Secrets of Shadowbolting

Ok for those blog stalkers out there.

Friday night was a fast kara run. It went well, we killed everything and I was called out for being too nice and polite.

Oh, and I also rolled 2 99′s on loot I didn’t need but was getting for the DE anyway. Instead of trying to explain, I just made a nice pretty picture of the highlights from the evening.

While The kara run the other day was not spectacular, I would like to point out the fact we had maiden down in under 2 minutes. This is partly due to awesome tankage, awesome heals and bringing the dps.
woot. Considering we had 3 alts on this run (OT, heals and dps) I was happy.

Can’t say much about the rest of that run though, so I won’t.

/
this is a rant post. most guild members do not fall into this category, but occasionally I run into a person who has made it into the guild that just blows my mind for one of a few reasons:
1. they’re playing computer games but can’t operate a computer
2. they are communication challenged
3. they just don’t get it
This is not meant to be a bash of this particular person, more just an example of what we are NOT looking for in our guild and my surprise and annoyance at the outcome of the situation
/

We are an adult raiding guild for a reason. The tolerance for stupidity is low, some people use mature language on vent when aggravated and we enjoy the knowledge that comes from experience. That being said, we don’t always screen new people as well as we should and we end up with warrtards in the guild. That being said, we were a little short on dps for kara last night so I bring a new member that in ordinary situations would never have been allowed in for not having vent installed. I work with him a bit but my mouth is falling open at some of his comments.

Lets do a quick recap. I ask him to install vent, he goes looking in his microphone properties for vent. It’s not there and he’s confused. This is bad. I point him to the ventrilo webpage and he ends up on the support page looking for the download. I point him to the downloads page and he (i thought) downloaded the client. As you can see by the timestamps below, whatever he did was not the case.
over an hour later I’m getting a little fed up with this genius who can’t seem to be able to install a program to save his life. We’re crunching through kara with a bunch of people on alts and I flat out tell him he may NOT come to aran unless he has vent running. Deciding he is “tired” he drops from the group and we 9 man it to aran.
I’m still fielding whispers on the side and he still can’t get vent installed. At this point I’m beyond trying to help him, it’s been 2.5 hours and he cant figure it out? I’m done.
His being tired did not seem to prevent him from staying online so after we go as far as we can 9 manning it with a pugged healer, we end after Aran at 18% and start trying to talk to him to figure out what his deal was.
We find out he is 13 and he gets a nice /gkick from Vuur for the official reason of being underage. When people asked I was really tempted to write “You can’t cure stupid” but i was talked into being a little more politically correct.

Now, about that kara run….we had a decently geared priest, a level 69 druid and a 70 pally healing. The pally was a pug and was lazy. The fact the 69 druid out healed him the entire instance was a bad thing as this pally had said he didn’t like over healing so he didn’t really heal, just watched the druid and priest heal. Was not cool and was part of the reason we couldn’t down aran. When you let your top dps drop – all the healing in the world is useless. Healing won’t defeat a boss, dps will. The druid was able to swap to kitty dps and do a little damage but 18% health on the boss and a 69 druid in restro gear is just not going to get the boss down unless you have another 20 minutes…In an aran fight, that’s just not going to happen.
Very frustrating.

Last night was a pretty decent Kara run. The lowest DPS was around 700 or so and we were whipping right on through. We got down all but the dragons because we still need to work on that raid cohesion thing and speeding up in between bosses, but getting maiden down in 1 min 13 seconds was pretty nifty. Anyway, I thought I did ok and with all the chatter about moving up into T5 and harder instances I have been working on my biggest issue – threat management.

I know I’m a warlock, I’m deadly, I’m scary, I’ll send a demon after you and you better just hope it’s the succubus.We’re talking threat management here. I love my pally buffs, I really do, but with them all my spell bonus is hovering around 1250 and I tend to have some crits in me occasionally. There are definitely a few times I try and cheat the aggro table and throw a shadow bolt or 2 a little earlier than I should (10k-13k threat lead by the tanks. i will start dotting around 3-6k but the sbolts tend to wait a little longer unless they are non elite. then I just giggle because by the time they find me they’re dead.). NORMALLY i can get away with this, however when the first 2 crit I tend to be in trouble. Lets do a couple of examples.

Moroes fight – We killed 2 of the 4 adds and then went after moroes. When he vanishes we swap to the 3rd add being tanked with moroes. Burn him down. Moroes is at about oh 45% or so and i’ve been casually shadowbolting, occasionally dotting ya know, my normal routine. Not really paying attention until OMG WHY IS HE COMING AFTER …oh. dead. freakin A. Now. Please. Explain to me how after that long attacking a target you don’t have enough threat to let your dps go nuts?
I’ll blame it half on the OT whose threat generation sucks and the 30% crits I was running that round up to a few 6800s.
We lost almost all the dps that round but because of being superbly over geared, we win anyway.
Nice work.

Next example.
maiden to opera – those 2 nasty little buggers who like to freeze people. Yes, it is good to behave. I do my dotting thing while the shackle is up and then carefully watching threat I see the tank has about 6k on me. That’s lower than usual but half the time on adds we burn em so fast by the time I’m passing the tank the target is falling over. No problem, Shadowbolt CRIT 5500, Shadowbolt CRIT 6300 oh ##$%. soul shatter. /hide
luckily no wipe. This is after I had to dig my soul shatter back out of the mess that is my icons because I had been playing with addon layout earlier in the day.
yeah.

Then today while doing my 9-5 (Ha ok but you get the point) job I receive a compliment.
“Vuur, You had some of the best threat management I have seen yet last night. Congrats.”

/pause

“thank you. I was trying to improve as we’re each trying to make ourselves better as we move towards t5″

/thinking to self…. “well I was some – especially on boss fights, but was I really that much better? hmmm. oh….maybe it was because of all the whispered conversations on the side that occasionally had me starting a little late in DPSing trash… (which is usually where I pull aggro and fall over like the clothie I am).”

so yes, threat management was better because i was working at it (some) and because I was half paying attention to all the conversations on the side (some).

/hides from the wrath of kaylok sure to be coming vuur’s way when he reads this….

And the last thing to end today’s commentary with is the following:
“Vuur, are you making it to ZA tonight?”
“I was planning on it”
“good, we need someone to pet the crocodiles”
/sigh