Secrets of Shadowbolting

Just past Flame Leviathan to the right is razorscale. This is a pretty easy fight if you remember one thing… STAY OUT OF THE FIRE!
The fight starts by talking to the Expedition leader. At this point, mole turrets pop up at the far side of the circle on the ground. There can be anywhere from 1-3 mole turrets so 2 tanks are needed to pick up the adds and group them up for AOEing. Dark Rune watchers have a nasty whirlwind and should be tanked away from the raid to avoid melee damage. Occasionally you will see a message pop up about a harpoon launcher being ready. One member of the raid needs to move to the back of the room to click and activate the turret. This will put a harpoon in razorscale.

While this is ongoing there is 2 types of fire damage to attempt to avoid. Blue fire will land and put an AOE effect on the ground. This must be avoided. Red and blue fire will single target one person but will not cause the AOE on teh ground. The bl;ue fire aoe will kill a player in under 3 seconds if they do not get out in time.
After (2 harpoons in 10 man, 4 harpoons in 25) the harpoons have been launched, razorscale will land. The tanks should bring the adds close to razor scale and DPS her down as much as possible before she launches again. Adds should be dead by the time she launches.

The adds will spawn again from the turrets and this is rinse and repeat until razorscale lands again. Once she is at 50% she will no longer launch in the air. After she has landed, the tanks need to immediately taunt her and drag her around the edges of the circle.

She will occasionally breathe fire which is a conal attack in front of her. Avoid the flames and burn her down.

So I’m a photoshop addict – I really enjoy it and as everyone else was changing their signatures for the guild forums, I decided to make my own. This works for now but I have a feeling I’ll be changing and updating it as time goes on.

So Distinct Advantage had a guild header contest for the web page. I didn’t win, but this was my submission I created in about 30 minutes.

It amuses me at times how petty people can be. I have really been enjoying the time spent with my new guild. Last week we finally got Sarth + 3 drakes down. It took a few attempts but the secret was no one dying during the time the 1st 2 drakes were up.

Since then, I’ve been raiding, leveling my priest/mage (finally 70!) and just enjoying the game again. Last night it was mentioned to me by a friend that another guild is convinced I’m poaching all their members. 3 that I know of have left the guild and joined DA. They contacted me about the guild I am currently in, asked me questions, applied and were accepted. No problems right?
Nope. These same people who didn’t want to listen to me before are having a much better time blaming me for the failure of their guild than trying to analyze the root of the problem. Good luck and good riddance to them.
My current guild is my guild in name only, I’m not an officer, I’m a raider. My guild has plenty of people to raid, recruiting now is more for quality people to enhance our ranks, not because we’re struggling to field 25 people. People are contacting me first – I’m not hunting them down. I’m online less these past few weeks because I have been busy. Hooray for real life activities outside of pixels.
The people who liked me before will continue to like me, the people who don’t, won’t. Am I really that concerned? No, not really. It’s a game. If it’s not fun, why are you playing?

I never realized how lucky I was to have a guild of RL friends until recently. While Blizzard of Oz still existed as a raiding guild, we had fun, we did things and then we went out for lunch and chatted about it later on in the week.

Shadow Syndicate was the WotLK rebirth of BoO with new management. It just wasn’t the same and I wanted to go a little more serious in raiding so I went to Ömen. I sort of knew a couple of the officers but didn’t really know the GM. The GM’s style and mine didn’t match and while it was fun to raid with competent players, the attitude was not what I wanted in a raiding guild. I got a little excitable over the weekend, said some things I shouldn’t have (bad timing) but meant anyway and decided it was better to /gquit than stay in a guild whose raiding style did not fit my personality.

Do I like raiding? yes. Do I like a lot of the BS that goes along with it? No. Do I think I have found a place yet that really fits me as a raider (and my crazy travel schedule) no. Am I actively looking? Right now? no. I’m going to take a week or 2 away from raiding – work on some alts that need some love (shadow priest,frost fire mage, elem shammy and my hordies) and just chill out. Vuur doesn’t need much more gear. Sel could use more gear but there’s no real rush and Pru still needs heroics to get out of the last few greens. When I actively want to run something, there’s always plenty of pugs happening.

I’m a little disillusioned with raiding at the moment, it seems to bring out a lot of the worst in people. In some ways I want to find a nw server and start again, in others I do like my server and some of the people on it. I spent 2.5 hours in Naxx last night on KT with a guild who hasn’t downed him yet. Both my main raiding toons have cleared him multiple times. The people were nice, chilled and laid back and the only reason we were having issues is the dps was low (top dps was 2k, lowest was 1100 in a 10 man). I stayed up a little too late helping them and we didn’t get him down but I enjoyed the no cursing on vent, no foul language and people being dedicated to stick it through and keep trying without whining and massive amounts of complaining. It was a nice change and I didn’t mind the repair bill that came of it.

Basically my summary of experiences is such:
RL friends will make a fun environment but not always the best progression guild
In game friends are in game friends – you should still do your research before jumping headlong into a guild.

ok ok, I know I haven’t posted in almost a month and it’s due to a couple things:
1. spending time outside of the game – it’s ski season, deal with it
2. working – I know this is a tough concept but occasionally I need to do something to get paid so I can keep shelling out my $30/month
3. traveling – my job involves travel and there has been some of that recently
4. death of a pet and subsequent adopting of a new one (or 2) – guinea pigs are cute but when they decide to die it can still make for an unhappy vuur

so anyway, I apologize and hope to get back to regular posting soon.

While collecting rats in Naxx may be fun, collecting farm animals in strat is even more entertaining

/Seldovia restro druid hat on

While perusing some of the other blogs out on the web in an effort to take a mental break from my job, I came across the topic of healing and addons. Now, from
the egotistical priest, the world of matticus and /hug came a whole slew of information, thoughts and ideas. Now, as someone who has run the gamut of no addons, addons, healbot, grid etc, in an effort not to completely rehash all the arguments listed above, I think a lot of the use or non use of addons comes from game exposure, length of time with toon, personal setup and knowledge of their character’s healing ability. Here’s why:

The longer you play a class, the more you know about your specific talents (or you should…). The more you have seen in game from quests, 5 mans, heroic 5 mans, 10 man raids, 25 man raids, increases your exposure to different situations you find yourself in. The more time you are trying new things and experimenting with your class you tend to find things that work best for you and layouts you like (stay with me, i’m getting to the add ons bit).

When I first started healing I was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of choices. Now I originally started on a priest back in BC so I was like wait, what are all these healing spells? As my guild was strapped for healers they basically said, great! you can heal now! we’re going to do heroics, you can heal, come along. Here comes my whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

With inexperience can come panic. I have found that HealBot can be a great starter tool for learning to heal. It helps you learn your spells, learn how much a 6k heal really is, lets you basically configure the setup and then play whack a mole to keep people alive. As was stated in some of the other blogs bove, it’s not just the add on that makes the healer. it is the player as well. If you take the time to learn the spells, you then start to move out of your norm and can experiment with other ideas and ways to heal.

Next little story to illustrate point. I leveled my druid to 80 originally as feral and then as boomkin while dual boxing with my death knight. I always had healbot up as the druid was assisting the DK and while in boomkin form I’m not using heals. If the DK or druid’s health is getting to low, its much easier to just click a quick rejuvenation and then pop back to boomkin and continue on with my questing. I dual boxed a few instances as Unholy DK/Boomkin and was fine.
Thursday i hit 80 on both toons. Let the celebration begin. Friday, one of the raid leaders says… uh Vuur, I know we asked you to keep Sel boomkin but we’re short on healers for Naxx on monday if we do a 25 man. Can you make her restro?
Here come’s the OMG phase. I have 3 days to turn a fresh level 80 boomkin into a restro druid for a 25 man naxx run on monday. Knowing full well that I do not know how to play Restro, I start reading forums, I go through Restro4life’s gearing guide and I start running regular instances as a healer. I’m using healbot to teach myself how to play, learning how everything works, watching the numbers on my recount scroll up and checking overheals to see why I’m OOM all the time. I start on heroics over the weekend and I’m slowly getting the hang of healing. I know I’m getting better because people are not dying as much and I’m starting to get frustrated with Healbot with the slow response time for the HoTs I am trying to cast.
As I learn my class and I learn to heal and how to best use my spells, I’m changing the way I look at my interface and how I want it to work for me. Monday comes, we don’t have enough people online for a 25 man naxx so we pug a few people and do Vault and Sartharion.

Now I really hate healbot. I can’t find anyone, people are all over the place and my dots are taking forever to cast. I do more research and decide Grid is the way to go. before I get grid really configured I end up switching guilds and getting pulled into a 10 man naxx run. Luckily there is another druid healer there and I have someone to bounce ideas off of and get some ideas on how to be better as well (it also didn’t help at this point in time I still had boomkin glyphs on).

Over the next few days, I took my tree self down to crystalsong forest, smacked a wolf, let it beat on me and practiced how I wanted to set up my heals. I use pitbull as well, but Grid keeps everything very compact. I turned all my heals into mouseovers bound to keys and chained trinkets and made a couple OMG HE’S GONNA DIE – HEAL HIM NOW macros. What I do like about Grid is I can put my tanks in one spot, healers in another and DPS in a 3rd. I can color my party members so it is easier to find people by class. I can see the length of time it takes for my lifeblooms to bloom, I can find poisons and abolish them and everything is all in one place, point mouse, hit button, move on.

The beautiful thing is yes, if tomorrow, everything blew up and I had no addons, I would still be able to function. My healing mouseover macros will work on blizzard frames and they will work on grid. However, my learning curve of getting to there was greatly eased by the fact someone took the time to write an addon to help me do my job.

The addons don’t make the game, but they can help when you know the limitations of how far they can take you. At the end of the day, a good hhealer is only as good as the person behind the keyboard.

After talking with the officers of Shadow Syndicate, I decided it was time for my toons to find a new home. This was in no way about any of the players that were in the guild but more about the way the guild was being run and the direction it was going. I was just not feeling that it was the right fit for me so I asked some of my other friends in game if they had space and last night Vuur and Seldovia moved over to Ömen.

I’m continuing to work on Seldovia’s Explorer title and while running around Ashenvale last night, I found a second Emerald Dream portal.

Another large dragon, another green portal that goes nowhere….yet.

A little while later, I had a tree fight. Tree fight you may be asking? Well yeah. He insulted my leaves. I wasn’t “green” enough. Hmmph. Thats what happens when your leaves don’t get sun because you’re in dungeons and stuff. I mean really.

So we went at it in the middle of the forest…Tree vs Tree

And yes it is true. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? I can tell you it does make a sound. Kind of like a sliding crunch as it falls over.

The reason I know this is because I was a tree, I WAS the forest for that point in time and no one was around.

So there you go, philosophical mystery solved.

And since it is Murloc week (and I apparently have an addiction to winterfin clams so i can get more Siren’s Tears), here’s Sel’s newest buddy.

So i’ve been working on power leveling my Death Knight / Druid pair and i’m finally almost to 80. I have about 200k to go on both which I will quickly finish up tonight.

I changed up the druid’s rotation a little after reading through the forums and her DPS went up significantly. Trash mobs I may have to work out a slightly different strategy because as with Vuur, you don’t have time for your full rotation and that cripples the dps. While in BC spamming Wrath was the way to go, Starfire is the new ‘IT’ spell. I’m not completely hit capped yet (still running around in greens) so Improved Faerie Fire is a must. Moonfire is great for pulling as the druid has a longer reach than the DK and the DK can easily taunt the mob off before it gets to the druid.

While leveling, I’m specced into Typhoon which is HUGE when the druid rips aggro because I’m being a lazy tank and i need to get them off me. I’m not so sure I will be using this in a raiding build but for leveling it’s pretty nice.

Mouse over healing has also saved my butt time and time again when I’m in a pry with other people. When I was using keybinds for everything there was too much target swapping while I was trying to tank/dps at the same time. It’s a lot easier to drop the DK in a fight, leave the boomkin back beat stuff up and pop out and heal while I continue my cast rotation on the DK.

Things I really need to work on:
1. Macros for trash Mobs – right now the IFF – IS – MF – Wrath – Starfire is too long, things are dead before i hit Starfire
What has been working better is IFF-MF-Starfire-Starfire-Wrath till dead

2. holding more aggro on the DK – I get lazy with my pulls and dont do everything to maximize threat – the druid can occasionally pull threat off as the DK still misses as her gear is still mostly greens with a few blues.

3. gear! Both are horribly undergeared and this really needs to be worked on. Once I hit 80 i can start bringing them to some other instances where they can gear up pretty quick./ Maybe even hit a heroic or 2 in the near future. The biggest annoyance here is running them both as DPS is harder to get groups. I get better luck going in as dps/heals and then i put out crappy dps since I’ve been gearing the DK to tank….

The Vuur has been busy. Last night we had 2 groups of 10 go into Naxx. We’re a little slower than some of the other guilds but we’re still making a dent. One group cleared 2 wings – Spider and Abomination. Maexxna took out 2 DKs and the main pally tank but they burned her in time before she ate the rest of the raid.

Our crew was a little lighter on DPS. Vuur was running 2100-2300 most boss fights but aside from a rogue tagging at her heels there wasn’t much above 1200. That hurt. We were training a new tank so boss fights took 2-3 shots to get them down.

In the meantime I’ve been dualboxing my death knight and druid. It’s like having a deathknight with a pet druid. I recently respecced from Boomkin to Tree just to be able to do some instances. Healing on the tree and DPSing as the DK was a challenge at first but Halls of Stone is now quite easy and I can pump out about 1200 dps on the DK while healing. Both need gear badly and i’m making the push to hit 80 and start gearing them up.

The biggest change I ended up making was changing around the druid to be mouseover heals and keep the DK bound to keys. The Druid group heal is on the same key as the DK Death Strike but this usually works out ok. Most of the time i can just drop a HoT or 2 on the main tank, occasionally raid heal and wait for a cooldown break on the DK to jump over and heal people up again. Boss fights is a different story. I’m usually paying more attention to healing than DPSing so the DK is not usually as deadly there but no one is dying….