Screenshot Friday

Sorry this is so late.

Enjoy!

Good thing I had a parachute . . .

Bacon is win

No the post has absolutely nothing to do with Bacon.  I just like stating the obvious.

The re-vamped Shadow Rising has been tackling ICC 10.  A lot of our core raiders have taken a break and as a result we have several new raiders and raiders that have been gone for a while.  Several of these raiders have either never raided, never seen ICC or haven’t seen it in a long time.

This is now the 3rd week of raiding.

The first week only had 2 new people in the run.  We managed to 1 shot everything up to the Frost wing.  We didn’t go into there because we had people who had to leave, so we called it for the night.

Last week was a bit more rough.

Del’s brother Zincarla had never raided ICC.  The night we took down the Lich King was his first time in ICC.  In fact his LK kill was his first ICC achievement.  So the joke is we take new raiders and make them main tank the LK on their first time in ICC.  All things considered, he works at learning the fights and gets better with every attempt.

Last week he was tanking with Arv.  Now Arv is an amazing tank and is geared to the teeth.  It was easy to give Zin the “easier” tanking jobs while Arv was there.  Even then there is a learning curve for new tanks.

We also had some “new” dps.

We have a new guildie named Lion.  Great guy.  He follows directions and genuinely is working hard to be better.  He is a RL friend of our awesome boomkin Moogik.  His Ret Paly is his first 80.  He has never raided, and is still very new to the game.  Even despite that, he has already learned how to do his research.  We have been bringing him on every 10 man raid to get him the experience.  Each raid he does better.  He is also a really nice guy.  I can’t wait for him to get more comfortable with us and start joining in on the bantering.

We also have a rogue that has been in the guild for a long time.  He is still in high school so his play time is very limited.  He does a really good job with his dps, so that isn’t any kind of issue.  He just isn’t that familiar with the fights.  He has been to raids in the past, but still needs refreshers on what to do.  The best thing is you only have to ask him to do something once, (if that) and he does it.  For example on PP, he does a great job of vanishing during the transitions and can be seen whaling away on the professor.  Good little rogue.  He does tend to ask questions about his spec and rotations during raids, but I tend to chock that up to him being a kid.  I think Zug has been working with him on stuff so I have no question that he will just get even better than he already is.

Last week, as I mentioned above, was rough.  We were trying to work on achievements and failing.  It wasn’t that we had bad players, because we didn’t.  We just had new players.  People that are still getting geared up were with us.  The officers got together afterwards and just decided that it would be for the best that we just focus on gearing up the newer players and getting them familiar with the fights while trying to get everyone a Kingslayer title.  We would do mount runs once we got people more familiar.

Last night was a bit better.  There were rough spots again, but again it goes back to the learning curve.  Dozzer came back (his work had kept him from raiding for these last months) and he had to shake the rust off.  He tanked with Zin.  This put Zin in new tanking jobs.  Translation – He got to kite the slime on Rotface AND drive the abomb on PP.  Despite the hiccups, we still got the double slime weekly completed and took down PP on the 2nd try.  We couldn’t get him down last week.  I blame Slice and Sorak for that. ^_^

Instead of going to the blood wing after the plague wing we decided to head over to the frost wing to expose the new players to some more fights they hadn’t seen.

We also wanted to make Zari heal VDW 😀

There were a LOT of problems with VDW.  I think close to half the raid either hadn’t seen the fight, or had been there as a different class.  Plus Zug kept trying to get the portal jockey achievement.  This meant he wasn’t outside slaughtering everything.  We did get her “saved” even though it was very sloppy.  I was dead so I really don’t know the full extent of how we managed to pull it off.  But it was onward to Sindragosa!

Have I mentioned how I hate her yet?

I am sure I have.

Actually I was VERY happy with how our attempts went on her.  Doz DCd after we took down Rimefang so we called a 10 min break and had the people not familiar with the fight go watch the video really quick.  When it was obvious Doz wasn’t coming back online (his HD died on him) Slice switched from holy to prot and we gave it a few shots to give people an idea of how the fight worked.

I was so proud that we didn’t chain ice tombs.  Let me repeat that.

Brand new people to the fight DID NOT CHAIN ICE TOMBS.

They also didn’t die to the ice blasts AND killed the tombs at the right time.

Even though I was in a tomb 3/4 times, I was cheering them on. 😀

After the disaster that was VDW it was very refreshing to end the raid on such a positive note.  No we didn’t take her down, but I have no qualms that we will get her down fairly easily.

Now I do need to mention something.

Monday night (or rather Tuesday morning) I only got 3 hours of sleep.  The lunch I had was gross which resulted in me not having lunch.  When I got home I got online right away (I was raid leading, I had to) and thus didn’t have time to have dinner.

This resulted in a VERY cranky and VERY short tempered me.

On top of that I was raiding as Demo for the first time.  I was not comfortable with the rotation which meant I kept messing up.  This did not help with my irritation.

So partway through the beginning of the raid I stepped down as RL and Slice took over.

I want to just say I am sorry to the guildies who were in the raid with me.  I’m not nice when I haven’t eaten.  I hope I wasn’t too mean to anyone.

Except Doz, man fuck that dude.*

😉

It got a little better once I got something to eat (honey nut chex FTW) during our break after lower spire, but I was still grumpy.

My reflections on Demo raiding are still not solidified.  I think once I get used to the rotation I will like it.  I will say that it is a HELL of a lot easier than Aff.  I also do a lot more damage/dps.  That part makes me really sad.  I don’t even have the rotation down correct (I keep forgetting to pop meta) and yet I am out performing my Aff spec where I have the rotation down.

The highlight for me was killing all the whelps in Sindy’s room.  I popped Meta, Immolation Aura and spammed SoC.  I peaked at 34,000 dps.

Yes, 34,000 dps.

I gave Zug a run for his money.

I know it was trash and it doesn’t count, but damn that was just fucking cool.

I also got a 31k soul fire crit on PP.

My best shadow bolt crit as Aff was like 19k.

I crit for around 20-25k on my shadow bolts as Demo.

Yeah, like I said, depressing.

It got better though.

After several Holiday boss runs Slice and I started helping Lion with his gear a bit.  He won the sword off Marrowgar and needed an enchant on it.  While helping him with that, Slice and I found out he needed some more TLC.

We hooked him up.

He is now fully enchanted out and had several gems replaced.  I went and got him the Valor bracers (he was using holy bracers).  He started out well over hit cap and below expertise cap.  He ended the night just slightly over each.  I think he is really going to start to notice a difference in his dps.  I pointed him towards a few Ret pallys in our guild and Slice has been working with him on his glyphs and rotations.  As I told him before I passed out.  He follows instruction and does a great job, the dps will come later with gear.

I might have also mentioned that helping him get decked out was like playing dress up with a doll.

But hey it worked out right?

Right?

*I just want to point out that I love Doz and am very happy he is back raiding with us.  We both like to give shit to the other so I have to give him shit when I can.

Screenshot Friday

That is quite a long ways down

And so it came to pass . . .

That I will be getting a non-affliction off spec.

YES I KNOW!

Trust me I have been depressed ever since it was decided.

Now begins the research.

I almost didn’t even know where to start.  Yes I know EJ is the *place* to go for information on raiding specs.  Trust me I know all about it.  The problem is I can’t stand EJ.  The posts are FILLED with their math proofs.  While I like math and enjoy it, I don’t even come close to liking it enough to be able to read those posts without wanting to gouge my eyes out.  So I avoided going there immediately.

The other problem I have with EJ is it is tough to find the basics.  For example, if you just want to know what the standard rotation is, you would have to wade through pages upon pages of math and top tier gear choices to maybe find the rotation you are supposed to use.

I already know where to get the specs (there are awesome raiders in Slice’s guild that have a demo raiding spec I can check out), I just needed the rotation.

Several months back (before I left SR) I had been told to start looking into a demo spec for the fights that needed more burst.  I went to twitter and asked there.  I got a TON of info and I was so very grateful for it.  I didn’t copy and paste it all into an email or anything because you can always go back and get your old tweets.

Unless you know, Twitter decides to crap out on you.

Twitter no longer shows when people have replied to me.  In fact I have exactly 5 replies on twitter.  3 of which are from September of last year, and the other 2 are from July of this year.  All 5 of them are completely worthless.

All of the lovely Demo lock info that I was given is now gone.  Because I had already asked once, I didn’t want to even go there and ask again.  Mostly because twitter doesn’t show any replies to me.  This means even if people gave me the information a second time, I wouldn’t be able to see it.

Fucking Twitter.

So yesterday when my boss left I started searching.

I started over at Killing Em Slowly because I know Ful has given me great advice in the past and he has put up a sidebar with the basic info on all the different specs.  I checked out his demo post.  While it was awesome (as per usual with his posts) it wasn’t what I needed.  He says that he doesn’t raid Demo.  He just uses it for BGs and 5 mans.

Ok, so no good, need to find something else.

I decided to brave EJ.

I know, I know >.>

So after about 20 mins of searching I finally found the *new* thread.  Where I got a ton of info that wasn’t fully bogged down with math.  Here is the link just on the off chance that someone else facing my situation wants to see where I got my info from.  The guy who wrote this post did an excellent job.  Mad props to him!

EJ says this about what spec to use:

META / RUIN
Spec: 00/56/15
Utility: Target 5% crit debuff, Raid spell power Buff
Other: 30 yards range, No spell pushback reduction, No threat reduction
This is the most common and best performing Demonology talent spec. It provides more utility than any of the other Warlock specs any higher DPS than any of the other demonology specs. In addition, the spell power buff provided by this talentspec is far more powerful then any of the alternatives. Through seed of corruption and sometimes immolation aura, this spec also does more AoE DPS than either affliction or destruction. This thread and it’s data is primarily focused on this talent spec, it produces significantly higher DPS than the others and is the only truly valid talent spec in end-game raiding.

This is what he says about glyphs:

Miscellaneous: Glyphs
In this section I will list the DPS value of each glyph for each talent spec. The 3 best glyphs will be highlighted. Simulationcraft was used to determine these numbers, high end ICC Heroic gear was used as a base.

	00/56/15	00/41/30	00/40/31
Conflagrate	0	0	844
Corruption	47	24	15
Felguard	302	237	0
Immolate	93	81	186
Imp	0	0	211
Incinerate	59	227	195
Life Tap *	333	127	133
Metamorphosis	65	0	0
Quick Decay	159	171	142
Shadow Bolt	27	0	0

Note on Glyph of Life Tap: The value of this glyph greatly depends on the amount of spirit on your gear, all specs scale slightly better (regardless of glyphs) with crit than spirit, however due to demonic pact; the meta/ruin profile prioritizes spirit as the raid DPS gain is far more significant than the personal DPS lost (Roughly 10 times more significant). If you do have very high spirit, then glyph of life tap may be viable for the other talent specs as well.

So ok those are the basics down.  Easy enough.  Now to find the rotation . . .

Meta Ruin, 00/56/15

Life Tap	If the Glyph of Life Tap buff is not active
Shadow Bolt	If the target is not currently afflicted by the Shadow Mastery debuff
Immolate	If your target does not have immolate active or the duration of your immolate on the target is shorter than the cast time of immolate.
Curse of Doom	If this spell is off cooldown and your target will not die within the next 60 seconds
Soul Fire	If Decimation and Molten core are both active.
Corruption	If this debuff is not currently active on your target
Soul Fire	If Decimation is active
Incinerate	If Molten Core is active
Life Tap	If your mana is low or the time remaining on your glyph of Life Tap buff is low.
Shadow Bolt	If none of the above

 

Extra tips:

Cooldowns

1. Demonic Empowerment, Use it on cooldown, do not wait for your Felguard’s demonic frenzy to stack or such.
2. Metamorphosis, Use this ability as frequently as possible, thus if you can use it 3 times in a particular fight- use it 3 times in that fight. So long as you’re using it as many times as you can, it can be helpful to synchronize this with other events; for example if there’s about 2 minutes left in a fight and your target is currently at 40%, then wait for your target to drop to 35% before using metamorphosis. Using Metamorphosis well requires good knowledge of an encounter, if you do not have that simply use it on cooldown.
3. Immolation Aura, You can use this ability once per Metamorphosis, it can be worth while to try fish for procs to go along with this high damage ability- for example you could try wait until the 4pc Tier 10 bonus procs for 10% more damage, or you could wait a few seconds until adds spawn- so long as you use immolation aura before there’s less time remaining on metamorphosis than the duration of immolation aura you’re not missing out on any damage. Note that if Metamorphosis runs out while immolation aura is still active, immolation aura will also cancel itself.
4. Trinkets, If you have use trinkets, it’s generally a good idea to use them on cooldown. You may however want to consider synchronizing your trinkets with metamorphosis for 20% extra damage while you use your trinket.
5. Potion, Since you can only use 1 potion during combat (and 1 pre-potion before combat starts), you should try use your potion during either heroism/bloodlust or if you pre-potted and your guild uses early heroism/bloodlust, use your in-combat potion during metamorphosis+decimation

 

Ok so yeah, lots and lots of stuff to absorb.

One thing that I am happy about is I really won’t have to change my gear all that much.  I do lose out on the 3% hit that affliction gets so I need to get a bunch more hit.  I managed to snag some bracers on Tuesday that have haste and hit on them verses the crit ones I have equipped.  I lose a bunch of spellpower by switching them out so I haven’t changed over.  I need to go through my options and see what I can do about getting me some more hit.  I do have the hit trinket, but it might just be smarter to re-gem.

Here is my armory link if anyone wants to check her out and give me some ideas.

Looks like I wont be rocking out to Dragon Age this weekend 😦

PS – I totally flaked out on my 1 year blog anniversary.  My first post was 09/14/09.  Wow I fail.  Oh well , happy anniversary to me! 😀

Screenshot Friday

Just another beautiful spot I found in my travels

Thursday Three Things

Since Del is out of town this week I decided to post this in his stead.

No he didn’t ask me to, I just decided I would 😀

1.  My father is a member of MENSA, I however am not.  Although I was put through a ton of “gifted student” testing as a kid.  I think I even took the SATs when I was like 7 or 8.  I don’t remember exactly what it was and I never remember to ask my mom.  I should probably look into joining MENSA though.

2.  I love romance novels that don’t have a lot of sex in them.  I actually enjoy the romantic story more than the descriptions of sex.  However I do enjoy hentai immensely.  So I guess it balances out.

3.  Since I deleted all of my facebook apps I no longer have a reason to log in, yet I compulsively check it every hour.  WTB friends who post more on there.

I’m not dead yet

I have just been leveling alts and playing Dragon Age.  I warned Slice that if he got me Dragon Age for my birthday that I would be addicted and would only want to play that.

For that very reason I had put off actually installing it on my computer.

Until this last weekend >.>

I had a three day weekend and I knew that Slice would be busy with homework so I knew I would have to entertain myself.  Lo and behold Dragon Age was sitting there waiting for me.

Thus began the weekend where I snapped at anyone and anything that interrupted my play time.

I even changed my gchat status to “Playing Dragon Age.  Interrupt me at your own peril.”

This of course didn’t stop Sorak from pinging me all weekend, or Slice calling me and texting me. /sigh men.

I am not sure if I have fully gotten through the beginnings of my game addiction or what.  I was able to not play it all night yesterday, so maybe the first thrall is done.

The reason I didn’t get to play all night last night was because the world events to take back the Echo Isles started.  After a pretty horrid day at work, I logged in and Slice and I did the event.  It was pretty cool.  Other than the first few quests (which if you are in a party only one person needs to do) you could basically sit back and just follow the giant group of people participating.  It was a nice little thing to help me calm down.

I guess I should back up a bit.

As several of my readers are aware, massive drama erupted in SR.  It resulted in several people leaving, myself included.  Well recently the source of the drama left SR and Sorak was left holding the bag.  Sorak & Zug were the original GMs of Shadow Rising.  The original group of people were good friends who happened to be awesome players.  Sorak decided he wanted to bring that back, but on a smaller scale.  As a result everyone who left because of the drama has since returned.  Well except for Slice’s priest.  He is sticking with his new guild and I think it is great.

The new goal of Shadow Rising is to be a small tight guild.  There are only about 10-15 raiders.  We will only be doing 10 man raids (wont need to worry about 25 mans ever again!).  Right now Sorak wants to work on getting everyone their ICC drakes.  Since this is the group that took down the LK I am fully confident we will be able to do it.  We did it once, we can totally do it again.

As a guild.

As friends.

Because frankly that is ultimately all that is important.

Oh and having Journey music playing, we mustn’t forget that!

😉

Anyway, back to last night.

So Slice and I were online (and back in SR, both of us are officers now) and doing the world event.  Suddenly in O chat Zug starts talking about doing an ICC run since we have 9 people online.  Sorak had to leave in like an hour but Moog was going to be online around that time.  Well what do we do until then?

Let’s go do the weekly guys!

It seriously felt like old times.  We grabbed all of the guildies online (except 1) and snagged a friend and former guildie to fit the 10th spot and we went to Ulduar to take down Razorscale.  We were joking and flailing about.  In fact Zug died in the first 10 seconds of the Razorscale fight.

I was home.

Afterwards we decided to go to ICC and clear trash with 9 people until Moog could come online.  Sorak left it up to Zug and me to lead the raid.  I asked Zug what he wanted to do and he told me to just lead the raid.

Well lookie here, I am raid leading again ^_^

What actually ended up happening was Slice and I led the raid.  I think it went over well with the two of us.  We tend to work well with each other.  LOL I would hope that we would.

I don’t think I really yelled at anyone the entire night.  AND I was healing too!

That has to be some kind of record.

We had a guildie that was a brand new 80 that had never raided.  So we got to take him through and show him ICC.  We only did heroic lootship (we had alts that weren’t as geared and some of us (me!) haven’t done heroics yet so I wasn’t comfortable healing them) but we two healed everything except for the blood wing trash and BP.  We one shot everything up to BQL in about 2 hours I think.  Maybe less.  We had to call it a bit early because we were losing some raiders, but it was a good stopping point.

By the time the night was over I was actually laughing and having fun.  I want to thank my guildies again for cheering me up.  I ❤ you guys and I am glad to be back home.

I totally went and played Dragon Age once the raid was over.  I HAD to get some time in for the day 😉

Screenshot Friday