Be Good

So, yes, I've been MIA lately, but never fear, nothing is wrong.

In fact, everything is going exceptionally right! You see, behind the scenes here, I'd applied to a handful of MA programs in Medieval Archaeology... in England. Well, wonder of wonders, they all offered me a place. So, the next order of business was spending a week or two intensively researching all the programs, seeing what kind of financial aid I can squeeze out of each one, etc., until I finally came to a decision.

Thus, this Fall, I will be attending the U. of Sheffield, in their MA in European Historical Archaeology! Hello, student loan debt, my old friend! And in the meantime, I've been planning and executing the innumerable, redundant steps of the willfully obfuscatory Visa application process, brushing up on my background reading, and teaching myself a couple languages (Damn it, Latin! Why can't you be more like English?).

Needless to say, I've been busy, and when I'm not busy, I'm a tightly-wound ball of anxiety. All of this is to say, I might hop onto WoW from time to time in the next few months, but I'm really not counting on raiding any time soon. After that, between school and an additional five timezones between myself and most of my guild, I'm afraid WoW will be chilling in the recesses of my hard drive. With any luck (bang on wood), a PhD studentship will come along by next year, so that's another 3+ years of madness.

But this is a happy time. This is what I've been working toward since... well, since I was a grade-school kid reading books about the myths and legends of ancient civilizations. So don't think of me as quitting WoW - I just won't be playing it for a long time.

Good News, Everyone!

It's inexplicable, really. We've been trying for weeks to take Rotface down, bringing him as low as 3%, but never quite making it before being overwhelmed. Then, last night, everything just clicked - slime pools were circumnavigated, oozes were kited expertly, and everyone got the hell out of the way when they exploded. Fully expecting to spend at least an hour on the fight, we proceeded to one-shot it. *shrug*

What this meant, of course, was that as soon as we headed over and killed Festergut (who is essentially on farm status now - though he refuses to acquiesce to my demands for footwear), we would be facing Putricide for the first time. It's an interesting fight, and frankly seems less fiddly than the ooze-wrangling of Rotface. There are, in fact, oozes to wrangle, but dealing with them is wholly reliant upon proper player movement and sufficient dps, rather than a somewhat unpredictable pathing A.I.

We made solid progress as we learned the fight, bringing the good Doctor down to ~50% on our last attempt. It will be interesting to see how we handle phase 3; on one hand, no more gas clouds or volatile oozes to deal with; on the other, the tanks and healers will have more to worry about...

In other news, I've made the switch to a Marksmanship spec - having acquired the two-piece T10 bonus, its inherent potential for abuse in conjunction with a properly-timed serpent sting and chimera shots made this a foregone conclusion, and my dps last night definitively bore the assumption out.

A Moment of Your Time

As you are probably aware, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Tuesday. Casualties are in the hundreds, at least; estimates reach into the thousands. Exacerbating difficulties in aid and rescue is the damage done to the nation's already weak infrastructure. I suggest making a donation to the humanitarian agency of your choice.



Edit, 1/15/10: Estimates are now placing casualties in the 100,000s. Disease is rapidly becoming a concern.

It Never Gets Any Easier

The guild's raiding has, indeed, progressed beyond Saurfang in the weeks following my last post. In the interim, one group - once - has managed to take down Festergut. Full stop.

It is somewhat analogous to an unholy amalgamation of Patchwerk and Loatheb, except the spores in this fight, rather than boosting your DPS, boost your immunity to the incoming massive raid damage. The DPS is up to you, and boy howdy, do you need a lot of it! Festergut has a five-minute enrage timer, and 9.4 million health in his 10-player iteration. That means, assuming two tanks and two healers, a minimum of 5k DPS from everyone else, or you lose.

Yeah, we lost.

That brings us to tonight's attempt at ToGC. We were feeling cocky - ok, I was feeling cocky - I mean, we've cleared ToC dozens of times, and now we've even got a few pieces of gear from the next tier of content! What could go wrong?

...let's just say they don't call him Gormok the Impaler for nothing. Those poor, poor tanks.

There Ain't No Sanity Clause

Last night, I made my long-delayed entrance into Icecrown Citadel, and lo, it was good. Well, pretty good.

Being that it was in the midst of the holiday weekend, this was something of an impromptu event, with only a handful of signups and the rest made up on the spot. There had been two full raids earlier in the week, which meant most of our raiders' mains were locked out, leaving about half the raid to be filled with slightly less well-geared alts. I'm fairly sure this was what determined the upper limit of our progress for the night.

In broad overview, we successfully moved through Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and the gunship event; we put in several very good attempts at Saurfang, but ultimately couldn't take him down. I found all of the encounters so far quite enjoyable. I don't believe any of them are difficult in terms of execution, but they do require everyone to pay attention, making for some engaging, interesting fights.

The Deathbringer Saurfang encounter is definitely a gatekeeper for the next segment of the raid. Last night our gear was well and truly checked, and found... wanting. The guild has taken him down in previous weeks, with our best-geared raiders, but that gear margin is clearly the difference between success and failure here. By our last attempt, we had what I feel is a sufficiently tight strategy: slowing the Blood Beasts with a frost trap while focusing fire on each, one at a time, kiting with everything we've got - Distracting Shot, Concussive Shot, Disengage - yes, hunters, rejoice, for this fight makes us specifically useful! The problem we ran into was the amount of time it took to kill each Beast; by the time the first was down, the second had made its way to a delicious healer. If there had been two hunters in the raid, I'm sure we could have kept them both occupied, but as it was, our DPS just wasn't sufficient. We ended the night on our best attempt, with Saurfang at 15%, and his mighty cleave dropping me to 0%, the bodies of my comrades strewn about the terrace.

Still, I'm happy with our effort, and looking forward to killing the bastard for many weeks to come.

If You Can't Beat 'Em

Since my gaming PC is out of commission, I've been reduced to hunkering down before the glow of my laptop, so raiding has been put on hold. However, after getting used to finessing the latency, I've found 5-mans are within its capacity, and have been exploring the wonderful world of cross-server PuGs.

My experience so far has been about what you'd expect; groups have ranged from casually-paced and chatty, to dead silent and chain-pulling like there was a prize for clearing the dungeon in under five minutes. Many have been perfectly competent, and while some groups have ultimately failed and fallen apart due to unfamiliarity with the new Icecrown dungeons, I have yet to encounter any true incompetence. Don't worry, I'm sure it'll show up sooner than later. I think I can give no better endorsement than to say that I'm going to be using this thing every day, whereas I never used to run with PuGs. ...all those extra badges may or may not have something to do with it >_>

The new dungeons themselves have been fun, with some interesting mechanics. Bronjahm is quite possibly the coolest, both tactically and musically, while the latter half of Halls of Reflection is suitably demanding for everyone, especially tanks, which reminds me...

I love new Misdirection! No more DoT ticks using up the effect before the trash actually reaches the tank! I did prefer the original animation, and I'm not sure why it was changed, but eh...

Ok, finally, the mammoth in the room: the new ammunition engineering schematics from the Ashen Verdict faction. The Iceblade Arrow schematic requires Gnomish engineering, while the Shatter Rounds requisite specialization is Goblin. There has been much head-scratching concerning the explanation for segregating ammo-crafting in this way. For one thing, among end-game ranged weapons, bows and crossbows significantly outnumber guns. This makes one specialization much more desirable than the other, both for hunters who happen to be engineers themselves, and in terms of market value for non-hunter engineers. Granted, as a dwarf hunter who strictly runs 10-man raids, the best weapon available to me happens to be a gun, and I'll be putting my Goblin engineering to good use. Still, I can understand the frustration of 25-man raiders and non-dwarves generally.

No... You Guys Go On Ahead...

[2.GuildChannel][AwesomeTank]: Hey, need 1 more DPS for a run through all three new heroics!

...time passes...

[ReallyGreatHealer] whispers: Would you like to join our hFoS group? :)

Eidtalheg sighs

So, why am I sitting here, writing a blog post, like some kind of shut-in Twilight fan? Why am I not laying down a whithering hail of artillery upon the minions of the Lich King?

It is because I sinned against the gods of Geekdom in purchasing, rather than building, my newest PC, which has been nothing but an unstable hulk of silicon and various conductive metals since the day it arrived. As we speak, it is in the shop, where even the most highly-skilled technicians are at a loss as to how so much suck could be concentrated into a single machine.

In other words, if Arthas is victorious, and the civilizations of Azeroth are reduced to shambling mockeries of their former glory, you'll have only Gateway Computers to blame.

Don't Worry, Li'l Buddy

I'm a vegetarian.

New Directions, Shameless Plugs

I haven't had much of interest to comment on lately, though I fully expect that to change once 3.3 goes live and the guild starts hitting Icecrown. We've been spending a lot of time gearing people up in Ulduar, and farming ToC and Onyxia.

As there is little in either raid in the way of upgrades for Eidtalheg, and to avoid burnout, I've been spending quite a bit of time running heroics on my Death Knight, whose Armory link I've added to the sidebar, and learning the intricacies of tanking. It's fun! With luck, I'll be bringing her to an Ulduar gear-up night soon.

I've made a few changes to the blogroll; a couple of much-loved bloggers have decided to move on to other things, and I wish them the best. I've also added a few DK-centric blogs I enjoy.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to a webcomic drawn and written by tabletop-gaming cheerleader, guild-leader emeritus, and rather nice guy, Shawn Gaston. It's set in the grim dystopian steampunk future of a fantasy world, and features a mix of action, intrigue, and humor. You go there now!

From Hell's Heart, I Stab at Thee!

Yes, at long last, I've gotten my very own Yogg kill. Even after clearing the next tier of raiding content, and knocking out a number of Ulduar hard-mode encounters, finally beating He Who Haunts Orthodontists' Nightmares was still a supremely satisfying experience.

The night began with our guild's first attempt at the Assembly of Iron's hardest mode, killing Steelbreaker last. After learning and mastering the frantic shield-tranqing and add-killing of medium-mode over the past couple of weeks, the general impression was that taking down Steelbreaker last is, well... pretty easy. Yes, he has a 100% chance of killing whoever tanks him, but realistically, with fair DPS, he will go down soon after the first tank explodes.


We then made our way through Mimiron (within seconds of a death-free victory) and a repeat of Hodir and Vezax hard modes, and moved on to the endgame. This fight really comes down to execution on the part of the brain-room team; as long as everyone on the surface can stay alive and sane, getting to phase three well before the enrage is entirely a matter of pounding on Yogg's brain, and after a couple of false starts last night's group performed admirably.

Upon seeing phase three for the first time, my first impression was, "gee, there are a lot of Immortal Guardians!" This was followed quickly by, "gee, there are a lot of dead raiders!" But, with fewer missed portals during phase two the next time, and better damage allocation between Guardians and Yogg himself, our victory was secured.

Does Anyone Else's Pumpkin Smell Like Tangerines?

...I licked mine...

We're Coming For You, Giant Constellation Man!

Last night's raid was a thing of beauty. Now that we'd got a handle on Yogg, it was agreed that there was no time like the present to begin pushing through the requisite hard-mode boss fights to unlock Algalon, as well as those needed for Glory of the Ulduar Raider along the way. So, with some trepidation as we were lacking a couple of key raid buffs, we undertook the initial task of retrieving the Archivum Data Disk from the Assembly of Iron. It took a few tries, but once we saw how Molgeim's adds behaved, we realized they could be AoE'd down before they had a chance to do much damage. Step one...

...complete!

Next up was Hodir. Since this hard-mode simply requires defeating the boss under a certain time limit, it is much like its normal counterpart - only moreso. Stacking all of the available buffs is non-optional. It is also necessary for the raid leader to know when to call for a wipe, to avoid accidentally killing Hodir after the timer has expired. Again, after a handful of tries...


...bam! We were rolling now.

Despite our newly-inflated confidence, we weren't quite intoxicated enough to push the Big Red Button, so after dispatching Mimiron the old-fashioned way, we decided to spend the last half hour of the raid on Vezax and the Saronite Animus. Without saronite puddles to stand in, mana efficiency becomes even more important for healers, which also means that not getting hit by life leech and shadow crash is even more important for the rest of the ranged. We gave it several attempts, the clock ticking ever closer to midnight, until, on what would have been our last attempt:


Victory!
/dance on a big dead lobster

So, yeah.

Gang of Miscreants Declare God is Dead!

When reached for comment, Friedrich Nietzsche said "told you so!"

Yes, after eight weeks, and at least as many hours, worth of attempts, The Pig and Whistle Society of Kirin Tor has defeated the Old God of Death!

...I was not present for this raid. FUCKING HEADACHES.

But nonetheless! I am profoundly proud of my guild. Where some might have jumped ship in frustration, we went back, week after week, until we got it right. And it never became a matter of banging our heads against a wall; every week saw marked progress. We went from wiping on phase 1, to wiping due to missing the brain-room timer, to making it well into phase 3, until finally... we just didn't wipe at all.

Now, on to hard modes!

You Are Going to DPS Very, Very Slowly...

Some might call me a masochist, but sometimes it feels like a victory just isn't worth claiming unless it's been preceded by hours of futile, mind-numbing failure.

That's what we encountered in Onyxia redux Tuesday night. We had enough interest to put together two 10-man raids, each led by someone who was at least familiar with the encounter at level 60. And, truth be told, our strategy seemed sound: phase 1, burn the dragon while standing well away from her huge ass; phase 2, group up around two tanks to AOE the whelps, dodge Taco Breath, and kill the Guards from range to avoid their Blast Nova; phase 3, burn the dragon while positioning ourselves so as to avoid being feared into the pits-of-many-whelps. E-Z.

Only, not. We spent three hours regularly dieing at the phase 2 -> 3 transition. From my perspective, it seemed that we were losing too many people to Blast Novas and Deep Breaths. This led to an overabundance of adds due to lack of DPS, or, when a healer or tank was the victim, well, we know what happens then. Eventually, we just had to give up.

The odd thing is, when we gave it another shot last night, with many of the same people from Tuesday and a basically identical strategy, we took her down in one try. The only difference I could detect was perhaps a marginal increase in DPS over night one, as the Guards seemed to be dispatched slightly more cleanly than before.

Anyway, after banging our heads against a wall all night, victory was that much more glorious once we found the door. Now, mount farming!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying

Ever since the Blizzcon '09 announcement that, in Cataclysm, "focus" will be replacing mana as the resource that Hunter abilities draw upon, there has been much speculation and commentary in the Hunter blogging community about what this will mean for our shot sequences, talent choices, and overall DPS. As with most changes that have ever been announced for this game, the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.

Now, I'm not about to say I'm totally confident that the developers will be able to implement this change in a balanced way right off the bat, but there are a few things I'm keeping in mind that have kept me firmly at "wait and see" on the RAINBOWOFOPTIMISM <--> SLAPINTHEFACEWHERE'SMYPONY spectrum.

First, the majority of complaints about the proposed system are based upon the assumption that the key abilities of each talent tree (i.e., Explosive Shot, Chimera, etc.) and their relative power levels will remain the same as they currently are, and we will be dependant upon the sub-optimal Steady Shot for focus regeneration. However, it has been stated that talent trees will be massively overhauled, as part of a trimming of passive-bonus talents. So, why should we assume that the primary abilities we have now will remain as such? And with five more levels and a tree-pruning, I can easily see room for re-scaling attack-power coefficients, to say nothing of the possibility of new abilities. Steady shot will likely remain a 1x or 2x filler shot, only now it will be recovering focus rather than killing time during cooldowns.

Now, admittedly, I generally welcome changes to the game; the opportunity to learn and optimize under a new set of conditions is one of the things that keeps the game interesting for me. At the same time, I can see that a change of this magnitude won't appeal to everyone; the same kind of playstyle preferences that lead players to choose Beast Mastery or Survival or Marksmanship will likely divide those who prefered being cooldown-constrained to being resource-constrained.

But I don't think focus is going to sound the death knell of the class.

Inching Ever Onward

Saturday night saw us take on (and one-shot!) the last boss in ToC10, Anub'arak. Like most of the Trial's encounters, this one incorporated some interesting mechanics, but was not a significant challenge. Ice bubbles were popped, adds were dragged onto frost patches, and the peasants rejoiced.

Immediately afterward, we decided to try Heroic mode, just to guage our prospects. It was established fairly quickly that we are probably slightly undergeared (being in mostly normal Uld10 gear), and will have to better coordinate healing assignments (e.g., more than a single healer paying attention to the tank).

After a couple shots at Heroic Northrend Beasts, we headed back to the Ulduar run we'd begun earlier in the week, with only Yogg left stand- er, floating. We spent quite some time working on the fight, and by the end of the night had mastered phase 1, and gotten well into phase 2. The group assigned to stay outside Yogg's head gradually got the hang of sticking together as we moved around the room to take down tentacles. I wasn't with the portal group, but there were apparently a few timing issues with people getting out before going insane. There are few things so terrifying as staring down an angry moonkin.

The tentative plan for this week is to utilize the raid lockout extension, and then lock ourselves in Yogg's room until he surrenders <_<

Mmm, Tastes Like Crow!

A real man can admit when he's been wrong.

...
...
*cough*

So, anyway, last week's ToC10 group hit a rather nasty snag with the Horde Faction Champions encounter, and it was beginning to look like this week would be a repeat failure. The fairly random nature of the enemies' target-selection and immunity to crowd control caused us to repeatedly succumb to the general chaos before we could bring even one healer down. Gradually, though, through several tactical iterations, we hit upon a successful combination of DPS allocation and kill order to finally take them down - at least with this particular team matchup. Still, I think our throw-everything-at-their-best-healer-first method should be pretty generally applicable.

Next, new encounter! I have to admit, even though the Twin Valkyr aren't exactly hard (assuming one isn't dyslexic), they are fun, which the Faction Champions are decidedly not. In fact, we were having such a good time, that it came as something of a punch to the gut when our entire raid was unceremoniously disconnected when we were seconds away from one-shotting the encounter. Garrosh is behind this, I know it.

Anyway, it was a good night overall. Even if I'm somewhat happier with the level of difficulty presented by ToC's later bosses, I'm still ambivalent about the design of the raid in general. While foregoing trash can make for a fairly quick run, the gladiatorial arena schtick still comes across as a lazy way to implement raid content.

That's all until next week, when the floor unexpectedly collaps- aaaaiiiiieeee....

The Bleeding Edge

Or, I Cut Myself Raiding.

As is obvious, I haven't been writing much lately. This isn't really for lack of raiding progress, so much as lack of anything very interesting to talk about. Although we have yet to beat Yogg (here's hoping for this weekend), we've easily taken down the two Trial of the Crusader bosses introduced thus far.

Too easily. Really, after Ulduar, ToC just feels like a design cop-out and ramping down in difficulty. Hell, it barely feels like a raid. I'm holding out hope that the remaining encounters will be somewhat more interesting, but at this point I'm much more interested in pursuing Ulduar hard-modes and ultimately Algalon.

Rock Lobster - Down!

With Vezax having smugly rebuffed our attempts to crack open his carapace and eat him with butter during last week's regularly-scheduled raiding, last night we initialized the Emergency Last-minute Boss Owning (ELBOW) protocol, and took on the last two regular-difficulty bosses in Ulduar.

It took a handful of attempts, but everything finally came together, and Vezax fell over. That left only Yogg-Saron and his crazy girlfriend.

Our best attempts saw us make it to the beginning of phase two, where we were overwhelmed by an excess of Guardians of Yogg-Saron. We had some trouble with people hitting clouds, and Guardians blowing up before they could be herded to Sara. We finally called it a night after... a lot of tries... but, we killed a new boss and saw a new encounter, which makes it a good night in my book.

Because Unlike People, Animals Are Never Jerks

I've been meaning to mention this for a while, and I'm sure if you're reading this then you're already aware of it, but Brajana of the blog Mend Pet, who is obviously more organized than I will ever be, has put together a donation drive for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Now, I've had a number of pets in my lifetime - two dogs, a cat, countless goldfish - and I've also worked in retail. It has been my experience that animals are more considerate, understanding, and simply pleasant to be around than most people. The least we can do is try to provide them with a decent standard of living.