Screenshot Friday

Her diamonds on the ground

Filler title

I am slightly distracted today.  Slice is coming to visit on Saturday so I kind of been focusing on that.  It is safe to say that I am not running on full cylinders.

Hell I haven’t even been on top of myself while raiding.

Tuesday’s 25 man is a prime example.

The 20% buff went into effect on Tuesday.  This means that I should be rocking the dps.

I did 7-9k all night.

Even on Lady D, where I get to stand there and not switch to adds, I only did 8091.9 dps.

Needless to say, I was not happy.

I know I kept flubbing up my rotation all night.  Since the only thing that was remotely bothering me is Slice’s impending visit, I am going to blame him. ^_^

Oh don’t worry about that.  He adores me, I’ll get away with it. 😉

Besides, if he gets pissy, I have ways to take care of that.

Nothing that arm punching cannot fix ^.^b

😀

I haven’t raided since then and I am hoping that I will be able to pull off a much better showing on Tuesday.

Originally I should have been able to put up a nice long post today.  My boss is out of the office and all of his partners are too.  So I can do absolutely nothing at work and not get any flack.  Then I come in to write a post and I get distracted by Slice calling me. >.>

So yeah, no long rant about target switching and why you need to do it on the Saurfang fight.

I’ll save that for another day. ^_^

I still need to pick out a picture to post for tomorrow.  So as of right now I have no clue what it will be.  Looks like EVERYONE will be surprised 😀

My adventures in the world of stabby stab

I recently made an alt.

I made an alt in a class I absolutely despise.

I made a rogue!

Ok now I just feel dirty. >.>

In an effort to kind of get back at all the rogues who have made my life hell in PvP on all of my characters, I am taking it out on my toon.

She was only given 4 12 slot bags and 50g.  If she wants anything else, she will have to earn it.

Yeah I foresee a long time until max level with this toon.

I did manage to pull this off with Lyssi btw.  She leveled to 44 (before she server transferred) with just 12 slot bags and about 40G.

No heirlooms either.

I went with a Forsaken rogue.

I was thinking of a blood elf at first, but then I decided I wanted to be able to eat my enemies.  So I had to be undead.

She is rather cute ^_^

I have been keeping her hidden at this time.  Just to have a toon to escape to.  I have told a few people her name and I fully expect others to figure it out.  So while she is “hidden” she isn’t like other alts I have that I want no one to find.  (You know, like the male gnome warlock I have on an RPPvP server that cackles evilly every time he kills something or someone dies)

Slice has decided that I will never be able to level this character.  As Kate said, “That sounds like a challenge.”

Oh yeah baby.

I started her on Saturday night.  I dinged 11 on her Monday night before I went to bed.  I am hoping by keeping tabs on her through here I will actively level her.  Even if it just one night a week.

I am so used to playing a caster class that I haven’t quite mastered the ability to deal with groups of mobs on a melee class.

For example:

I was questing in the Mills in the Undead starting area.  You have to kill several named mobs and bring back their remains to a former employee back at the inn.  One of the people you have to kill is inside the first house you come up to.  In front of the house were 3 mobs AND the named mob I had to kill (she pats).  Two of the three mobs were casters and won’t move if I pull them with my thrown daggers.  If I get too close I just end up pulling all four mobs.  I didn’t die, but it was a damn near close thing.  Those suckers chase you for a long time.  If I was a caster, I would just burn down the caster from range and pick off the other guys.  I cannot do that as a level 9 rogue.

Suddenly I remembered:  I CAN FUCKING STEALTH!

Win!

I went into stealth and waited for the named mob to pat away.  Then I walked right past the three mobs at the door and pulled her over to where I could kill her without pulling other mobs.

TLDR: I have to change my mindset while playing.

The only other melee character that I have leveled for any period of time (my warrior, pally & other rogue don’t count cause I hardly played them) was my DK and all I did was smash the keyboard.  She actually stopped being fun once I figured out a rotation.  Funny how that works.

I have been talking to Andrew about what spec I should level as (he says combat, but then he is a combat rogue) and has been helping me with generally attempting to figure out how to fricken play.  Right now I pull with my thrown dagger, then spam sinister strike until I have like 2-3 combo points, then hit gouge, then stand there and stare at the mob until I have enough energy to hit eviscerate.  Whereupon the mob either dies or I get to spam sinister strike again.

So yeah I am most likely “doing it wrong” but I am having fun.

My favorite thing to do is to yell “STABBITY STAB” right before I kill shit.

I think I must turn this into a macro!

Look Ma! It’s a post!

I don’t know if it has been writer’s block or if I just haven’t felt the urge to write.  Whatever it is has impacted my blog updates.  At least I know I am not alone in not posting as much anymore.  The vast majority of my feed reader is empty.  Makes me sad.  Then I think about how I am not posting and how I might be making someone else sad.

Thus you get a post today!

Things have slowed down a lot in game for me.  I recently cut back on my raiding.  I used to raid 25s on Tuesday, 10 man ICC (hardcore group) with Lyssi on Wednesday, and 10 man ICC (regular group) on Tattia on Thursday.  Then on the weekends we would do ToC (usually 10 & 25), VoA, WG, hell even some OS and old world stuff.  Long story short, I was constantly busy doing some raid or another.  If I wasn’t raiding then I was running chain heroics on my druid with guildies.  Sort of paying back all the people who ran with me to get badges and gear on Lyssi.

I don’t know if I just got burned out or if I just got fed up.  Either way I flipped out and left in the middle of a raid (we were actually doing attempts on the LK).  Even when I was having a horrid time, hating every moment in the raid, I had never left in the middle of it.  In this particular instance I had no other option.  I could not physically play.  I decided that the best thing for me to do was to not run the 10 mans anymore.  The guild needed me for 25 mans (any warm body is needed it seems sometimes >.>) so I couldn’t bail on them for that.  The 10 mans though, there are plenty of dps and enough healers to where I didn’t feel guilty for not raiding.  Since they were quite successful without me, I didn’t feel like it was that big of a deal.

I found myself without a purpose when I wasn’t raiding.  There wasn’t really anything I had to do each night.  I would log in, do the fishing daily on Lyssi and the cooking daily on Tattia.  Maybe run a random on each of them if there was a guildie to run with.  Then just kind of camp books in Dal and chat with friends via whispers.  Guild chat seemed to have died, vent died, hell, most people just kind of stopped logging in.  Kind of made me wonder why I was even still logging in.

Last week changed things up a bit.  Again, I was not going to be raiding with the guild outside of Tuesday’s 25 man run.  My best friend Robert was coming into town on Friday and I had to clean my apartment.  Those that know me in RL know that I am a huge slob and my apartment is always a mess.  So I had a big mess to clean up since I was having company for the night.  Thursday rolls around and I was on the computer (not logged into WoW) checking out my FB stuff when I get a gchat ping from Tir saying that Arioch needed me for the 10 man that night.  That I could come dps and that it was a fresh run.  Would I please come online and join them.  Me being me, ever the procrastinator, I said sure and logged in to Lyssi.

The runs we had been doing in SR have slowly changed from a casual, yet serious, environment to “We vill keel dis boss dis vai and you vill du eet like dis” kind of thing to me.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  As it has been pointed out to me (over and over again mind you) specific encounters require a specific strategy to make them happen.  I am fine with that.  What I object to is the lack of fun in those situations.  Vent is usually silent.  No one talks AT ALL.  The tension is high and the moment something goes wrong the blame game starts.  Vs the way it was before where people spoke on vent to call out things during fights (on top of what the RL needed called out), for example, on VDW, the calling out of the different mobs so that people on opposite sides can switch as needed.  People used to joke in vent and in chat.  Our raids were always a blast and filled with raunchy jokes and oddball comments.  Suddenly the only thing you hear is strats over vent.  It made me dread logging in to raid.

I knew when I signed up to raid with SR I was joining a raiding guild.  I knew that it was not going to be like EoF and that I would have to step up my game.  What I didn’t expect was it to become more of a hardcore feel than it originally started out as.  I don’t know if that made sense or not.  When I joined, I viewed SR as a serious raiding guild.  Not a casual one, nor a hardcore one, but a serious one.  We weren’t pushing the progression envelope, but we weren’t still wiping on Marrowgar.  Suddenly we were pushing progression.  We stopped doing the weekly quest on Tuesday and instead focused on ICC 25.  A “hardcore” 10 man was formed that was going to extend the lockout until the LK was killed.  Raiding had always been “SRSZ BZNZ” before, but now it was big time serious business.  This is where I think I made the mistake in joining the hardcore team.

Shadow Rising has a ton of superior dps players.  These are the people who consistently shell out 8-14k dps on bosses.  Here I am on my little warlock putting out 6-7k.  I was ALWAYS the lowest dps in the hardcore team.  I know that there has to be someone who is the lowest, but it was always me.  Even the flex healers were putting out more than I was.  At the time I didn’t know what I was doing wrong or how to fix it.  It just kept building up until it came to a head in the middle of a LK fight and I left the raid.  I was about ready to quit playing for good at that point.

About 2 weeks or so ago I got in a 10 man ICC pug group.  I mentioned it on my blog.  I had recently fixed my spec and gear thanks to some help from Hex and his friend so I was eager to try it out and see what I could do.  For the first time since I had hit 80 on Lyssi I was topping the charts.  It is quite the ego booster to see that.  For once I was not in a raid with these people that could just pump out the dps like there is no tomorrow.  I know that it is a false sense of accomplishment, but it was enough to make me happy with myself.  I actually felt like I had brought something to the raid.  I didn’t ever feel that in the raids with SR.  I always felt like I was being dragged along and carried even though I knew I really wasn’t.  I think that there has to be some sort of sense of purpose given to raiders for them to fully feel a part of the team.  Up until that point I didn’t have it.

Fast forward to this last Thursday where I was asked to join the regular 10 man run.  I was unsure how my joining the raid would be taken.  I hadn’t felt any kind of animosity from other guildies.  In fact people were happy to see me there.  It was a very wonderful feeling.  There was a comfort in having Ari lead the raid too.  She hadn’t led a raid in several weeks so it was a pleasant change.  I also noticed that the people who usually were topping the charts with their uber dps were not in the raid, even on alts (except for Sorak).  Don’t get me wrong, the dpsers we had still rock the numbers (especially Kate) but it wasn’t going to be a repeat of the top 4 dps doing 10k and then me down at the bottom doing 5k.  Everyone was pretty evenly matched.

Want to know the best part of that raid?

It wasn’t my warlock topping the charts.

It wasn’t us one-shotting almost everything.

It was the dirty jokes, funny comments and relaxed atmosphere.

Vent had random music played in it.  Lorethos piped up with random zings.  I teased Slice and he got me back.  We made fun of Sorak getting wifed and then made sure that he knew the term was now called being “Sorak’d.”

We had fun.

We killed shit.  We got loot.

We had fun.

I hadn’t had that much fun raiding with SR in a long time.  It was refreshing.  I couldn’t wait to do it again.

I think most of the snags that had been holding up my return to raiding have been worked out.  I don’t know if I will ever join the hardcore team again though.  I don’t think I am cut out to do that.  While it will be a bummer to not be with the group pushing the envelope, I value having fun higher on the scale.

The best part of this for you?

I feel like writing again. 🙂

And the answer is . . .

On Friday I posted a picture and asked everyone to guess where it was.  Many people guessed, and no one even got close.

Now I was laughing hysterically the entire weekend.  Everyone automatically assumed that the picture was taken in a specific zone.  Several people even made comments that every zone had been guessed and I was still saying no they had it wrong.

Well that is because they did. ^_^

Kate dropped a big hint when she made a comment on Friday.  The fact that she knew was a huge hint.  Kate has been playing this game a very long time and knows how to get to all the cool and hidden places.

Especially to the places you aren’t supposed to be at.

This picture was taken in Quel’Thalas.   Or more accurately the ruins of Quel’Thalas.

It is not in a zone so no one would be able to guess the zone.

It was in fact there during Vanilla WoW, so it is not part of any of the expansions.

I have only ever seen the red line along the water there in those ruins.

This is the conversation I had with Kate:

12:41 PM me: i think you are the only one who will guess today’s screenshot
🙂
trixyheleva: I better go look. God I’ve been so lax on the blogosphere
12:42 PM me: dont tell if you know
im enjoying letting people go nuts all weekend
trixyheleva: That’s Quel’Thalas
me: LOL
trixyheleva: I know that pink sky anywhere
me: told you
trixyheleva: I swam you out to it =)
me: i know

notice the time. 😀

Anyway, this was just a quick post to fill you guys in.  I had a few people ping me on gchat complaining that I hadn’t answered where the picture was taken.  I am hoping for a chance to make a post this afternoon once the boss disappears.

Screenshot Friday

Can you guess where I am?

NINJA EDIT! – I will post where this is on Monday provided no one guesses before then.

Musings

For some reason I have been avoiding news about Cataclysm.  It isn’t that I am trying to remain spoiler free, I think it is just because I don’t really care at this point in time.  Yes I am excited about the new races, the new zones, flying in the old world, etc.   I also know that it is in the future and frankly I am enjoying what I am doing now.

Last night I was just kind of eh so I ended up not making a ToC 10 for Tattia’s weekly.  Instead I decided to just fish.  I had gotten lucky with gold coins and decided that I was going to fish for the duration of my glow worm.  I am now 4 coins away from getting my Titanium Seal of Dalaran.  I need 2 copper coins and 2 gold coins.  I managed to snag 4 of the missing 6 gold coins last night.  Now mind you I am doing this with a +20 fishing pole and a fishing skill of like 360 something.  I have this horrid feeling that I won’t be able to fish up the last 4 coins I need until my skill is higher.  I do want to get max level fishing though.  I have this goal of being able to fish up all the fish needed for fish feasts and making bank.  I needs a way of making money. 😀

I don’t have the intention of getting the fishing achievements, I just want that coin.  I want the worn troll dice too.  I need to figure out where they drop and how I go about getting them.  THEN rope friends into getting them for me :D. 

Tonight is ICC 25.  I am curious to see how Lyssi compares to my guildies who just destroy the meters.  Hopefully she will get enough badges tonight to get another piece of T10.  If I get lucky I can win the token.  Most likely not, considering my PR is crap.  When I last looked at it I was sitting at .99.  Oh well.

One day it will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine.

Moving on!

I am missing one book for the higher learning achievement on Tattia.  I got it on Lyssi the other day.  I need to get it on Tattia so I can stop sitting in Dal all the time when I am bored.  It is kind of funny.  When I needed multiple books I just did laps.  Now that I need one frickin book, I just sit there camping it.  Currently I need the book in the Dalaran Visitor’s Center.  I will get it too.

Stupid achievement.

I’ve been farming leather on Tattia and creating lower level greens to DE.  It has been working out well.  I have almost 12 stacks of dust in my bank and like 4 stacks of essence.  On Bloodhoof I had a ton of essence and hardly any dust.  Now I can’t seem to get essence to save my life.  Very odd.

One of these days I will need to straighten out Tattia’s boomkin gear.  I have so much stuff in my bank that I don’t need to be holding on to.  Spring cleaning of my bank!  Woot!!

I need to make a personal guild too.  I have my bank toon, but I don’t have her in her own guild.  I think I need to get her that.  Having a guild bank makes things so much easier.  I find that when I put my gold in the guild bank I don’t impulse buy.  Hmmmm something to do definitely.

Rambling for rambling’s sake.

My weekend in pugging

This weekend saw me pugging raids on Lyssianna.  I don’t normally pug because I raid with my guild.  I have since quit the progression team and am taking a break raiding on Tattia, so I only raided ICC 25 on Tattia.  Lyssi still had both her raid IDs free.

Thursday was Kate’s birthday and her and I had plans to do lunch and get our toes done on Saturday.  Andrew had a raid at 1 pm so we nabbed him and went to lunch a little early.  After we dropped him off Kate and I went off and got pedicures.

Purty!

Her and I spent most of the day out of the house so when I got home I was just not interested in finding a pug.  So Slice and I quested together in GH.  I want to get the deathchill cloak on Lyssi and I am going to get him his whether he wants it or not. 😀

Sunday rolls around and Slice and I were doing randoms when Tir announces that he had joined an ICC 25 and wanted to know if we wanted to join him.  We said yes and I got to DPS.  We had a shammy in the run who had the Kingslayer title so we were going to do heroic lootship.  It was looking like a ton of fun.

Previously I had Hex have his roommate check out my spec and gear and get me all straightened out.  I was slacking in the dps department.  He helped me with my gear and I went back to my original raiding spec.  I had changed my spec around to get a bigger range and to get curse of exhaustion for the flappity bitches in the LK fight.  Going back and looking at it I had gimped my dps by about 5%.

This was NOT a good thing.

He let me know that the 4 piece tier 10 was super awesome and that I needed to get it ASAP.  I had previously looked at it and kind of written it off as not that great for Affliction; looks like I was wrong.

I am currently dealing with a lack of hit situation so I am stuck with the hit trinket.  Until I can get my last 2 pieces of T10 I cannot switch the quill out for the nevermelting ice crystal.  According to Hex & his friend, I will then be “raping” the dps charts.

Interesting choice of words, but oh well.

So right now Lyssi’s gear is kind of in the awkward in-between phase with only 2 piece T10.  I did get the crafted pants though.  Hex donated 3 saronite for me to make them (I scored 5 on the AH for under 800g each) and Slice donated a saronite for me to buy the pattern.  Hex also farmed up some eternal shadows for me so I could make the ebonweave.  I had the frozen orbs needed, but hey farming was quick.  I think I only ended up using like 12 orbs instead of the original 20 I was going to have to use.  So it wasn’t a total waste of time.

This was how I was set up to go on Sunday’s ICC 25.

I rocked the charts.  Even with target switching and the raid leader not listening about having certain people stay on LDW, I still managed to be on top of the charts.

I don’t know what it was.  I almost felt like I was in a Zen-like state while dpsing.  Things were just flowing.  I wasn’t full of panic, I wasn’t worried about everyone around me.  I was just calmly going through my rotation.

It was amazing.

The pug sadly had several people who did not know how to do lootship.  Even on regular.  It was extremely frustrating and irritating.  They finally ended up doing it with 5 tanks.

Yes, 5 tanks.

On regular.

Even then the fucking tanks couldn’t hold threat.  I died several times because the stupid tanks could not hold threat.  Now I know that seed of corruption is a huge threat whore, but if a lesser geared tank can hold threat when I use it, these guys shouldn’t have an issue.  It was so horrible.  The good news from that run was I won the ring that drops off loot ship.  It wasn’t heroic, but it was still very very nice.

The raid broke up as soon as we completed Saurfang.  I didn’t win the roll on the token. 😦

The shammy who had the kingslayer title said he was going to form a 10 man ICC and asked me if I wanted to go.  Since Lyssi still needed it I said sure.  He cobbled together some people and I grabbed Soth on his pally and we started off.

We decided we were going to give MG a shot on heroic.

Bad Idea

Only two people had seen this fight on heroic.  For those that don’t know (I was in that party until Sunday) he does the bone spikes during the bonestorm.  Everyone, and this includes the tanks, has to dps down the spikes.  Those suckers have a metric crap ton of health.  In order to deal with the spikes during the bonestorm you have to stay bunched up.  Yeah well we didn’t manage this.  We were also 2 healing with a holy pally and disc priest.  The tree went kitty.

After we wiped we switched it back to regular and decided that we would just keep it at regular until we got to loot ship and just do that fight on heroic.

We quickly went back in, buffed up and took down MG and LDW.  I tried to get put only on LDW instead of having to switch to the adds, but the RL (the shammy) wouldn’t hear of it.  The tank whispered me and told me to just stay on her anyway.  I laughed, switched to the adds in the beginning then stayed on the boss.  Towards the end I switched to the adds because there was a fanatic up and the shammy wasn’t killing him.  I killed him and then helped pull her over to the next phase.

I think I was #2 on that fight.  I know I was #2 on MG.  The hunter in the group with us was just amazingly good.  I couldn’t beat him no matter what I did.  The other person I was fighting with for top spot was a DK.  He kept switching between blood and unholy so that was interesting.  He was nice enough to let me know so that I could switch my curse.

We managed to one shot everything up to BQL.  Yes, a pug one shot PP and BP.

*flex*

My recount showed that I did 8800 dps on Fester.  Soth’s showed that I was over 9k.  This was with getting puked on constantly too.

*flex*

We wiped on BQL the first time because the DK got the biting messed up.  He was supposed to bite me and instead bit the healer standing to my side.  Then when we had 4 people bitten (including the healer) they all got mind controlled because they didn’t bite anyone.  We actually ended up wiping at 6%.  The 2nd time around I got bitten (and lived! finally!) and was able to unleash hell on the boss.  I ended up doing almost 10k by my recount.  Soth did 12k on his pally.  He still was #2 after the hunter.

The raid was called after that fight because the OT had to go to his guild’s 25 man ICC.  All in all it was a good run.  I got the off hand off MG and Soth got the cape from heroic loot ship, a necklace and a trinket.  He made out like a loot ninja.  The really cool part was the tank who was still rocking the shield from CoS won the heroic shield from loot ship.  A HUGE upgrade for him.

The shammy was without a guild and said he would think about apping with SR.  The priest whispered me and asked about our raid times.  Him and his friend the holy pally said they were putting in apps.  So 3 possible recruits from one raid. 😀

Also!  Angerfork from the caption contest was chatting with me this weekend and decided to apply as well.  😀  He brought over his druid and lots of awesome pets for me!  YAY!!!  So I am looking forward to getting to play with him.

I frankly had a blast with the 10 man ICC.  The shammy said that he will most likely be making a pug group each week so I will see about running with him again.  I have him on my friend’s list.  It looks to be a lot of fun.

There was definitely a confidence booster in running that ICC 10 & 25.  Normally when I run with my guild there are so many people who do just amazing dps that I am the worst dps in 10 mans or like 7-10 in 25 mans.  I am not always doing bad dps myself, but I am way behind them.  For once I was on top and it was exhilarating.  I actually asked Tir if I had just gotten better or if the people we were playing with (on the 25 man run) were that bad.  His reply: I was kicking ass.

😀

This week will most likely be pretty quiet.  I am going to run my own ToC 10 tonight since I still need the weekly on Tattia.  Then I have ICC 25 on Tuesday with Lyssi.  After that I have nothing for the rest of the week.  Funny how your schedule clears up when you don’t raid. ^_^  Slice and I were going to go back to working on NR loremaster.  He is still raiding so it might not be very often.  Who knows, maybe I will get back on Zuleka and get her past her twenties.

We shall see.

Screenshot Friday

Beautiful sky

Oh yeah!

So I guess I should be posting a blog post here huh?  Yeah I am a total slacker.  Forgive me?

Last night was ICC 25.  I was ready to go on my lock.  One of the first people inside (as per usual) and had a portal down to summon the lazy.  We had just summoned in the last person when I find out that Tir is short healers.

FUCK.

Arioch had already switched to her priest and so I asked Tir if he needed my druid.

“Yes”

FUCK!

Ok, ok it isn’t the end of the world.  I know I am helping out everyone.  This is why I transferred my druid over right? *cries*

Healing commence!

The healers were all SR peeps.  Sorak, Ari, Tel, Slice and myself.  This of course meant that we were talking shit about everyone else.  Healer channel FTMFW.

Also, what the hell is up with DPS not having any fucking situational awareness?  When the shock vortexes occur in BP do me a favor and follow this step by step list:

1.  Look to see if there are people around you

2.  If there are people, move away 10 yards from them

3.  Once you are 10 yards away, STAND THE FUCK STILL

4.  Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT keep running.

5.  If there are no people around you, STAND THE FUCK STILL AND DPS

6.  Do not run into the healer’s bubble and force her to move away from the tank who is dying and needs heals.  This will cause her to be hit and pushed back.  This means that she is even FURTHER away from her healing target, who by the way, IS STILL FUCKING DYING!

Seriously, don’t make me hate you any more than I already do.

WTB SITUATIONAL AWARENESS FOR DPS PLAYERS PST!

Kthxbai!