enormous void zone that deals 9,000 shadow damage to anyone in it!

Eventually, we learned to group up and stay in front of Auriaya so her Sonic Screech would be diluted among us. Killing the Defenders off to the side away from the battle zone helped keep the area clear and the DKs were instrumental in deathgripping them away when they were low on health. Stunning them in place and finishing them off in a controlled location was a key part of our strategy. Lucky 13 was the magic number of attempts, and Auriaya lay dead on the floor!

We had managed to defeat two new bosses in Ulduar in one night. It seems the return of Guth is a good omen for the Red Devils.

Another Ulduar Boss Down, Courtesy of the Red Devils!

2009-05-01T16:22:00.012-04:00

Another weeks raiding was upon us, and on Tuesday we re-entered Ulduar in grand style! Flame Leviathan proved to be a simple fight and I was once again aboard a chopper. No last moment heroics were required this time, but I am looking forward to trying out a different vehicle sometime, perhaps as a gunner? Ah, well... maybe next time.

Then we paid our friend, XT-002 a little visit. The hardest part remains to be trying to handle all those crazy adds while maintaining sufficient dps on XT. We pulled it off once again and then headed down to Razorscale.

Like XT, Razorscale's biggest challenge is add management while dpsing the big lizard. We were up to the challenge and swatted the overgrown flying gecko down for the count. Then, it was time to quit for the night, but... we would be back!

And back we were - just last night. We assembled inside Ulduar and began discussing which boss we should attempt... Ignis, or the Iron Council? We had experienced a crushing defeat at the hands of Ignis last week, but had at least made a few attempts. Of the Iron Council, we had no knowledge. After several minutes of argument, the decision was made to try out the Council. We rode over to the teleporter and zoned in to survey the gauntlet before us. Perhaps overconfident, we wiped on the first trash pull. Those mobs are no pushovers!

Our second try got us through the first gauntlet and found us ready to pull the huge mobs guarding foyer before the staircase. Again, we were unprepared for the full fury of these monsters and managed to wipe in the chaos. A second shot and we managed to make it to the left around the stairs and got our first view of the Iron Council. Holy crap, for a dwarf that Steelbreaker is one big dude! We decided to take him out first.

Our initial pull was short lived as we soon discovered the pressing need to move Steelbreaker out of the Rune of Power and our ranged dps into it as quickly as possible. On our second attempt, we managed to put Steelbreaker on the floor, only to get quickly wiped out by a Rune of Death. Runemaster Molgeim was to be our second target, and on the next attempt we successfully put both Steelbreaker and Molgeim out of the picture! We all scrambled towards Stormcaller Brundir, who was being otherwise occupied at the far end of the room. I didn't get three steps forward before I found myself dead on the floor. What the hell hit me, I have no idea, but the rest of the raid was fully focused on revenge. Avenge me, Red Devils! Avenge me!

And they did. A few minutes later, the smoke cleared and Brundir lay in silent defeat upon the stone floor of the Iron Council's chamber. I was quickly resurrected and the loot distributed to the jubilant raid. We had downed yet another boss in Ulduar!

We regrouped at the staircase and cleared the last remaining guards there, then ascended up the stairs, only to be greeted by the enormous Kologarn. When I say enormous, I am in no way exaggerating! This boss is so big he is three targets with each arm comprising a separate target in addition to Kologarn himself! The main target is his right arm (which is on the raids left for the more directionally challenged of us). We needed to focus our dps on that arm until it gets blown off, and then switch our attention to Kologarn until his arm regenerates. However, that arm isn’t giving up without a fight! When it falls to the floor, the resulting pile of rubble springs to life in the form of numerous elemental adds that can wreak havoc on the raid. They have to be finished off quickly in order for the raid to focus on Kologarn. All the while laser beams are shooting out of his eyes (I kid you not) and his left arm sweeps across the raid pummeling us! Not only that, but we were often wiped out by his stanky old breath. Somebody get this dude some breath mints. Seriously!

Time after time, we tried to face this bad boy down. Many times, a wipe was called and our fearless raiders would scatter for the door. All I can say is, Kologarn has a very long reach and Stone Grasped me just before I reached the teleporter! I watched in horror as his laser beams chased our raiders into the teleporter room. Escaping his wrath should result in an achievement! We made a total of seven tries on Kologarn before our Healer in Chief, Peeo, had to log for the night.

With our HIC gone, it was pointless to continue banging our heads against the wall that is Kologarn. Arriving back in Dalaran, we found that the Alliance held Wintergrasp and quickly regrouped then headed for The Vault. Badda bing, badda boom, both Emalon the Storm Watcher and Archavon the Stone Watcher were wiped off the face of Azeroth by the intrepid Red Devils, a terrific end to a night of raiding!

Get yourself some super sticky tar, Kologarn. We are coming back for you on Sunday!

XT-002 Down for the Count!

2009-04-24T00:19:00.011-04:00

The Red Devils had successfully defeated the Flame Leviathan and Razorscale earlier this week. Our next test in Ulduar was to face down the overgrown wind-up toy, XT-002! As this ridiculous piece of hardware strutted around doing calisthenics and punching the ground, we sneakily pulled his front guards from their posts and made quick work of those mechanical buttheads.

It was decided to try a "spread out" approach, as XT is known to toss bombs about. We fanned out in front of him and commenced with the dps! One cheeky raider commented that the occasional tantrum displayed by XT sounded reminiscent of one of our tanks in a previous raid! Sadly, these first few futile attempts proved to serve us poorly as light-bombed and gravity-bombed guildies would be out of healer range and quickly succumbed.

After several fruitless "spread out" attempts, a new strategy of a left/right and front/back assault was planned. This seemed to work better, though we found ourselves overwhelmed by his spawns during his rest stops. We decided to stick with the grouped arrangement, making minor adjustments to our attack strategy. We honed our plans, carefully balancing our dps between attacking his exposed heart while preventing the healing spawns from reaching him. Off-tanks were kept busy controlling the larger pummelers and bomb-bots. With each attempt, our confidence grew and we came closer to victory. Our 16th try proved to be XT's undoing and he fell in a heap to the floor. We had succeeded, putting out 27 million damage in just under 6 and a half minutes! Good job, Red Devils... good job!

A note for my fellow hunters... those little heal-bots don't have a very large hit box and seem to be able to pass close to your frost traps without setting them off. If you are assigned to use these traps, be careful of your placement to ensure they are triggered. Personally, I think assigning hunters to this duty is an enormous loss of much-needed burst dps on the exposed heart, at least for our group of intrepid raiders. There are far more effective AoE classes that are better suited to the job. Ideally, we should limit our add duty to misdirecting the pummelers to the off-tanks and get back to business on XT! But, a disobedient raider is a liability, and we should do as we are instructed. Our raid leader, indeed the entire raid, is counting on us.

Anyway, after a small celebration over the now inoperative XT-002, we backtracked to Ignus the Furnace Masters fiery lair. His front guards stood no chance against the mighty Red Devils. Our blood was up and we wanted more! We advanced on Ignus, but were soon no more than a smoldering group of corpses littering the stone floor in front of his furnace. Personally, I found myself quickly in the soup, so to speak, as he grabbed me up and stuffed me in his "crotch pot"! This was going to require a carefully planned strategy and after three attempts, we elected to retreat and plan our next encounter with him for another day. You will be ours, Ignus. Oh yes, you will!

In other news, Blizzard has Authenticators back in stock! You can be sure that I ordered mine promptly and it should be here any day. These things are in limited supply, but provide an extra layer of security against hackers. And believe me, you do not want to fall prey to those scumbags! The Authenticator is cheap, only $6.50, a one time cost. Their only downside is how few of them Blizzard has been able to provide to its subscribers. Don't dawdle... order yours now! Or, if you have an Iphone, you can download an applet to provide the same security.

Adventures in Ulduar

2009-04-22T17:02:00.008-04:00

Or, "How I Spent Yet Another Vacation From WoW"

Patch 3.1 has arrived, and with it the new raid instance Ulduar. Needless to say, the Red Devils were stoked about this new content. I wish I could report that I was with them during their first attempts, but sadly I was not. Each time I tried to log on to Seabrat, I would be immediately disconnected from the game. I tried repeatedly (always keeping in mind the definition of insanity) without success. I moved the addons folder and the wtf folder to a backup drive and tried again, but nothing worked. I was able to log onto my alts, so I filled out an in-game ticket and spent the night questing and leveling while listening to the raid on Vent. The ticket was still open when I logged off five hours later.

The next day I had an e-mail message from Blizzard stating that they had moved Seabrat to resolve the issue. Sweet! I tried to log onto Seabrat, but the same problem persisted - I would be disconnected immediately. I logged onto an alt, filled out another ticket and went back to leveling. That ticket was also still open when I logged off.

And... the next day I had another e-mail from Blizzard that Seabrat had again been moved to resolve the problem. Again, I tried to log onto Seabrat with the exact same outcome. Sigh, another "alt" night. I filled out another in-game ticket, this time asking that they stop moving Seabrat and investigate the problem further. Moving him was not solving the problem. That ticket was also open when I logged. Meanwhile, my guildies were heckling me by linking their new loots from Ulduar. Grrrr.

Another day dawned with another e-mail from Blizzard. They were "investigating" the problem, yay! I was still unable to log on with Seabrat. This time I posted a message on Blizzards Technical Support Forum then spent the night watching TV.

Saturday afternoon I checked my e-mail and found no message from Blizzard. Then I checked Blizzards Technical Support Forum hoping to find a "blue" response, only to find that my post had disappeared! That was annoying. Why would they delete my post? I decided to try once again to log on with Seabrat and voila! I was in!!

I spent the day trying to catch up on all the 3.1 changes; dual spec, train Black Arrow, spend talent points and re-talent pets, etc. Then I spent quite a bit of time at the training dummies trying to relearn my shot rotation/priority. I'm not really fond of the whole Black Arrow thing, but you have to use it to get Lock and Load procs now since Serpent Sting won't do it. I still have to keep Serpent Sting up though, which means yet another cooldown to manage and another shot in the rotation. Traps still ensure a Lock and Load proc, so Freezing Arrow becomes more valuable, I just need to have trash mobs available since it simply fails on bosses. It does work well on the Razorscale encounter as there are plenty of trash mobs around to throw a Freezing Arrow at!

I read up on strategies for Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale and XT-002. I was trying to be prepared, but reading strategies really only gives me an idea of what the encounter is about. I have to actually experience it to figure out what is really going on. It's one of my many learning disabilities. But, I wanted to be at least a little prepared for my first exposure to Ulduar.

Sunday night is a raid night and we had enough people to make an attempt. The boss de' jour was Razorscale and we made nine decent attempts, but wiped each time. Monday we wanted to regroup and try again, but lacked the appropriate classes and ran Malygos and Sartharion with 2 drakes up. Tuesday, however, we were all business and ready to roll in and exact our revenge on Razorscale.

First though, we had to get past the Flame Leviathan (FL). This was my first encounter with him and I was more than a little intimidated, so I selected a chopper to ride. That seemed to provide the least possibility of screwing up the raid. We battled through the trash and I had a blast honking the horn and spraying mobs with tar. We got ready for FL and all of us chopper drives laid down some tar in front of his door. He charged out into an inferno of flaming tar and began chasing us around. Things were utter chaos, but I tried to make sure to lay down tar in front of FLs path and find players as they were launched off FL after destroying his circuit board. I guess they didn't trust me and would run away as I zoomed in to pick them up, choosing instead a quick death from splash damage. Hmmm... I was pretty sure I showered before the raid. Must be all that sticky tar on me.

Anyway, we were down almost all of our launched players so I made the decision to abandon my chopper and hop into a Demolisher. I loaded myself into the launch tube and waited to be sent on my mission to destroy FLs circuitry. It was looking like a wipe, but I was hoping to at least get the experience of being launched and seeing the top of FL. Suddenly I was there! I quickly shot down the adjacent circuit and then proceeded to melee the one I was standing next to. That took a bit and I was now the only player left outside a vehicle. Really, I kind of expected a friendly chopper to come pick me up, but that didn't happen. I started running for the first open vehicle I could find while firing instants at FL. Needless to say, I was soon dead, but my sacrifice had saved the day! FL had been disabled long enough to bring him down. The raid showed its appreciation by rezzing me last and then only because I was loot master! I'm telling ya'... it's a tough crowd.

Oh well, off to pay our respects to Razorscale. Having been there once before, I was a little more confident on this encounter. The trash is problematic and we had some problems with a sleepy tank, but we were making progress. On our sixth attempt we suffered the ever humiliating 1% wipe. Grrrr... we zoned back in and promptly stomped her into the ground, even earning the "A Quick Shave" achievement! Not only that, but we managed to make our mark in the WWS annals with a top 500 fight ranking (at least at the time of this writing). Way to go Red Devils!

We finished the night playing with the trash before XT-002, but wiped a couple of times and called it. We will be back Thursday better prepared for that encounter.

That brings me to the subject of my personal performance. I usually do pretty well in raids, not great and certainly not well enough to be considered for one of the true "top tier" raiding guilds. Another survival hunter in our guild, Fountainhead, has been competing with me for the top hunter spot and generally beats me out. That's ok with me, I don't feel the need to be first place all the time and I do sometimes still beat him. The gap between us has usually been pretty small and I felt we were both doing our part in terms of dps. Now, however, he is about 20% over me and that indicates (to me) that I am not performing at acceptable levels. It could just be the extra five days he had to adapt to the new shot rotation/priority and it certainly isn't gear. He's just putting out substantially more shots than I am and I have got to get better at selecting and timing my shots.

Can I, or have I reached the limits of my meager skill? Only time will tell and I will gracefully step down from raiding should I no longer be able to perform to the guilds (and my) standards.

Alas, Poor BRK!

2009-04-07T13:38:00.003-04:00

Alas, poor BRK! I knew him, gentle readers, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. (Shakespeare's Hamlet, mildly edited)

Yes, 'tis sadly true. The godfather of hunters, BigRedKitty, has passed from our realms and the hunter community is lesser for it. While we all support his decision to focus on his wife and family, we also mourn his absence. His intuition, wit, patience and desire to help his fellow hunter were fundamental qualities so often absent in WoW players. Never one to brag or denigrate, BRK was tirelessly cheerful, supportive and entertaining in his approach to hunter education. So tireless, in fact, that it appears his wife and child were deprived of a similar level of attention, thus his decision to withdraw from the playing field and focus on more important things.

BRK, we salute you and hail "fare thee well".

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields,
And until we meet again,
May God hold you
In the palm of his hand.

Hackers, I Cast Thee OUT!

2009-03-30T14:53:00.009-04:00

Well, a whole week has passed without being hacked! I hope that I never have to go through that again. It was a long and trying process: reformatting, reinstalling, virus scans, spyware scans, firewall downloads. Argghhh... none of that worked! It finally dawned on me, my PC was posessed!

I began my search for an exorcist. Since my PC was an avowed agnostic that proved to make the task more daunting, but I was eventually able to persuade Father Guido Sarducci to pay us a visit. Upon entering the room, Father Sarducci stated that he indeed did feel an evil, malevolent presence emanating from my PC. He sprinkled a few drops of Holy Water (odd that he keeps it in a vodka bottle) in a circular pattern around the PC. That was when things got weird. Ok, they were weird before, but this got scary weird. The hard drive lights started flashing, the PC began erratic boot cycles and the CD drive doors began opening and closing in a random fashion! When Father Sarducci began speaking the rituals of exorcism, a torrent of vile smelling megabytes began spewing forth all over the good Father. This stopped the exorcism process as Father Sarducci stormed out of the house screaming something about dry cleaning costs. I was on my own again and could swear I heard a deep rumbling laugh (with a chinese accent) emanate from the bowels of my PC (or maybe the power supply, I dunno).

That was when I could hear those familiar troll voices from WoW saying, "Stay 'way from de Voodoo, mon". That had to be it... somehow the bad mojo had invaded my PC. I had no choice but to fight Voodoo with Voodoo. I sent a plea for help to Marie Laveau, the famed Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She immediately sent me a Voodoo kit guaranteed to fix all my PC problems (only $19.95).

The box arrived in the mail a few days later. It contained some small wooden skewers, a voodoo doll, a small bottle of rum, a few packages of varying dusts and salts, and a detailed set of instructions which I followed to the letter. I carefully opened the PC case and removed some of the dust that had accumulated inside. That dust was inserted into an opening in the back of the voodoo doll along with the salts included in the Voodoo kit. The doll was then carefully sewn shut with the blackened bone needle and sinew (also included in the kit).

I was instructed to then open the little vial of rum, pour it into my mouth and spew it onto the doll. Then I was to immediately sprinkle the Voodoo dust from the kit over the doll's head while chanting "chinese hacker, chinese hacker" repeatedly. Seemed like a waste of perfectly good rum, but I wasn't taking any chances and did as I was instructed. After five minutes of chanting, I was to then place all of the wooden skewers into the doll at various points illustrated in the kit while holding the doll over the PC.

Once the ritual was completed, the instructions said that my PC was now free of hackers and so far that seems to be the case. The doll was smelling kind of rank and the instructions didn't say anything about disposal, so I removed the wooden skewers and tossed it to the dogs for a chew toy. I can't be sure, but I thought I actually heard tiny little chinese screams as both dogs fought over their new toy. Meh, whatever dude... hope ya' like doggy breath!

So, I am finally hacker-free and back to playing WoW again (all while retaining my sense of humor, no less)! Setting up keybinds and all the other "personalized touches" in WoW is taking a little time, but I am getting there. I think everything is pretty much back to normal, but I have noticed that Seabrat now has these strangely glowing eyes....

O Seabrat, Where Art Thou?

2009-03-20T13:53:00.002-04:00

Well, as I write this, it appears Seabrat is currently on the Blackwing Lair realm, but I sure didn't put him there! Since the account has been disabled since Monday, I have to assume that the hacker did that during his last little adventure at my expense. I had a Seabrat character on a few other realms, but since they don't show up in the armory any more I assume the hacker deleted them. Meh... no biggie. There is only one true Seabrat, and he has been kidnapped!

My PC has been reformatted and reinstalled. AV, spyware and firewall have all been updated and installed. Scans have been done with numerous virus and spyware scanners. WoW is installed and ready to go. I would buy an Authenticator in a heartbeat, if only they were available! My e-mail address and password have been changed. My WoW account has been updated with the new e-mail address. Everything looks good and ready to launch!

Yet... I am still not convinced that my WoW account is secure. If the hacker knows the answer to my secret question (or the last digits of my CD-key), then I believe he/she can still reset my e-mail address and successfully swipe my account. I am waiting to hear from Blizzard on that one. Until then, I am out of the game.

Oh, and Mr/Ms Hacker, if you are reading this I would like to offer you a free, all expenses paid offshore fishing trip. I'll bring the bait, drinks, food, tackle... everything, even the chain and cement blocks. I promise you the experience of a lifetime!

Hackers Suck and Blow... At The Same Time!

2009-03-17T16:25:00.005-04:00

Aw crap. Even after reformating and reinstalling Windows and WoW, the hacker was able to strike again. Even as I was writing my last post, he/she was in-game and ruining my WoW life. I didn't realize this until I checked the Red Devils web page to see the ominous posting "Seabrat Hacked Again?" Oh, boy - that can't be good. Sure enough, apparently I had been. But... I had received no e-mails from Blizzard regarding a password reset, e-mail change, etc. When I tried to log into the game, sure enough - my password was invalid. It had been changed.

I called Blizzard... again. While sympathetic, there wasn't much the assistant could really do. I explained that this person had been screwing with me for a week now and asked for a password reset. I also explained that I had received no messages from Blizzard regarding any account activity related to this latest hack. When I provided him with my e-mail address, all he would tell me was that wasn't the one currently on the account - he wouldn't tell me what it was. Ah ha! The hacker had obtained access to my e-mail and grabbed the messages before I could get them. That's why I never heard anything from Blizzard. I did manage to get Blizzard to set my e-mail back to the correct one.

I then changed my e-mail password and created a new e-mail account as well. Then off to the Blizzard support site to update my WoW account e-mail to the new one. When I logged into Blizzards website, I got a message that the account had been banned, but was able to successfully change the e-mail to the new address. I sent an e-mail to Account Administration, but have not heard anything at this point. With the account banned, no one can get to it - not me and not the hacker.

I sent an e-mail to my ISP support group asking them to review the access to my e-mail account over the past few days. I am waiting to see how they respond.

This leaves me with a number of mysteries.

Do I still have a keylogger or some sort of spyware on my PC? Having reformatted and reinstalling everything, I would hope not. It is possible that I did not correctly wipe the main drive and left a hidden partition with the infection on it. It's also possible such a partition exists on my second hard drive, which I did not reformat. Finally, it's possible that this was done solely by hacking my e-mail account (my WoW account name and e-mail name were the same) and using that to reset my password, intercepting the auto-response e-mails from Blizzard.

If I have to completely wipe out the entire PC, how do I save my personal files such as pictures, videos, spreadsheets and countless other files that I have developed over the past 20 years? I don't want to lose all that, but don't want to keep reinfecting my PC when I restore those files from whatever (external hard drive, etc.)

Is the infection actually in my BIOS (Phoenix Award v6.00PG)? I spent some time trying to find a BIOS reinstaller on the web, but was not successful. I may have a BIOS CD somewhere, so I'll have to find that.

What will Blizzard do at this point? Since the hacker knows my account name, is it possible Blizzard would create a new account and transfer everything? From what I've read, they will not. Or will they even bother to resecure this account, and instead just say, "Sorry baby, you're screwed. This account is gone forever." Hopefully not, I don't think I could commit to opening a new account and starting over - especially if this can just keep happening.

Finally, since none of the scans, firewalls and spyware utilities I have run (and there are a lot) have found any sign of the infection, how is anyone ever able to be certain that their PC is secure? Have we gotten to the point where you can never be secure if you are connected to the internet? Are the bad guys that good and the good guys that bad at this?

Stay tuned... I have a feeling this ain't over yet.

Hackers Suck!

2009-03-16T17:18:00.003-04:00

And I should know. Yes, my WoW account got hacked. If you've been there, you know the feeling. If not, I hope you never do. Imagine my feeling of dread when I checked my e-mail last Tuesday to see several messages from Blizzard's infamous "donotreply" address. The first one I opened was a notice that my recent request to change my e-mail address needed to be confirmed... click here to continue. Uh, no thanks. I didn't make any such request. Not only that, but the "new" e-mail address was for a Chinese domain. You might think that would set off alarms at Blizzard, but apparently not.

The next e-mail was to inform me that my request to transfer Seabrat to the Galakrond realm was finalized. Oh noes! They haz kidnappped Seabrat!

The last e-mail informed me that my password had been changed.

Ok. Time to call Blizzard. Oops... they are on the west coast and I'm on the east coast. They were closed for another 2 hours! That was a long wait for me, but when I got hold of their support staff, they changed my password for me and e-mailed it to my correct e-mail account.

When I got home, I was able to log in with the new password from Blizzard, then promptly reset my password again. Seabrat was indeed gone from Gorefiend, but my other characters were still there. Checking each of them, I found they were all broke and their banks empty, but all equipped gear was still intact. I checked the guild bank with Seawolf and saw that she and an "unknown" (Seabrat was gone from the realm, so he was now "unknown") had taken their alloted withdrawals from the guild bank. Mostly enchanting supplies. Damn!

I talked with my guildies on Vent and let them know what had happened. Several pitched in with advice on what to do next and one sent me some software links to try and help me find my security breach. I logged off and began my foray into my PC. I ran at least three different spyware programs, tried out several rootkit analyzers and assorted registry scans. I saved the logs and posted them to my guilds website. It was late, I was pissed and logged for the night.

The next morning I checked the guild website to see what their review of the posted logs revealed. I didn't see anything suspicious, but wanted some expert opinions. I was greeted by several postings that Seawolf was raiding the guild bank again and posting in the trade channel to sell her illicit goods. I obviously had a keylogger and it was very well hidden. Checking my e-mail, I found yet another notice from Blizzard - my account was suspended. My guildies had been successful in their pleas to the GMs to suspend my account.

When I got home that evening, I logged into our Vent server and began chatting with my guildies. Several work in the PC field, and one even works in PC security for the federal government. His advice was heart wrenching: reformat your PC, reinstall Windows and software, cancel your credit cards. This was not what I wanted to hear. I decided to wait another day and discuss it with another guildie. His advice was similar, so Friday evening found me seated at my PC for a long night of software installation. I started out with my Windows boot CD, wiped my hard drives and reinstalled Windows. That didn't take long, but now the real chore began... updating Windows and MS Office with all the patches and updates took hours. Finally, it was time to reinstall WoW. I had saved all the update patches so I saved some download time, but just the initial DVD installation of Wrath takes nearly an hour. Then installing all those patches... whew! Saturday morning at 4am, I was finally done. I sent an e-mail to Blizzard that my account was ready to be released and went to bed.

Later, on Saturday evening I logged into WoW to find that Seabrat had been restored, but all other characters were gone. The hacker had taken his final shot when he started getting whispers from my guildies and had deleted everything in the account. Unfortunately he had sufficient time to do this before the account was suspended. Fortunately the recently restored incarnation of Seabrat was intact, at least in terms of equipped gear, spec and professions. I asked for an invite back to Red Devils and deposited the enchanting mats that had been restored at that point. I opened a GM ticket to explain my predicament, but since my account was still under investigation he couldn't touch the deleted characters. I would have to wait until the investigation was complete to see what shape Seawolf and my bank 'toon were in.

That didn't happen until Sunday. All my characters were restored, along with a series of in-game mails from Blizzard with the items that had been sold off by the hacker. It took quite a while to deposit all the guild items back into the guild bank, but at this point I think almost everything has been recovered. The only items still missing are the honor and valor tokens on Seabrat. Since those can be used to purchase BOE gear, I can imagine what happened to them.

The most disturbing thing in this whole event is my inability to identify the keylogger, or how I got it in the first place. I have both a hardware and software firewall running, spyware, popup blockers, Kaspersky antivirus/malware and consider myself fairly knowledgeable regarding internet security. Nonetheless, I still got nailed. While all evidence points to a WoW hacker only, there is no guarantee that nothing else was compromised. That keylogger was extremely well hidden, none of the scans or rootkits I ran revealed any sign of it.

So why the hightech and stealthy hack into just a WoW account? The simple answer is it's a relatively safe, high return theft. Stealing virtual property doesn't have the risk, or attract the attention of law enforcement that "real" identity theft carries with it. That doesn't mean they can't make money doing it. WoW's virtual economy transfers into the real world via gold sellers. There is no shortage of these people and if you do a simple internet search for "WoW gold" you will find thousands of links to sites that sell virtual cash to you for real money. While there is little doubt that much of these sites stockpiles of virtual gold are obtained through "legitimate" farming, you can certainly see how hacking into someone elses account and stealing their gold and selling their items in-game gives them a much higher rate of return for their efforts.

In short, we... the game community, have created this problem for ourselves. If none of us were willing to shell out real money to buy virtual gold, the hacking of WoW accounts would generally be limited to people just looking to screw with others. Without the profit motive, there would be little reason for these hackers to put in the time and effort required to develop their craft. Blizzard, in turn, has had to put extensive development dollars into subverting these people where possible. The development and implementation of "Warden" to prevent botting, the in-game banning of gold sellers, the GM time to respond to hacked accounts and the need for "investigation" teams all take away from game development efforts. That affects all of us, even those that never get hacked.

Ah... Days Off!

2009-02-16T17:12:00.004-05:00

So what's the reward for clearing Naxx in one night, followed by Malygos and OS (with 2 drakes up again, I might add) the next nights?

Days off, baby! That's what. And... I found them enjoyable. Not that I didn't play WoW, I did, but not being chained to the computer for nights on end was kinda' nice. The guild, on the other hand, started a second round of Naxx-25 composed almost entirely of alts (which I have several of... all below level 20). Of course, we don't have enough players with level 80 alts, so there were a few pug spots. As far as I know, the alt run went... ok, I guess, but I have to imagine it is a much greater struggle. Those 'toons are certainly lesser geared, and I imagine their skill with their alts isn't up to par with their mains.

Nevertheless, their dedication inspired me to try to level up an alt. I chose my druid (Seawolf), who has been sitting at level 12 while performing banking and auction duties for Seabrat. I chose the druid class since, as a hybrid, she can be a healer, a dps-er or a tank, depending on spec and gear. That's a lot of flexability the hunter class simply doesn't have. So, I can level this one toon and still have a lot of choices.

I played around over the weekend and leveled her up to 21, finally getting cat form. I must say, the combat ability skyrockets in that form and leveling became quite a bit easier. Melee combat is very different from the ranged version I am so accustomed to playing with Seabrat.

Will I take her all the way to level 80? I don't know. I still prefer my hunter, but having a second class to play and being able to participate in alt runs would be nice. The only real down side is that long, long grind to level 80.

Oh Fickle Fame

2009-02-13T14:06:00.010-05:00

Fame is a fleeting thing. One day you're hot, the next you're not!

Oh well, I never started this blog for fame, but for my guildmates. However, it is nice to be recognized and my brief moment in the sun was glorious. Gotta' soak up the good stuff while you can! But what happened? How did this all come about? Here's a timeline of relevant events:

January 20, Seabrat respecs to Survival after the great Hunter Nerf of '09.
January 25, Seabrat finds PowerAuras helpful in his conversion to survival and writes up a "how to" in this blog.
January 26, Seabrat's WoW Blog exceeds 100 hits/day on a consistent basis.
February 1, BRK does PowerAuras right and makes a video, with a small acknowledgment to Seabrat.
February 2, Seabrat's WoW Blog exceeds 1,000 hits!
February 3, Seabrat's WoW Blog down to 500 hits/day.
Febrary 12, Seabrat's WoW Blog back to 100 hits/day.

Then, take a look at the content report:

My post regarding PowerAuras had more hits than the all of my other posts put together! So, while creating a post about a timely and helpful topic (PowerAuras) was the seed, it was the reference from BRK that actually caused the explosive growth. Kinda' like super mega-fertilizer, something I bet BRK will readily admit to being!

Why do I bring this up? I managed to do this once in a little more than one year of blogging and it was still BRK that brought the HPS (hits per second), baby. BRK does this consistently... and that's why he is the godfather of hunters. All hail BRK! Were it not for his tremendous influence, I would still be a struggling huntard with more bad habits than the entire population of San Quentin. But now... I am just a huntard!

One Night in Naxxramas

2009-02-11T13:46:00.011-05:00

Oh yeah, we got this stuff down, baby! The Red Devils rode into Naxx with guns blazing and dropped every boss in one night. How do you like us now, KT?

I'd like to say we swept the place with no deaths and no wipes, but we had a little fubar with Gothik the Harvester when the live side got overwhelmed. By the way, it seems that Patch 3.0.9 has disabled feign death on that particular fight. No resist warnings, no "feign death failed" message. Just laying there on the floor while that piece of trash mob kept beating on me! And I wasn't the only one... we ran with four hunters and we all noticed this little "upgrade".

Since we didn't want to get bored, we also decided to go for a few achievements on this run. This resulted in three attempts on Kel'Thuzad with two wipes at 0.01%. Man, those were hard to take. If only ONE more dpser hadn't died earlier in the fight.

But, we persevered and even earned a few achievments: clearing the spider wing in under 15 minutes (Arachnophobia), Grand Widow with the followers up (Momma Said Knock You Out), Sapphiron with no frost resist (The Hundred Club) and killing 18 abominations in front of KT (Just Can't Get Enough). Still no "safety dance" though. Someone always seems to die on that one! And we couldn't seem to avoid killing a few spores on Loatheb (Spore Loser), but we gave it a good try and didn't intentionally kill any of them.

And guys... always, always remember. She may sound like this on Vent, or even act like this in-game:

But, as demonstrated by one of our very own Red Devils (a very popular feral druid with a fondness for Doritos, I might add), she probably in all reality actually looks like this:

So please, I beg of you... think before you flirt!!

Sartharion-2D

2009-02-11T13:44:00.002-05:00

After having fully cleared Naxxramas several times and dropping Malygos a couple of times, the Red Devils found themselves in search of new challenges. It was time to start working our way up to taking out Sartharion with all three drakes up. We had successfully one-shotted him with Tenebron up, so we decided to flex our raiding muscles and try two drakes.

We started last Sunday, making 12 unsuccessful attempts. Each showed improvement, but leading a raid is a little like herding cats. And these cats were getting pretty skittish by the end of the night. We did manage to drop Tenebron on the last few tries, but couldn't quite keep it together to down Vesperon. We were confident we could pull it off with a fresh start on Monday. Bada boom, bada bing, we managed to scratch out a win on our second shot, putting out 20 million damage in just under 11 minutes.

Now, I would like to say I was instrumental in our success, but sadly that is not the case! Lowering the spell detail effect all the way down really helped me to see the void zones, but being an old decrepit Night Elf I still couldn't quite move fast enough. On our first attempt, I fell prey to a void zone that spawned perfectly in the lava wave gap where I stood just as the wave passed me. I felt pinned down... I was turned to shoot at Vesperon and couldn't run forward (into the lava wave) and didn't think to strafe sideways until I was already dead. On the second try, it was all me baby. I was focused so much on my shot rotation (damn SV spec) that I forgot to watch where I was standing and died a few milliseconds after I realized what was happening. Hopefully the newly revised "blue" void zones in yesterday's patch (3.0.9) will be easier to see amidst all the red flames, background and waves.

So, what next? More training with two drakes? Substituting one of the lesser drakes with Shadron? Jump right in to three drakes? That's still being decided, but be sure I will keep you all posted here!

Malygos, We Barely Knew Ye'!

2009-02-03T12:28:00.009-05:00

Heroic Malygos... pretty much the current endgame content (unless you count Sartharion with 3 drakes up). And, on our second night of attempts, the Red Devils succeeded in killing the big blue dragon. Not only that, but we nearly one-shot him! Unfortunately, a stray pet wandered into the fray and wiped the raid on our first attempt last night. Rumor has it that pets are currently bugged in this encounter and can frequently wipe a raid. So... all pets were banned on the second try and Malygos went down like smooth bourbon. As an SV hunter, I am required to make bourbon references whenever possible!

Anyway, counting the first night at 16 failed attempts and last night at 1, it took us a total of 18 attempts to down the old boy. Not too bad, and certainly exceeded the gloomy prediction of our pally-turned-deathknight Guth, who stated (rather boldly I might add) that it would take us more tries than Archimonde!

I am not at all a fan of Phase 3. The psychadelic moving rainbow and multitude of red drakes overwhelms my senses. In truth, it's a seizure inducing nightmare! I managed to live through it, while trying my best to stay at max range and "with the blue square" of which I seldom even captured a glimpse. Whoever the sadists are on the Blizzard design team that designed those graphics, they deserve a special place in hell forced to watch (and listen) to "Wham" singing "Wake me up before you go go" until the end of time. Even worse, I was tasked with loot master duties and had to go through a rather laborious loot distribution, complete with roll modifiers. It's never taken so long to dole out four pieces of loot in my life!

But sometimes even good deeds are rewarded, and this was one of those times. I was able to complete the questline "Heroic Judgment at the Eye of Eternity" and received my [Favor of the Dragon Queen], just about the best neck piece in the game! With the looting process completed, everyone retrieved their badges and exited through the portal (thank god!). Our kindly mage, Kiralana, summoned a portal to Dalaran and we were done for the night. Good job, Red Devils!

Ghostcrawler Chats with Hunters!

2009-01-31T14:36:00.024-05:00

As some of you may (or may not) know, Ghostcrawler (GC) is the "face" of Blizzard on the official WoW Forums. Love him, or hate him (and most seem to), he is the company front man that attempts to explain to the masses what is happening and why with game changes. His life, as near as I can tell, is a daily sh#t storm, and whatever he is paid, I doubt it is enough.

Obviously, GC did not sit down and discuss with me personally his viewpoint on the hunter class, but he has attempted to respond to some of the more reasonable posts regarding hunters on the WoW Forums. So, with that in mind, let's conduct our little interview, shall we?

GC, welcome to Seabrat's WoW Blog! Thanks for taking time away from your busy schedule of mucking through the decaying slime and debris in the WoW Forums. But, seriously, what is up with all the buffs, nerfs, buffs (ad nauseum) going on with the hunter class?

Look, all things considered we would much rather buff than nerf. Players love it when they get buffed. The sun comes out and the birds are singing. When we nerf a class we get (I kid you not) death threats. So we must have a really good reason for nerfs.

Usually the reason is that we have absolute, not relative targets. If you are in a raid and someone is doing 8000 dps, sure the "fun" solution is to buff every other class up to that point. If we end up over-buffing someone to 8500 dps, well then we can go back and give everyone else additional buffs. Maybe at level 90 everyone will be doing 12,000 dps, but inflation is inflation, right? Right? Of course we'd have to buff all the monsters too. We'd probably have to buff gear and talents because otherwise their contributions might seem paltry (I get 20 more dps when I do 8000 dps? lol.). In short the changes necessary to avoid a nerf just spiral out of control.

I am talking mostly about PvE here. The balance for PvP is quite different and while raw power is certainly a factor, specific abilities and their cooldowns and synergies are usually far more important. The same thing is true though. If a particular form of CC is too potent, then in order to avoid nerfing it, we would have to give lots of other classes better ways of breaking CC. Then the original player feels gimpy so we give him the "this CC cannot be broken" ability. The vicious cycle still exists. Sometimes a single nerf, even if it's unpopular, is a ton less work than a lot of buffs, and sometimes it is just better for the game regardless.

Some players ask: Isn't this what betas and PTRs are for? That is true. But it often isn't enough. MMOs are living games. Things change over time. Players are crafty and find new ways of using abilities to do things we didn't anticipate. Software has bugs, and sometimes they aren't uncovered even with the most rigorous QA. Rather than denying that these problems can arise, we would rather just be open about them and get them fixed as quickly as we can. (I didn't say "quickly," I said "as quickly as we can.")

One of the things we are trying to do is get changes turned around in a more timely manner. In the past if a class or spec was too weak they often had to just suck it up until the next tier of content is released. I think the community wasn't necessarily prepared for this, which is why you see some "roller coaster" feedback. Other players, we know, are thrilled that issues might actually get looked at quickly instead of going on and on. And to be fair, we can be even faster and there are problems that have persisted for longer than we would like, but WoW is a big game and supertankers don't turn on a dime.
Sorry, it wasn't supposed to be a "GC goes off on OP" response. There have been several posts lately asking why we have to nerf classes and referencing "the roller coaster" in general. I just wanted to attempt to explain our logic so that it seemed, well, logical and not punitive.

Ok, fair enough. Do you mind if we take a few calls from our listeners? Caller 1, you're on the air. What do you have on your mind?

Umm...wait a minute..

Caller 1:
You're telling us that the theory crafters were in fact, correct when they showed the ways hunter DPS would be effected by the nerfs. You should learn to trust them GC, they seem to know Blizzard math pretty damn well, and in the past, considering the number of times Blizzard representatives have been wrong about math and been shown so by the theorycrafters, you need to start considering that it's possible that we know as much about the mechanics of our class as you do, if not more.

The theorycrafters are right a lot and they are wrong sometimes too. (The theorycrafters also sometimes make incorrect assumptions about our goals.) Hunters predicted they were going to be awful in PvP in LK, and I don't think that is shaping up to be the case. Retadins made long posts (with numbers) about how bad they were nerfed. The trick is knowing when to listen to players and when not to. It is rarely simple. Our game design process is never going to be: the community hands us numbers and we make changes. It is absolutely valuable input but it is just one tool, not the whole process.

We appreciate community feedback. Let me make that absolutely clear. That is why I am out here on these forums every day. But this is not an open source project. I don't mean for this to sound harsh, but we're ultimately not asking you to sit down and design the game with us. I promise though we will listen, even when we disagree or choose to go a different way.

Oh boy, retadins... don't get me started on those guys! Thank you, Caller 1. Caller 2, you're on the air!

Caller 2:
You're telling us that you really don't care about the data (that you keep telling us you like) that showed undeniably that Hunters were not out of line compared to other DPS classes.

That's not really a question, but we do like to get numbers. Many of the arguments that hunter dps is currently too low are arrived at by comparing hunter dps to classes whose dps is too high.

Caller 2:
You're telling us that despite the fact that even though Survival is the highest DPS spec for hunters right now and despite the fact that it still does not do as much DPS as the old BM build, that you think it's too much DPS. The data shows GC that hunters are not "consistently" at the top since the changes nor were they consistently at the top BEFORE the changes. Yes, they're about 10% lower than they used to be while other classes are as high or higher than they used to be (Mages, Warriors, DKs).

We like the damage numbers coming out of Marks hunters. That is our target right now. Your feedback would be better directed (assuming you want it to make a difference) suggesting how to get BM and SV closer to that target.

I don't know that I agree the new SV is doing less dps than the old BM. My experience has been otherwise. Speaking of which, you've indicated in your posts that BM was "over-nerfed" and there are plans to buff it back up (a little). While you didn't specifically say there were plans to nerf SV, can we expect that to accompany the BM buff when it happens?

I'm looking at GC, but he has his poker face on. Ok, thanks Caller 2. Next up we have Caller 3 with a question about the role of the hunter class as dps.

Caller 3:
You're telling us that all of us who think of the Hunter class as a DPS class are wrong because you're telling us that you have some other plan - because if you're telling us that Survival is currently TOO STRONG despite being weaker than a NUMBER of other classes in DPS, then you're telling us that we have some other role besides DPS. Because how else can a DPS class be a DPS class if they don't have competitive DPS?

You are a dps class. You should be up there with mages, locks and rogues... *all things being equal.* Things are rarely equal. A very talented and well-geared Retadin or Boomkin might beat you. Even though we can disagree on which hunter spec is the easiest to play, the class as a whole is not easy to play, at least not at the expert level.

But I suspect what you are really getting at is that certain classes are doing more damage than you consistently. We know. Those classes know it too and they can probably guess what is about to happen. Then there will be many posts like this from them. :)

Yeah, we know what will happen. Glad I don't have your job! Caller 4 is on the line with a question about hunters in arenas. Go ahead Caller 4!

Caller 4:
You're telling us that hunters do not deserve a 10% representation in arenas either because you are continuing to ignore the fact that you nerfed the only spec that gave hunters better than a 2% or so arena representation in the history of the game.

There are some balance problems in Arena at the moment, absolutely. However, if you look at hunter participation, it is growing every week. You can find plenty of players posting right now today that they think hunters are too good in Arena. Our ultimate goal is for every spec to have equal Arena representation. Clearly that is a very lofty goal and we aren't going to get there overnight for say Prot paladins or Fire mages.

Thanks, Caller 4. Caller 5 seems very dubious of Blizzards commitment to listening to outside input. What do you have to say, Caller 5?

Caller 5:
You're telling us that you have some sort of numbers on your end that we don't see that contradicts what we've predicted and seen in practice and are asking us to take that on faith despite a long history of the players being correct in predicting the impact of your [Blizzard's] actions. You're asking us to take you on FAITH GC before the virtual ink is even dry on the apology you made for ignoring us for 2 months and calling our predictions wrong. You'll understand I hope, that we're not really prepared to take you on faith anymore. Would you take yourself on faith if you were playing a hunter for the 4 years of this game's history right now? Would you? Honestly?

I'm not sure what you're asking for here. We design the game. You can choose to trust us or not to trust us. Ultimately though your degree of faith in us really has no impact on the game itself. If you don't like our decisions, you can tell us and I promise we'll listen. We may (and very often will) decide not to make any changes based on your feedback. But we will make informed decisions.

Caller 5, you really are suspicious, but I hear ya' brother, and you did bring up a valid point. However, we really can't expect Blizzard to accept our data, but it's nice to know that they do listen. Caller 6 has a question about the goals Blizzard has for the hunter class. Go ahead, Caller 6. What's on your mind?

Caller 6:
GC, I think what most people are trying to get a grasp of is what your goals are for hunters - in the past Kalgan I think mentioned that x or y ability didn't fit into the model or feel of the hunter class - the problem is that we've seen so many changes I don't think many of us are aware what the goal is for the class to be, so we're after some sort of indicator of where you'd like to take us so we can give feedback and suggestions that are within the design contexts you'd like to see.

Yeah, like a few people pointed out, that is a very broad question and one that every class or spec likes to ask often. There isn't some kind of secret plan for hunters. We aren't trying to change your role or fundamental mechanics... at least for the next few months. :)

When we have announcements to make about your class, you won't be able to miss them.

We want hunters to be succesful. Whether or not you are happy with your dps and utilities, I hope you can agree that we have spent a lot of effort in the last several patches on your class.

Caller 6:
OK first off GC, thank you for the responses. My apologies if you feel we are being "argumentative", but I am speaking from a point of frustration and I hope you will understand that. That said, my real "question" with this thread was: "What is your plan for hunters?" Which has been elaborated on and which you generally answered.

Okay, cool. It’s nice to know you actually were interested in the answers. I don’t at all mind if players get frustrated. Just try not to overdo the negativity, insults, ranting or sense of entitlement (and I am speaking to everyone here). That can and will turn off other players and drive them away from these forums, which is about the worst thing that can happen.

I have to agree on being driven away from the forums. That place is a zoo! Caller 7 wants to know about the mysterious mechanic changes hinted at in your posts about Patch 3.1. Go ahead, Caller 7. You're on the air!

Caller 7:
I *THINK* you mean that our role is going to stay the same (DPS class) and that our fundamental mechanics will likely change, but any clarification you can offer here would be great.

Yes, your role will not change. We have some long-term plans for mechanics but it is way too early to talk about them. Blizzcon maybe.

We have time for one more call. Caller 8 seems to feel that hunters, as a class, have been treated unfairly by Blizzard. What say you, Caller 8?

Caller 8:
"Nerf them down and build them back up slowly, being super cautious not to let them be overpowered for even a little bit." While the process for other classes has been: "Buff the hell out of them and nerf them back slowly if needed, it doesn't matter if they're overpowerd for a while."

I suspect many players would say this about their class, regardless of the class. :)

We don’t treat classes like children, making sure everyone has the same number of cookies. I see players sometimes listing patch notes as “Their class got 41 buffs while ours only got 12” which is a silly thing to say on so many levels. We buff when we need to buff and nerf when we need to nerf. We don’t dwell on how often or what magnitude those changes are. We are more concerned about balance than fairness, if that makes sense (note to self: you will almost certainly be clarifying that statement for months to come). When we don’t make a change that we want to, it is almost certainly because there is a technical or design limitation preventing it. Players may perceive that as “it doesn’t matter if they’re overpowered for awhile.”

One more thing I would like to add is that there is no concept of “hunters do X dps.” You can generate numbers on a target dummy, or numbers on Patchwerk, or numbers for Naxx, or numbers for Naxx bosses. All of those are numbers are likely to be different, and that is something we want. We want every encounter to be different. We want some classes to so better on some fights than others. It’s more interesting that way than if every encounter in the game always produced the same classes in the same stack rank. A big disconnect between the community and the developers is that we don’t accept dps as an absolute number. It is relative and it is nebulous. The community with its spreadsheets and target dummies more often views it as an absolute.

Wait, didn't you start out saying that you had absolute targets for dps? Now you say that you don't accept dps as an absolute number. How is that?

[cold stare]

Well, that's all we have time for today. I would like to thank GC for his participation today, as well as his ongoing attempts to communicate with all of us on the forums. Thank you, GC!

Oh hey, no problem. And, Seabrat, as a hunter... well, you just suck!

Um, thanks, I guess. Hey, I'm a work in progress!

Another Naxx-25 Clear!

2009-01-30T16:21:00.009-05:00

After the huge lag-fest we suffered through last Tuesday, the Red Devils picked up where we left off... the Four Horsemen, and one shot everything in the place! Good job, Red Devils!

As is usually the case, after clearing Patchwerk a few comedians in the crowd began calling for more hunter nerfs after the dps meters were posted...

The number one and four spots are both survival spec hunters. Six and seven are marksmen spec hunters. The general consensus seems to be that hunters should not top the dps charts and that's just not reasonable, particularly on Patchwerk where the hunters can maximize their dps by focusing on their shot rotation without being interrupted or moving. The druid, mage and warlock had no problems competing here, nor is Seabrat unreasonably out in front. Unfortunately, Blizzard appears to be buying in to the general consensus and has stated that they think survival hunter dps is too high. You can bet that explosive shot will be nerfed in the near future.

Now, let's go to another fight... Thaddius.

In terms of a hunter-friendly fight, Thaddius is the polar opposite of Patchwerk. You are constantly moving, you can't get to sniper range and you have to watch your polarity buff in addition to your shot rotation. The dps meter shows the proof of this with the number one spot held by a paladin, one of the comedians mentioned earlier. Really the top five spots are all very close, which seems kinda' balanced to me.

So, what to make of this? Hunters are a pure dps class, as are mages and warlocks. We don't have the ability to be tanks or healers, no matter how we spec. Is it unreasonable to expect the pure dps classes to outperform the hybrids (like druids, paladins, and deathknights) in terms of dps? I don't think so, but I certainly respect their opinions (which Blizzard appears to share) to the contrary.

However, it seems patently unfair that a druid can go feral/boomkin spec and top the dps charts, respec and regear to top the heal meters and then respec and regear to successfully tank a raid. I feel similarly about paladins. While a ret pally should produce decent dps, they shouldn't be topping the dps meters. A class that can do it all shouldn't be able to do any of those things as well as a class dedicated (limited?) to that function. That would eliminate the need for having those classes in the game, and that is not in Blizzards best interest.

BM "Over-Nerfed"?

2009-01-28T15:26:00.005-05:00

Well, yeah. And Blizzard was told this, as well as provided sufficient data and documentation. That's what makes the thing so frustrating. They ask for input, but just ignore it!

Anyway... I don't think they are likely to put much effort into this, ala the "huge caveats" diclaimer. I do expect they will nerf SV hunters by reducing the damage from explosive shot, but doubt that BM will receive much of a buff. I suspect the goal is to keep BM below the MM spec in terms of dps, generally because of Blizzards earlier comments that they regard BM as "too easy to play".

On a lighter note, the Red Devils took to the 25-man raiding field again last night; Vault of Archavon, followed by Naxxramas. I got lucky on Gothik the Harvester and [Leggings of Failed Escape] dropped and no one else rolled. Finally, a "real" set of epic pants!

We tried to take down the Four Horsemen, but the server lag was incredible. After two wipes, we ran over to the Spider Wing and cleared it. Lagged as it was, we were able to clear through Maexxna.

We were a little frustrated with Naxx and decided to attempt the Obsidian Sanctum with one drake up. It was still a battle of chaos, and I was whacked by a lava wave! I simply misjudged my location as I was zoomed way out. I got a battle res from a druid (thanks Nyyx!) and managed to stay alive for the rest of the fight. I can't say the same for SeaCat. She died, came back with Heart of the Phoenix, died again and stayed down. No Improved Res Pet...(cry). Fortunately we managed to defeat both the drake and Sartharion. [Fury of the Five Flights] dropped and I won it! Lady Luck was smiling on me once again, much to the dismay of our rogues.

Power Auras!

2009-01-25T23:04:00.015-05:00

Way back when I was BM spec (like... last week), I had very little need to track cooldowns and buffs. Serpent sting was put back up as needed and my shot rotation was pretty simple. Now, as SV spec, that has all changed. It is critically important to hit an explosive shot every time the cool down is up. Aimed shot is used to replace a steady shot when its cool down expires, since it hits so much harder. Then, when Lock and Load procs, I need to carefully time my explosive shots so I don't clip one of the ticks. It's all mind boggling, I tell ya'!

So, as is usually the case when I find the game is presenting me with challenges, I went looking for an add-on to help me out. What I found was something called "Power Auras". Now, I would never have thought to look to auras as a hunter add-on, but this little jewel can track a lot of things and give you subtle hints as to what's up. This is done by displaying a configurable "aura" around/above/below your toon.

First on the agenda, I wanted to know when the debuff from Serpent Sting expired. The Noxious Stings talent provides a 3% boost to my damage output, so I don't want that falling off. Not to mention I wanna' get those Lock and Load procs! Power Auras can track when a debuff is not active on the target and this is how I set that one up. Just type /powa to get the configuration screen:

Now, whenever I am in combat and I don't have a serpent sting up, I will see two green horns displayed on either side of me. Toss up a new serpent sting and the horns disappear! Make sure you use the "casted by me" checkbox here, or other hunter's in the group will make your aura disappear. You need to have YOUR sting active to get the benefits from it!

Next up, I certainly want to know when explosive shot is ready. Power Auras can track when an ability is ready. So I set up another aura like this:

This will display the explosive shot icon over my head each time the cooldown expires. One note - if you want to use the icon display like this (use own texture checkbox), then you have to have that spell/ability on your action bars.

Now, since I don't want to divert my attention from all the onscreen action, I also would like to have Power Auras tell me when aimed shot was ready. This was done just like the explosive shot:

Woot! A great big, blue knife over my head and I know that aimed shot is ready to rock!

But the biggest challenge for SV is when Lock and Load procs.

With no cooldown, it's all too easy to clip the second tick of explosive shot, significantly reducing your dps. You gotta' be patient! The Lock and Load buff lasts 10 seconds, so you have time to choose your shots, just not much time. Here's the Power Aura I set up for Lock and Load:

Looky there... a great big, red skull and crossbones, along with a timer (using the timer tab), appears over my head while Lock and Load is active. Can't really miss that! I even used the sound tab to cause a sound to play with each proc, just in case I've gone blind.

But, remember what I said about being patient? Now that I know when Lock and Load is active, explosive shot will have no cool down. But... I don't want to spam it. That damage over time (dot) component is pretty significant and I don't want to keep refreshing it before it's done it's job. One more aura should do the trick.

Now a big, red "BUFF" shows up while explosive shot is ticking down. While I'm under Lock and Load, I don't want to refresh explosive shot until the "BUFF" disappears.

I would really like to configure an aura to tell me when to use Tranq Shot, but haven't quite figured that one out yet. I'm sure it's do-able though. I just need to figure out what buff(s) to look for on the target!

The Great Hunter Respec of '09

2009-01-25T17:14:00.008-05:00

Patch 3.0.8, don't you just love the beautiful names those fine folks at Blizzard come up with for these things. It's almost clinical, really. In this case, for us beast mastery (BM) hunters, it was kind of like going into the doctor and being told, "You're too healthy, so we are going to give you cancer. Oh, and your little dog (cat, whatever), too. Please leave your $20 copay at the door on your way out." Nice, huh?

Blizzard has a long and colorful history of such actions. Classes and their abilities get buffed and nerfed all the time. The official statement for their most recent assault on the hunter class, specifically BM, was that they believed hunters were doing too much damage in raids. And, early on after the release of Wrath of the Lich King, that certainly appeared to be the case. As time progressed and other classes achieved better gear, as well as learned to use their new abilities effectively, the dps gap between hunters and those specs was quickly eroded. My personal belief is that the new level 80 spells and 51 point talents for those classes were of actual benefit, unlike the "freeze-trap-on-a-stick" given to hunters. But, it was too late, Blizzard had made a decision and would not revisit it. Hunters would be nerfed.

To accomplish this, first the staple of the BM spec, Steady Shot, would have its attack power scaling cut by half. Then, since volley was being used to put out some truly impressive numbers on groups of mobs, it would also be toned down with a 30% cut across the board. However, survival (SV) spec hunters, long the red-headed step child of the hunter class, would actually get a boost to their explosive shot! Much like the paladin class, and it's red-headed step child spec (retribution), Blizzard was changing the rules we had all lived by for so long. Now, we all remember what happened with ret pallies recently (they became unstoppable killing machines) so, as you might expect, many long time beast mastery hunters respecced to other builds, most noticeably survival (SV).

Now that the patch has hit the live servers, Blizzard officially dropped another bomb... they considered BM to be an "easier spec to play", and that they want the harder-to-play specs to bring more dps. Their issue is just how much lower BM should be before players will not spec that way. Not surprisingly, this is at odds with their previously established goal to bring all three hunter specs to equitable dps levels. Blizzard often makes statements that they really don't appear to actually put much stock in. They have said they want numbers that support opinions, and not just opinions alone. When provided with such data, they simply state that it doesn't agree with their data.

It should certainly be recognized that they are trying to keep their player base happy. We are paying THEM, after all and not the other way around. They far too often have to deal with emotionally based complaints, rather than factual issues. However, in the case of hunters, they have been unable to develop a class that is truly feasible for both PvE and PvP play. Hunters have largely been a PvE class for quite some time. Given the way Patch 3.0.8 was developed on the test realms, I think they have run out of ideas to help fix the class. At this point, almost every complaint issued has been met with their latest edict: "Don't worry about it, we are going to rebalance hunters in Patch 3.10." This has left hunters everywhere shaking their collective heads. With Blizzards track record, this is likely to be bad.

So Seabrat, like many former BM hunters, is now attempting to retrain himself to fit into the SV mold. And it ain't easy. Blizzard's statement that BM is an easier spec to play is more of an understatement. BM is not a one-button class, as often disparaged by others, but the shot rotation was much simpler and lent itself well to the use of macros. Sadly, there is no macro for survival shot rotations that won't result in a noticeable loss of dps. To maximize dps, you have to conciously decide which shot to use based on buffs and debuffs (both yours and the targets), "lock and load" procs, as well as shot cooldowns. You have to perfect both your decision tree and timing, and with ever-present and ever-variable lag, these are truly monumental tasks. However, even with some errors in timing/shot selection, the dps provided by the SV spec is noticeably higher than BM brings to the table. The real problems arise in a raid where all that focus spent on timing and shots gets in the way of watching what's going on around you. "Seabrat, you're standing in fire/void/poison!" isn't something I heard often as a BM spec. I could watch myself, move and get back into my shot rotation. With an SV spec, this is a little harder pull off.

I have decided to face this as a challenge and intend to stick with the SV spec, at least until the "Great Hunter Rebalance of Patch 3.10". I feel that SV is overly complex, but perhaps this is truly Blizzards goal. The exceptional player that can master all those tasks will bring superior dps to the raid. The rest of us will be left behind. Just how far behind is a challenge for Blizzard.

Chainsaw + Powerline = BAD

2009-01-23T16:31:00.018-05:00

Ok, so... the "chainsaw" incident, or why I am offline again. Well, I am actually back online now, but I was offline for several days. Way offline, like off the grid, as they say. And... it was all my fault, sorta'. This whole thing really all started when I was having my house reshingled. It was time, really. The old shingles were way past their lifetime and a few were missing from past hurricanes. I called the person that had done the sub-work on my remodel two years ago. His son, Shaun, had started a roofing business and I knew he would do good work. I picked out the shingles and my wife, Cheryl, picked out the color. Soon, Shaun and his crew were busily pulling off the old shingles and working hard.

On one of my many trips up to the roof to check on progress, Shaun showed me an area where they had found subterranean termites under the felt. There wasn't much damage and he had replaced the decking just to be safe. That part of the roof had a large tropical tree (Schefflera) growing right at the corner of the foundation. This was keeping that part of the roof constantly shaded. It was also the route the termites had used to reach the roof. It was time for the tree to go. In addition to the termites, it was also growing up under the foundation and was likely to cause damage soon.

Now, I live in Florida, a subtropical climate. Bugs are just a fact of life. I've even convinced a guildie who lives in Canada that cockroaches are rampant here. Herds of them roam the streets, children often ride upon their backs, and many (far too many) even conduct successful runs for public office.

But we have more than just roaches, we have all kinds of bugs including a wide range of termites; drywood, subterranean, formosan... the list seems endless. Soon after we first moved into this house we discovered we had drywood termites. This was made abundantly clear when huge swarms of winged flyers suddenly appeared within the house one evening, getting into everything and flitting about the lights. I am using both "huge" and "swarm" correctly here, you couldn't breathe without inhaling half a dozen!

I should point out that prior to purchasing the home, we were required by the lender to get a termite inspection, which we did and were declared "termite free". When I called the inspector about this, he explained that was just a formality and that he was not responsible for actually finding any termites that may, or may not, be there. It was all part of the "Termite Inspector Relief Act" which was intended to help generate revenue for his industry and not for the protection of home buyers/lenders. I, not the inspector, was on the hook for treating the house for drywood termites. This treatment consists of erecting a huge tent over the house and pumping it full of a highly toxic gas for two days, which may (or may not) result in complete destruction of any furnishings within the home, but is guaranteed to kill anything living within the confines of the tent, including termites. I can attest that this treatment does work. Everything within the house was dead, including a family of fruit rats that had made a home in the attic. That's another story, but I can say that the treatment just kills things, it doesn't preserve them in any way.

Flash forward to two years ago, when I came home to find an oak tree in the front yard had fallen over! To make matters worse, the tree had fallen on the powerline to the house, snapping the riser pole and electric meter completely off. I attributed the ongoing electrical activity in that general location to the complete lack of power within the house. I called the power company, they came out, cut the power and wished me luck. I called an electrician who, being a fairly bright fellow, quickly isolated the problem to the fallen riser and electric meter. He could do the work the next day, but I had to get a permit from the County, who would then inspect his work before the power company would reconnect the lines. Permits are expensive, risers and electric meters are expensive, but the worst part was the two day wait for the County inspector to approve the installation so the power could be turned on. No power for three days. In August. In Florida. We have a small generator which ran the refrigerator and freezers, as well as a couple of lamps, but not the AC. Ugghhh... that was pretty miserable.

Oh yeah, back to the fallen tree. I called a tree guy to come take it away and he found that the tree had contracted a fungus, which I suppose is kinda' like a bug. That fungus had allowed termites to get into the root system, which was why the tree had fallen over. Sorta' like if a wild band of roving weasels suddenly appeared and chewed off your feet, you would fall over. He also pointed out that three adjacent oak trees also had this fungus and I should consider removing them as well. I was suspicious (ala the "Termite Inspector Relief Act") and just had the fallen tree removed.

About a year later my wife and I were watching TV one evening when we heard a loud crash, then an explosion, followed by a complete loss of power to the house. We noticed this because the TV went off and the dogs ran to hide under the bed. I cautiously ventured outside to find an oak tree (one of the ones previously identified with the fungus) had snapped off about 12 feet up the trunk. The top, looking all the world like a huge broccoli stalk, had landed on the power line and then smooshed our little pop-up camper parked beneath it.

The riser was ripped off the house again, but the meter remained on the house even though it was kinda' burned and melted... and still smoking. The power company, bless their little hearts, came right out, cut the lines and wished me luck. This was looking awfully familiar, like... deja vu all over again. I found out that permit fees, risers and meters had gone up a lot in price, but the County would still take two days to do their inspection. No power for three days. In August. In Florida. Again.

Which brings me to today. Now that Schefflera tree, while tall, wasn't really that big. I could remove most of it myself and save some money, or at least that was my plan. Over a period of several days, I slowly made my way through its many trunks. Unlike a normal tree, this thing didn't have branches... it had trunks. Lots and lots of trunks. I would bring one down, de-leaf it, bag the leaves and cut up the trunk with my trusty chainsaw. Last saturday, I had worked my way down to the last remaining trunk. The largest one, incidentally, which had a wicked lean over the power line. I knew this would be a challenge, but I had developed a plan. My ingenious plot involved a rope, a truck and my wife. I would use a ladder to tie the rope as high up the tree as I could reach, tie the other end to the trailer hitch on the truck and then have my wife drive the truck to pull the tree away from the power line as I heroically cut through that last trunk. It was perfect! It was foolproof! It was... well, maybe not "perfect", exactly.

As I busied myself with the ladder, rope and truck, my wife cast a baleful look at the contraption I had created. Bah, she never believes in my creations. She looked at me and said, "I think we should hire someone to do this". Hmmm, a non-believer. Given the look on her face, I knew she would never agree to participate and drive the truck, so I decided I would just pull the truck forward, tension the rope as much as possible and put it in park. That should generate more than enough force to successfully pull the fallen tree away from the power line where it would fall safely into the front yard. The rope was long enough that the truck wouldn't get hit, so I was good to go!

Now, I should have recognized that this was not the same plan I had so carefully prepared over the past three days. But I convinced myself that this was just a minor modification - my plan was still perfectly feasible. We engineers like to use the word "feasible", it makes us sound confidant while we are actually expressing some doubt. I started the chainsaw and my wife looked at me with one eyebrow raised and took a few steps back. I cut a nice v-notch in the back side of the trunk, the side I wanted the tree to fall on. You know... away from the power line. Then I commenced making the falling cut on the other side. I lined up perfectly with the center of the v-notch, a nice straight cut through and the tree suddenly sprang towards the truck just as I had envisioned it.

At this point, I found myself in a flashback to my childhood watching Wile E. Coyote attempt to capture Road Runner. I mean, really, the only thing missing was a big fat "ACME" stamped on the side of the chainsaw. You see, if I am behind you and give your big, fat head a hard shove, your whole body will fall away from me. Hah - just like I planned! However, if I shove you behind the knees, your knees will go away from me, but the rest of you will fall right on top of me, which is not exactly what I had planned. And the rope that I had tied around the tree was basically about, oh say... knee level, for the tree at least.

So, as I watched the freshly cut trunk spring away from me and towards the planned landing zone, I couldn't help but notice that the top of the tree had apparently not gotten the memo. It was moving a lot slower than the trunk, possibly due to the air resistance of all those huge leaves. We engineers notice and analyze things like that, it's just part of our nature. And, as an engineer, I quickly determined that the top was also moving in exactly the wrong direction. I could bore you with all the esoteric equations and formulae related to gravitational acceleration, fluid dynamic analyis of the airflow through and around the leaves, dynamic moments, and so forth, but instead will simply present a brief synopsis of the results from my analyses:
1) Things are not going according to plan
2) It is not going to fall on Cheryl
3) It is not going to fall on me
4) It is going to fall on the power line

I can only assume a sudden burst of adrenaline had provided my brain with all the horsepower it needed to complete a detailed assessment of the movement of that tree. However, after I finalized result number 4, all adrenaline was depleted leaving my mind unable to process further information. Therefore, I could not complete a full assessment of the resulting stress on the power line and its attachment point to the house before the answer was presented to me in excruciating and gorey detail. The riser was once again laying on the ground, but the meter box, while slightly dented, remained attached to the house. There were no sparks, smoke, flames, explosions or any other signs that something was amiss aside from the incorrect placement of the riser. I cautiously approached the meter to find it still spinning happily away, counting all those kilowatts being consumed by the household appliances. We still had power!

I turned to look at my wife, only to find her with that same damn eyebrow still raised. I smiled at her, turned off the chainsaw and said, "That's enough home improvement for today."

I waited until Monday to call the power company, since I knew exactly what they would do. No point in going the whole weekend without power. After I called, they came out promptly, told me I was having nothing but trouble with that power line (news flash, thanks), cut the lines and wished me luck. I called the electrician, who wondered aloud if he had been here before. Seems like others were sharing in my deja vu this time. I answered yes, and asked if he had some kind of bulk discount, or frequent shopper program. He just smiled. I found out that permit fees, risers and meters had gone up a lot in price (again), and the County would still take two days to do their inspection. No power for three days. This time in January, with a cold front approaching. No heat and cold showers for three days.

The power is back on now. Cheryl still isn't speaking to me, but she has gleefully related her version of events to anyone who will listen. I think I hear her on the phone even now, snickering and giggling. I've received a few heckling phone calls, so I just let the machine pick up for now.

Comments?

2009-01-13T17:48:00.004-05:00

After my latest post, I noticed that moderation had been enabled for this blog. That was never my intent, and I was pretty curious as to why I never seemed to get any comments on my posts. Thanks to those of you reminding me to update the header to show that I am level 80!

That has been changed now, and comments will post without moderation. That doesn't mean I will be ignoring the comments that are posted, not at all! I love hearing from my visitors. However... posts from gold sellers, power leveling and that sort of thing will be removed. Rude, condescending, or otherwise obnoxious comments will also be removed. You wanna' do that stuff, take it to the official forums.

Heroic Naxx Cleared!

2009-01-13T17:33:00.010-05:00

Last night the renowned Red Devils of Gorefiend made their first successful full clear of Heroic (25-man) Naxxramas! After struggling with incredible server lag over the past few days, we were able to one-shot Thaddius with every member still standing at the end. An incredible job, and yet another achievement earned.

We then ventured up to the Frostwyrm Lair, aggressively guarded by Sapphiron. Our initial attempt was pure fail when the main tank was swatted like a fly. Mass chaos insued as each raider was knocked off in rapid succession! Total combat time... 36 seconds.

We regrouped and tried again. While we did a little better, the main tank was again swatted down and we wiped in 3.5 minutes. One more time gang, third times a charm! We engage and manage to keep the main tank up, but too many of our dps were getting killed off. We struggled along for nearly 11 minutes and suffered the ego demolishing "1% wipe". So close...

Fourth attempt and everyone survived to put Sapphiron down in 7 minutes flat! Nice job, Red Devils! Now where's that rascal, Kel'Thuzad hiding out?

We wander down the hall and there he was, hanging around a bunch of undead scum! We prepped for the fight and rushed in. The undead scum were quickly polished off and soon Kel was squealing like a stuck pig, screaming for help from the Lich King! Suddenly, mind controlled raiders were turning on their comrades and four enormous Gaurdians of the Icecrown swarmed in, overwhelming our intrepid group and wiping us out.

We regrouped and once again prepared for battle. Unfortunately, one of our silly mages decided this was a good time to play with his Crashin' Thrashin' Racer. Guess who got left behind when the rest of us rushed in? Yup... the mage, who became a very dead mage when the undead scum suddenly discovered him in their midst.

Our third attempt was nearly a carbon copy of our third attempt on Sapphiron. Too many dps died and we again suffered a 1% wipe after nearly 7 minutes of combat. But, again like on Sapphiron, our fourth attempt was golden and we polished off Kel'Thuzad in just under 6 minutes.

Wait, what's this? Holy smokes, [Envoy of Mortality] dropped! Hunters everywhere drool over this item, including yours truly. When the roll was called, all four hunters rolled (as well as a screwy warrior). The warrior's roll was disqualified, of course, but Hilfer won the item. Rats, rats, rats! And he had just won [Arrowsong] a few nights ago, too. See what I mean about Lady Luck NOT being a lady?

PC Hassles Continue...

2009-01-10T23:00:00.007-05:00

Ok... so, System Mechanic didn't solve my problems and I was still continuing to suffer from random lockups. WTF!

Late last night, while working to isolate the cause, I suddenly found myself staring at an old wallpaper after yet another reboot. That's odd, it was my "old" wallpaper. Hmmm, it seems I had a copy of Windows on both hard drives, and for some strange reason the second drive had booted instead of the first. I copied all my other files from that drive onto the "main" drive and reformated the second drive to make sure I wiped out any confusion over which version to load at boot up.

At this point, that seems to have solved a number of mysterious issues that had popped up in the last two days. All my software seems to be operating properly, with the exception of trying to capture video from my DV camcorder. The IEEE1394 port doesn't recognize anything when I plug the camera in and turn it on. It does seem to interfere with my ethernet connection however! Grrrrrrr.

So, my next step will be to buy a firewire card and bypass the native motherboard support. The cards are cheap enough to take a shot. If that doesn't work, I guess I will have to try cobbling something together from a couple of the old PCs I have laying around. All that just to be able to capture my camcorder tapes.

A Return to Naxx

2009-01-08T15:49:00.007-05:00

Recently, my PC went on strike with a failed hard drive. Due to my own ineptness, I managed to stretch the problem into a two day ordeal as I tried to restore Windows and wound up wiping everything out on both drives! Did I say ineptness? That's skill, baby! Skill!

Anyway, I installed a new drive (1 terrabyte FTW!) and got everything running again. But, soon I was suffering from frequent lockups and reboots. Something is still amiss. My latest attempt to get back on the internet highway in a dependable fashion has me installing System Mechanic, which found a number of registry problems. For the moment, that seems to have done the trick and I haven't had a lockup or reboot for nearly 30 minutes. A new record!

On Tuesday, the Red Devils put together 25 intrepid souls and headed back into Naxx. We did pretty well, with only a couple of wipes, and made our way through the Spider Wing and the Plague Wing. We ended in the Death Knight Wing and cleared through Gothik the Harvester before calling it a night. We plan to go back in and pick up where we left off with the Four Horsemen on Thursday night. With any luck, we will get through the Abomination Wing (grrr... Patchwerk) and finish off the Frostwyrm Lair for a full clear!

We have done the Obsidium Sanctum a few times and can usually down Sartharion. We even made an attempt with one drake up, but we wiped pretty quickly. The Raid Leader wanted everyone to stay focused on Sartharion, but it appears you need to take down the drake(s) as they enter the fight as quickly as possible and leave Sartharion for last.

I haven't even made an attempt on Malygos, as that whole dragon riding thing is a difficult thing for me to master. I need to spend some time on the daily quest which simulates the fight, but each time I do I go down in flames on the first fight! It gets frustrating quickly when you can't seem to make any progress.

Patchwerk Falls at Last!

2009-01-02T16:06:00.008-05:00

Patchwerk is an interesting and somewhat unique fight. You have to bring enough dps to bring him down in a timely fashion, but still have enough healing to keep at least two tanks up. Some poor meat shield has to be there to take those hateful strikes while the main tank keeps him otherwise occupied. Our biggest problem was keeping these two alive. The other melee just needs to keep their health low enough so that they don't receive a hateful strike. Usually a quick dip in the green canal does that, but it's a difficult thing for a healer to NOT heal them when they see someones health suddenly drop down low.

But on December 30, our last raid of 2008, we one shot the spider wing and then finally succeeded in bringing that big, nasty tub of guts down for the count, doling out 13 million damage in four minutes. In fact, we one-shot him! He even dropped Arrowsong, but Hilfer won the roll as it seems my magic touch with rolls from our previous Naxx run had abandoned me. Lady Luck, come back to me!!! Hmmph, some "lady" she is.

Patchwerk is at least one of the encounters that Blizzard appears to be basing the upcoming hunter nerf on, stating that the class puts out too much dps. Well, it is an ideal fight for hunters since we don't have to move and can focus entirely on our dps. In this example, all our hunters were in the top five dps, but the number one spot was held by a mage. Personally, I think the perception that hunters are OP has been dramatically overstated. While we may have had the benefit of being able to out-dps other classes with early gear, those classes are quickly catching up with gear improvements as evidenced by the warlock and mage in the coveted top five group shown in this fight.

But, I digress. Following Patchwerk I enjoyed my first encounter with the gauntlet known as "frogger". The raid has to maneuver past a series of constantly spawning slimes. I almost made it on my first attempt, but died at the last line of slugs. Try to run past the tail of a slime at each crossing and the encounter is trivial. We finally grouped up at the entrance to Grobbulus. Gee, haven't been here before either! I was a little puzzled at the fight explanation, but was fortunate to never get the "mutating injection" debuff. I simply had to stay out of the poison clouds and away from Globbulus (never in front of him), and was content to dps my little heart out! By the way, those poison clouds on the ground stick around after he dies (Adira), so be careful when you try to loot! Be patient everyone, and wait until the poison dissipates.

Next up... Gluth, the foul plague-dog of Naxxramas! But first, we had to get there. Again, this was all new to me and I managed to fall off the small pipe next to the platform before the entrance to Gluth's chamber. Ok, no problem and the raid summoned me back up to them (after appropriate heckling, of course). The we charged through the conduit to Gluth (stay to the right!) and the fight was on. I was assigned to kite the spawning zombies that emerge from the grates in the floor. Having watched a video of this fight, I was prepared to do this. Unfortunately, the video I watched was the 10-man version and we were doing the 25-man. What's the difference? All three grates spawn zombies, and more of them! I was pretty comfortable with four or five hot on my trail, but after the count went past seven I got a bit frazzled! Fortunately I had help from a mage and another hunter, and we had this bad dog put down with our second attempt. Bad dog, no biscuit!

Now we found ourselves facing Thaddius. Spartoss did a good job of dividing the raid into two groups for the adds leading up to our boy Thad. And, since this was my first time here, I promptly missed my jump to Thaddius' platform. I ran back to the ramp and tried again. And missed again. Third time was a charm and I made the jump. I positioned myself correctly for my charge debuff (negative) and started in. We wiped before my charge was ever reversed, so I didn't have to try and reposition on our first attempt. Then the instance seemed to "bug out" and players were entering combat the moment they zoned back into Naxx. We weren't able to successfully regroup until everyone had died and zoned back in. Of course, this was blamed on a hunter's feign death. When in doubt, blame the hunter.

We regrouped for our second attempt, dropped the two adds and I successfully made my jump to the platform (yay). The Thaddius encounter started and soon the charge debuff was applied to the raid. Oopsie, I need to get to the other side of him... nope, not anymore, I was dead. On our third, and last, attempt, I was careful to stay front and center until the charge debuff was applied, then scurried my little hunter butt over to the correct side. DPS, DPS, switch sides, DPS, DPS, switch sides, DPS, DIE! What the heck? Someone (not me), did not go to the correct side on the debuff switch! Too many of our dps remained to kill Thaddius within the enrage timer and we soon wiped. It was late, so we called it for the night.

And that, my friends, was the end of Red Devils raiding for 2008! We have had a successful year, with many challenges. Progression was something of a difficult thing for us. We struggled with the loss of some good raiders, but found some new ones. We had a lot of fun together, with minimal drama and a lot of successful boss kills. Congratulations to all of our Red Devils and may 2009 bring us continued success!

WoW Oddities

2008-12-15T15:16:00.003-05:00

Occasionally, software doesn't work like it's supposed to. In the case of complex online games, things can sometimes get lost in the communication between the server and the client. When this happens, what you see as a player is sometimes deceiving!

A case in point, while recently running through a 5-man dungeon, our tank (Geldor) was suddenly showing up naked! I made a point of asking why he didn't have any of his armor on and he responded that he did. Only one other person in our party was seeing what I was (and we may never fully recover), but I promised Geldor I would post a screen shot for him.

Geldor, this is for you. As for the rest of my readers, I can only say that I am deeply sorry for any emotional distress this may cause...

Red Devils Hit Heroic Naxx!

2008-12-15T14:59:00.009-05:00

After what seemed like an eternity of no raiding, the Red Devils finally returned to the scene last week. We gathered up our crew and headed out to test ourselves against the Arachnid Quarter of Heroic Naxxramas! After a small altercation at the summoning stone (those damn Horde think they own everything) we were able to zone in and commence to putting a hurt on the evil dwellers within.

Those silly arachnids never knew what hit them and we absolutely devasted the three bosses of the Arachnid Quarter! That's right, we one shot Anub'Rekhan and Grand Widow Faerlina, with one wipe on Maexxna due to an important raid member being locked outside when the battle commenced. Wow Web Stats is a little wonky and didn't show any data for Maexxna, but that 8-legged freak was swatted hard!

I actually won a roll on Anub'Rekhan and found myself the proud owner of a [Strong-handed Ring]. Wowza' that's a sweet upgrade!

But hey, the night was still young, and the Red Devils had their blood up for more. We decided to pay the denizens of the Plaque Quarter a little visit. Our finely tuned band of adventurers were more than a match for these guys. Noth the Plaquebringer took four attempts as we balanced the raid between the live and undead sides of the gate.

Heigan the Unclean and Loatheb were both one-shot!

Lady Luck continued to smile on me and I won the roll for the Mantle of the Lost Protector! Woot, two roles in one night... perhaps my roll luck has changed for the better! Good bye [Spored Tendrils Spaulders], hello [Valorous Cryptstalker Spaulders]!

And that wrapped up our first night in the new 25-man Naxxramas raid. I was off to get the [Lesser Inscription of the Axe] shoulder enchant from the Sons of Hodir. I'm still grinding reputation with these guys to get the [Greater Inscription of the Axe], but that's a long grind with no tabard to help out in dungeons.

On Thursday we all regrouped and headed back to Naxx to take on the Military Quarter. Ok, these Death Knights are a tad bit tougher than what we had encountered on our previous foray. Instructor Razuvious took us three attempts before we were able to end his training days. Gothik the Harvester took five and we wiped nine times on The Four Horsemen before we called it a night.

Sunday night we returned to the Horsemen and tried again. Due to real life duties, I was late to the raid and missed the first attempt, but after four more tries we had those four ponies laying on the floor. Umm, slight design flaw here, Blizzard. Do you have any idea how long it takes for 25 raiders to open and loot that damn chest to get their [Emblem of Valor]? A little help here, please?

After defeating the Four Horsemen, we headed over to the Construct Quarter to take on Patchwerk. We butted heads with this monstrosity five times before we called it a night. With no warlock in the raid to resummon errant raid members, each attempt seemed to take forever as some of the raid would release and fly back while others were rezzed or had successfully shadowmelded or feigned death to escape at the scene of the crime. This split up the raid, leaving those that released to face a respawned gauntlet to get back to the party. We never seemed to coordinate on this point and it cost us valuable time as we struggled to regroup after each attempt. Hopefully we will have a warlock next time, or will improve our coordination on whether to release or not!

Wrath Foods for WoW Chefs!

2008-11-25T16:25:00.006-05:00

For all you culinary folks out there in WoW, there are some great new recipes in the latest game expansion, Wrath of the Lich King! These new buff foods are even better than previous versions. Not only that, but the buffs provided have an increased duration of 1 hour now. Here's a list of these great new delicacies.

Wrath Descends on Gorefiend!

2008-11-14T17:06:00.013-05:00

Well, it seems the expansion to World of Warcraft (Wrath of the Lich King) has been successfully launched by Blizzard with many servers reporting extraordinary queues to log in. Amazon met their delivery date and I was able to install the expansion and log into Gorefiend with no problems. My first trip - to the Borean Tundra via the new boat in Stormwind Harbor.

Upon arrival, I quickly scurried about Valiance Keep picking up quests and learning my new Grand Master profession skills (Leatherworking, Skinning, First Aid, Cooking and Fishing). Then I was off questing away and trying to level up once again after more than a year of being level 70. I made it to level 71 before the server crashed and I gave up for the night. I just gotta' remember to use that new talent point when I next log in!

I did find out that the Cenarion folks are a lot more radical in Northrend than anywhere previously. If you don't believe me, just kill a Mammoth or Rhino calf, then wander up to the Cenarion post and see how they react! It's like wearing a mink coat to a PETA rally... you better expect some serious abuse!

Leveling can certainly be a chore on a Player versus Player (PvP) server, but for the most part the Horde seemed focused on leveling last night. Not to say I wasn't ganked, I was... repeatedly, but things were rather tame for Gorefiend. I expect ganking to become much more common as the Horde get leveled up and back to their business of griefing the Alliance.

Mass ganking will reach a peak when the first 80s start to come along and misuse their new found power to abuse lower level players still trying to level. Such is the nature of a PvP server with a game that attracts a large population of downtrodden geeks and nerds seeking an outlet to their frustrations. I chose a PvP server for the added dimension it gives the game and accept that abuses will occur. That doesn't mean I don't get frustrated when a group of Horde decide to camp me while I'm trying to quest and level up. I just tell myself that I'd rather have them occupied with griefing me in-game than out in the real world torturing kittens. I'm not saying... I'm just saying what do you think people like this do in real life?

Image courtesy of WowInsider

The Eve of Wrath!

2008-11-12T16:10:00.008-05:00

It seems that yesterday's maintenance in preparation for the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion to the game yielded extensive network difficulties for Blizzard. Most realms were down until late last night, and when they did come up there was an unexpected glitch that allowed players to get PvP gear from vendors for free, or without the rating requirements! Blizzard is aware of this, and will be taking steps to reclaim those items if you took advantage of this bug. Naughty naughty!

On the local front, the lack of a WoW fix appears to have sent many scurrying about the internet in search of various web sites related to WoW. This showed up on my radar when, for the first time ever, this blog received over 100 different visitors in one day! Woo hoo and thanks for stopping by!

Really, I don't think my actual reader base is growing that much, since most of my visits (80%) are coming from search engines. It's nice to have new visitors, regardless of where they come from! Everyone is welcome here, and I hope you enjoy my little stories.

Speaking of stories, I was browsing my Facebook page the other day, when a very disturbing ad appeared. It appears to be an ad for hair removal, but it was the photo they used that I found disturbing. That woman doesn't need hair removal. She needs a can of Raid for that spider nesting in her armpit! Seriously, I mean, that's just nasty...

Exotic Pets!

2008-11-04T14:20:00.009-05:00

As an avid beastmaster (BM) specced hunter, I was enthused with the new 51 point talent in the BM tree, which allows the hunter to tame "exotic" pets, as well as providing an additional four pet talent points to buff up your loyal companion. Having had some time to play around with these new pets I now feel comfortable discussing them here.

Now, I really should point out that at level 70 the BM hunter just doesn't have enough talent points to keep his pet supplied with sufficient focus and still roll a 51 point BM spec. We have to forego the talent Go for the Throat, which is in the marksman tree. This results in a pet that can be focus starved, meaning the pet doesn't have enough focus to apply the special attack each time the cooldown is reached. Today's patch (3.0.3) reduces the focus required for special attacks from 25 to 20, and this may help reduce some of the focus starvation. Still, the decision to play a 51 point BM at level 70 is a personal one and may not provide maximum dps in a raid. Personally, I really like the four extra pet talent points!

My first exotic pet was a devilsaur (SeaMonster). Ever since my days back in Un'goro Crater I have had a fascination with these mobs. Those sneaky bastards killed me more than once and the opportunity to tame one to have it serve me was just too much to resist! Devilsaurs are in the ferocity family, which means they are focused on dealing damage (dps) at the expense of their own armor. As an exotic pet, the devilsaur has a special attack called Monstrous Bite, which causes damage, but also boosts its damage by 3% for 12 seconds. This effect can stack up to 3 times and has a cooldown of 10 seconds. However, the hunter can spend three points in the BM talent on Longevity which reduces the cooldown on Beastal Wrath, Intimidation and all pet special attacks by 30%. That means Monstrous Bite would have a cooldown of only 7 seconds, while the effect lasts for 12 seconds! Toss in a Rabid talent point on that devilsaur and he can go into a killing frenzy, increasing attack power by 5% with successful attacks each having a 50% chance to increase attack power by an additional 5%. Plus it can stack up to 5 times and lasts 20 seconds. Go, go, SeaMonster!

Another interesting choice for a raid pet is the worm. These are tenacity pets, which means they are focused on tanking over dps. Their dps isn't as high as a ferocity pet, but they have more armor and health. Normally in a raid setting, the hunter will select a ferocity pet since it won't be tanking. The worm however has a special attack called Acid Spit, which causes nature damage, but more importantly reduces the targets armor for 30 seconds and is stackable up to 5 times. Since this has a 10 second cooldown (reducable to 7 seconds), a hunter can easily keep the armor debuff up over a long fight. The result is a pet that will actually reduce the hunters dps output, but may well raise the overall raid dps. Since debuffs like this no longer stack, only one worm per raid would be beneficial.

For PvP, my choice of exotics was the chimaera, a member of the cunning family which is a balance between dps and armor. I named my chimaera SeaStorm because its special attack is Froststorm Breath. This is a combination of frost and lightning which inflicts both frost and nature damage, but more importantly slows the target for 5 seconds! This attack also has a 10 second cooldown, but is reducible to 7 seconds with the hunter's Longevity talent. Given enough focus and careful application of concussive shot, your target is going nowhere fast. Against melee classes, this pet is a kiter's dream!

I looked at some other exotic pets for PvP. Silithids are also in the cunning family and have the special attack Venom Web Spray, which sprays toxic webs preventing movement, but only for 4 seconds while suffering a 40 second cooldown! Corehounds are in the ferocity family with a Lava Breath special attack dealing fire damage and reducing the target's casting speed by 50% for 10 seconds. This would be great for casters, but most of my PvP problems come from melee classes.

With the release of the game expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, we 70s will again be faced with gaining experience and leveling our way up to 80. Many hunters will want a pet that can serve as a tank, and the tenacity tree is there to serve. My own personal choice here is the gorilla (SeaMonkey), which is not an exotic pet. Any hunter can (and should) have one! And why is that? AoE, baby, AOE. Prior to the new talents released back in Patch 2.4, hunters were pretty much a single target class. Oh, you could take on two or three mobs, but beyond that things got dicey. But our Volley spell got reworked and is now a truly useful AoE attack! All you need to implement it is a pet that can tank multiple mobs and hold aggro. The gorilla's Thunderstomp does just that. Send him in to round up a big group, wait for a Thunderstomp to go off, then volley them all down! Practice makes perfect, and for the hunter class AoE grinding is a new treat. Try it out on the roaming packs of clefthoofs in Nagrand. You'll probably find yourself giggling the first few times you pull this off successfully!

Pet images courtesy of Petopia!

The Woes of Master Looting and Our New Loot System

2008-10-31T16:56:00.022-04:00

For the vast majority of our raids, our Guild Leader Adira fills the Master Looter (ML) role. On occasion, however, she will assign this responsibility to another officer. For those of you that have never performed this duty, it is a thankless and tedious job. There is no glory in it and you will find yourself distracted from other raiding duties and activities as you try to make sure that all the mobs have been looted and the loot distributed correctly. While the rest of the group rushes off to the next trash pack, you're left behind to loot the corpses, pass the greens off to the assigned disenchanter (DE), collect blue/purple bind-on-equip (BOEs) for the bank, and finally make sure any bind-on-pickup (BOP) items are looted to the appropriate raider. Depending on your guilds loot system, you may also have to track and record who gets what and why. There's a lot of opportunity for screwups, and while you'll never be thanked for doing the job without error, you will be ridiculed and harrased for any mistakes, real or perceived.

Fortunately I have avoided making any really stupid errors (my opinion, others disagree), but I have certainly made my share of excusable mistakes (again, my opinion). There are a lot of things the raid itself does that contribute to most of these errors. There is usually a lot of chatter on vent, much of which is confusing to the ML. I make a point of using Raid Warnings (/rw) to identify the specific item being looted. Still, some people either ignore these warnings, or just aren't paying attention. Then of course, when it comes to using rolls to determine a final winner, there are always the jolly jokers that like to put in a roll just to see if they would win, or attempt to fake a high roll (/roll 1000000). Others roll, then either say (or post in chat) that they would like to pass. All of these things serve only to confuse the ML, who only wants to make sure the right person gets the item!

As a raider, you owe it to your fellow players to not deliberately interfere with the loot distribution process. Fake rolls, rolling on loot you can't use or don't want, extraneous chat/Vent use and not paying attention during loot distribution are all things that interfere and cause confusion. I think it would be fair to say that when an error occurs in assigning loot, there are at least some, if not all, of these things going on. Our officers want to make sure that loot is distributed properly, but remember that many of us have small chat windows which seemed endlessly filled with constant banter and the same is true of Vent. We can either cooperate and keep things focused on the item at hand, or we can take half an hour to make sure everyone agrees on each item before it is passed out. Personally I prefer the cooperative focus route. No one likes to go through a 20 minute explanation of a boss fight, and I doubt the raid as a group wants to waste time on distributing loot.

I currently use an addon called NRT (Nihilum Raid Tracker) to help keep track of who attended the raids, as well as who got what in terms of loot. This greatly helped out by relieving our Master Looter from having to keep loot notes during the raid. Our loot system, though, was based on dkp which meant someone (usually the ML) had to have those records available to figure out who was qualified for a specific item. With the release of the upcoming expansion (Wrath of the Lich King), the Red Devils will be rolling out a new loot distribution system using the in-game roll function with modifiers based on attendance. This will further complicate the ML duties, requiring the attendance values for each raider, their subsequent roll modifier, the value of each roll made and a calculator to figure out the ultimate winner. Oh joy! Yeah, we can put together a spreadsheet to help manage all that, but it still places even more of the burden on the ML and expands the opportunity for mistakes.

All of this is an attempt to make our loot distribution system fair and equitable. The general consensus throughout the guild was that our old dkp system was unfair to newer members and to members who didn't raid as often. With little to no dkp, they had no chance at winning an item. Under the new system, they get an opportunity, but will be disadvantaged competing against someone with a higher attendance and thus a higher roll modifier. Still, a chance is better than no chance. We have yet to test out this system and while I agree that it provides additional incentive for attendance I have no doubt that it has its flaws and will have its share of detractors.

Red Devils Clear Black Temple!

2008-10-31T16:53:00.007-04:00

WWS Report: http://wowwebstats.com/sqlfnwwd2ekgg

While standing over the smoldering corpse of Illidan Stormrage last night, I couldn't help but think, "ah the sweet smell of success!" Before the Sunwell Plateau was implemented into the game, the Black Temple was the very pinnacle of raiding in The Burning Crusade with Illidan the ultimate raid boss to be defeated. Now the Red Devils had accomplished that feat and were standing on that very pinnacle!

Thursday night, we picked up where we left off and made our way towards the Illidari Council. We had the very good fortune of having a Paladin from another guild offer to lead us for the night. Since none of the Red Devils had made it this far before, we gladly accepted Innomine's offer of assistance. Suffice to say, he was instrumental in our success!

We had one unfortunate wipe just before the Council's chamber when a second group of trash mobs were unexpectedly pulled. We picked ourselves up, dusted off and got back to work. We soon discovered that the initial pull on the Council fight was crucial to success and immediately wiped! We made a second attempt and did quite a bit better, but had some difficulty dealing with all the AoEs and wiped a second time. Once again, the third time was a charm and all four council members lay dead on the floor! We continued the use of rolls to determine loot distribution for this run, which on a personal note I really dislike as I seldom ever roll over a 50. I guess the random number generator (RNG) just hates me!

And now the big moment was upon us. It was time to face Illidan! Akama joined us and lead us to the entrance door to Illidans platform. We waited in anticipation as he opened the door and allowed us entry. Running up the ramp, we could see Illidan crouched down, deep in thought as we all circled around. Innomine gave us a very detailed explanation of the five different phases of the fight we were about to face, groups were formed and assignments made. We all prepared ourselves as Innomine went to give Akama the word that we were ready and to initiate the battle.

Our very first attempt on Illidan was the very stuff of legend. Illidan announced to us that we were not prepared and the battle was on! Alas, on stage four I was too close to Illidan as he summoned his shadow demons, was targeted by one and summarily killed. Our other hunter, Hilfer, died the same way, leaving our raid with no hunters for misdirects or frost traps. Things just got more complicated, but the Red Devils continued their heroic fight and soon Illidan's health was below 20%. It looked like we just might one shot him on our very first attempt! Alas, it was not to be and we lost our critical mass. Too many of our dps had died and our momentum slowed to a crawl. At 18%, the last of us were felled. Illidan had won this match.

We made a couple more attempts, losing too many people too early, but we were learning from our mistakes. We learned where to stand, where to run and when. Our strategy was shaping up, even as we failed to bring Illidan down anywhere close to 40%. Suddenly, we made a breakthrough and with some very strategic battle ressurections and selective use of soulstones, we were able to successfully defeat our foe with only four of our raiders dead. We had done it. We had defeated Illidan Stormrage! Congratulations, Red Devils!

And so, now we find ourselves ready to attempt the Sunwell Plateau, which we have tentatively scheduled for Sunday night. Are we prepared? Illidan thought not and was proven wrong. We shall soon see.

Back in the Saddle Again!

2008-10-29T13:25:00.021-04:00

WWS Report: http://wowwebstats.com/ckemubvptkxzq

Well, well, well! After nearly two months of no raids for the Red Devils, we finally managed to put together a Black Temple run. We actually scheduled the thing for nearly two weeks to make sure that all our guildies had the opportunity to be there. The most often expressed concern... how will the loot distribution be handled, will we use dkp? While a valid question, the frequency and the occasional "If we use dkp, I'm not coming" comments were disturbing. Red Devils is first and foremost a guild, and not your personal loot machine. While we will be rolling out a new loot distribution system for the expansion, we decided to go with simple rolls rather than use dkp for this particular run.

We actually got started relatively early, about 7:15! We rolled in and just stomped everything up to, and including, Bloodboil... all one shot! Woohoo!! Then we moved on to the Reliquary of Souls (ROS) for our first attempt ever, and of course we wiped. We came back for a second attempt and made it to Phase 2 before we wiped again. They say the third time is a charm and for us, it sure was! Down goes ROS, hrray Red Devils!! A "3-shoot" according to our pally extraordinaire, Guthwine.

Should we stop here and continue later this week? A few players wanted to log and go to bed, but many were begging to at least go do one attempt on Mother Shahraz (Mother). It was finally agreed to make one attempt and then quit for the night. As it turned out, one attempt was all it took for us to put Mother down for the count!

Now, we all know that the raid instances have been nerfed and that these accomplishments aren't quite as meaningful as a result, but we were all very happy to have gotten the opportunity to see some new content. Since the release of the expansion isn't for another two weeks, I hope that last nights success will create enough interest in the guild that we will be able to get back to our normal raiding schedule for those two weeks. It would be great to clear Black Temple and even take on the Sunwell Plateau before everyone goes back to leveling in Wrath of the Lich King.

As for the new talent system in the current Patch (3.02), it appears that the Beastmaster hunter spec is quite viable for raids. I am currently specced as 51/10/0 and using a cat for raids, but still managed to top the damage charts for the raid even though tasked with serving as the loot master which kept me out of a few trash mob fights. I also managed to break 2,000 dps on several boss fights, the highest of which was ROS which ended with me at 2,337 dps!

Would I have done better with 50/11/0, as current theory says (more pet focus and pet dps)? Maybe, but I am more than satisfied that the four extra pet talent points provided by a 51 BM spec is good enough for now! Cats are scheduled for a nerf to their rake ability, but exotic pets are supposed to be changed to provide about 10% more damage than non-exotics, so I think I'll stick with the 51 BM spec for a while.

Seabrat Heads to Sea

2008-09-26T14:42:00.004-04:00

Well, this will be my last post for a while. This Sunday, Mrs. Seabrat and I are headed to the Florida Keys for two weeks! We will be scuba diving, catching lobster, fishing and trying to relax in between all that. When I get back, I'll be updating my Team Seabrat blog with stories of our adventures!

Seabrat the Troll (on Exodar) has reached 50, so I might be able to actually get him to 60 before the expansion. Speaking of which, given the current state of beta and subsequent blue posts in the official forums, it looks like Blizzard will be pushing an unfinished product if they actually try to meet their published release date of November 13. They could postpone, or they could release on time, but given the massive changes to all the classes, I suspect there will quite a series of follow on patches as Blizzard tries to fix issues and balance class play.

As a hunter, I'm not a big fan of Arenas and I don't think hunters as a class will ever be well represented in that venue. WotLK doesn't seem to promise any real change to the problems hunters face in Arena combat and I seriously doubt Blizzard will be able to resolve them, or have the intestinal fortitude to do so. No point in QQing, I'll continue to play my hunter and participate in Arenas only occasionally for fun.

Thrall Lives... for NOW!

2008-09-24T15:23:00.003-04:00

Well, we managed to get our boy Thrall down to 13% before we were overcome. Rather than attempt a stealth approach via summons, we elected to ride in. It was quite a sight... a full 40 man raid riding into Orgrimmar together. We had no trouble making it into Thralls room, our problems initiated when Horde started swarming in. Too much of our dps went to killing Horde and not enough stayed on Thrall. Had we focused more on Thrall, I believe we would have taken him out.

So for now, Thrall gets a reprieve, but the Red Devils will have their due soon.

In other news, Blizzard has announced that it will be wiping honor points with the release of Wrath. I believe this is a mistake, as it essentially extends the wrathapy syndrome to include battlegrounds. They are promising a few new items to spend your honor on before Wrath, presumably in the upcoming content patch. Battleground tokens are also rumored to be removed, so consider spending what you have now, or after the next patch, but definitely spend them before Wrath comes out!

Wanted... Thrall!

2008-09-23T13:17:00.004-04:00

Wanted, Dead or ... well, just dead!

Today is the Red Devils anniversary and we intend to celebrate by invading Orgrimmar and killing Thrall. We hope to team up with members from a number of other guilds to accomplish this!

Succeed or fail, I expect this to be a blast. If we can just get our members to show up.

From WoWWiki:

Strategy
The most critical part of the strategy is to give the Horde as little warning as possible. Mainly since Horde players tend to feel more obligated and passionate about defending Thrall than any other WoW leader. The slightest mention of an attack on Thrall is enough to send a fair number of players to his side.

Diverting attention can be done either by using a warlock to summon, or if you are careful, gathering across the bridge west of Orgrimmar, then riding to Thrall's room at full speed. Once there, use area effect spells to take care of the guards, then a simple tank and spank strategy on Thrall. Vol'jin may be offtanked at the same time, or Thrall can be taken down first by approaching from the left side of the room as you enter and Vol'jin may be optionally taken care of afterwards. Two raids (80 people) are recommended.

He can be done easily with a 40 man raid if done right. With a well geared 40 man raid group of 70s you can drop him easily if summoned in and done without alerting many Horde.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part!

2008-09-22T16:12:00.014-04:00

Tom Petty sure got that one right. Waiting is the suck and it seems to be the order of the day for the Red Devils, as well as many other guilds. Wrathapy continues to be prevalent and we have essentially cancelled raiding for the time being. We've done a few Zul'Aman runs, but generally there has been very little attendance on our raid nights.

Quite a few guildies have taken the opportunity to level up alt characters and, with the "Recruit a friend" bonus to leveling experience, have succeeded in rapidly stocking their larders with an array of level 70 toons. I've tried, really I have, but I just can't seem to get into the other class types. Warlock, priest, shaman, rogue, mage... none of them really appeal to me. Warrior and paladin are just too different to even try! I really enjoy the hunter class, even suffering through some really egregious "nerfs". The worst of these was the dead zone that allowed other classes, particularly mages, to lock a hunter in place then stand in his dead zone and nuke him down (ala MC Hammer: You can't touch this!). Thankfully, Blizzard eventually recognized this as "unfair" and removed it. Before that, it was being unable to place traps while in combat. Oh, there have been some serious outrages committed against the hunter community and I expect the release of Wrath will bring a few more. I don't intend to QQ about this now, but prefer to wait and see what the future will bring.

So, what have I been doing? Well, in terms of WoW, I have been leveling another hunter. Sorry, but like I said, I really enjoy the hunter class. This time, I have chosen a PvE server and rolled... HORDE! Yeah, I know, but I wanted to see how the other half lives. Seabrat the Troll is currently roaming around Exodar and is in his mid-40s. Nasty looking little bugger, isn't he?

I have been following a leveling guide this time, so in addition to the post TBC bonuses to leveling experience, I have been able climb the ladder much quicker this time. Of course, all the knowledge I've gained playing a hunter has helped too, especially with a dramatic decrease in deaths! I'm not quite the noob I was before and that makes a big difference.

At this point, Seabrat the Troll has not set foot in a single instance, even though a few opportunities have been offered. I still remember all those PUGs I ran with the One True Seabrat and the almost universal abuse of the hunter class. If anything goes wrong, everyone seems to pile the blame on the hunter. I try not to let such things get me down, but really... WoW is a game and there's no point in playing if it's not fun. Besides, I've got people waiting in line to abuse me in real life. I don't need WoW for that!

At the end of this week, I'll be leaving WoW behind for a 2-week vacation to the Florida Keys. When I get back, there will still be time to try to get Seabrat the Troll leveled up a little more. I doubt I will hit 60 before Wrath is released, at which point my focus in WoW will be leveling the One True Seabrat up to 80! There will be a lot to learn with the new talents and abilities which will require some significant research and testing in order to master the hunter class again. Well, maybe not "master", but at least play decently again.

The Beast Master spec may be dethroned as the best raiding/leveling spec. Both the Survival and Marksman specs are being significantly reworked and may provide better utility in a raid. I certainly hope BM remains raid viable, as I have really enjoyed playing that spec, not to mention the new "exotic" pets available to BM! Having suffered at the jaws of those sneaky devilsaurs in Un'Goro Crater, it would be so sweet to go back and tame one for a pet! As pets go, cats are unlikely to be at the top of the heap in Wrath. Sigh, good old Seacat has been by my side through many scrapes and adventures and I would be very sad to have to keep her stabled. I would prefer to release her back into the wilds of Winterspring where she can roam freely.

Google Web Browser = Keylogger?

2008-09-13T00:04:00.001-04:00

It appears that Google's new web browser (Chrome) may have been the source of Jaskel's recent hack. Although this has not been positively confirmed, other members that have tried this new browser have also been hacked.

At this time, Google Chrome is definitely NOT Seabrat appoved!

Bank Robbers!

2008-09-10T15:40:00.006-04:00

Oh a sad, sad day for the Red Devils. A guildie posted to my wall on Facebook that the guild bank had been emptied out. Needless to say, I quickly logged on and found all our bank tabs empty save a stack of 15 arcane dust.

A quick check of the bank log revealed that Jaskel (aka Haleki) was the offending 'toon that had swiped all our goodies. Oh noes! No way would Jaskel do that, so I opened a GM ticket to report the problem. I also asked that they lock his account to hopefully prevent any further losses. Unfortunately, the GM refused, so Jaskel's account remains open for further theft. Apparently, Blizzard supports bank robbery and character theft as they will not interfere in any positive way or take any preventive measures.

At this point, no one has been able to get in contact with Jaskel and I hope that at the very least he is able to retrieve anything that was taken from his toons. Our guild bank is the least of my concerns.

**UPDATE** Jaskel is back in control of his account and Blizzard is working on restoring his belongings. Hopefully, the guild bank can be restored as well.

Wrathapy?

2008-09-08T15:36:00.004-04:00

Well, the Red Devils have had to call off our last two raids due to a lack of attendance. And, it doesn't look like we are the only guild having this problem recently. Why is this happening? What could be the cause of such a sudden drop in attendance for raiding?

There are probably a number of factors in play, such as the start of fall school/classes and football starting up on TV. But I think the biggest causative factor is the rumored release in the near future of the latest game expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I call this "wrathapy", a combination of "wrath" and "apathy". I would bet that people are more interested leveling up alts in preparation of the new level caps rather than trying to progress in content and attaining gear that they feel will be obsolete with the new release.

But, is T6 and equivalent gear really going to be obsolete with the new expansion? Personally I don't think so. Quality gear like that will probably be invaluable for leveling to 80. I'm also betting that T6 gear will be suitable for T7 raids, after all, T5 gear is used to raid T6 content. Only the last 2 bosses in Mount Hyjal drop T6, so raiders first stepping into MH would at best be in T5.

However, this may all be wishful thinking on my part. I don't particularly like alts and don't have the patience to repeatedly level them, nor the innate skills required to learn additional class skills and abilities. I have a hard enough time just playing my hunter!

How Sweet It Is!

2008-08-31T22:05:00.004-04:00

Really, this happens so rarely that it deserves a special mention...

Arathi Basin 5 cap! Hey Horde, how do you like me now??

Chinchilla - a Minimap Addon

2008-08-30T11:30:00.014-04:00

Ok, I have to admit that I am something of an addon junkie! While many players are content with the "stock" user interface (UI) provided within WoW, I would wager that the vast majority use a number of addons to modify it. My list is pretty big, but I also have a fairly modern and powerful PC that can handle the overhead of running all these addons. Having experimented with quite a few different addons, I am pretty happy with the ones I currently used. I remain on the lookout for new ones, as the developers of these addons are a highly creative bunch.

The other night I was scanning through the various WoW blogs that I have saved to my "favorites" list when I came across a recent posting by Lassira over at The Hunters Mark. She had compiled a list of the addons she was currently using, most of which I also used, or had tried and abandoned. There were a few I hadn't used before, and one in particular stood out: Chinchilla, a minimap addon.

The minimap is an important tool for hunters. We can track all sorts of mobs, as well as other players using it. If you play on a PvP server, you probably keep Track Humanoids up 99% of the time! This is invaluable in battlegrounds as well as routine farming to alert you to incoming threats. If that red dot suddenly disappears, be alert for a rogue/druid attempting to get the drop on you!

Chinchilla provides a great boost for customizing your minimap display. Not only can you change the size and appearance of the stock minimap, but it also alerts you as to who pinged the minimap and allows you to move and change its scale on the fly using the mouse.

The feature that "sealed the deal" for me, is the expander function that can be bound to a key and displays a greatly zoomed version of the minimap in the center of your display! This will quickly reveal the location of all those blips much faster than zooming in/out on the actual minimap. What a great idea!

I used this function last night while guarding the Blacksmith in Arathi Basin. I was having trouble locating a red blip nearby. A quick keypress showed me that little trouble maker was hiding out in a small shed adjacent to the blacksmith building. I could target him, but couldn't shoot him and SeaCat would not attack either! Well, now... looks like an afk Horde has found a bugged hidey hole. I waltzed in and proceeded to melee him down, which took quite a while to do (whew). I never could get SeaCat to help, and he never moved the whole time.

There are a lot of other features and customization provided by Chinchilla, and I have only hit the few highlights that appealed to me. It does a much better job than the other minimap addons I have tried, and even allowed me to get rid of a stand alone addon I used to track pings! I give it the Seabrat Seal of Approval!

Archi Spanks Red Devils!

2008-08-29T11:31:00.006-04:00

Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow...

After two consecutive back-to-back kills, Archimonde successfully fended off the Red Devils and sent us packing! We had cleared up to Azgalor earlier this week, and I was looking forward to one more opportunity to win those [Bow-stitched Leggings]. We one-shot Azgalor, but... no leggings! Grrrrrrr.....

Oh well, at least Lesi, Kiralana and Jaskel all got T6 gloves. Holychicken got the [Girdle of Hope]! Grats guys.

Off to see our old pal Archimonde! Many of the officers and the Raid Leader boasted that with such a strong group, Archi had no chance... in fact, they wouldn't be surprised to one-shot him! Once again, semi-skilled (but untalented and drunk) monkeys seized control of many guildies keyboards.

It was a slaughter! No really decent attempts at all. Main tank deaths, people dying to doomfire, airburst and Grip of the Legion. Fear bombed people were dancing in doomfire, while others attempted to "write their names in the snow" with doomfire following them. It was ugly, man, real ugly. We put in 13 attempts before we decided to call it a night.

A Reader Responds!

2008-08-26T13:30:00.015-04:00

Finally, a reader has posted a response!

Brandon posted the following regarding my recent post "YOU Need Omen". Brandon wrote:

Maybe Urvin just knows how to play and doesn't really need it?

What did people do in 40 man raids when agro was an issue and there were no legal threat mods???

Also a hunter should never NEED omen (l2feigndeath).

With that being said I am a life hunter and I use Omen just b/c it's easier for ppl & so I can be lazy & not have to FD all the time like I use to.

Threat mods are just like salvation.. they are not a need.

Well, huge thanks go out to Brandon for taking time to respond with his views on this. I really do appreciate all my visitors and the responders above all others!

Let me reply to the issues that Brandon has brought to my attention. First of all, I have no idea who Urvin is. We don't have a member of our guild by that name! However, we do have a mage that sure does know how to play and feels he doesn't need Omen. I maintain that in fact, he does need it as he continues to risk wiping the raid without it. A specific example of this is Gurtogg Bloodboil in the Black Temple. This fight requires everyone to stay below the threat of three tanks, not just one! And this is where our mage fails. Pulling threat on Bloodboil is virtually a guaranteed wipe.

Ah, the days of 40 man raids. I am extremely pleased that Blizzard realized the insane level of difficulty posed by trying to get a group that size together and coordinated. But "legal" threat mods? Does this imply that there were illegal ones? Anyway, Omen is not the first of its kind... I just believe it to currently be the best. KLHThreatMeter, or KTM for short, was the golden boy before Omen came on the scene. And, like Omen, it was virtually a requirement for raiding guilds, even for 40 mans.

Grrr... the old "l2whatever" phrase. Nothing implies arrogance like someone spouting that particular witticism. And in this case, as it almost always is, it demonstrates a lack of comprehension. Omen does not prevent a hunter from having to feign death, but provides him/her with a tool for timing their feign. First and foremost, feign death is far too often resisted. If you have waited until you actually pull aggro to feign death, you better hope it's not resisted! If it is, there is about a 95% chance you're dead and a pretty good chance you wiped the raid. Omen tells you when you are approaching the main tanks threat and that is when you should feign death. If you get resisted, stop your attack and wait until your threat has dropped enough to resume. Forget your epeen and the need to top the dps chart. Successfully downing the boss is far more important and the true measure of your success.

I don't know what a "life" hunter is (perhaps a spec, or new tree in Wrath?), but I am glad Brandon does run Omen. He should realize it's not because he's lazy, or that it allows him to avoid feigning death. Feign death is a powerful aggro reducing tool, and if a hunter is doing their job properly no addon will exclude their need to feign death. We just put out too much dps (threat) to avoid it. For a hunter, Omen helps you time your feign death and timing is everything... in WoW and in real life!

And don't get me started on salvation! Ok, too late. Salvation is an important buff. It reduces the threat from dps and allows a player to hit harder and longer while maintaining a lower threat generation. It is absolutely needed by many classes that don't have a threat reduction talent, or one as powerful as hunters do. A successful feign death wipes all threat, but a resisted one does nothing. Salvation is useful to hunters, but is not as benefical as other paladin buffs such as Might, Kings and Wisdom.

Most raid leaders (Red Devils included, unfortunately) will insist that hunters get Salvation first. While they see this as reduction in wipe probability, it is a disservice to the raid and to the hunters. Hunters need to learn to use Omen and wipe their threat by feigning death as needed... not rely on a buff for reduced threat. With my current gear, Might provides a 50 to 60 dps boost, a significant increase. Given that we usually have three hunters and assuming similar dps increases, we are gimping the raids dps by more than 150. I believe our raids would be better served by helping our hunters learn to watch their threat on Omen. However, I am not a raid leader (don't have the skill or knowledge) and all arguments made by our hunters for Might have so far fallen on deaf ears. Like the Marines, we hunters make do with what we have.

Archimonde Falls Again!

2008-08-25T22:19:00.017-04:00

Woohoo... the Red Devils marched into Mount Hyjal tonight and took our pal Archimonde for another test drive! It took us 10 attempts to down him which is 100 less than the first time. So, we have improved by 90%!

Midnight Chestguard dropped, and I watched closely as offspec bids were made. A rogue finally stepped up and bid main spec, so I let it go, but it's a pretty nice dps chest for a hunter! This time three different T6 Helm tokens dropped: Protector, Conqueror, and Vanquisher. I bid on the Protector token and won... Come to me, my precious! Hmmm... same graphic model as my Vengeful Gladiator Helm, just a different color. Nice effort there, Blizz (smirk).

So, now I have two T6 pieces: gloves and helm. Here's the downside... as I've posted before, some of the pieces of gladiator PvP gear are actually better for raiding than their PvE counterparts. In this case, my Vengeful Gladiator Helm has better stats than the Gronnstalker's Helm (no armor penetration on this T6 piece), even with the 2-piece set bonus which increases the mana gain from Aspect of the Viper by an additional 5% of Intellect (I are huntard with low intellect and 5% of nothing is just more nothing). Aspect of the Viper is really a fall back for BM hunters and we avoid using it otherwise. So the 2-piece bonus is not very useful for my current raids.

Now, the 4-piece set bonus increases the damage dealt by Steady Shot by 10%. That's really a bonus worth having! All I need are two more pieces, but for now, the Vengeful Gladiator Helm will be my first choice.

End Note: Well, it appears our half crazy/half insane/half bad at math guildie really is all that. Some of us went back into Mount Hyjal after the Archimonde kill and there were no respawns of mining nodes. Too bad, it would be a nice reward for defeating the nightmare that is Archimonde!

Red Devils Redeemed!

2008-08-24T22:25:00.003-04:00

Well now, what a difference we saw tonight! We knocked Supremus on his big, blue elemental butt and put down the Shade of Akama in record time! Both were one shots, which is more like the Red Devils I know!

Teron Gorefiend took us two tries. It seems that some people were a little slow getting out of the raid when they got the Shadow of Death debuff. We recovered on the first one, but the second did us in. We came back in and put him on the floor. I must have annoyed the healer in my group, 'cause I wasn't getting heals and ran through two healthstones and a super healing potion. I died horribly, but at least I wasn't ghosted!

Tomorrow night is either Archimonde or Bloodboil, depending on what kind of group we can put together. I'm expecting a lot of pain either way.

Are You KIDDING Me??

2008-08-22T15:08:00.010-04:00

OMFG! We got wtfpwned by the first two bosses in Black Temple!

How, oh HOW, could this have happened? I mean, we ARE the mighty Red Devils. We've been one-shotting these two jokers for weeks, and now this?

/hang head
/shame
/shame
/shame

That's it, laugh it up, seashell boy. Ok, maybe our dps was a little low. We didn't have all our A-game players on, but still... healing was off and dps wasn't bringing him down fast enough. And seriously, how hard is it to keep an eye out for those stupid seashell spines? People were getting pegged with these things and being ignored! C'mon Devils, a little situational awareness please! Finally our uber-lock, Jaskel, logged on and we subbed him in ASAP. After four (shudder) tries, Naj was taking a dirt nap and we moved on up to Supremus.

Ok, Supremus is not a hard fight. In fact, he's a pushover. But, you do have to observe the first law of WoW...

STAY OUT OF FIRE!

In this case, a blue flame trail that moves extremely slow and really doesn't travel far. It's nothing like Archimonde's doomfire. Seriously, just move away from it. Yet I watched people continuing to stand covered in blue flame and dpsing away.

/whisper moron MOVE!

In phase 2, Supremus is "unleashed" and will chase random people. If he chases you, RUN AWAY! But... be careful where you run. You don't want to get yourself cornered, or take Supremus too far from the group. His volcanos in this phase are a little trickier. They can spawn right on you and do a lot of damage quickly. Still, even if you are unfortunate enough to get spawned on (sounds almost as nasty as it is), you have ample time to run away and live. If you are truly unlucky, as I have been, you might get a second one spawn on you as you run and in that case, you're dead. But that's a rare situation. Above all, don't run into a volcano! They have a long range and like I said, do a lot of damage. Just stay the hell away from them!

Sigh... after two failed attempts the raid leader had to go to the airport and pick up our AWOL guild leader. And really, by this time the core raiders were entirely demoralized. Most of use were happy to just call it a night, dress our wounds, repair our gear and nurse our now thoroughly demolished egos.

YOU Need Omen!

2008-08-21T18:32:00.011-04:00

Oh yes, you definitely do need Omen! Whether you do 5-mans, 10-mans or full blown raids, you need Omen. Tanks, dps, healers, whatever, regardless of your role, you need Omen.

So, why do I choose to make an issue of this? It's simple really, my role as a dpser is severly hampered when I pull aggro and that big, bad mean boss comes over and gets all up in my grill! Now, normally when I'm running with the Red Devils, it's not an issue. Except for one person, who shall remain nameless (Urvan), everyone has this addon installed and running. As an officer in Red Devils, I would never divulge the name of one of our members. Why this one person (Urvan) chooses not to install this addon, I can only surmise that he (Urvan) is stubborn and bullheaded! This particular mage (Urvan) does extraordinary dps, but only occasionally pulls aggro. How he (Urvan) manages this I have no idea, and honestly don't care! Of course, he (Urvan) has iceblock to fall back on when he (Urvan) does pull aggro, but at that point the damage has been done... he's pulled aggro off the tank and it's up to the tank to get it back. I betcha' if Blizzard changed iceblock so it could get resisted, or fail, like feign death does, he (Urvan) would get Omen installed PDQ!

But enough of this nameless mage (Urvan), the real reason this comes to mind is my participation in another guilds Kara run the other night. This guild has been extremely helpful to the Red Devils, and besides they are a good bunch, so I was more than happy to pitch in and help them out. Now, at this point, I outgear Kara by a substantial margin and I knew I would have problems with aggro control. But this was made worse, far worse, when their tank did not have Omen installed!

But Seabrat, I'm a tank... why do I need Omen? I'm supposed to have aggro! True, you are supposed to have aggro and I would prefer that you keep it. But if you don't have Omen, you won't show up on its aggro list and I will have no way of knowing when I'm about to get big ugly over there real interested in me! I would much rather feign death before he notices me, than after. Especially if it's resisted. That way, I get to live and you don't have to chase him back down.

Ok, Seabrat, but I'm a healer. I don't hit things, I just heal everybody else. Great, I love healers... especially those that heal my pet, too. But guess what, it won't take long before big ugly notices what you're up to and will take a stroll over your way to politely tell you, "Hey, ya' know... I've been beating away over there on that tin can with legs for a while now, and I can't help but notice you keep undoing all my good work! I'm sorry, but I really can't allow that so... splat." And that's the end of you, my beloved healer! Yeah, you need Omen too. Healers can really piss off the mobs and it's good to know when they are about to notice you.

DPS? Forget about it. You need Omen. As a hunter, just soloing with my pet, Omen is a valuable aid that helps keep me safe while SeaCat goes all postal on the mobs. She's a much better tank than I'll ever be, and while I can heal her, she can't do much more than lick my lifeless corpse. Not that she sticks around after I'm dead anyway.

Bottom line... you need Omen. Get it. Install it. Learn it. Use it.

Who Are You?

2008-08-20T17:05:00.005-04:00

I'm always curious as to who, if anyone, actually comes to read these little excerpts of my WoW experiences. I get very few comments on any of my postings, so I can't judge from that. Fortunately, Blogger does have a few tools they provide to give its users some idea of how many hits their blogs get and from where. I was digging around in it a little today and found a neat map that I thought I would share. See those orange dots? One of them is you!

Most visitors are gone within 10 seconds, but a few of you actually stick around and read one or more pages of my rantings and ravings. Thank you... it's kind of cool to know that there are a few people out there that actually take time out of their own busy lives to read what I have to say!

Azgalor Refuses to Drop Trou for Seabrat!

2008-08-20T15:34:00.009-04:00

Sigh, once again into the void that is Mount Hyjal. Last night, our fearless group of Red Devils ventured in to clear the way to Archimonde. I was rocking the house at first with MQoSRDPS (massive quantities of sustained ranged DPS - credit BRK), but my timing got off somewhere around the sixth wave of trash on Rage Winterchill. I never did get back in the groove and was distracted by miscellaneous whispers and occasional wife aggro (honey, come fix the TV) the rest of the night. Not that I performed badly... just not to my liking.

Anyway, the run was fairly smooth except for a few cases of overlapping waves. We managed to recover each time though, and cleared all of the first four bosses with no wipe outs. Rage "Icebolt" Winterchill was put on ice, Anetheron "You are defenders of a doomed squirrel" was swatted and Kaz'rogal "You... have been marked" were all taken down in rapid succession. Hey, even with all my shadow resist (SR) gear I seemed to get hit with every single mark! What's up with that? When I went to switch back to my normal raid gear I was shocked (shocked, I tell you) to see that I was wearing my PvP gear, not my SR stuff! Stupid add-on... it should know what button I meant to click.

Azgalor was our last victim for the night and I was feverishly praying that he would finally drop my Bow-stitched Leggings! I was on add duty along with two other hunters, one of whom didn't get the memo and stayed on Azgalor instead. Our pally tank seemed to have a very difficult time holding aggro and both of us hunters found ourselves repeatedly pulling aggro. Of course, I got doomed again, so the battle was fairly short for me. I have gotten doomed for nearly 100% of our fights with this jerk, and quite frequently I am the first to get it, too! I've earned those pants, so drop trou, Az!

Oh well, nothing to do but sit and watch as Az-hole-galor's health bar slowly ticks to zero. Yay, he's down! The loot list pops up and... wtf? Don Rodrigo's Poncho? Who wants that junk? No one, that's who! One of our druids took it for off-spec. Well, at least the three T6 glove tokens that dropped were needed by someone, so none of that "trade for PvP" gear crap happened.

Before we could get the loot all distributed, the raid leader calls out on Vent: "Who talked to Thrall?" Oh noes, someone started the push to Archi! Mobs incoming! Thus began a mad dash to get the loot sorted out and I ported back to Shatt before they were done. Better safe than sorry. Unfortunately, once I left, my loot tracker addon (NRT) can't record who actually loots an item. Sure hope I guessed right for dkp, or I'm gonna' have some angry guildies!

On an interesting note, one of our raiders made the statement that after Archimonde is killed, all the mining nodes will respawn and that we should go back in to collect those epic gems. Well, maybe... but she's half crazy and half insane (and half bad at math), so who knows? Hopefully, we will get another chance to test her theory soon!

Guild PvP Night!

2008-08-19T13:33:00.007-04:00

Last night the Red Devils decided to call off our usual 7:00 pm raid. Given our recent spanking by Bloodboil, our Raid Leaders and Officers didn't feel we had the right people on to try that again and a general lack of rogues prevented us from making our first foray to the Reliquary of Souls. We needed a break!

When I first logged in, I noticed a large group of our members in Un'goro Crater. That's an odd place for a bunch of level 70s to hang out. I switched to the Vent channel they were using and soon realized they were engaged in a small war with the Horde and were determined to claim Un'goro for the Alliance! I grabbed my PvP gear and flew over to lend a hand. Our group was banded up and hunting down the Horde (level 70 as well) as they spawned. There were a few minor skirmishes, but we soon succeeded in convincing them they were outmatched. Un'goro was ours!

As we continued to circle around, we often encountered lower level Horde questing in the area. Many of these were killed on sight, which is not a "Seabrat Approved" activity! As our group realized the original level 70 Horde seemed to have abandoned the fight and left, general harrasment of these low level Horde ensued. I can only imagine the stark terror that level 54 Undead Warlock experienced when ten level 70 Alliance rode up and encircled him. Well, actually I can do more than imagine it - I've been there! Usually I was quickly dispatched and often camped until I could successfully rez and sneak away. So, while I don't condone this practice, it was nice to be on the other end for a change.

But, back to the cancelled raid. We had a bunch of guildies ready to roll and the Officers posted a vote for doing a T5 raid, or PvP. There wasn't enough interest for the T5, so PvP it was. We soon had a group of 14 people looking for blood. Groups of this size cause the battleground (BG) queues to skyrocket and no one wants to wait an hour to get into a BG. Besides, Alterac Valley (AV) won't let more than five at a time sign in. The solution is an addon called Preform AV Enabler. This little jewel of an addon allows you to bypass the standard queue system through some sort of Azerothian technology! The only requirement is that everyone in the group has to have it installed. We sent everyone off to download and install it and it can currently be found at two sites:
WoW Interface
Curse Gaming

Use of this addon can be a little tricky. Each member of the group has to open the Battlemaster (BM) window for the desired BG. When you do this, you will find a new button there "Preform AV Enabler". If you click this button, it opens another window that lists the entire group. This window shows the current BM window each member has open, if they are queued, if they have a deserter debuff, etc. Only the group leader is responsible for actually queuing the group. Everyone else only needs to open the correct BM window and nothing else. The leader will queue the group, and choose when to enter the BG. When he does, everyone is automatically queued and will also automatically enter the BG that the leader selects.

I can't stress this enough... do not enter the BG on your own! Let the leader do that. The reason for this is the addon is not foolproof. Many times some of the members will get queued for different BGs. When this happens, the leader will drop everyone from the current queue. This will close the BM window for each member. All you need to do is reopen the BM window and let the leader requeue. This can happen repeatedly and sometimes the group needs to wait until the queue list is refreshed. If you enter the BG independently and not let the leader enter the group, you may find yourself alone. Congratulations, you're stuck unless you desert. Of course deserting locks you out of all BGs for 15 minutes. Chances are, the rest of the group will proceed without you and you will have to wait until your deserter debuff wears off and the group is ready to queue again. DO NOT ENTER THE BG ON YOUR OWN!

Ah, the sweet success of premade BGs! Four and five caps in Arathi Basin (AB), four caps in Eye of the Storm (EoTS), demoralizing the Horde in AV... it's a beautiful thing! I sincerely hope the guild does this more often.

Softstep Boots of Tracking!

2008-08-19T13:29:00.004-04:00

Sunday night found the Red Devils back in Black Temple (BT). Since we had already cleared through Shade of Akama, we were able to port back to the center of BT and took off to give Teron Gorefiend a bad day! Our healers were a little off their game and it took us three tries to down him. I myself died on each attempt, which doesn't usually happen. As it turns out, it was an omen of things to come.

When Gorefiend went down, he dropped the Softstep Boots of Tracking! Now these have been on my wish list for quite some time as I think they are best in game pre-Sunwell, but I held off bidding since I had just gotten the Quickstrider Moccasins in Mount Hyjal last week. I felt certain that one of our other hunters would snap them up. Instead the only bid made was for offspec. No way I was going to let that happen, so I quickly bid as main spec and they were mine! Since these new boots don't have any sockets, I had to regem a little to keep my helm's meta-socket active, but that was easily done. The only downside is my dkp bank has fallen, but in reality I have most of the pre-Sunwell items I want. Now if Azgalor would just drop Bow-stitched Leggings one more time...

After Gorefiend, we decided to head for Gurtogg Bloodboil. We've only downed him once, and it's a real test of our healers. I was not overly confident that we would succeed, given the difficulty we had with Gorefiend. We made four attempts, and on the first three I died to the bloodboil debuff combined with the splash damage from the Acid Geyser during the first Fel Rage. Clearly, we had a healing problem. The Fel Rage stage is when our dps folks need to be going full out - not worrying about staying alive. On our last attempt, I used my healthstone and downed a health pot which kept me up long enough for the debuff to wear off so I could bandage. By the time I was back to dps-ing, the Fel Rage was over! Soon thereafter, the tanks died and the raid wiped. Everyone was frustrated and the officers decided to call it a night.

Bloodboil is most definitely healer intensive, and requires near perfect coordination between them. Most, if not all, of our healers hate this fight, which is understandable as it places quite a strain on them. However, as we progress, I believe that healer coordination is going to become even more of a factor as well as coordination raid wide. This means that bringing new people into the raid will become more difficult as they have to learn the fight and the coordination required. We need to increase our "core" raid group from the current 10-15 raiders to at least 20. That has been a challenge lately with vacations, other committments, connection problems, etc. No doubt about it, T6 raiding is a real challenge!

New Shoulders!

2008-08-14T23:30:00.008-04:00

After putting Archimonde in his place, we saddled up and headed off to Black Temple. We had cleared Naj'entus previously, so we moved in and put the big sleeper hold on Supremus. After that we cleared on to Shade of Akama and put things right there, too.

I picked up the Shoulders of the Hidden Predator as a minor upgrade. Plus, I needed a new shiny to make me feel better after losing the T6 helm. Holy smokes, this thing has eyes! Now, you would think that with an eye in my helm, and another eye on each shoulder no rogue in the world would be able to sneak up on me. Sadly, that is not the case. Those moving eyes are just "eye candy" (pun intended) and don't do a damn thing! I call shenanigans!

Oh, and that Van Gogh painting I'm holding? Thats the ever famous Crossbow of Relentless Strikes! Also known as the Chicken on a Stick, the Chocobow and the ever popular "Fisted Chicken". C'mon, Blizzard! This thing is supposed to be a hunter weapon! You know, stealthy and all. It shouldn't look like something out of a circus act! Where in the hell would something like that blend in...Vegas maybe? Do ya' put a strobe light on rogue helms? No, of course you don't! So why put a bright neon, glow-in-the-dark paint job on one of the best hunter weapons in the game? I'll tell you why... Blizzard has been making a joke out of hunters forever. This is NOT what we meant by "pimp my hunter". This is "make my hunter look like a pimp"! Grumble, mutter, growl...

/target Blizzard
/rude
/rasp

Archimonde Falls to the Red Devils!

2008-08-14T22:33:00.009-04:00

ZOMG! Apparently the planets are still stuck in alignment! The Red Devils successfully brought Archimonde down on our fourth attempt of the night. And every single one of us was still standing to gloat over his corpse. Well, at least over the pile of armor that remained!

Phat loot? Oh yes, very phat! Grats to our resident Marksman Hunter, Snyped, who picked up the Bristleblitz Striker and Urvan, our Mage Extraordinaire, won the Tempest of Chaos.

Three T6 helm tokens dropped and were won by Zienith, elite paladin, Adira our ever compassionate Guild Leader and Hilfer, our uncontested tier DKP champion!

Congratulations to all! Success after fourteen nights and 110 attempts... now, lets do it again, but faster this time.

Vengeful Gladiator's Helm at Last!

2008-08-13T15:41:00.012-04:00

Finally - all the planets aligned and I was able to meet up with my 3v3 partners, Jaskel and Vierra, to get in our arena matches before the weekly reset. We actually did pretty well, winning 10 matches and losing 6. This brought our rating up a little bit and we would have continued to play, but the arena server crashed (during a winning match, of course). We're either getting better with our strategy and coordination, or faced only teams that were even scrubbier than we are!

So, Tuesday evening, I flew over to Netherstorm, paid a visit to the friendly arena vendor and claimed my brand-spanking new Season 3 helm. The broken off horn is a little disturbing, but I do like the "roving" eye in the center. Then, of course, I had to buy gems and glyphs which set me back a few hundred gold. Since I will be using this helm primarily for PvE, I chose a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond (+12 Agility & 3% Increased Critical Damage) for the meta socket. The red socket got a Delicate Living Ruby (+8 Agility). Then a quick trip to the Cenarion Expedition to get a Glyph of Ferocity (34 attack power and 16 hit rating) and my new helm was all gussied up!

But, what to do with my old Season 2 Merciless Gladiator's Helm? That's a pretty big investment to just delete it! I decided instead to head over to the Lower City Quartermaster for a Glyph of Shadow Warding (20 Shadow Resist) and apply that over the old Glyph of Ferocity that it had. Now I have a nice helm to wear for battles that require shadow resistance.

WoW Salutes the Olympics!

2008-08-10T18:48:00.005-04:00

Blizzards' tribute to the Olympics is a new tabard and non-combat pet. Available for a limited time for participation in battlegrounds. Hurry and get yours today!

To PvP or PvE: That is the Question...

2008-08-07T15:58:00.018-04:00

Ok, so I never read Hamlet, or any Shakespeare for that matter, but I have been doing a lot of battlegrounds (BGs) over the past few weeks. Last night I finally got my final piece of the Season 2 gladiator gear and now have the full Merciless Gladiator set!
BGs are a lot more enjoyable when you have decent gear, and using PvE gear for hunters (at least below full T6) results in the dreaded "glass cannon" syndrome. Yeah, you hit hard, but you get swatted like a fly! It's very demoralizing when your own death count is higher than your kills!

A lot of gossip has been generated over epic PvP gear (i.e. "welfare epics") and the ease with which they can be attained, and I can see both sides. Raiding is difficult, since it requires a team of 25 people with spot-on coordination and seemingly endless wipes to attain PvE epic loot. The loot should be "epic" in nature!

On the other side of the coin, any single player can get the entire Season 2 gladiator set by simply grinding out honor in the various BGs. But, you have to participate in all of them, since the gear requires honor tokens from each BG. You can't just pick the ones you like. So really, acquiring epic gear still takes a lot of effort and dedication, regardless of whether it is from PvP or PvE. Not everyone can get into a successful raiding guild (I consider myself very fortunate to be in one), and Blizzards approach allows every player a real opportunity to get epic gear and the sense of accomplishment that goes with it. Sporting T6 armor or weapons tells everyone of your skill and experience, just like the latest season of Arena gear does. Describing PvP epics as "welfare" is unfair and inaccurate. Those epics were earned just as much as any PvE epic and their owners deserve the same respect!

There is no doubt that there is some crossover between the use of these epics. Hunters, in particular, will find that the Season 2 helm is better for PvE than most of the raid epics, up to T6 content and the Season 3 helm rivals or exceeds some of the helms that drop in T6 raids. The Season 3 2-handed axe was highly coveted by hunters for PvE and serves them well even in T6 content!

I am shooting for my Season 3 helm even now and have been 250 arena points shy for the last 3 weeks. I just can't seem to find arena partners, even though I personally have both 3v3 and 5v5 teams, as well as a 2v2 charter yet unsigned! As a hunter, it's difficult to find arena partners as we are currently not well suited to arena combat. Nor am I an arena fanatic looking to climb in the ratings. I just want to have a little fun with friends and grind out enough arena points to occasionally acquire a new piece of gear. With the current seasons rating requirements, there isn't much in the way of Season 4 within my reach, but the Season 3 gear is still good stuff and an upgrade over my current (and now complete) Season 2 set.

Ah, but BGs... you don't need anyone else to team up with for these. Just sign up at the nearest battlemaster and you are soon in the fray. As a result, these things often function as huge pugs with the expected level of coordination and subsequent success. You will get honor and tokens even if you lose, but only about a third of what the winning side will receive, not to mention that losing sucks!

The solution? Premades. All BGs but Alterac Valley (AV) allow entire raid groups to sign in together, and even AV will allow parties of five in. Oh, there are addons that can help get full raid groups into AV and these can often be painful encounters if you happen to be facing one. It's not always a guaranteed loss, but as the saying goes, "the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong... but that's the way to bet."

Now, where was I? Oh yes, premade BGs! I have been running these with a few other Red Devils (big shout out to Jaskel, Vierra and Vitter, among others) and this has proven to be a much more enjoyable experience than going solo. Granted, these aren't full premades as we try to keep to a party of five. The queue times become unbearably long if you have a larger group, but even having just five coordinated players on the field of battle can make all the difference between winning and losing.

There have been some memorable moments in these battles... guarding the lumber mill flag with Vierra in Arathi Basin (AB) and watching her mind control (MC) attackers then tossing them off the cliff is one of my favorites! We have also been very successful acting as a strike team, riding from flag to flag and capturing four or even all five of the AB bases (five cap for the win, woot!).

In Warsong Gulch (WSG), Vitter has earned MVP status by repeatedly capturing the Horde flag and successfully capping it. I have often sacrificed myself to assist his successful return to our base and been rewarded with some of the fastest (and most) WSG wins than I have ever seen before!

Eye of the Storm (EoTS), how I hate thee! But with Vierra by my side, we make a formidable team holding down and defending a base as the others move on to capture more bases and/or run the flag. I have yet to suffer a 4-cap loss with this team, something which happened all too frequently when I go solo in this BG.

Alterac Valley (AV), however, continues to be my favorite BG. Not only is it epic in scale (40 vs. 40), but it is also the only BG in which NPCs play a role. Just the sheer size and difficulty in making a full premade helps to keep this BG on a more even keel in terms of win/loss balance between the Horde and Alliance. Blizzard has changed AV several times, and the days of battles lasting hours, or even days, are now long gone. Winning strategies have also evolved and in it's current version, the Alliance have largely figured out how to win, though there are still a few inexperienced players that make fatal mistakes. "WHAT IDIOT JUST TOOK IBGY (Iceblood Graveyard)?" isn't seen nearly as often in the battleground chat channel as it once was. In general, it's all about capping the four towers and killing their General for a quick win, trying to prevent a turtle, or falling back to a turtle, depending on how the battle evolves. While it is now possible to lose the battle and leave with almost no honor points, wins/losses are at least balanced, or in favor of the Alliance. As a result, this is where I go to grind out honor and it usually results in more honor per battle (400 to 600 for a win) compared to the other BGs. Even a loss is often more honor than a win in the other BGs.

So, grab a few friends and go kill some Horde for the Lord! Grind out the honor, get yourself some "welfare" epics and wear them with pride. You EARNED them!

No News is.... No News

2008-08-06T16:27:00.009-04:00

So, it's been awhile since my last post here, and some of you may be under the mistaken impression that the Red Devils have quit raiding. No, not at all. We are continuing to do battle with Archimonde, and are slowly improving. Our best attempt to date has gotten him down to 39%. We continue to struggle with keeping everyone out of doomfire and this has been complicated by the fact that our core raiding group is only about 15 players. Filling out the remaining 10 spots has resulted in a varying group each night, many of which are new or relatively inexperienced with this particular boss fight. So, each night begins with a wipe-fest as some of our healers relearn to tag-team the tank to keep him up and ranged strive to avoid fire while remaining near the decursers. A few even have to relearn how/when to use their tears when airbursted. Even our elite members have at times found themselves equipping a mining pick instead of their tears, which makes for an interesting corpse when they go splat.
But, I remain confident that Archi will soon fall. And there remains a lot of nice gear to be had from the four bosses prior to Archimonde, such as my still longed-for Bowstitched Leggings. Those four bosses are pretty much on farm, and we can easily clear through them in one night and still have time for a few brief chats with Archi.
Black Temple is also an interesting raid, with the first four bosses routinely being downed. Bloodboil has fallen once to our guild, and I expect he will remain a challenge for our healers. Reliquary of Souls (RoS) is the next boss on our agenda, but Archimonde in Mount Hyjal continues to be our current focus. Downing him will definitely be a red-letter day for us!
As for me, I have managed to get my shadow resist (SR) gear all crafted up in preparation for Mother Sharahz. I have also accumulated quite a wealth of haste gear which gives me a lot of flexibility in gear selection. Armor Penetration (ArP) is the next stat I will be focusing on. I currently think the right combination of haste and ArP will be the key to maximizing my dps on Tier 6 (T6) raid bosses. Haste has an effective cap (rumored to be a weapon speed of 1.92), while ArP just gets better the more you have. Trying to maintain an appropriate level of haste while achieving adequate ArP (700 to 800??) is proving to be quite a balancing act.

And, of course Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) has a rumored release in quarter 4 of this year...

Ding Dong the Blood Elf's Dead!

2008-07-08T15:19:00.002-04:00

Hah, you foppy old blood elf! How do you like us now, huh? You threw everything you had at us and we flat out stomped you into the ground. Just in case you would like to see how we did it, here's the WWS Report.

Kael'thas Sunstrider is a prolonged and complicated fight with five different phases. Coordination was key and our raid leaders proved to be up to the task. Things get hectic with each phase and our priorities had to change on the fly. Our raiders have greatly improved in their ability to follow direction and comply with the raid leader's directions. This combination proved to be Kael's undoing.

So at long last, that quest has finally been completed! A quick trip to the Caverns of Time to turn it in and most of us had enough rep to complete all three ring turn-ins. The Band of the Eternal Champion is now mine! A nice upgrade and more than a few gold was a very satisfying reward for defeating a boss that had previously frustrated us for so long.

We have now successfully cleared all of Tempest Keep. Congratulations, Red Devils!