Achievements of the past week December 28, 2008

Well, it was about 01:30 Christmas morning that one of my guild members managed to coerce me into joining one of those oftentimes epic fail raids for the For the Alliance! achievement. It was almost 02:00, and I was thinking about a thousand things that I would rather be doing, such as sleep. The selling point for me?

Guildmate: Pookies! There’s a guy in here with an Australian accent!
Pookies: INVITE ME NOW.

The group had just finished wiping to Thrall (their first attempt on a leader), at which point about a quarter of the raid had left.

Now, let me be frank. I have no idea how any 40-man raid can wipe to a city leader at level 80. Back in the day, people had to jump through firey hoops into order to take out the likes of Bloodhoof (one strategy involved tagging and then passing members between the two or three full raids of players it took to kill him). Nowadays we have the numbers to plow through the bosses using brute force.

After I joined the raid, we regrouped, went back in, and Thrall was toast. And then so was Bloodhoof (after much debate as to whether Cairne is a male or a female). We headed to Undercity, and even Sylvanas didn’t prove to be much of a problem with her constant teleporting. Of course, Silvermoon City was a ghost town and we didn’t meet any resistance there, and especially not from that pansy Theron.

Just shy of 04:00, I was back in Dalaran and riding my shiny new Black War Bear.

But here is the kicker: learning Black War Bear actually put me at 50 mounts, so I finished Leading the Cavalry at the same time!

Worth staying up until 04:00? Hell yeah. The Australian accent was just icing on the cake. And it was hot.

(The rest of this post is not WoW-related.)

In other achievements, my brother and sister and I finally unlocked Rock Band 2’s Endless Setlist 2 yesterday. The Endless Setlists are setlists which include every song in their respective versions of Rock Band. Completing the setlists on any given difficulty gives you cool instrument icons depending on what instrument and difficulty (as a group) you played the setlist on: medium awards silver, hard awards gold, and expert awards platinum. These icons make your e-peen grow by three sizes: they are visible to people you play with online.

We knew we didn’t have a chance playing guitar, bass, and drums on expert for every song (especially drums…), so we decided to go for hard difficulty.

It was all smooth sailing until the last ten songs or so when we hit some speed bumps. During Vision by Abnormality, song 82 out of 84, we failed. We weren’t prepared for it at all (we had never played it before). And, even on hard, it’s a bitch. The first time we failed it, we were distraught. We had already been playing for seven hours (with a couple of breaks). Then we realized we could retry the song without starting at the beginning of the setlist. We did. And we failed again. Eventually we managed to beat the song by switching roles and getting my sister’s fiancé to take over the foot pedal on the drums. This trivialized the drum part, and I was already getting the hand of the guitar/base parts so whoever was playing the strings part I didn’t take (I ended up taking bass so I could complete more energy phrases) just had to die less than three times.

After beating Visions, it took us a couple of tries to beat the next song (also a new one). Song 84 was Judas Priest’s Painkiller, which we knew we could beat.

And that was it. After eight hours of playing Rock Band 2 (my third day straight of playing, by the way), we had our gold icons. Our first order of business after that? Well, we went online and showed off our new bling, of course. Solo singers are generally in short supply, but we found one who, to our delight, commented on our gold icons.

And now for something completely different December 20, 2008

Coming at you from the Flying Circus (Dalaran): the new and improved WotLK Pookies!

We’re gemmin’ … again December 19, 2008

So, what do we think about gemming in WotLK? Well, I’ll tell you what I think about gemming in WotLK: I’m gemming exactly the same way I did in TBC.

Once again, our most important stat seems to be spellpower. Regen is important, but, again, unless we do something really funny with our itemization, the spirit on our gear really does afford us ample regen for most fights. Yes, we sometimes have to practice mana management more than we had to in TBC, but between ret paladins, Mana Spring Totems, Innervate, and Runic Mana Potions, mana should not be posing any problems for your average druid.

So I have been gemming straight spellpower. What else is there to gem for? Spirit? Well, let’s talk about that.

Pre-WotLK, the benefit of spirit’s contribution to ToL aura could not be quantified without making a plethora of assumptions regarding your raid healer team composition, what spells they used, and at what frequencies they used them. Regardless, some saw this buff to the main tank to be more valuable than the personal output of the druid. These people justified (although not so much by using math) the stacking of spirit over spellpower. Fine. I’ll (begrudgingly) give them that.

But when we remove the effect of spirit on ToL Aura, we are just left with some regen and a small spellpower bonus. The contribution of our total spirit to spellpower while in ToL Form is, simply put, awesome. So spending item value on spirit is a great idea. However, unless you are suffering from a lack of regen, you really should gem (and enchant, for that matter) for raw spellpower over spirit for a maximum increase in output.

Makes sense, right?

But what about socket bonuses? Have you looked at your socket bonuses? I have yet to see a spellpower bonus on any of my gear, so I can’t tell you if those are worth getting (or if they even exist), but looking at the socket bonuses available on my current gear (haste or crit rating, a couple of mp5, a couple of spirit), I am not crying over not getting most of them.

I know what you’re thinking. “Most?” Yup. The WotLK version of the spellpower/reduced threat meta (Bracing Earthsiege Diamond) now requires two red gems and one blue gem to activate. That means you have one purple gem to stick somewhere in your gear, and you should try to get a socket bonus out of it since you have to use the gem anyway.

How about the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond? Well, for a class that doesn’t have regen problems to begin with, it would seem like regen overkill. I strongly discourage the use of this meta gem over the Bracing Earthsiege Diamond, but if you choose to use this meta do take note that the requirement to activate the bonus is one red gem and one yellow gem.

On the Raid Again December 17, 2008

I have been trying to write this post for a week. Yes, a week.

The situation is that EoTS has started raiding again, four nights a week. The situation is that we lost so many players in the last months of TBC that we are currently only running one 10-man group.

Naxx is down to a one-and-a-bit night clear. Last night we managed to clear all four wings in four hours. Tonight would be Saph and KT (I’m assuming). Hopefully soon we’ll be down to a full clear of Naxx in one night.

Malygos has proven to be our only challenge. We have spent nights getting phases one and two down, and now we are working on phase three. We typically have about three minutes left on the enrage timer, which I’m told is more than enough to actually down Maly. But we seem to have a lot of suck in the raid when it comes to DoT stacking, which can only be rectified with more practice. I hope that mofo goes down soon. 😦

Last night every token that dropped was a Vanq token. The only Vanq users we had in the raid were a DK and myself. By the end of the raid we were greed rolling tokens for off-spec sets. So Pookies is now 4/5 T7. But he’s still wearing crappy rare leveling rings and Boots of Divine Light (from Hyjal), so it kind of cancels out. /shrug

It also makes me sad that even with the 4-set bonus, Nourish probably pales in comparison to a Regrowth. I like Nourish.

WTB mace with spirit on it so I can replace my staff from h-Oc.