DPS: We Deliver

Character

2009-05-01T14:04:00.003+09:30

I might have been incredibly slack about posting in recent months but I'm still reading lots of blogs and most recently have become a fan of the excellent WTT:RP thanks to Anna of the Too Many. WTT:RP is a role play focused blog written by a group of quality role players from Feathermoon, the server which is home to my main character Jezrael. If you have any interest in RP I highly recommend checking it out.

My interest in role play and who my characters are is always a background thread to my experience of playing. While I'm generally more consciously focused on preparing for the raid, or making some gold to support that expensive raiding habit the stories about who my different characters are simmers along in the back of my mind, and of occasion I spend some time waffling my thoughts to my RP friendly co-workers.

I'm always putting off writing about my different characters because none of them are completely fleshed out. Most of what I know about them is their personalities and some of what caused them to be that way. Often I haven't thought in great detail about their physical characteristics. I think it's high time that I wrote down what I know. Perhaps more will grow from that. Perhaps I'll finally write the story of how Jezrael tamed her first companion animal. Perhaps I might even engage in some in-game RP one day.

I'l start with Jezrael since she is the character I know most about.

Jezrael
I'm not quite sure how old Jezrael is. She is definitely not thousands of years old. I think of her as being sort of middling in age. Mature but not middle aged. She grew up in Ashenvale and comes of a family who traditionally have been Sentinels. I still haven't thought up a family name that I like for her that isn't too trite, already exists, or doesn't suit her.

During her formative years Jez trained as a hunter with the eventual intention of becoming a Sentinal and roamed the forests of Ashenvale with her boon companion Broichan; a young druid in training. Although she never revealed as much to Broichan, as they grew up Jez fell in love with him and believed that one day, when the time was right, they would marry. There was no rush, they were young and they both had much to learn in their respective crafts.

Unfortunately for Jez, Broichan; who was some seasons older than her, was sent off into the world by his druid mentor on some kind of clandestine mission, and after a time she didn't hear from him anymore. I don't where he went or why, only that Jez's overall motivation and why she didn't become a Sentinel, why she left her home and went out in the wider world also, is because she is searching for the man she loves. It is her tragedy, that she doesn't know where he is, or what happened to him, or whether he even lives, and this has shaped her personality.

As a Sentinel in training Jez had a great deal of anger for the Horde. Especially with the Horde's deforestation activities. However her experiences in the broader world have tempered her feelings, and although she is at heart still distrustful, she has learnt that not everything is as black and white as she might like.

Personality-wise Jez is quite serious, she has strong sense of right and wrong and values honour above all else. She finds it hard to let go and relax and has few close friends since she is generally distrusting. Letting people get close to her is difficult, motivated by losing someone she loved so fiercely in Broichan, she doesn't want to open herself to more pain, and therefore of course is missing out on so much. She can appear to be quite aloof and judgemental of others, but if you win her trust and loyalty she will be a staunch companion. The hustle and bustle of the great cities are something she generally avoids, preferring to keep to less civilised areas, she is happiest when out in the wilds, just her and her companion. She could be considered somewhat tactless and direct although she will tell you she is just honest. Alcohol is a weakness and she has had a few embarrassing moments as a result of one too many jugs of wine. Jez is very aware of her own dignity and loss of this causes shame.

Thinking about what I would want for Jez in the sense of character development through story, it would be for her to have some experiences where she learns to let go more and enjoy the here and now rather than focusing on what might have been or what may be. Where she is forced to further acknowledge that there are shades of grey, that nothing is as straight forward as she might like it to be. That it is ok to be vulnerable and to let love (whether romantic or platonic) into her life.

Physically, Jez is tall (of course, she's an elf) and as a hunter her build is lithe with a smooth flowing motion to her movements that is both studied and quiet. No stomping or screaming here. Jez is in no way arrogant, she is capable and she knows it but feels no need to broadcast this. Her garb is utilitarian and practical, she has little taste for fripperies or fashionable attire with the most ornamentation of her clothing present as subdued woven designs on the garments she wears beneath her trusty mail. Her hair is long and purple and while she prefers it loose practicality oftens sees it tied into a braid. She wears a smooth shaped stone strung onto a leather thong about neck and beneath her clothing. It was a gift from Broichan and thus she has great emotional attachment to it.

That felt good! Writing that down helped me discover a few more things I didn't know about Jezrael. I think I shall have to do this more often, and definitely for my other characters.

I wonder how much other players think about their characters, even if, like me, they don't actively role play them?

Epic flight - old skool style

2009-01-13T06:53:00.004+10:30

One of my goals ever since she hit 70 has been to get epic flight for Seph. I scrimped and saved but it took me a while to get the gold together and by the time I had Northrend was upon us and Jez was my first character out the door to level up and get ready to raid. That achieved I started playing Seph a lot more and decided there was no point worrying about epic flying until I could train the cold weather flying skill at level 77. That day recently arrived and with much glee I also purchased the Artisan riding skill. Huzzah!

Now I was faced with a choice. I could simply train the epic flight skill or, I could undertake the original quest line. As someone who really enjoys the druidic lore it was a simple choice - I would do the quests and using the wonderful guide by Aurik at /hug it was an enjoyable and straight forward process. Although everything was a lot easier at level 77 I still had a bit of trouble on the Eagle Essence since I elected to stay in Moonkin form and burn the guy down. The other parts of the quest were cake and I just enjoyed the lore even though the running around all over Outlands and then to Azshara was a little tiresome. It just made me look forward to getting epic flight form even more! Emelin on his druid Broichan and Miss Csilla helped me out with a heroic Setthek Halls and finally it was mine (sadly the mount didn't drop)! Seph is now a very pretty, very fast, birdie!

Pew pew..... Zzzzzzz...

2009-01-11T08:00:00.004+10:30

Drunken Badgers cleared Naxx 25 on our first visit there as a raid. This was awesome - we got many loots and a feeling of satisfaction at our awesomeness. This was lame - when there is no challenge it's a little boring. Well it wasn't a straight one shot of each boss...we had a couple of tries on Thaddius and Gluth before we downed them.

I know Naxx is the entry level raid for Wrath but it was no where near like the challenge we experienced when first starting Karazhan in TBC. There is a discussion going on in our forums at the moment about this very subject. Generally the feeling is - this time round we are an end game experienced team. Many of us have been working together raiding since the Kara days - and therefore it's not so much that the bar has been lowered by Blizz but that we exceed a bar that has been set to allow entry into the game for players who are at the place we were when TBC first came out.

One thing everyone agrees on - we hope Ulduar is released pretty soon before we get bored of current content and that it is more of a challenge.

The remaining challenges for our raid currently are Malygos 25 and Sarth 3D. I'm pretty confident we'll get Malygos soon - our 'clean up raid' got him to 20% last week and that was without all of the A team regulars in the group. Sarth 3D, as was pointed out in the comments of my recent post on fighting Malygos as a hunter, seems to be the fight considered the most challenging by the broader community. So maybe that will take a little longer.

One thing is for sure - I personally need to work on my Heigan dance party skills!

I shopped smart

2009-01-04T08:23:00.004+10:30

I shopped pet smart. Although I like the achievements I haven't been particularly obsessive about getting any of them. I work on them when I feel like it generally. With the exception of the 50 mini pet achievement that is. I have always loved the little pets in game and was always sad that as a hunter with the bag space problems this brings I never had any room for them. With the changes as of patch 3.0 I immediately started collecting the little cuties.

It was fun soloing my way into Black Rock Depths for the Smolderweb Hatchling (who looks like a little brother to my spider Smithers!) and the Worg Pup and it was also fun researching where to get different pets via Breanni's awesome website and creating my own list of all the pets I possess.

I was sitting on 48 pets thanks to the Winter Veil gifts and the generosity *cough* of my druid and death knight alts when Seelyon a fellow guildie who knew I was working on the achievement was incredibly generous and mailed me a Cobra Hatchling from the Oracle dailies which he could easily have sold on the AH. This gift prompted me to finally go and pick up the Ancona Chicken in Shimmering Flats which was the last easily attainable pet on my list to bring me up to 50. Hooray! Stinker, I has him, and for a skunk he is super cute!

Fighting Malgyos as a hunter

2009-01-03T09:33:00.007+10:30

In a nice start to the new year the Badgers have downed Malygos in normal mode for the first time. Since it was a spur of the moment raid with the guildies online at the time rather than an 'A team' planned attempt the victory is even sweeter.

I mentioned in my last post that I believe (like others) that Malygos is the most epic fight to date in WoW and I definitely stand by that. The mechanics of the fight certainly require everyone to be executing their role with a high degree of skill. Whatt I'm going to talk about here is the fight from a hunter perspective, there are many good guides out there to the overall fight strategy so I see little point in repeating them.

I found the fight quite difficult as a hunter during phase one, however perhaps this came down to the particular way we executed the fight and the composition of our raid group. I'm definitely interested in hearing tips, tricks and suggestions!

Power spark buff and positioning
The thing about phase one of course is that you want to make sure that you arrange for as many people in the raid as possible to benefit from stacked power spark buffs. The way we handled this was to have the main tank reposition Malygos as much as possible each time a spark spawned so that it was coming from his rear. The ranged and melee DPS would then down the spark when it was in range but before Malygos was able to soak it up.

As the only hunter in the group I found it very difficult to be on the spark buff area and still at range of Malygos. The spark buff area is quite large - about 10 yards, but so is Malygos' hit box. I would start the fight at the top of the damage meters and then quickly fall down the list during phase one. Now as we all know hunters are very good at MQoSDPS and Malygos is a DPS race so it's important for all DPSers to gain benefit from the buff. I mentioned the issue I was having and our MT bless him was able to position Malygos such that the melee and I were all able to enjoy the buff. I'm pretty sure that this adjustment helped us win. Not because I'm all that awesome - but because of the nature of the fight.

As a hunter you're in a great position to help position the sparks - and as tempting as it may be to do this to your benefit it's better of course for the maximum benefit to be achieved for the raid. I use a target macro - /tar pow and concussive shot to slow the spark once it's on the platform since they move quite quickly at this stage. This gives the melee time to pick it up and down it in their position - we also had a death knight using Grip to pull them in and using Concussive gave him some precious extra seconds.

Pet behaviour
One thing I also noticed during phase one is that pet behaviour is a little buggy. Several times I noticed after coming down out of the blender that George my devilsaur was over near the boss but not actually attacking. As a BM hunter this is not good. I had to call him back to me and then send him back in again to attack. Quite annoying as this required precious seconds away from pew-pewing.

Phases two and three
There's nothing much specific to hunters for these phases - in phase 2 stay on the ground, the melee are the ones that need the disks and in phase 3 everyone is in the same boat - stack stack boom!

Altogether a fun and challenging fight. I'm really looking forward to doing it on heroic!

Where's the challenge?

2009-01-02T07:35:00.004+10:30

There is such a plethora of bloggers out there now all posting great stuff about the new expansion that it has caused me to feel a little redundant. For the past couple of months I would have an idea for a blog post and then when browsing my regular reads find that someone else has already covered the topic more than adequately. Also y'all write too much! Seriously I am continously about 2 weeks behind on my feeds! I should probably prune my list of feeds back, but I am more likely to increase it since there are so many good blogs out there. This is very much the case given that I am also on the search for new reading material given some changes I have made in terms of game play.

As I've said before, I'm no theory crafter so I really value the work my fellow bloggers do distilling the wisdom of communities like Elitist Jerks into nice clear blog posts that I can learn from.

So what changes have I made? Well, Jezrael my lovely hunter got the love at first and is sitting pretty to enter Naxx 25. Levelling Jez was pretty much cake, I was T6 geared and able to breeze through the content mostly. This is a big difference from TBC where I spent much longer working on gearing for end game content. While my gear level starting Wrath made a difference I think it mainly comes down to the changes Blizz has made with making the rep grind much easier and having no attunements. It has also been interesting to observe the different commentary about the relative difficulty of the content in Wrath.

End game raiders tend to be dissatisfied with what they see as a lack of challenge but I also see posts where mostly non end game raider people talk about the challenges they have faced with regards to certain instances. From my perspective of being in the position of playing with a group of well geared, and more importantly skilled, players the content so far has pretty much been quite easy. To put this in perspective I've done all 10 man content except Malygos & Sarth and all 25 man content except Naxx and Malygos at least once (Sarth with adds down though). So far I agree with Zasp from The Egotistical Priest that Malygos definitely feels like the most epic fight to date.

I keep asking myself - is the content really that much easier than TBC? I've gained access to it more quickly, but this time round I'm end game geared and there are no attunements or serious rep grinds. It's hard for me to make the comparison. I do definitely agree however that the difficulty of trash pulls has been trivialised. Crowd control seems a thing of the past and like Flyv I miss the care and finesse we used to have to use to handle multi mob pulls. These days from a hunter perspective it just feels like 'lolvolley' all the time.

Tomorrow is our first official 25 man Badger Naxx and I'm looking forward to it, but also a little worried that we are going to smash the place easily. Seems strange doesn't it, but I'd like there to be a little challenge to the place at least. Of course I need to remember that Naxx is the entry level raiding encounter for Wrath and appparently is meant to be pretty easy but still. I still have fond memories of wiping on Attumen on our very first Kara raid. It was memorable because it was a challenge. If the challenge is non-existent then I am pretty confident that our raid will lose enthusiasm for it pretty quickly. Hopefully Ulduar will be released soon!

I got a bit diverted by talking about content difficulty I'm afraid when I actually intended to talk about something entirely different! Food for another post.

On preparing the raid for Wotlk and loot systems in particular

2008-12-31T14:37:00.000+10:30

The Drunken Badgers raid had a successful run of Burning Crusade raiding. By no means leaders we managed to come from behind to end our TBC raiding era as one of the top 20 raids on the server although sadly we never made it to Sunwell, and after the pre lich content nerf patch it didn't seem worth it.

For a guild that formed and began raiding during TBC I like to think this is no mean feat. We certainly learned some lessons along the way and as a result evolved our raiding management in order to achieve the goals that we had set for ourselves. As far as I can tell we also ended TBC with a good reputation on our server as a fun group who know what they are about, which can only stand us in good stead for the future...

So enter the Lich King, and Drunken Badgers are preparing to take on the 25 man content available in the new expansion starting with 25 man Naxx. It was decided that we would commence 25 man raiding in the new year, giving everyone the opportunity to level up at a leisurely pace if they so desired and to also account for the disruptions of the holiday period.

Unsuprisingly most, if not all, of the core raiders of the group hit 80 pretty quickly and started working on gearing up through heroics, 10 man Naxx and various guests spots in other 25 man raids in order to be in tip top readiness for the official commencement of Badger raiding.

During this period the drunken officers have been working on some further changes to raid management, mainly to do with sharing duties to decrease the load previously on the shoulders of only a few individuals. We now have several different raid 'offices' that are shared across 2 to 3 officers. How these officers manage their particular areas in terms of sharing duties is up to them. The offices are loot management, raid leadership, DPS performance, healing performance, tanking performance and recruitment.

I put my hand up to be a loot officer and have been learning how to use the loot mod of choice and with the other raid officers working on refining our loot system still further. Lively discussion took place from near the end of TBC raiding onwards whether we should stay with the current system or look to moving to another. Although generally happy with the way Suicide Kings was working for us we had encountered a couple of specific problems: top spot camping and bottom dwellers.

Top spot camping occurs when a person chooses not to bid on items that would be an upgrade for them in order to hold onto their position in the list so as to be guaranteed their holy grail item should it drop - we like to refer to this within the group as the 'DST' - ie Dragonspine trophy - something many people were after during our Gruul's raiding period. Although it is the individual's choice to hold out for their grail the decision to pass on upgrade loot is seen as detrimental to raid progression on the whole.

Bottom dwelling is where people on the bottom of the list have no hesitation in bidding on items due to their having no guarantee of other loot. Often the bottom dwellers would be subs. Bottom dwelling was further exacerbated by the top spot campers, who were generally regulars.

So we end up with a situation where our regulars are not improving their gear and our subs are making out like bandits.

Personally I never had a problem with the way our use of Suicice Kings functioned, I geared up at a reasonable pace, but I also never held out for a particular item.

The discussions concerning our loot system to me essentially speak to what kind of raid we want to be. In our earlier days we had been concerned with keeping it simple, encouraging a roster of regulars but retaining some fairness to subs - since subs when in attendance helped us achieve success as much as the other attendees. We were initially quite casual, not thinking particularly of progression as our main focus - but rather fun with hopefully some success.

As we have succeeded, so too has our focus evolved. We are now definitely more focused on progression. Therefore in order to achieve progression we have had to look at tightening up performance requirements even further, stepping up recruitment and tweaking the loot system to support progression.

As the passionate discussions have demonstrated progression does not necessarily equate with a loot system that is equable to all. We are trying to arrive at something in the middle. Also, an opinion which I stand by, is that the loot system is not *the* answer to successful progression - that all areas of raid management need to be considered holistically. That said we are doing our best to develop a loot system that gives subs a reasonable chance of receiving loots whilst at the same time rewarding regulars and discouraging camping at either the top or the bottom of the list. Other goals are keeping it relatively simple to explain and manage for the loot officers. We considered DKP and loot council, but both systems have inherent issues which we were not happy with collectively. The problem of a growing point spread in DKP and the lack of transparency and risks of alienation with Loot Council respectively were the main issues. We even considered just going with the in game rolling system but the RNG is RNG factor put people off, myself included.

The system which we will use as we begin 25 man raiding is as follows, naturally if it doesn't work we will make changes, we're certainly not inflexible.

We use Raid Ninja as a sign up tool and it is now mandatory for all raiders to indicate their attendance status for the raid by Tuesday each week (we raid once a week on Fridays). This will net each raider 1/8th of a point whether they attend the raid or not. Attendance at the raid having signed up correctly will net each raider 1 point, if they did not sign up they will earn no points. By the end of a 2 month period each raider must have a point total equal to or greater than 3 to remain a regular. The benefits of being a regular? Only regulars will be on the SK list. The process when a piece of loot drops will be bidding from people on the list (main roles only) then if no bids open need roll to everyone at the raid (again main roles only) and then if no need rolls open greed for offsets etc. Additionally every 2 months the SK list order will be randomly reshuffled to discourage camping.

We're hopeful that this system will be reasonably equitable for all and not too difficult to maintain. The most cumbersome part will be tracking attendance and point awarding - but I'm crafting a google spreadsheet with nifty forumlas with the help of a certain tanky person.

After the system has been in play for a while I'll be sure to post about how it's going.

Opplyse the gentle

2008-12-24T09:30:00.007+10:30

Opplyse wandered forlornly across the marshy terrain of the wetlands. Having only recently left the Ebon strongold and ventured into the outside world after the disturbing events at Light's Hope Chapel she found herself at a loss, uncertain what action to take next.

Her life before becoming a death knight was lost to her except in the disquiet of her dreams, where unsettling images would rise in her mind as though seen through a murky pool. None of it seemed as though it could possibly be real.

What was she supposed to do now? She felt the powers of the death knight still within her, a bubbling rage waiting to be unleashed, but her spirit was broken. No doubt she should take ship to Northrend and start the journey towards exacting revenge on Arthas. Yet she could not, not yet. A time of reflection, of looking inward was required. Time to clear her mind and settle her spirit. Prepare for the bloodshed ahead. Bloodshed where she would be a willing conscious participant, no longer driven by the will of the Lich King. She found she had little taste for it. Had she not witnessed and delivered enough pain? She would spend some time wandering the lands and gathering flowers, a pastime she had discovered to be a soothing one.

The time for vengeance would arrive soon enough.

Loving the lore

2008-12-20T08:04:00.005+10:30

Although not actively engaged in it I definitely have role playing tendencies. At least to the extent where I enjoy thinking about how my characters feel about the world, their personalities and their reactions to events in game, even if I don't actively play these things out in the game itself.

One of the things I very much enjoy about playing Warcraft is the lore and in Wrath I am enjoying the quest lines and story involvement more than ever. Blizzard have really stepped it up a notch with Wrath in my opinion and for several reasons. Firstly, there are DRAGONS! Lots of dragons! As a long time fan of these mythic beasts it's exciting to see them in game and from a lore perspective it's definitely great to get back to the main Azerothian story line started so long ago in the early stand alone games. Secondly, the amount of flavour and detail Blizzard has imbued into the world really adds to the immersion, and thirdly and perhaps most compellingly, the introduction of phasing technology means you feel as though you are actually having an impact on the story.

The battle of the Wrath Gate quest line is simply THE best, most epic, quest line ever and some of the most fun I have ever had in the game - especially in solo play. The long Marshal Windsor chain in vanilla WoW was certainly great and I'm glad I was able to experience it on Jez, but in my opinion the Wrath Gate sequence has taken it a step further. I won't go into details in case anyone reading this has not yet done the quest since I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone, but if you haven't done it yet I exhort you to go do so. Now.

I have dabbled in the past (several years ago now) in writing role play fiction through a forum based community and I did a fair bit of reading about writing fantasy fiction. One of the tenets I most clearly remember is in order for a fantasy fiction environment to succeed it must be clearly imagined and consistent. The community I was involved with wrote role play fiction based within Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time world and I had a massive guide I would refer to when writing to ensure authenticity with the world.

It's this incredible depth and richness of detail which I love about the World of Warcraft and think contributes strongly to it's ongoing popularity. There are of course other important aspects of the game that cause it to stand out from the crowd but for me the lore itself, and it's exposition within the game, is what anchors me in.

A new dawn

2008-12-20T07:56:00.002+10:30

I first started writing this blog during Burning Crusade and my blog banner image was a lovely shot of Jez against the back drop of the Nagrand sky. It seems only fitting therefore that as I begin writing about the new world of Northrend and my adventures there my blog banner should change to reflect the dawning of this new world.

I took the screenshot I used in the image on the northernmost cliffs of Icecrown. Perhaps if (when!) I get a proto-drake I will update the image again *grin*

Terrible

2008-12-17T22:59:00.001+10:30

I am a terrible, terrible blogger and I apologise to anyone who still checks in with me *ashamed face*. I have lots of ideas for posts, some great screen shots I've been collecting and have found absolutely no time to write *sad face*. With the holidays almost upon us I hope, intend even, to remedy the dire lack of content around here!

On Spiders, pet special ability issues and macros

2008-10-24T11:52:00.009+10:30

It's exciting times to be playing a hunter there's no doubt about that. As I alluded to a in a recent post I've been running around training some new pets. My choices are a combination of research, analysis and 'zomg cute factor' just so you know *grin*.

I've got Snaggle as my Ferocity pet so I wanted to try out a Cunning and a Tenacity pet. After some reading at the most brilliant pet resource of all Petopia I opted to train a spider as my Cunning pet. My reason was because spiders have the special ability Web and I could foresee this being very useful in PVP against melee classes.

I decided to train one of the spiders that lurk in Terrokar forest since a) the location was convenient and b) I like the skin. After putting the lurve onto my spider and feeding him some Clefthoof Ribs to make him happy I specced him out and played around a bit with killing other spiders to get comfortable with using him. I found myself to be pleased.

Next I hopped over to Ironforge to pick up some glyphs from the Auction House and realised that a couple of fellow guildies were duelling out the front, a warrior and a rogue. Eager to try out spideys Web ability I joined them. I duelled the warrior first and won and then fought him again and lost. Mr Rogue had been observing and was very interested in seeing Web in action so then we duelled. I lost the first one and won the second. Now Mr Rogue is one of the top PVPers in our guild, very skilled so the fact that I managed to beat him was awesome! He however was not very pleased with spidey at all! I was not very pleased to discover the rogue ability Dismantle. We experimented a bit and discovered that when under the effects of The Beast Within it's still possible to be affected by Dismantle. Not happy. Still all in all I was feeling the joy of having a new tool in my PVP arsenal and in honour of the discombobulation Mr Rogue was experiencing trying to find a counter for Web I adopted his name suggestion for spider: Smithers. Hehe.

The main thing though of course is working out how to manually trigger Web. In a PVP situation against more than one player it's going to be pretty useless if the ability is on autocast and spidey uses it on a ranged caster while a warrior is all up in my grill. During these initial duels I had an autocast macro set up to toggle the ability:

/petautocasttoggle Web

But this didn't give me the fine control I was looking for. Someone suggested I modify a warlock pet macro for my own use and this is what I ended up doing. The bonus being that I can use one macro to trigger a special ability for each pet depending which one I'm currently using thus:

/cast [pet:spider] web; [pet:cat] rabid; [pet:bear] swipe

I haven't decided whether it's worth having the cat and bear abilities on manual cast yet. I can see a future where I get yelled at for having Swipe on autocast for bear in a crowd control situation. Rabid I will probably end up working into a macro associated to a shot rotation. Anyway the macro works and that's good. Well it kind of works. I've been grinding elementals up in Nagrand for pet levelling purposes (as well as hopefully some profit) and using the time to experiment with 'on demand' casting of Web. I soon discovered that I would frequently get a 'ability not ready' error when trying to cast it. Huh?

I'm no guru as I've often stated before so it was time to search the interwebs to see what more intelligent people than me are saying. What was puzzling me is that Web is a no cost instant cast so it's not like I needed to make sure Smithers has enough focus before I try and cast it. What then is causing the issue? To Elitist Jerks! I waded through the massively long Hunter WoTLK thread and on page 185 came across this comment:

Hey guys, I've noticed with my crab that while claw is on autocast, it triggers the 1.5s GCD and thus it makes it very hard for me to using pin or roar of sacrifice.

I have noticed however that intervene doesn't have this problem since the pet can intervene while in the GCD of a claw. However, I wish blizzard would do the same with pin and roar of sacrifice as these are all on demand skills.

The way it is currently, I have to turn off claw, cast pin, then turn claw back on. Even though I have a macro to do this, it requires 2 button presses and is kinda inconvenient.

Does anyone have any opinions on this? =P

I know that blizzard removed focus costs from almost all the pet special abilities since people were complaining that due to the focus dump skill, no pet could ever have the energy to perform their special abilities without the hunter first disabling the auto cast. However with the special attacks on the GCD, it is still pretty annoying =P.

What do you guys think?

Aha! So it seems that pet special abilities are using the 1.5 second Global Cool Down. That's not very cool since even with the changes to Autoshoot you're generally spending a lot of time managing the GCD to keep up a steady rotation working in your shots as you need them. Initially I tried inserting /stopcasting in front of my macro but this didn't yeild consistent results. Further research revealed that pet special abilities share the GCD with Bite. So I turned off Bite and ran around killing Basilisks. Result - Web cast everytime I wanted it to. I removed the /stopcasting command from the macro and experimented with firing the macro mid cast of steady shot and no problem. This would seem to indicate that the special ability is tied only to Bite and not the GCD for hunter abilities. No idea if this is actually true though.

Conclusion: At this time the only way to manually cast a pet special ability on demand is to have Bite turned off. Whether this is at the detriment of your DPS is not a question I have the theorycraft skills to answer, but for me, in a PVP situation the ability to control when I cast Web is more important to me than the damage from Bite.

Of course now I need to work out whether I should manually cast Wolverine Bite or just leave it on autocast. Questions, questions, questions! Like I said, these are exciting times! I'm sure I'll have more to report once Smithers is level 70 and I've mixed it up in a BG.

What has your experience been? Got any wisdom to share?

Corrupting the innocent

2008-10-23T09:22:00.003+10:30

Well the not-so-innocent is what I would opine *grin*

Although I should probably be working on levelling my new pets, continuing my experimentation with the issues some pet abilities seem to have and all those kind of things last night I instead had lots of fun running around on a new toon with a friend from work who is exploring World of Warcraft with a trial account. Typhoon Andrew and I are both hoping that she'll decide she likes the game so much that she'll subscribe, but I think we're both also consciously trying to not push the crack too heavily hehe. Of course if she does subscribe I'll be angling for her to roll a toon on Feathermoon rather than stay on the oceanic server Nagrand where we are currently slaying kobolds. Ugh Kobolds, I think they are even more annoying than murlocs!

I can tell you this - she's a born mage - cackling with glee as she fire balls critters.

Say hello to my lowbie priest Caeri and Kittoug the evil mage.

Rehuntarded in a brave new world

2008-10-21T09:44:00.001+10:30

It's been an exciting and also unsettling few days since the patch hit. My initial reaction upon logging in was to feel completely at sea - re-huntarded in fact. I immediately regretted my lack of in-depth reading on the changes affecting the hunter class and was overwhelmed by a UI that was in most parts broken as a result of me using a lot of mods to replace every aspect of the default interface.

My first step was to get my UI into a semblance of working order. Sadly Ace Updater is no more so I have picked up the Curse installer and so far am finding it to be rather good. I discovered that Deadly Boss Mods although apparently updated for 3.0 causes a problem with my chat frames where I can't see my chat at all so I've got it disabled at the moment. Hopefully it will be working now as I have a Black Temple raid in just under 2 hours. I also had to set up my action bars all over again which meant setting up all my G15 keyboard hot keys again.

The next pressing question was how to spec and also what pets to use and how to spec them. Decisions, decisions! Initially I threw together a deep BM build just to try it out and went off and tamed a devilsaur. He is big and stompy and I named him George *grin*. To see George hit level 65 upon taming was a great thing but that's still 5 levels to get him up to a raid ready state. Hmm. I tried him doing a few Sunwell dailies with him and discovered that I pulled aggro off of him very quickly. He was also quite focus starved and this probably impacted on him not being able to use growl as often. I had all abilities on autocast as well and of course he is only 65. Going deep BM to pick up exotic pets means having to forgo Go For the Throat in the MM tree. Not to mention missing out on Aimed Shot as well which I enjoy having mainly for PVP.

All this activity took place over a couple of nights of play so I'd been able to do some brief interwebs research and from what I read on EJ it seems that for a 70 build you pretty much want GFtT still and my trial with George seemed to indicate that was the case. I was also concerned about having a 'raid viable' build since the Badgers plan to keep raiding T6 content until we either hit 80 or finish it. Mainly because we want to see the content.

So that evening I placed George in the stable and respecced to a build I'd put together using the talent calculator - it's a 48/13/0 build which allows me to push 3/5 Kindred Spirits in the BM tree but still retain the yummy Lethal Shots, Mortal Shots, Go for the Throat and Aimed Shot in the MM tree.

Of course in this brave new world I also need to spec my pets too! You can be sure I immediately purchased the 2 additional stable slots now available so was also keen to try out some new pets. I've always had cats as pets throughout my entire time playing WoW but now I wanted to try out the different trees which meant picking up a cunning and tenacity pet. A future post will deal with the fun and games of new pets and talent builds. Initially I just needed to spec Snaggle my cat to be my raiding pet ready for our raid and I threw together an initial build. Stay tuned for a post on how I fared in our weekly raid.

I can haz bear!

2008-10-12T21:29:00.012+10:30

I've been terribly slack about posting lately. I'm afraid that a busy real life (seems like all the birthdays and babies and weddings are all happening at this end of the year) coupled with a sense of ennui has left me feeling a little unmotivated to write, especially when everything is about to change. Yep, the pre-expansion doldrums have finally started to kick in and just like prior to release of The Burning Crusade the question of 'is it really worth doing X or Y' with my toons is starting to rear its' head. There are, however, plenty of things worth doing and with the popular belief that the patch will arrive with the next maintenance the Badgers have been busy.

We've been running ZA for several months now and our once a week extreeeem ZA raid has slowly seen a growing group of people gain their Amani War Bears. As Cynra recently posted we even had an emergency mid week run at a ridiculous time of morning for the Americans and a not so bad but not so early time of night for the Aussies. This Sunday was our last ever run with a chance to get the bear mount if the patch really does hit and yours truly was the only regular raider still without a bear. I'm sure you can imagine how nervous I was! What if we stuffed it up? I wasn't sure what would be worse - if I made a colossal mistake and ruined my own chances or if one of my dear Badgers did and I would be so sad.

I don't think I have suffered such extremes of emotion playing a game since the good old days of blockading in Puzzle Pirates. Firstly one of the people scheduled to come didn't show and we had to find a replacement who would be ok with not rolling on the bear if they didn't have one since this was the final chance for me as a long term regular to get one and was also geared and experienced with the run. Luckily fellow guildie Puppetteer stepped into the breach. The run started really well with everything going super smooth right up until the pulls before the lynx boss. Somehow people got feared and the mobs on each side of the door got pulled and we wiped. We NEVER wipe in ZA any more. I started chewing my fingernails nervously at this point and making strange wheeking noises while Emelin kept chanting at me 'it will be ok, we'll make it' over and over.

So we regrouped, and cleared all the trash and had about 30 seconds to mana up and prepare for the pull. Until that is Puppetteer our dear lock, wandered a little too far into the room and face pulled. Eeeek! Galvanised into action I let rip with a Misdirect to our main tank, everyone sprang into position and the healers out did themselves keeping Mogri (the MT) up while our pally OT Cliff got into cleave sharing position. It was on and everyone unloaded as much firepower as we could muster. Never has a fight seemed to go for so long! We made it with literally seconds to spare and I was the closest I've ever been to a heart attack. The elation after the tension was exhilerating! I got bear! Huzzah!!
To celebrate what is likely the last bear run naturally we had to pose for a photo moment mounted on our bears and then our Moonkin made the excellent suggestion of converging on Ironforge in all our bear-y glory to preen and strut and generally be idiots. This idea met with much acclaim and we hot footed it over there to crack some pony kegs and have a good time doing bear conga lines while people either laughed, cheered or mocked us.
After we'd had our fill of being blithering idiots it was on to Mags. I for one decided that since I'd actually been there and done that I wanted the title to go with it and several Badgers felt the same so Cynra had put in motion the plans for a run. We ended up having to pug it unfortunately which was pretty much full of fail until some people left and we were able to pull in some more guildies who had since logged in. Once we had a higher Badger quotient things went much more smoothly and I'm now the happy owner of at least one BC title. Sadly no Hand of Adal as we were unable to down Kael on our Saturday raid, but still, it's been one awesome weekend for Jez!

Special edit: our irascible rogue recorded our jaunt in IF and has added a very fitting soundtrack, it made me giggle like a loon all over again watching it.

Brewfest! Hic!

2008-09-27T20:18:00.006+09:30

The many festival events that occur throughout the year are a really fun aspect of playing Warcraft. Being a Drunken Badger one festival that definitely appeals is that of Brewfest. We've been having a lot of fun doing the daily boss in Blackrock Depths and both Jez and Seph have walked away with some 'lawl' items such as the Direbrew Shanker and useful items such as for Seph the sweet stam trinket Brightbrew Charm. Best of all though both Jez and Seph are now running around on their own Great Brewfest Kodos! Hooray!I also discovered to my immeasurable delight that if you drink enough you really DO see pink elelphants roaming Shattrath! *grin*

Just before Brewfest arrived Blizz also gave a nod to Talk Like a Pirate Day which I took advantage of by turning Jez into a pirate for a while. It was very amusing to me to run around in pirate costume due to my history of playing Yohoho Puzzle Pirates. Poor Jezabella, I haven't logged in for a while now. She's just sitting in her villa counting gold these days. Last I remember she was sitting on about 2.5 million, imagine having that much gold in WoW!

Retro Raiding

2008-09-27T08:05:00.011+09:30

It seems that the closer the expansion looms the greater the vogue for 'retro raiding'. Prior to TBC the only end game type raids that Jez participated in were ones for Zul'Gurub, Molten Core and Ahn'Qiraj 20. Even though I never got a chance to see them I did complete the quest lines for attunement to Onyxia and Blackwing Lair. Probably because I'm an incorrigble completionist.

I have been very pleased of late therefore to be able to see both of these instances as part of the retro raiding frenzy that has gripped Feathermoon. Nax has been seeing a lot of action too but as I never managed attunement for this old world version of The Burning Crusade's Sunwell I haven't been able to see it and I doubt I will be bothered getting attuned before Wrath hits. These three are the only remaining old world instances that require attunement still.

Blackwing Lair's dark environs. Poor dragons, reminds me of Blades Edge.

Visiting Blackwing Lair was an absolute thrill, remembering as I do the tales of trial and tribulation of the then lead raid groups going through this content back when Jez was just a young huntard drooling over the big bad hunters walking around in their uber Tier 2 gear.

Compared to the open spaces of Mount Hyjal, my current raiding location, the decor of BWL was quite gloomy. Lots of dead dragons and stone halls. Quite Dwarven in style really. As our normal raid's main tank commented to me (as he too had come on this adventure), he wouldn't have relished hours and hours grinding this dungeon back in the day and I agree. At least in Hyjal we're out in the fresh air *wink*

You might think that seeing BWL as level 70 would be a walk in the park, well I can tell you now it certainly wasn't that. I was part of a group of about 25 composed of end game raiders from several of the most high end raids on the server and we still had to be careful. My greatest challenge was throttling back my DPS as the amount of damage I was doing was insane. Also as the only hunter I was responsible for several of the boss pulls by Misdirecting to the main tank. Being completely new to the instance and having no idea of any of the fight mechanics made this quite nervewracking!

I need to remember to turn off names before taking screenshots.

The Nefarian fight out on his balcony was definitely the highlight. That was an extremely fun fight, everyone was giggling and exclaiming over vent about the different animals they were getting turned into. I was turned into a giraffe! I didn't think they even existed in the Azeroth universe! Nefarian sure has an active imagination *grin*

Is it just me or does the tunnel leading down to Onyxia's lair look like a giant gaping dragon maw?

Just yesterday I joined a band of adventurous types who desired to seek out Onyxia in her lair. I jumped at the opportunity to go when Csilla the perky priestess mentioned that more DPS was being sought. It was quite amusing to arrive at the instance entrance and get the 'Discovered Onyxia's Lair' dialogue. As we moved inside it was only natural that many jokes about MOAR DOTS and 50 dkp minus were made. Again being almost completely ignorant of the fight I was a little worried about doing something huntard-like and demonstrating major fail. As it was the fight went very smoothly. This was a much easier encounter and our group of ten or so featured a motley mix of gear levels and some people not yet 70.

Dead Onyxia huzzah!

I'm very happy that my efforts to get attuned all that time ago did not go to waste even if I have not been able to experience the 'full flavour' of the instances. The opportunity to see the content at all is definitely a win in my book.

Has anyone else had the opporunity to do some retro raiding? If not where which of the pre TBC instances would you most like to see?

Banking attire is very important

2008-09-24T06:51:00.013+09:30

I've heard others talk about how they dress their mules in special outfits and thought this adds a bit of fun to that poor overworked toon. In my case a female dwarf paladin who never saw beyond level four. Fittingly for a dwarf she hasn't seen daylight outside of Ironforge in months. I started playing her in the early days of my WoW career when a friend had just started and also rolled a paladin. Myself and another friend thought we'd help him along with some companionship. However the two guys soon outstripped me in levelling and I found Dwarfs altogether too short and slow after playing a Night Elf hunter and returned swiftly to my beloved Jezrael.

Recently an enterprising individual was advertising over trade chat all of the items they had for sale including a COD delivery service. They were using a clever mod that allowed you to query different items. I promptly ordered up an outfit to dress my dwarfikins in, I present to you Serenla, Dwarven banker.
As you can see I've added rounded corners to this image. Inspired by a recent post from Aurik of /hug I decided I really wanted to learn how to treat images in this way as I think it looks really attractive. When I have a moment I'm also going to look into getting the model viewer and using masks so that I can present images within posts in the attractive way that Aurik and others do, but for a Photoshop noob like myself I was pretty excited to work out how to do rounded corners heh!

In your face Archimonde!!

2008-09-18T06:58:00.004+09:30

The DB raid has been pretty lucky in terms of our progression, we moved through T5 and into T6 at a pretty rapid pace. At the end of January this year we were sitting at 70th server on wowjustu and by mid July had moved up to 25th. At the time of writing we are currently sitting in 22nd. I think this is mostly as a result of a core group of skilled and dedicated raiders who have consistently raided together since we started back in Karazhan way back when. Over time this group has also grown as we have picked up recruits to the raid.

However Archimonde has been a bit of a stumbling block for us. It's a complicated fight that more than ever requires every person in the raid to be experienced with the fight and be totally on the ball. One mistake by one person can cause a snowball effect that results in fail.

The DB raid started in Mount Hyjal in June and quite quickly got the first 4 bosses on farm, however due to various factors including some instability of our roster it is only now, 2 months later and after numerous attempts that we have successfully downed Archimonde for the first time. In true DB style however it was a one shot! We had a good feeling about this particular group and were confident that we'd get him after a few attempts but I think we were all suprised and elated to succeed on the first attempt. Unfortunately this particular huntard was out of the fight early after dying to Doom Fire for the first time ever. How embarrasing. I was lucky enough to get a battle rez later in the fight (which is unusual since we don't ever BR due to the risk of the person getting quickly killed due to low health and causing another Soul Charge) to contribute some pewpew and help down him. The delighted screaming and yelling over vent and various chat channels was awesome. It's these kind of moments that totally make the game for me.

Random acts of kindness

2008-09-15T20:03:00.009+09:30

I've been slaving away at my Netherwing rep dailies lately. As you may recall one item on the list of my many goals has been to get myself an awesome dragon to fly around on. This last Friday night I headed on over to Shadowmoon Valley to do my daily round of questing. I was gathering the annoying fel glands when someone asked in general chat if anyone needed eggs. 'Netherwing eggs?' say I, to which they respond yes, and I promptly indicate my desire for them. The Netherwing eggs are awesome because they are a repeatable hand-in that earn you a tasty 250 rep.

I'm promptly invited to group by a pally who gets me to fly over to him where he is standing on an egg. He then leads me to a couple more eggs and then offers to help me with my dailies. This guy was seriously my lucky charm because I got a bunch more eggs from mining Nethercite and from downed mobs. He helped me do the mine dailies and then went off to do Magisters Terrace with his guild.

Being that I'm an Aussie playing on an American server the dailies tick over about 9:30pm so I was able to do a couple more quests immediately after handing in one lot and also found a couple more eggs. All told I gathered 12 eggs in one session!! I'd been expecting to have to spend about 3 more days doing the daily round of quests to hit exalted - but thanks to this generous person I dinged that very night and was able to pick out my shiny new mount!

So Lokthor of Feathermoon - I salute you! It's these kinds of random acts of kindness that make up for all of the r-tards out there. I should also mention Klinktronic a friendly mage who also tried to help me out with an egg he'd found in a mine node - however when I mined it I got no joy. Still it's the thought that counts!

I also have to say that the last quest that you go through at Exalted is awesome. Yay for finally having my lovely netherdrake. Now which goal to focus on next?

Tales from the battleground

2008-09-09T22:19:00.002+09:30

I may never pug a battleground again. Ok I'm lying, I know I am, because I'll want to PVP and no one else will be up for it and I'll keep hoping for one of those stellar moments where the stars align and a pug group forms with no AFKers or idiots but rather with people who know how to play and want to win. Yeah, I'm an idealist I guess.

I do have some positive stories to tell from the warzone of the battlegrounds though, there is hope.

Last Friday night I was part of a group that just roflstomped all over Warsong Gulch (ok so it was a premade of guildies plus some friends, I promise I have a couple of good pug stories too though).

We won 7 games in a row, mostly in around 8 minutes each. After the 7th game we just couldn't seem to get the queue to pop no matter what how long we waited. Horde of the Cyclone battlegroup I apologise to you. Actually no I don't! HAH! And jimihendrix hunter with the /rofl emote? You picked the wrong hunter. There's nothing like having everyone on voice chat to help organise a little personal extra pwnage.

We had so much fun as a premade we went back and did it all again on Sunday. Good times. Although it sadly got a little boring after a while.

How about a tale or two of triumph in the face of adversity? After a really disappointing 'losing attitude' pug WSG the next one I joined I immediately asked if there were players present who wanted to win. I got a couple of affirmative responses and then a pally piped up: "What are your instructions then oh fearless leader?" (or something along those lines). 'Well crap' I thought, 'You've put your big huntardy foot in it now Jez, better talk fast or forever accept the label of scrub'. So I did: "The main plan is communicate, call all incs and exits, guard your carrier, set picks, control mid, get our flag back. Mostly just communicate." I wasn't very hopeful but zomg people DID communicate and would you belive it - we won! That was a very satisfying feeling.

Then there was that Eye of the Storm incident. Emelin and I were grouped up to PVP together so barely a premade but when thanking someone for a buff I realised that I was Battle Leader. Eeep. Um. Ok, might as well say.. something.. no one else is. So I gave some basic instruction: Grab DR and MT everyone else rush FR. And people actually followed my lead and we captured 3 nodes! I did my 'call incs early' thing and spent most of the battle guarding a node and calling out instructions re where to defend and where to attack. As a hunter I generally end up guarding nodes in battlegrounds like Arathi and EoS so if I've got the eyeline I tend to do a lot of communicating about enemy movements anyway. Well and tell people to fight on nodes not roads. But yeah we won that EoS too!

I don't really like being in the 'leadership spotlight' so to speak in WoW. I prefer the role of support. But it just goes to show that being the one to stand up and give some direction and encourage communication can actually make a difference. I don't think we won those battlegrounds because of me, but I do think that by communicating early a desire to win and offering a strategy it maybe boosted all the other jaded people like me sick of losing attitude pugs into bringing their game faces and doing their best to win instead of just expecting to lose and not bothering to try that hard. A positive winning attitude really does help. Who knew.

A huntery look at Mt. Hyjal: Anetheron

2008-09-04T07:06:00.007+09:30

Welcome to the second in a series of posts on Mt Hyjal from a hunters perspective. When we first started Mount Hyjal I looked around for a hunter guide to the instance and didn't come across anything so hopefully other hunters will be able to get something out of these posts, or even better from my selfish perspective - teach me some new stuff to help improve my performance *grin*. I've previously written about the Rage Winterchill fight.

As per my previous post WoW Wiki provides info on the instance overall and the specifics of the Anetheron fight.

As usual I will be talking from the perspective of how we in DB handle the fight, I hear tell we do things somewhat differently from many other T6 raids. The important thing to remember is: your mileage may vary, there is no 'teh one and only' strategy. Also, rather than covering general tactics I will look at tips and strategies specific to hunters.

Anetheron is the second boss of the instance and the last boss which you will fight in the Alliance camp. The trash waves preceding the arrival of Anetheron introduce a new mob type which is of great interest to us as hunters: Banshees!

Trash waves
As per the first bosses' trash wave hunters should be dropping frost traps in sequence to slow the incoming mobs. All of the other tips etc I mentioned for Rage Winterchills trash waves apply again. However, of specific interest to hunters for this fight are waves 4,5,7 and 8 which feature Banshees. Waves 4 and 5 have 4 Banshees and waves 7 and 8 have 2 Banshees. Hunters can provide an important service to the raid by kiting the Banshees back to the NPCs to take care of them leaving the rest of the raid free to handle the other mobs.

Preparation
Make sure you have swapped your PVP trinket back out for your normal trinket whilst the raid is preparing for the Anetheron waves.

I have a general macro named 'target' which I update for various fights and prior to the commencement of the Anetheron waves I like to set it up for the Banshees so that I can quickly start the process of grabbing aggro and kiting them. My macro is very simple: '/target ban' and bound to a key. I use a combination of Arcane and Distracting shot to grab aggro. You could MD yourself I suppose but I prefer to use my MD on my tank target to introduce a nasty Abom to them for instance at the beginning of the wave.

In my post on Rage Winterchill commenters suggested it was a good idea to bring NPCs into the fight early. This is fine and good and if you need to introduce the NPCs from the very first wave of the instance you should do it. We find in our raid that we handle the waves quickly enough without the NPCs involved leaving us time to drink and rez (if need be) between waves and will save the NPCs for the Anetheron fight.

Anetheron
Of note for hunters in the Anetheron fight is the fact that Towering Infernals will spawn on top of players at timed periods. Whilst the player targeted should run toward the OT who will tank the infernals it is the job of the hunters to MD each infernal onto the OT.

Therefore it's important to set up an MD rotation as overwriting another hunters MD can cause big problems. I set up an alphabetical MD rotation with our hunters as the easiest to remember and not dependent on group make ups being changed. We don't use an MD on the boss as he arrives as the MT is usually able to pick him up straight away. Still it's a good idea to keep on your toes in case one is needed.

In the DB raid we have a couple of rogues who will use Distract on the bosses as they arrive to give the raid more time to prepare for the fight (drink, rez, buff, etc). As soon as possible after the last trash wave I change my target macro to '/target tow' so that I can very quickly pick up my infernal. These guys can smoosh squishier members of the raid very quickly and you want to get into range of the infernal asap. It's important to communicate about the MDs. I generally announce who has the next MD over vent for each infernal, also important is to quickly coordinate who will have the next MD if the next hunter in the rotation has gone down. This is one fight where having several hunters is a good thing. It's definitely doable with only two if neither one dies, and I know of raids that have no hunters at all! Of course I think you need at least two hunters but I'm a little biased ;)

Once the OT has picked up the infernal ranged DPS should burn it down before the next one arrives whilst melee DPS concentrate on the boss. In our raid we position Anetheron on the right hand side (if you are facing the entrance the mobs come through) with the OT standing near Jaina. This allows the healers on the OT to benefit from Jaina's awesome spirit buff, keeps the infernals far enough away from Anetheron and gets the other NPCs involved in the fight.

It's important to keep the raid spread out as much as possible so that the number of people affected by Carrion swarm is kept to a minimum - this is most important for the healers of course.

During the fight we also have one hunter (me usually) keep up Scorpid Sting on Anetheron which helps out the healers who are needing to split their time between healing the MT, OT and also the raid as well as dealing with downtime from Sleep and Carrion Swarm. To do this I need to position myself where I can swing between pewpewing the infernal and throwing up another sting on Anetheron without having to move much.

Sending your pet onto the infernals does no good due to their fire damage so I generally send Snaggle to gnaw on Anetheron's knee caps and try and keep a mend pet on him. The most important thing in this fight for hunters is getting the infernals to the OT stat and keeping up MQoSDPS. As soon as Anetheron is down to around 15% or so we switch all DPS over to him and burn him down whilst the OT handles the remaining infernal and then finish the infernal off afterwards.

Once Anetheron is down it's time to hand out the sweet loots, grab your badges and mount up and ride to the Horde camp. Make sure everyone is out of the base before talking to Jaina and activating the destruction of the base. If you happen to be a miner you can mine nodes containing epic and rare gems along the way. We hand any gems mined over to our loot master who hands them out via raid rolls at the end of the raid.

So now you're two bosses in and ready to take on helping Thrall and friends save the Horde base, guides to the two bosses you'll face here coming soon!

Image courtesy The Warlocks Den

A huntery look at My Hyjal: Rage Winterchill

2008-08-28T21:11:00.005+09:30

Welcome to the first in a series of posts on Mt Hyjal from a hunters perspective. When we first started Mount Hyjal I looked around for a hunter guide to the instance and didn't come across anything so hopefully other hunters will be able to get something out of these posts, or even better from my selfish perspective - teach me some new stuff to help improve my performance *grin*.

So, on with the show. I'm not going to give you the details of the instance here, just tips and strategies for hunters. There are plenty of resources out there to give you information about the instance overall and the specifics of the Rage Winterchill fight. Go read them now if you like, I'll wait.

Back? Ok good.

Now I'll be talking from the point of view of how we in DB handle the fights, this will of course change from raid to raid, and what works for one raid may not work for another.

Preparation
You'll want to come to Mt Hyjal fully prepared with all your consumables etc. For the first two fights the only special gear you will need is your PVP trinket. Preferably the 2 min cool down one. The trinket only costs 8k honour so it's not hard to get hold of with a little effort.

Trash waves
There are eight trash waves before each boss (except for Archimonde) and if you wipe on any of those waves you have to begin the encounter for that boss again right from the very first wave.

The instance starts at the Alliance encampment where you will fight the first two bosses, Rage Winterchill and Anetheron. We fight the trash waves just at the gates where they enter. If we need to engage NPCs we kite the mobs back to them.

Drop a frost trap just ahead of the entrance before the path heads downhill and get any other hunters in the raid to drop their own frost traps in sequence behind the first one back towards the raid so that they get triggered in a chain. This will slow the mobs nicely and if you have a pally tank like us will give them a lovely chance to consecrate and get most of the mobs to stick to them like glue.

As a hunter threat is always an issue - switch between the mobs your tanks are targeting to get the most out of your DPS. It's very helpful here if you have a mod that can show tanks and their targets such as CTRaid, OrA or Xperl Unit Frames (if someone with the either of the first two mods has assigned the tanks this gets picked up by Xperl). There are no doubt other mods that do this job too.

Multishot is awesome for the trash mobs. Remember to feign preemptively if you can and switch targets often though

When your tanks have built up some nice threat dropping an explosive trap in the melee adds some extra fiery death to the mix.

Each hunter in the raid should be assigned an MD tank. Use your MD on every pull. Especially good with Abominations which are nasty, particularly to squishies.

Rage Winterchill
Mr Lich is the most straight out fight in the instance. Stay out of Death and Decay - and remember to keep your poor pet out of it too! If you get Icebolted use your PVP trinket immediately to escape it.

Work out with the hunters in the raid who has Imp Hunters Mark - they should be responsible for keeping it up on the boss. There's no real need to use any stings on this guy.

Apart from these things it's simply a matter of unleashing the DPS, burning the guy down and collecting the phat loots.

So there you have it, the first boss in Mount Hyjal is toast. From here on in it gets more interesting and therefore more fun!

Looking for regulars for T6 raid

2008-08-28T07:29:00.004+09:30

Do you love to raid but can't commit to 2-3 nights a week raiding for whatever reason? We can help! The Drunken Badgers are a guild on Feathermoon and we are looking to fill some regular positions for our T6 raid. Like many other raids out there we have started to feel the attrition of pre itch king burn out plus the impacts of RL on some of our folks.

We are 4/5 in Mt Hyjal and 3/9 in BT. Currently we are focusing on downing Archimonde before returning to Black Temple. Our best attempt so far has been 10% on Archimonde - so we are very close to downing him. We raid once a week on Friday starting at 6pm server and going for 5 hours.

We are particularly interested in ret pallies, shamans and priests but are open to all classes.

You will need to be geared to around T5 level whether via T5, Badge or appropriate PVP gear. Experience with the Mount Hyjal fights and especially Archimonde is a plus and we we will look at experience over gear when considering applicants, so if you have an alt that you could bring that isn't the most awesomely geared but you've done these fights on your main we'll bring that under consideration. You will need to have your PVP trinket and the SR neckpiece and cloak or be willing to get them asap. The PVP trinket in particular is required.

You don't have to be a member of our guild to raid with us. You do need to have access to ventrilo but you don't have to talk if you don't want to :)

The Drunken Badger raid is chock full of mature people who know how to have fun. We use the Suicide Kings loot system with some modifications.

To apply and/or read up more on the raid and the guild visit us at our forums.

Ok recruiting post over. We return to your regularly scheduled frippery soon.

What have YOU read response

2008-08-26T07:52:00.005+09:30

Mr Kestrel over at the Aerie has a list up responding to a question picked up by JustOneAnna of the books listed in the National Education Associations top 100. The idea is to

Look at the list and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE

So here's my list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)

The only reason I've read a lot of these is because I studied English Lit and University. Only four books on there rate as loved. I'm not really a fan of 'canon' literature. It's good to see a lot of modern authors on the list though.