Catching up & Looking at 4.1

So I took a few weeks off from WoW to prepare for Naka-Kon. Before that, I'd joined the guild I'd mentioned previously, that I'd raided with before being bitched at by the GMs of Legions of Azeroth. Now, I'm a member of Guildbook on Stormreaver. I raided with them for one week before Naka and we beat down the first two bosses of Bastion of Twilight pretty quickly. That was more bosses in one night than in two months with LoA.

I then took two weeks off, and upon returning last week, we again downed the first two bosses and wiped a few times on the Twilight Ascendant Council. This week, we beat them in just a few attempts, before heading on to Cho'gall where one of our raid members decided to afk for 30 minutes without telling anyone. We pulled without him and wiped fairly quickly and no one felt like waiting for him, so we called it there.

Still, I managed to get myself a new healing neck. I also won the roll on some healing boots but passed them to one of our healers since I'm main spec shadow (why this guild doesn't do main over offspec, I don't know, but we're all cool enough that it's worked out fine).

So I'm currently quite pleased with how the social dynamics and progression in game are going for me right now. My real life friend quit last month to go back to playing Everquest (and subsequently quit that too), so I'm out one friend on there, but another friend just rolled up on my server and we've been playing together quite a bit the past few nights, keeping things fun outside of raiding.

But in upcoming news, Blizzard has announced some of the things coming for the 4.1 patch. Probably the biggest news is that Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub are being retooled into heroic 5 man dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of simply retooling things, but similarly, I wasn't thrilled about ZG being taken out, if for no other reason than I really wanted the damned mounts! The week before Cata hit, I got the raptor, but I'd still never gotten the tiger. Similarly, in ZA, my guild had gotten to the point where we could manage to get the Armani War Bear, but I always lost the roll and eventually, it was no longer available. Thus, I'm excited that similar mounts will be available again, even if they're not the same ones.

Of course, with patch comes class changes. Not much is changing for us priests. The biggest change I see, is that our mind sear damage will again be increased which will hopefully, again, make our AOE respectable.

My hunter is also now 85 so I glanced at their changes. Again, not much, but our multi-shot damage is getting a huge buff. That will be swell, but given that hunters already have good AOE, I don't know that it will stay that way.

I recently started leveling my paladin again to help tank instances as he levels. Currently, she's at 81 so possibly 85 by the time 4.1 hits. Again, not many changes here. We get a holy power when our Grand Crusader pops and we use our Avenger Shield. But given holy power isn't a huge issue for tanks, it's not something I'm jumping up and down over.

So that's where I'm sitting currently. Cool story.

/Gquit

Some pro tips for anyone who runs a guild:

If your guild is too small to raid and you consistently fail to put a group together, and the guild doesn't do anything else together, you're not much of a guild. Thus, don't try to enforce rules saying that your members can't pug content that you're not anticipating to do that lockout period.

This week, I decided to run a Bastion of Twilight with another guild to try to squeeze out a few more Valor Points and get another piece of Tier 11 gear before our guild's raid night so I could hopefully be more helpful with the DPS. So I checked with our GM to ensure that BoT wasn't one of the instances we were planning on running got in, downed two bosses, got my new tier piece, and passed my hit cap. All things that you generally want your raiders doing.

But the GMs in Legions of Azeroth decided otherwise and instead, decided to enforce rules written when we were a 25man raiding guild in Burning Crusade in which we didn't allow raiders to PUG content on the current tier level because we could always get raids together and clear everything. Meanwhile, at present day, there's three raid instances with at least four bosses each. In none of them can we down a single boss yet, and we don't even have 8/10 players necessary to pull a guild group. So the rule doesn't make much sense to enforce. But they decided to anyway. So last night, when they realized I'd gotten saved to an instance on the current tier level, I was demoted from my guild rank, which essentially lost me all my guild privileges (what little there were).

So I dropped that guild. I expect I'll be joining the guild I've been PUGing with which is in much the same situation: They're lacking a second tank and need a ranged DPS. I can fill the DPS position and my real life friend has been (slowly) leveling a paladin tank, so we may be just what they need to fill off their raid group. But while they can't, they don't seem to be twits about who's allowed to raid what.

Still, I'm rather frustrated that I now have to start entirely over with guild rep. Not being in a position on my main to redo all the quests through Cata (which earned me a good deal of the nearly revered rep I had) means it will be a long time before I can gain some of the guild bonuses. Plus, I'm rather annoyed with the amount of time I spent cooking, fishing, skinning, herbing, and doing other things towards guild achievements. You'd think that, in absence of raiding, someone who was one of the top contributors to the guild (even higher than the GMs) I'd get a little love. But not. Not even close.

LFGuild

I've been thinking about leaving my guild lately. This is a tough decision since I've been with this group since the middle of Burning Crusade when Karazhan was still the highest level of content all but the most elite guilds would ever see.

Our biggest problem getting further then, and then in Wrath, and again now, is just members. The guild is tiny. We only have about 10 really active members and with people changing mains for Cata, we don't have a good raid balance, even if everyone can make it. Three druid healers isn't good for a raid. I've been voluntold to heal for the time being which I don't mind terribly, but we're still lacking a strong tank healing class.

Or a second tank for that matter.

Several weeks ago, we'd had a guild meeting and discussed recruiting, but in the intervening weeks, we've not gained a single member. We found a paladin tank that's decently geared that's willing to come with us although not join the guild. So we're able to get in to content now, but this new tank didn't seem entirely comfortable at tanking.

Additionally, our GM has been telling us to watch videos for a fight so we can learn it, and then tries to tell us to do something different which confuses everyone and suddenly people are running all over getting themselves killed. It's been a mess. Poor leadership all around.

So I've been watching trade chat and LFGuild channels to see if I can find a guild looking for a good shadow priest and no one seems to want us right now. It's quite sad.

Tonight is supposed to be a raid night, but I'm taking it off for RL stuff and don't really care. The entire game has turned into nothing more than logging in to do dailies, blow my alchemy transmute, run my daily heroic, and log out. Raiding hasn't been worth it thus far.

So in 2 weeks, my paid time will expire and I think I'm going to let it lapse. I'll see if I can find some friends elsewhere to play with, but so few guilds seem to have my desired raid times or need my class the game hasn't been seeming worth it lately.

Perhaps this will mean I'll have more time to write my book

So..... Cata

Cata's been out for nearly a month now and I haven't posted much on my thoughts on it thus far.

I headed out at midnight to get the expansion. I wasn't planning on getting the collectors edition since I'd heard it was pre-order only. Turns out Best Buy had some extras, so I got one. I installed it and waited for the server to switch over.

Release night was crazy. The line to get to the flight master was insane. And when I say "line", I mean "cluster fuck".



After about 10 minutes, I finally got it, grabbed my quest to head to Vashj'ir, and headed out there. Release night was ridiculously laggy. I was having 2 second delays on all spells. Oddly, there didn't seem to be many people in the zone compared to later nights when lag was lower.

Regardless, I leveled through Vash, headed to Deepholm, realized I hadn't picked enough herbs to be able to pick the ones there, headed back to Hyjal, did the quests there, grabbing herbs along the way, returned to Deepholm, and Uldum.

Our resident rogue was our guild first 85, followed by one of our warriors, and then a hunter. I was fourth through the gate, having done quite a bit of healing through instances for that last level.

Since then I worked to get my real life friend to 85, and try to get us both enough gear to run heroics. And dear lord what a pain that has been. The number of places and methods required to be sufficiently geared to run heroics well has been painful. Some gear has come through quests. But the ilvl 333 stuff only seems to come from the end of long quest chains from an entire zone. Thus, I netted the quest achievements for every zone except Uldum and Vash. The former because I just quit for awhile, and the latter because it was bugged and not enough quests existed for the first few days. Seeing that, I left a few undone and apparently they've gone and fixed it, so I need to pick up those last few for the achieve.

Meanwhile, other slots can only be well filled from running non-heroic instances. And some.... well, there's just nothing there for some slots. Want a good set of druid healing boots right now? There's an ilvl 316 pair, but absolutely no 333 pair. Instead, you'll skip straight to ilvl 346 boots. Either you get those from the heroics you won't be able to heal, or you get these boots which only drop from a rare spawn with a 9-14 hour respawn timer in a cave that's heavily traveled by questers. My friend took the latter route. Other gear comes from Justice Points. If you saved some from Wrath, you're a step ahead. But since my friend blew all hers for boomkin gear, she's been hurting for JP gear since she can only get 70 JP a day, being unable to heal most heroics due to poor gear.

As a priest, I haven't been suffering nearly as bad. The healing is brutal, mostly due to severe mana issues. But as I've improved gear, that's slowly being mitigated. Still, I've been having some problems with my regen skills. Hymn of Hope takes far too long to channel. A tank will likely be dead by the time it's done. Shadowfiends have had their attack changed. Previously, they were permanently set to aggressive and would go after whatever your target was. Now, you have to be attacking the target to get it to attack, or actually press another button to tell it to. Obviously, as a healer, I'm not attacking anything, and having to actually tell it to attack both wastes a bit of its time attacking as well as takes my attention away from the people that need healing. I think this was an extremely poor choice.

Alchemy has been a help. The new mana potions are potent, but requiring Whiptail makes them expensive to produce since it can only be (reliably) farmed along the banks of the river in Uldum (also around a lake in Tol Barad, but have fun getting ganked). It's a very limited area and since it's so well defined, you can bet that you'll be competing to get it. Still, this isn't nearly as bad as the Azshara's Veil which only comes from Vashj'ir, and is extremely spread out. Super slow, yet required to make my flasks.

Aside from healer mana issues, heroics just haven't been going well. I've tried running several with PuGs, but generally drop within the first few minutes when it becomes clear the tank still thinks he's playing Wrath, and tries to AOE tank everything and not worry about cleaving the CC, if he even waits for it. Similarly, few people have been paying attention to boss mechanics and people standing in things has been a reoccurring problem, and a waste of healer mana. On the first boss in Halls of Origination, none of our three dps knew the lever mechanics (on normal) leaving the tank and I to be the ones to have to do their work for them.

Sometimes, I can't entirely blame people. The green healing circle druid healers drop frequently does a very good job of obscuring any ground effects from the bosses. The faint blue tornadoes on the first boss in heroic Throne of the Tides blends in with the blue room and are easy to miss when you're staring at health bars. Overall, it's requiring an ability to multitask that many people don't possess nor have the gear to compensate for.

In the meantime, I've also been working on archaeology a ton. I've maxed it out in Eastern Kingdoms, hoping to get the DPS caster staff, but no luck so far. After maxing my alchemy, I switched over to Kalimdor to put together Canopic Jars and attempt to get the Vial of the Sands recipe to turn myself into a Sandstone drake. So far, I've put together one jar and haven't gotten it. I've collected most of the materials, and almost have the 24k gold necessary to buy the Sands of Time.

Cooking has been a pain as well. I've finished leveling it, which wasn't too hard. But getting recipes requires the daily cooking quest. In this case, I wish Blizzard had gone with some more of the variety they had with gear: You get recipes from daily quests, instance drops, chefs in various cities, or reputation rewards. Nope. Instead, there's the painful bottleneck to collect the recipes.

I've been mostly concentrating on fishing recipes and haven't quite maxed that out, but am slowly working on it as I help the guild with the That's a Lot of Bait! achievement. Annoyingly, the main fish I want for the best dps caster buff, doesn't come from pools, making fishing them completely useless for the guild achieve.

Next week, the guild is hoping to have its first raid. I'm quite skeptical that we'll be geared enough. Additionally, we're lacking several spots. One of our tanks plays primarily on another server now and, even if he does sign on to play with us, is now playing a shaman as his main. Our third healer was an alt of another guild's member's, but now that she's concentrating on her main, we don't have her either, leaving me to probably be the 3rd healer for some time.

Another of my real life friends recently started playing and is leveling a Death Knight to be our new tank, but it's a long process. I'm not sure why Blizz didn't extend the cutoff for recruit-a-friend XP since the level cap was raised as well. He's currently 70, but it's probably going to be another 2-3 weeks before he's sufficiently geared to take up tanking, if he can even handle the responsibility with such a challenging difficulty as a new player.

So that's what been going on for the past 3 weeks with me. Overall, I like Cata. It's a good challenge, but there's some annoying oversights, and it's showing just how bad many players really were.