Firelands ! New Content ! Horray !

25 eager raiders looking forward to new content as well as shiney shinies, and we decide to go for Beth'tilac which we take down in our second attempt, and it would have been the first if our tank had remembered a very, very important thing “Is my healers with me or did I just leap and charge forward ?” Yes, a typical “ME TONK, ME TAKE BOSS – TONK TONK !!”. But Beth'tilac went down and I must admit it is not really that much of an interesting fight, however, this is normal’s and let us see what hard modes will bring.

The second boss which we attempted was Shannox who went down in the third attempt with one of our attempts being a ninja pull. And from Shannow we moved on to Lord Rhyolith, who died in the 5th pull and two of those were ninja pulls because people simply were too eager.

These three bosses were relatively easy, but I am also aware that due to the fact that the majority of our gear is +ilvl 372 it does make it quite a lot easier and more forgiving in regards to mistakes, however, this next boss is not forgiving and is a step up the difficulty ladder. We went for Alysrazor, and after 10 wipes we called the raid due to the time had reached 23.15.

We went back the day after and started out with Alysrazor, and after 5 wipes the bird stopped flying, and it was a decent kill which took us  10.30 to pull off. However, it did show the poor, disastrous and seemingly none excising thing called “Move without taking damage” people got hit by tornadoes like if it increased their DPS and they were aiming for it, and healers were no better infact our druids seemed to have rooted, however, it went down but it did again demonstrate the sheer incapability for people to avoid damage. And furthermore it revealed a major theme in our healers idea of playing, which was that it would be better to throw out overhealing than throwing a dot or two or even direct damage towards the boss, and a common excuse was “It is so little what does it even matter?” . Sure, it might not seem like a lot from 1 person, but do you have 4-6 people doing it then it will become a decent chunk of damage, and how many times can you recall that you wiped on 300k or less thinking a few more crits and would have killed it *hint* healers do fucking damage when you got time and mana for it*.

We turned towards Baleroc, and despite us just healing randomly we got him down in the 5^th attempt, and it is a boss which I will look forward to on heroic.

Majordomo Staghelm was a boss which we thought to be another step up, but after 5 pulls he died and we were then 6/7 with only Ragnaros left. But again we stopped due to the clock had reached 23.15. ´

At Sunday we visited Ragnaros, which went great for a starter. Our guildleader had birthday so he wasn’t attending, however, it didn’t occur to our officers that it might happen or that any of them should read up on the tactics. And that meant that we stood literally for 45minuttes doing nothing while one of the attempted to find something out, and may I point out that we had tactics and videos posted on our forums, however, I am not to judged (Reading is hard YO?). After this unexpected afk time the officer who took over started to assign things, and when I say things I do mean things. Names on abilities were none existing, abilities were incorrectly understood and I was about to explode due to the level of incompetence. After a few wipes and more wrong information, and a bunch of people coming up with “ideas”, I say ideas when I should say stupid fucking suggestions, on stuff that they “found out” and suggested we changed or how to deal with it? I am not saying that we got a full tactic on the forum and all the abilities explained on forum and in the Journal, which Blizzard have implemented. So basically I was in a bad mood because of people’s lack of preparation while expecting an easy kill. However, we didn’t kill Ragnaros we wiped miserably many times, and may I add “HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET HITTED BY LAVA WALL CONSTANTLY?”. This was a problem, but so was handling adds and I do mean all adds, and then to add we got tanks dying due to our druids which we had assigned to tank healing pretty much went back to WOLTK style – hot hot hot, a damn a 70k hit on the tank nevermind the hots will be sufficient… Learn to fucking play your classes it isn’t rocket science.

We went in the day after and took Ragnaros after 21 wipes, but I am pretty disappointed with the way people handle new boss encounters and neglect the use of defensive cooldowns, health stone and doesn’t care to read the least on an encounter or just watch a video on youtube. But hey – I am not to judge, I know raiding is hard – Sometimes you have to do stuff. 

Last depressing raids before patch 4.2

Last raid before patc h 4.2 and Firelands, and a new main character.

Yes, Firelands will be here tomorrow and I since I just jumped back to my restoration shaman (On which my gear is brilliant – or not) and was in the raid with 2/5 in BoT cleared and BWD cleared, so 5 bosses that should be a piece of cake with two raid days left and everyone geared to up over their ears ? Meh, think again. 

Again I had to kite adds on Conclave, and for some reason I still cannot figure out (Okay, I was perhaps a bit hung over) I had immense problems with pickup up the adds the usual way, and if that wasn’t enough they spawned like crap almost every time – Yey. We finally managed to take it down and I reclogged to my restoration shaman for Al’Akir. I should perhaps add that we the last couple of weeks more or less has one or two shotted Al’Akir, however, for some apparent reason it would seem that a majority of our raiders felt like they would miss tornadoes, lightning and the general fun of the encounter – So they decided to play like a bunch of retards on meth and when we finally managed to kill Al’akir, well then we had spend almost 3 hours on two bosses which we usually spend a maximum of one on. So we called the raid and decided that the last three could wait a day, and hopefully people would have found their focus, glasses and runned out of drugs. 

So, did they find their focus ?

There is your answer:

 It was one of the worst raids I have experienced in this expansion, and we started on Council. Let me give you brief explanation – Phase one wasn’t really a big problem, except we had a few tank deaths due to we putted our resto druid on the tank (Rej spam on the raid is just gr8888 only 50% OH), however, if the druid threw any HTs it wasn’t during Ignacious’ Flamebreath and pretty much everyone else had to try to emergency heal the tank. Okay, we ended in phase two  which is pretty simple: grab tornado, grab vortex rinse and repeat and run away with Lightning Rod and kite the Frost Orb into the fire. It isn’t complicated and we even have our raidleader announcing what debuff to take, however, it is seemingly an impossible task for a bunch of our raids, sadly. We ended up taking it on normal – Hard boss is hard, sometimes you have to do something else than tunnel. 

We took Cho’gall after a few wipes due to people forgetting (Because it is only the 100^th time?) that they have to interrupt and kill the fucking Fire Elemental, horray ! He went down and we “only” had the retard check aka. Sinestra left.

Sinestra – I just love dispelling just as much as kiting adds, however, someone has to do it and atleast dispelling Wreck wasn’t the issue. The issue was people pulling agro on Sinestra in phase one, pulling agro on whelps (When they shouldn’t be on them) and tanks dying to Cutters with +50 stacks of Twillight Spit on them. A fucking brilliant run turned better, oh wait – It didn’t ! And this has made me wonder, how hard is the game currently ? Or phrased another way, How big of a bunch of retards am I raiding with? Only Firelands will show, but if this continues I foresee a grim, grim future.

Closing in on patch 4.2

With the upcomming patch 4.2 and the new and interesting content known as Firelands will be flung in our heads ,ready or not, on the 29^th of June (Yes, Europe !!). Most people tend to focus on what new flashy loot will be available for them and their class along with the changes in their classes, which can be for the better or the worse.
I did the same in regards to holy paladins, and lets take a brief  look at the changes to holy paladins.

·         Our mastery gets “reworked” and can now stack, but in spite of this it is still a situational stat at best, and since it only affects our direct heals it isn’t that great since, and I can only speak for myself and the paladins in my guild, but we tend to balance our healing around beacon and beacon swapping. It can now stack, but unless you play like a retard, OR there is some insane attack that we would be able to mitigate by stacking a shield like idiots – Unless that is the case I hardly see any change to our mastery.

·         Holy Radience gets it CD lowered which always is nice – This, makes us more viable for raidhealing, which apparently is quite important to some holy paladins, and I must admit I do welcome it because I usually want to spam it more than I can currently.

·         WoG becomes more potent, however, It is still sub par compared to LoD when we talk 25man content, but I guess it will be a nice boost to 10man paladins.

·         Divine Protection will now grant the same speed buff as HR, and I guess a lot will argue “this is only for PVP”, and sure it Is possible done to make paladins more viable in PVP, but it is sure a very, very and I stretch this – VERY nice feature, which if used wisely will grant you the ability to avoid some damage. And as a bonus you will look like you do care about surviving and using your defensive cooldown , which is a thing I still think people tend to ignore the importance of.

And in regards to gear I had gathered close to BiS (Stupid Fing trinkets – this is the 2^nd expansion where my trinkets just seems to have vanished from the game), however, at the brink of new content and while being prepared for it am I going to reroll, again. Or I guess it is more of a “back roll” to the character I changed to in order to help out the guild in the beginning of Cataclysm – my shaman.

It wasn’t an easy call, however, there is several reasons:

·         When playing in a Danish guild (And I am fairly sure it is the same thing in every guild where you only got one nationality) the amount of people isn’t that big, and this affects the numbers of “useful” classes which will apply to your guild. Our case was that an old paladin, who have played with us for a few years and then took a break due to IRL stuff, decided to reapply to the guild. So what do you do? Four paladins will undoubtedly be one too many, and you aren’t really in a position to throw away good applications and especially when you know a person is a quite good player, I mean , that is just stupid. So one way to resolve this was to say: nay – you quitted on us before, however, since the manner of his leaving was presented in advance giving us time to replace him, and since he wishes to play with us again (yeah, it must because of the awesome jokes I crack on VT and all that other stuff) it does also show a great deal of loyalty. Loyalty is a thing which is too rarely seen, and I do think that when you got loyal players who come back that they should be given a chance. So I suggested that I “rererolled” to my shaman, however, this being a week before Firelands and my shaman at the same gear level that I left him when I rolled pwaladin, and the paladin in somewhat half heroic gear it isn’t the start of the content I had hoped for. However, as it is said numerous times and therefore must be correct: Skills > gear.
Furthermore, this movement of persons will also ensure that we are “full” on healers, and should thereby be standing better due to not being forced to run suboptimal setups as we did before with 4 holy paladins. It worked, but it did require some coordination and I must admit we did have some quite good paladins.

·         I just realized that I forgot to hit the damn “Enter” and thereby pretty much throwing everything in to one single paragraph.

·         BUT, we will now look at Firelands with two restoration druids, three paladins, two priests and three shamans which I think is a quite decent  setup.

·         Furthermore, I did talk about the difference in gear level, but then again I doubt that people want to change their ilvl 372 just to get a few +points over a person who runs around with ilvl 359. And I guess it will be healthy for me to try to be in the lower end of the healing meter (Yes, aren’t we all some small horny bitches who wants to be able to point at the meters and say “Look, Look at my healing done I must be the best healer in the WOOOOORLD, or a massive cock who snipe heals, but I choose option number #1)

However, the more I think about it the more I am looking forward to playing my shaman again at a higher level than our occasional alt run whenever I am bored.
And one thing that I do think is quite unique for a shaman is the ability to throw a HR and then spam Lightning Bolts in order to maximize the damage whenever being close to a first kill, and as I have stated in a few posts – A few of our first kills would simply not have been possible if our healers hadn’t thrown out between 3-5 million damage. Furthermore, I get around a thing which I have been thinking on and that is the inadequate Judgement, and the none excisting scaling with the mana return, and it is a thing which will rape paladins in the butt at one point if the issue does not get addressed. It is a great tool and depending on the fight I did regn. between 100.000 – 150.000 pr. Fight due to Judgement, but it is a decent amount now, but when we get further into the expansion it will be harder to justify the usage of a GCD to regain that amount of mana if you are running around with 200k mana (It will take a while, but I hope you understand what I am trying to say), and furthermore you are not capable of using your Judgement as you wish during progression and when being slightly undergeared – whereas a druid uses one GCD with innervate and priests one with Shadow Fiend, but yes shamans is in the same business as us and has to spec into Telluic Currents and with a cast of everything between 1,2 and 2 sec casttime, depending on your haste level, they do seem to be worse off than paladins, but since that their mana “gain” scales with the damage it will therefore scale with gear which makes it more and more precious as you get better and better gear.

Oh well, I guess that was enough whine – but I do think it is an issue that needs to be addressed and I believe it was a paladin from Method (Yes, those something who were worse than the Finnish) who addressed it on the official forums under Healing, but I seem to be unable to find the thread, but if I will I will edit it in because he did say some quite interesting things.

Here is the link, and the post is written by Shakaroz from Method Link to post

That will be all for now, and I guess with a new class and new content I will making a few posts which will deal with me whining about the content is too hard or my class is underpowered or any other excuse I can find to explain my miserable playing.

While add it I will take the liberty to give a little advertisement, in case you play a shaman please read on and if not do it anyway you might want to do so, for a guy who plays a restoration shaman and I must admit that when I played my own shaman back when normals were hard I did agree with the majority of what he had to say, and I think he has some very nice observations, however, here is the link: www.lifeingroup5.com

A peak back before 4.2

Looking back on the the content which we have encountered from the release of Cataclysm, and what I think of the content and design of them so far.

First I will have to say that it has been a massive and possible a little too much content released in the beginning, and I am fairly glad that Firelands was postponed simply because it would only have been the the top 200 guilds which would have had any “farm time” of all the content.

Blackwing Descent (BWD) – Beside a few bosses which proved to be unkillable without bugging it (Hello Atramedes) or a boss which required class stacking to an extreme (Hello Kitty, I mean Nefarian). But all in all I am pleased with the 6 bosses in BWD and they do all require that one has to move away from the tunnelvision while pressing ones 1 1 1 3 4 rotation, which I personally think is a good welcome. And with the changes to healing I think it is quite fun that you now will see a far bigger difference between a good player and a bad player. An example - In WOLTK a bad shaman would use Chain Heal and Lesser Healing Wave and a bad shaman would use Chain Heal and Lesser Healing Wave and there would not really be any difference, and even if you played very well it was hardly noticeable if you were better than the guy who was clueless but was just spamming CH. Now you are able to see a difference between a shaman who knows what he is doing and one who just pushes his buttons randomly. I am a firm believer in that it is a good thing that the game has become more challenging and that it didn’t matter if you pressed 1 1 3 or 1 2 3 4 you would still do decent enough to get through. I do understand the need for Blizzard to show everyone their content, but there is just a far to big playerbase to make everyone happy, and you could argue that “Hey, top guilds are a minority so therefore the focus should be on the people who couldn’t move out of damage in spite of their lives depended on it” and it is a valid point. However, I do also believe that if the “top level” was removed and made far too easy it would remove a very, very large playerbase simply because people talk about Paragon, Ensidia & Method and look towards the players in the guilds for tips and ways to improve their own gameplay. Furthermore, if that aspect is removed and made to “common”, yes I am aware that this might sound like I am an elitist jackass, and a requirement to a) Understand more than 50% of your class, b) Being able to minimize the damage you as a player takes and finally c) Work as a team. If those were removed or made less important there would hardly be any challenge or fun in the game, the fun part is that a lot of people who sit and yell “The game is too casual friendly and easy now, I wish everything was like in Vanilla” usually have forgotten the dull and annoying grind for pots, elixirs, flasks as well as the problem with 40 people – Some of the will be AFK, Unfocused or just plain baddies and that was one of the reasons why people look at Vanilla WoW to be more challenging. Another and I must say that it is quite important is that some bosses were so bugged that they virtually were unkillable.

Finally, and what I think is one of the key things is – We have improved and the players which play today are for the majority more skilled and better players than people who played in Vanlilla, and they got more experience now. I am fairly convinced that the content that Blizzard has given us in this expansion is some of the hardest and most challenging that we have ever experienced, and I think that it is the way to do it. The content so far is also far more demanding on every single player an example is Council in BoT – If a person fucks up with Debuff he is likely to die, if he does so with Lightning rod he is likely to wipe the raid. If he fails to get the Frost Orb to the fire – He will wipe the raid, and all of these things has one simple thing in common – They are all about movement and how you place yourself when you know certain things will occur, and you are in control of 98% of it – People who say “Raped by RNG”, sorry but that is just b#llshit you made a mistake – Admit it and let us move along and hopefully you will learn from it.  

 Bastion of Twillight (BoT) – I like the ideas of the instance, but I really, really hate that many people tend to play WOLTK style meaning: I do not need to move from this thing, which will do 30-50K damage to me and is completely avoidable or I have an ability which will remove 50% of it, nah – I will get a heal” and it is so frustrating because a 30K heal is for a paladin a Divine Light which is 7k mana and if you have to spend that amount on more than a few people, well – you will drain your mana and in the end your tanks will suffer.
Halfus – Honestly I have given up with melee, if the Fireball  Barage will hit – they will all get hitted every single time. If the tank does a countdown you can be sure that a caster will have finished his cast the instant the tank says 1, and thereby already giving us a semi optimal start in the name “herp ti derp ti diipiiis”.

Valliona – I do like the idea of tank switching and two realms, and I do remember that our first kill was pretty tight, as a first kill should be! But when we land on “farm” people tend to ignore Twillight Blasts falling from the sky and is avoidable. People with engulfing goes “ ZOMG MOAR DAMAGE NAU” smashing between 2-5 people down at 50% before they realize “Ehm, perhaps I ought to move”. People “forget” to move when they are target with Metorite or doesn’t bother to move into our gathering point when we get a blackout, and thereby putting additional pressure on the healers and on the raid. However, I do think it is a fun fight – beside the RNG of CD stacking on Blackouts and the outcome.

Council: FUFUUFUFUFU, debuffs -. Movement, buff / debuff, Lightning and if we manage all this perfectly we are likely to have someone going “WUT IS DAT BLUE THING DAT IS FOLLOWING ME – I WILL CHARGE IT RIGHT ON” and bam – You just wasted 5 min. And the trash before Council what on earth were they thinking ? Something along the lines (I believe a French accent would fit nicely) “How can we make this unbearable and annoying like nothing ever before?”
And I will say that I believe that it is either the hardest HM or the 2^nd Hardest because it requires everyone to be on their toes and not make any mistakes because it is quite hard to kill the boss with 24-23 or less people even if you got them all perfectly at 23-24ish%  HP.

Cho’gall – First we tried to morph a mage, but since we failed miserably at interrupting people which in the end gave Cho’gall an average of 2-4 stacks it was simply impossible to keep the mage alive for long enough to benefit from it. Instead we just used the CDs we would have used on him on the Shadow AoE which would be absorbed with 9 or 10 stacks instead, and it worked quite nicely. However, when my guild hits the “dis is farm” … seriously, interrupts on MCed people seems to have lower priority than taking a direct hit to the genital area or ignoring Blaze until you finished 3-5 casts. However, it is a fun and challenging fight and when we reached it for the first time we had quite a lot of optimizing to do, and I would highly recommend that people used WoL to compare other peoples logs with their own. We found out that our damage output was much higher, until we the add spawned and then it fell a lot because we used a suboptimal movement tactic and when we changed it we didn’t drop nearly as much damage.

Sinestra – A fun fight and as a paladin I just love to heal Calen with Avening Wrath + Divine Favor and when he hits 60% pop Guardian of the Ancient Kings and see a HPs which just sky rocks. Sadly, the last time when I was able to keep a 56k HPs until our wipe at 5.30 min a healer had to go and I was de/promoted to dispel duty – Horray, I am now the 6^th dispeller we have used for this. The sad part is that people fail just as much to the Cutter than to Wreck going south. Furthermore,  I cannot stretch how important it is for people to use their defensive cooldowns and for priests and druids to use Divine Hymn and Tranquility. And on the same time how important it is for healers to throw a dot or two up on the boss whenever they just are throwing out overhealing anyway. Sadly, many are stuck in the old idea that I am a healer and therefore I only heal as well as DPS saying: I am a damage dealer hence I cannot use my healing spells or defensive CDs, and that is sadly just plain stupidity and is shows that you aren’t making the most out of your class.

Conclave of Wind – I hate it, I really really hate this boss, but I guess that is mainly because I get the honors of kiting the damn adds on my Death Knight because we only have one person in the guild who plays a DK, and he has been busy with IRL stuff à Hey, you got a DK alt right ? Kite ! They are a fucking pain to kite, and do require a bit of practice because if you make the circle to big you will most likely have very big difficulties with picking up the 2^nd wave, or if you make the circle to little it is the same story. This can be helped with a Warlock to Stun the adds or a Mage to put down Ring of Frost, but you cannot always depend on it – Or if people can control their trigger happy fingers à BAM, an add is raping the raid because someone just had to whore 100 more DPs … Brilliant… idiot.

Al’akir – Phase one is all about movement – making the right decisions and minimizing the damage that you take. Phase 2 is about controlling the adds and is a DPs race, and it is very wize to let the classes who can cancel the Acid Rain aura do it at 11.12 debuffs – And that is Mages, Paladins, Rogues and Death knights (AMS <3) . Phase 3 is again movement, and can be  pain if people “forget” about the Lightning Rod debuff.

Overall I do think the content is quite fun and challenging, but it does also require that you play with people who know what they are doing and not just die every 25 second and then blaming it on RNG or bugs. There will be some bugs, but RNG – It should be named “Random Error 40” since it is usually YOU who makes a mistake.