Hmmm Interesting

Just for the record, FailMage has not respecced to Arcane.  It was just a joke Andrew made and my caption was just going along with the picture.  FailMage is keeping her fail fire spec.  She is my heroics bitch and my PS supplier.  She gets frost emblems, I get cash for the PS.  It works well.

Speaking of emblems I have 133 emblems of triumph on Tatia that I have no idea what to do with.  I guess I COULD upgrade my boomkin gear, but I really don’t enjoy dpsing as a boomkin in heroics.  Vel says it is because I am a “starfire” druid and thus fail.  That might be all well and good, but I think it is more I never really played Tatia as dps in heroics.  Yes for a while I would come as dps on her because Heleva doesn’t have a dps spec on her priest (she has PvE heals and PvP heals) so if I wanted to go I had to dps.  I don’t have a rotation down at all.  Vel has tried to help me on it, but the way my keys are positioned does not lend to using the rotation I need to for non-questing.  I have the buttons in position to help me when I do dailies on Tatia.  I don’t really want to change the spell positions for the rare times I have to dps on my druid in dungeons.  You all can roll your eyes at me all you want.  I specifically created this character to heal with, not to dps.  That is why I have my warlock.  She is the raiding bitch.  She brings the deeps.  Or at least she used to. >.>

Speaking of which I think I *might* finally have managed to get used to the button placement for her.  There are still several spells that I don’t use enough in normal rotation that I haven’t made new muscle memory for.  Shadow Ward is one of them.  I used to have it bound to the 4 key up on top of the keyboard.  Now I have switched it to the 10 keypad 4, which used to be my corruption button.  The 4 key up top is now life tap.  So instead of hitting Shadow Ward to protect me from losing health, I am now life tapping when I shouldn’t.  My soul shatter button is also facing the same situation.  It used to be number 8, only now 8 is rain of fire (to match up where my blizzard is for FailMage) and soul shatter is 0.  By the time I find the damn spell it is usually too late.  The other day in Gundrak I found my banish spell to banish the elemental before I found the soul shatter spell.  I like to think that banish saved my life. ^_^  To think that I didn’t even have it on my action bar until we fought Freya’s trash.  Good times, good times.

Wow I need to learn new transition phrases.  I use the same damn ones over and over again.  But then that is how I talk so I guess I am not moving too far off from where things normally flow. *shrugs*

Last night was . . . interesting . . . to say the least.  We did our weekly raid runs.  We got lucky and our boss was Noth the Plaguebringer in Naxx.  Mis was online (wewt!) so we strong armed him to tank the first group.  Mis was MT, Dily was OT on his DK, Heleva was solo healing as Disc, Andrew was on his rogue, our new warlock came on, wait for it, his warlock, Vel whipped out his boomkin (someone had to clean that poison), Ness brought his warrior and I came on my lock.  Two warlocks?!  Yes.  Destro and Aff baby.  I feel for Heleva.  She refuses to get a healing addon, says it is easy mode.  Everyone who heals just kind of rolls their eyes at her and teases her, but hey it is her playstyle, go for it.  Although I REALLY DO THINK YOU WILL BE HAPPY USING ONE!  oops caps lol .  She had kind of a struggle and even got close to being OOM, which as a Disc priest she never has an issue with.  I did tell her to not worry about healing me since I could essentially heal myself, but I don’t know if that helped or not.  I think we might have had a death, but I honestly don’t remember.

After we finished we regrouped.  Andrew was going as a tank on his pally, Heleva got her warrior to tank and our new warlock whipped out his druid we didn’t know existed.  Lo and behold . . . another tank.  Vel came to solo heal on his shammy.  I was on FailMage, Dily was on his shadow priest and his son Zakk (who had left the guild) came on his ele shammy.  So we had 3 tanks, 3 dps and 1 healer.  It was Naxx right?  No big deal right? >.>  Fucking gargoyles.  They suck REALLY bad.  Especially when each dps is dpsing down a separate one.  Even moreso when all 3 are dpsing one down and can’t kill it fast enough.  I blame myself for that.  FailMage is not set up to bring the high deeps in raids.  She is only sub par in heroics for that matter.  Dily and Zakk both were doing fantastic dps, but it wasn’t enough to make up for my lack of.  We did finally manage to bring all 3 of them down, but several of us died in the process.  I had already died earlier to the slimes.  I had pulled aggro so after dropping my clones I ran to the tank only to die.  Apparently that is the worst thing I could have done.  *sigh*  I fail at more than just maging.  We did manage to take down the boss, after a VERY long fight.  We decided to hold off on doing the 3rd run until the Air Force crew and other really late night people showed up.

So what do you do when you have people online?  RANDOM HEROICS!  Heleva was ready to crash out for dinner at that point and Andrew wanted to get his daily run time in so they logged.  Another guildie (Maticus) came online so I nabbed him and our warlock’s bear tank (Gelmir) and we queued up with me healing.  We got UP.  Gelmir hadn’t tanked (or played) his druid since July so he was Naxx geared and rusty.  I made a little speech at the beginning of the instance about our “noobie” tank and to hold off on going full out on dps until he got threat.  I was quite proud of the speech because I managed to get it out like a flight attendant.  Complete with the whole “enjoy your flight” type comment at the end.

We started out ok then the ret pally started running ahead of the tank and telling us to “gogogo” and to “chain pull” despite the entire spiel I had given.  I told him no, several times.  His reply was that his guildie (who was also in the group and at ilvl 261) would just pull aggro anyway.  I replied that he could go ahead and do that, I wouldn’t heal him if he did.  Gelmir took it as a challenge, which I wish he wouldn’t have, but he did.  Now mind you we hadn’t even gotten to the first boss when this was going down.  When we got there I hadn’t been healing the pair for a little while and the pally comes out with how it didn’t matter what we wanted they were going to pull anyway.  I again said I wouldn’t heal them and “no heals = death” which apparently they couldn’t comprehend.  During the boss fight the pally had taken damage (he stayed too close to the platform) and since I wouldn’t heal him he starts bitching in chat “Heal me you tool” because you know, that will make the healer WANT to heal you.  I said “oh look ignore!” and put the moron on ignore.  I hadn’t ignored the other guy yet because other than getting aggro (with his gear it really was expected) he wasn’t being a douche like his guildie, I wasn’t healing him, but I wasn’t ignoring him.

The boss was downed and we kind of waited a few before pulling the abomb in the hallway.  Went down the stairwell where you have that group of mobs at the base of the stairs, another to the left that you can avoid and of course a pat that comes down the stairs.  I am not fully sure what happened other than there were WAAAAAAAAAY too many mobs for that pull.  Mat went down, I was next and then Gelmir.  Since I had the pally on ignore I didn’t see the “ha ha ha that is what you get” message he put in chat as he and his guildie went running off picking up more mobs and bringing them to the entrance, where of course we would end up after running in as ghosts.  I came in first and saw the two of them standing there with a huge line of mobs running towards the door.  I immediately turned around and ran back out.  This zoned me back into Dalaran.  I kept trying to zone back into the instance but since they stayed in combat I couldn’t get back in.

This entire time we had been trying to kick the pally.  It is complete and utter bullshit that you have to wait for the timer debuff to wear off before you can kick someone.  Apparently he tried to vote to kick me.  How he can fail at basic math is beyond me.  You need 3 people to vote to kick someone.  There were 3 of us and 2 of them.  How the hell did he think he would pull off that kick?  Since you can only kick one person per run we couldn’t get rid of his guildie.  We re-queued and picked up a shammy.  I immediately sent him a whisper asking him to initiate a kick on the warrior.  He told me he wouldn’t do that unless the guy did something that warranted it.  I then went on to explain to him what the pally and warrior had done to us and what the current situation was.  He pretty much acted like he didnt believe me.  By this time I had already sent in a GM ticket regarding harassment for what the guys did in the instance, which I let the shammy know.  Originally we weren’t going to proceed in the instance until the warrior left, but Gelmir decided to pull anyway.

We all kept an eagle eye out on the guy, but he seemed to be behaving.  I even went back to healing him.  Gelmir was convinced that he was going to pull something on a boss fight.  Oh no, that would have been too obvious.

In the room after you kill Skadi are the stupid mobs that fear you.  You go down the stairs and most tanks LoS the group of mobs from the other room into the base of the stairwell.  Gelmir did this, I even typed in chat he was doing this, and the warrior pulled in the other group along with the one that Gelmir brought.  One group of those guys is bad enough with a rusty tank, two is just bullshit.  I was getting chewed to bits and feared up the yin yang.  Everyone but the warrior died.  The shammy says in party chat “I guess you weren’t lying” and proceeded to say we should just call the run since some “person” who was obviously 8 couldn’t seem to play.  We told him we were sorry to see him go and that it was a shame because he was a great player.  He said the same about us then dropped group.

Instead of re-queuing Vel said he wanted to come in and “have some fun” with the warrior, who was STILL in the group.  Gelmir tried to get the warrior killed, but sadly the jerk survived.  We finally resorted to just sitting there doing nothing.  After about 5 mins he finally dropped group.  We of course cheered and brought in Andrew’s pally.  I then joked about having 4 tanks in the group since every single person (besides me) had a tank spec.  So what do the guys do?  Why each one decided they were going to tank.  That’s right, we 4 tanked the rest of heroic UP.  We triggered bane and I died, only to be b-rezzed to keep their asses alive.

It was a blast!

We decided to have a tank battle and do another instance.  We queued up (they all picked tank/dps) and we got heroic UK.  PERFECT!  The place is easy and I have 3 manned it on my druid with a tank and one dps.  We got lucky with the dps we picked up.  It was a newbie shadow priest who just laughed with us.  We kept making cracks in chat and pulling entire rooms.  I don’t even have to heal that much in raids.  It didn’t end up being a “true” tank battle because the two druids ended up going kitty for most of it, but it still was a blast.

The best part was I got a reply from a GM telling me they would look into the situation with the pally and the warrior.  That they appreciate “quality” players like me notifying them of situations such as that.  Go me!

These are the people in question: Hardtoguard and Terminates of Legacy of Kahn on Mannoroth.  If you see these people drop group, they are NOT worth dealing with.  Unless of course you don’t mind assholes in your groups.  Your call.

Bonus post!

Here is the bonus post I promised last week.

Actually it is just a cop-out bonus post, but a bonus post nonetheless!

Enjoy courtesy of Andrew!!

Why oh why did I ever leave fire?!?!

Go Read

Seriously, go read Arioch’s post.  She says it so much better than my limited writing skills will allow.

Since I have already said my part on this topic I will let the discussion continue over there, unless I need to make another rebuttal, and I will go forward with my usual weekend recap on Monday.

Feigning death is the way of the future

 

Yoo-hoo bitches, yoo-hoo

 

Yes, that goddamn awesome.

When I actually logged into my main server I ended up running heroics with guildies.  Yesterday took the cake though.  Vel, Dily and I queued up as 2 dps and 1 tank and got heroic UP.  I was on fail mage, Vel was on his druid and Dily was tanking on his pally.  Our PuGs were a warrior and a priest.  Turns out they were both from the same server.  Now the warrior was about 200-219 geared and when he actually dpsed he was doing about 2.5-3, WHEN he dpsed mind you.

Oh dear lord this priest. >.>

Nice enough guy, at least in the first 2 minutes of the run.  He queued up as heals, and was dpsing.  At first I thought it was maybe because he was bored, I know some healers will dps when they really don’t need to heal.  He was about 219-226 geared, which could make sense.  The only problem was the tank was dying.  Dily wasn’t getting any heals other than a renew here and there and a bubble.  Vel had to pop out of boomkin form to heal him a bit because I sure as hell couldn’t heal him as a mage.  We kept asking the priest if he was healing or dpsing.  The guy wouldn’t answer.  At one point he was putting out 1100 dps.

I finally stopped and took a look at his spec.  Get this, he had 18 points in shadow, 30 in disc and 23 in holy.  What the hell kind of spec is that?  Now I don’t play a priest, but I think you kind of need to pick one talent tree over the other.  He didn’t have enough points in any tree to do any good in anything!  He was dpsing with shadow spells, but didn’t have enough points to get shadowform, so he was out of shadowform.  He would run up and pull mobs before anyone was in the room.  Vel kept saying that we needed to let him die.

We got to the first boss and he pulled an A-bomb before the boss had even finished her stupid interchange with the lich king.  I killed the damn thing out of spite.  He got close to dying too because Dily wouldn’t go and pull it off of him.  Then the fight started and he didn’t heal anyone.  If he would have been stuck in the sword ritual we would have let him die, but we didn’t get that lucky.  Since he would use so much mana to dps he had to stop and drink constantly.  I play a mage that sucks mana like no one’s business and I have learned how to conserve my mana and refill on the go.  Made me cringe when I saw him stop to drink yet again.

When we got to Skadi I said that the warrior would eat it in the whirlwind and the priest would too.  This was in fact the case.  The warrior got all pissy that he died.  I told him “whirlwinds hurt, you might want to move next time.”  He started bitching that he didn’t get any heals to which I told him “the priest was too busy dpsing to heal anyone.”  Someone then initiated a vote to kick and we booted the horrible priest.  Dily did check his gear and it was a mixture of healing and dps gear, just like his spec >.>

The best part was the blue proto drake dropped.   We had kicked him before we looted too.  The warrior said he would whisper the priest and tell him what happened.  Dily, of course, won the drake because that is the luck he has.  When the rare mount dropped in VoA he won that too >.>

We queued up and got a shammy healer and filled her in on the horrid priest.  When we pulled the next couple groups of mobs Dily pipes up “OMG! Heals!”  We all laughed.

We asked the shammy if she would be willing to come with us on some more heroics and she agreed.  So we queued up again, and fuck we got heroic halls of reflection.

I know fail mage is NOT geared to do this instance and Dily knows his pally is not geared for the instance.  Vel was and the shammy was, but that did not help.  We got a DK who was about 219 geared.  He knew what he was doing though and was pulling 3k easy.  We couldn’t even make it to the first boss.  The only reason we stuck it out was the 15 min debuff.  After several wipes the DK dropped group and we were able to re-queue up again.  Guess what we got!

OCULUS!

<.<

Since we keep getting this instance we try to go for acheivements.  The last time we were there we did all ruby drakes.  This time we wanted to do all emerald drakes.  This plan ended up being full of fail.  We wiped more here then we did in HoR.  The healer, who kept pushing to get the acheivement, ended up having a convienent D/C so we queued up for another person and had decided to do it the regular way and to hell with achievements, we just wanted to be done.  The guy knew what he was doing and we pulled it off in moments, and we all ajourned back to our respective servers.

So if you get a priest from Mannoroth with the name Roxy or Roxie something or other make sure he isn’t healing.  He has a bright pink tabbard with blue stars.  Just either vote to kick or drop group.  He is not there to heal.

A little treat

Andrew decided to make me another hilarious comic/picture for this blog.  So I thought I would share it with you.

Enjoy!

I want to send out a special shout out to 4 awesome people on the Arthas server:  Airstream, Lyssarra, Lalune and Feralelf.  I got into a PuG with them on my druid and they were so awesome we did another instance together.  Thank you guys so much for the fantastic runs.  I hope we get paired up again!  Good luck in the game guys!

Fail Mage Powers Activate!

Yesterday was a fun filled adventure in fail mage dps.  I didn’t do too too bad according to Dily.  Of course with him he then went on to tell me all about the tier gear and which would be better for me here and there etc.  I had to stop him because I just wont remember it.  I am not the best when it comes to gear.  I can’t grind for hours/days/weeks/months for a shiny new piece of gear.  As long as the character I choose to raid with is geared for the encounter we are raiding, I am good.  Right now both of my raiders (Millea & Tatia) are geared for TotC.  Millea is geared for 10 man and Tatia is geared for 25 man.  We are running 10 man regular.  I am perfectly fine for what we are raiding.  When we decide we want to move further along, I will get the appropriate gear then.  I don’t need to be fully geared out in 245 ilvl gear on every toon to be happy.  Is that not putting the optimal amount of dps or hps out there?  Probably, but then that is why I am not in a hardcore raiding guild.  We take raiding seriously, but we aren’t going to tell you to spec a certain way or squeeze out every last drop of dps that you can by turning yourself into a machine.  I can hold my own when I dps.  I might not always be #1, but I am usually up in the top 3.  When I heal, we usually stay alive.  Although I don’t know if that is because of the other healers in the group or if we just all work so well together that we have less deaths.  Couldn’t tell you.

I got into it a bit yesterday with Dark/Soth over at Clearcasting and I agree with some of his points but I also think that his mentality is what a lot of people have now.  Since so much better gear is now available sooner, everyone should be maxing out on their dps and there should be no such thing as a learning curve.  I call bullshit right there.  The VAST majority of the people playing don’t hit 80 with an entire set of epics waiting for them complete with a rotation that they have down pat.  I know not everyone does the regular dungeons before they hit the heroics, even though they should.  Most people are content to have their guildies carry them through Naxx to get them geared out to do chain heroics.  I don’t want to be “that guy” so I went the PuG route.  I did the regular dungeons until I got better gear then I started on heroics.  I am following the natural chain of progression.  Since I am doing that, I WONT BE DOING 2K DPS RIGHT OUT THE DOOR.  I am sorry but it just doesn’t work that way.  As I do instances more and get a piece of gear here and there, my dps slowly climbs.  Hell I managed to pull off 2k dps overall in Heroic VH with my guild.  I did around 1700 on each boss.  I was ecstatic.  Then we went to the next instance and I was fail dps all over again.  It happens.

I only hit 80 on my mage on Sunday early evening.  While I have been doing a bunch of heroics, I haven’t been sitting there doing nothing but.  I don’t have a ton of badges.  On Monday I got my first piece of badge gear, an ilvl 200 off-hand that has hit on it.  I had 29 badges and I was able to get that with 25.  I went and got the rep weapon from Kirin Tor and I was finally able to lose my heirloom staff.  I was EXCITED when I did this.  I was so happy to get those two items you would have thought that I had gotten a legendary weapon.  I ran heroic VH on Monday night.  I walked away with three upgrades.  I swear I was floating I was so thrilled.  Yesterday I found I had 31 badges, so what did I do?  I went and got myself tier 9 shoulders.  Why did I do that?  Well having already leveled a clothie I know that shoulder upgrades are for shit until you raid.  The best shoulders I had on my warlock were the ones that drop in heroic CoS.  I had those shoulders for almost a whole year.  When we did raid Naxx and I got to go on my warlock, the T7 shoulders never dropped for me.  I had to wait until I could save up 30 triumph badges when I could only get 2 a day in order to upgrade my shoulders.  Even then it took forever because my guild needed me to heal, so Millea got benched.  My getting those shoulders was a big deal.  I am not quite ready to see if I want to get this tier set or that tier bonus, I just wanted to get the biggest gear hurdle knocked down.  I am not sure I explained that to Dily correctly.

One of the cool things from last night was I got randomly put into a PuG group with Trixy, Heleva’s tank.  She had been telling us in vent and gchat how she had made this macro for when she tanks PuGs.  The next thing I knew I was in a heroic AN and her macro was being posted in party chat.  We laughed in vent that we got put into the same group and she told me that I now had blog fodder.  Yeah I kind of do ^_^

That run was a piece of work >.>

The highest geared toon was the DK dpser.  Then Trixy, then me (fail right there if that tells you anything) the pally healer and then the rogue.  The rogue was still in mostly greens and some quest blues.  Considering that, he actually didn’t do too badly on his dps.  I don’t know if the pally was just new to healing, if his gear was the reason, or something else, but he had a hell of a time keeping us all healed.  He was really bad about keeping the poisons off us.  Especially that leeching poison the 2nd boss does that heals her.  I died on the first pulls in the room with the first boss, then he wasn’t making any move to rez me.  I died trying to save him and he couldn’t be arsed to rez me.  It took Trixy running over to try to rez me with the army knife before the pally figured out I was dead. >.> *sigh*  I actually won Essence of Gossamer which I thought was hilarious.  So many tanks ran that instance over and over again to get that trinket, and here I am on my mage and I win it.  I laughed a lot.

We ended up doing heroic Nexus next and when Trixy popped up her macro the healer started laughing.  Said they couldn’t kick her because they had to wait 5 mins.  They were a pretty cool group of people, who might not have been had she not posted that.  There was a moment of “oh shit” when the hunter targeted the rift and pulled the whole group.  He was all “When the hell did that change!?”  Trixy replied “2 patches ago.”  Yeah I laughed again.  I think I was the only death, as per usual.  Totally wasn’t my fault though.  We were on the 4th boss and just as I started to move away from the spikes, he rooted me into place and I died instantly.  *sigh* fail mage.  Trixy was all “why didn’t you blink or ice block?”  Well it happened too quickly for me to react, and I just didn’t think to use those abilities at that time.  When the spikes come, you move.  I think I need to move my “oh shit” buttons around.  I did manage to get the achievement off the final boss though.  That was awesome.  I’ve only ever gotten it on my druid because she can shapeshift to get out of the ice.  I love being a human .

I’d like to think that once I get used to doing instances on my mage that I will stop being such a fail dpser.  I noticed that over the course of the evening I got progressively better.  Dily and I were talking about that and he wanted to know if I thought it was the upgrades or if I just fixed my rotation.  I honestly think it was me getting better with my rotation.  Considering I normally play an affliction warlock, you would think I wouldn’t have a problem with keeping my mage DoTs up, but apparently I do.  I am REALLY bad about making sure living bomb is always up.  I am bad about clipping fireball when I get a hot streak and scorch falls off before I realize it.  I know there are add-ons I can get that will help me keep everything in line, but frankly I don’t want to rely on an add-on to tell me how to play.  It will take practice, and I need to do it.  I haven’t had an opportunity to hit up a training dummy as of yet, but I will soon.  I like to use the ones in Darn.  No one is ever there.  I am not sure where the ones in the Exodar are, but that place just confuses me so I avoid it when I can.  All the bright lights from the crystals make it difficult for me to see stuff.

Hopefully soon I won’t be as much as a fail mage as I am now.  Keep your fingers crossed. ^_^