The Stage of History

I did some ridiculous shit today. I don't know where I started or where I finished. I was ostensibly working through most of it and just doing it here and there... But in the end, I dropped Ony again (I guess the reset was this morning?), flattened Attumen, Raptor, and Tiger bosses (no mounts), killed the Panther boss (hoping for a quick 18 slot bag), and then... cleared Molten Core.

I didn't really mean to. I just wanted to check it out. But then it was so good, the memories of seeing 40 bodies lying dead in these old areas I haven't been back to.

Only moment of trouble was Majordomo. I didn't really realize what was going on at first and lost 4 of the team to teleporting (on to the pit or something? I'm still not sure what happened) before just settling down with my DK and death strike for healing, and a few minutes later, I was opening the chest.

Later, I took a shot at timed CoS (the daily) and got to the the last pause before the drake fight (where Arthas tells you to rest). I think there's only 2-3 more pulls from there and I was not nearly max'ed out. I wasn't flasked, fully buffed, well-fed, all that shit. I was slow in some areas. But, I didn't wipe or lose anyone for that matter, which is the first time that's happened. I basically need to remember to blow my tanking cooldowns on some of those bigger trash pulls in the first half. The bosses don't really bother me at all but sometimes, between aggro and losing focus, I can let things get out of control on those early pulls.

So, time to take fight club up a notch or shut it down forever. I took all my kids, individually, and checked there DPS on the target dummies. It broke down like this from highest to lowest obviously:

Ele Shaman - 3.5k

Frost Mage - 2.3k

Surv Hunter - 2.1k

Demo Lock - 1.8k

Mutilate Rogue - 1.8k

S Priest - 1.7k

Boomkin - .8k

The gears range but they're all getting there. So, I don't really understand what the fuck is the difference. Well, it's 2-3 things. Gear differences, rotations are less efficient here and there, specs are better and worse, glyphs are more and less easy to utilize with 1-button. But, let's put it straight out there: Shaman kick ass for boxing. Kick. Teh. Ass. My ele shaman has been leading the pack from day one and I promise you, it has nothing to do with me and my borderline retardation. I don't know if I'd prefer 3 more shaman or if I sort of like the challenge of getting my other classes more efficient and devastating. According to the dual-boxing forums, people running all sorts of class comps have massive DPS success in the end, so I know it's just me. And the tinkering IS the game for me. So, I guess you could say I'm happy.

Onyxia vs Doomwalker

I tried to "farm" my easy heroics because I'm kind of fiending for a few pieces of badge gear. I rolled through Gundrak and DTK with zero wipes, finally! In fact, I finished DTK with the Eck debuff still on my crew (nothing that impressive since it's an hour buff and I kill Eck right before the last boss). Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good about the team. I did AN and wiped once on the final guy but knocked him down on the next try. Went to Nexus and plowed through the place until Keristrasza... I downed her yesterday but today it was not to be.

I tried everything I could think of... different totems, different lock pets, different gear, different cool downs saved for the enrage timer. I attempted her probably 9-10 times but in the end, I just gave in for the day. I even had her at 1500 hps. It's funny... playing with even a single other person, we would have killed her. but things fall apart in multiboxing and it's not pretty. I read a priest solo'd her by dot'ing and running around the instance (she's slow as shit).

Then I went to CoS and blew that. Then I tried doing Naxx 10 with my brother (so 6 of us) and the second mob stumped us (the gargoyle that heals fully at 30%). We were going to switch around to up our dps and we would have dropped it but he had to split. Then I went and killed Onyxia for fun (my first time). Man, I wish I'd been farming this bitch for months now... 18 slot bags alone are worth like the 10 minutes of killing it took. Then I went to kill Doomwalker because I heard he drops 500g. He also drops bombs. I got him to 10% but didn't know about the enrage timer (fucking game mechanic... the only thing it enrages is me) and he blew my crew up as well.

I'm done for a bit. Just wanted to try some fun things. Might go in to MC or BWL and see how those go. I've never seen Karazhan either. It's funny, years ago I installed a private server version of WoW on one of my hard drives. I went in and gave myself all sorts of shit and went through BWL and MC, just checking things out (BWL was the top instance at that point). Now, with this crew, I sort of feel like I'm back there again.

Why is this game so nice with it?

Quick hits I wanted to mention:

• I only have one shaman in my crew (I know... what a fucking oversight) so for totems, as with the cup that holds the blood of Christ, I have to choose.. and choose wisely. In each totem slot I can drop either an offensive or defensive buff basically. I'm dropping Stoneskin (the DK buff Horn of Winter takes the place of Strength of Earth, something I only just found out... because I'm a fuckin noob), Totem of Wrath (you really have to... even in the blizzard-happy fight with Novos, you can't give up that buff on four casters for a little frost resistance), Cleansing Totem, and Nature Resistance Totem. Now, the first two don't really have better choices. The last two are questionable, right? I could have mana/health regen and Wrath of Air down instead. But having the Cleansing Totem down all the time has been invaluable. The number of fucking mobs that spit weird goo in my face is insane and I don't have time to micro-manage every fight. Always having this down and not needing to know before hand whether I'm entering into a plague bukkake has saved me a couple of wipes per instance run. The thing is, keeping your tank up is all that matters as long as he/she's got aggro. If that's true, everything else can basically be fixed. So I'm giving up a bit of DPS but my survivability has ratcheted up.
• I made a purge/tranq shot macro. It's just a /stopcasting macro that's bound to one key. There are a lot of mobs that enrage in these Heroics. I know that most of you are steamrolling through all of these and there's no point to using cc or tranq shots. But I want to develop good habits for Icecrown so I can make pulls as easy as possible. When I see someone enrage, I start a heal on myself and then purge/tranq the mob and the fights suddenly become trivial.
• Bloodlust is sofa king amazing. It's almost like coffee to me. No matter what obstacle I face in life, all I need is a little coffee. I could accidentally pull Yogg with my shaman and if I bloodlust, I'll suddenly feel like "you know what? I think I got a shot here!"
• This brings me to my next point. My macro for "freaking out" (that's actually what I call it) basically /use's trinkets and longer buff cooldowns like rapid fire, icy veins, whatever. Use this every fight. I can't believe how short some of these amazing cooldowns are. 2 minutes for Power Infusion? Really? Although I have really long cooldowns like bloodlust on a separate button for boss fights. You want some things to always be ready.
• Make sure your team has a disenchanter. Don't be like me.
• When I started, my focus was simplicity. As I've introduced more complex play (utilizing more of each classes' specialities), my game has improved. Don't shy away from stepping your game up a bit. If you're failing, add CC, stop AoE tanking, decurse, drink elixirs, get enchanted and gemmed better. Basically, don't give up, do what it takes, and think and you should crush anything... anything that doesn't require you to move each individual toon too much, that is.
• These last two bits are about my DK Tank. First, Army of Dead is fucking hilarious. This crew of morons that remind me of the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (who does a tribute to the weasels in WFRR? I fucking love this world) pops out all around you. Sometimes you summon one in such a way that it aggros the boss you're about to pull (I know: only I'm this dumb). They taunt like Ocho-Cinco and for some weird reason, they'll have a boss surrounded and then the whole group will run like 20 yards away WITH the boss. Sometimes this takes the boss out of my DPS range. Sometimes the boss has an enrage timer. Sometimes I wipe. But there are a few times where it's great to have that many extra hit points taking random beatings for you. I still like to use it whenever I can.. if only for the hilarity.
• My current DK build is pretty good. I've tried maybe 15 builds and all have been fine, to be honest. But there are a few things I took this time that I doubt any serious tank takes. First, lowering my deathgrip cooldown helps a lot. As I said already, as long as the tank is alive with aggro, life is good. Anything that let's me fix a fight spiraling out of control I like. This really does save my ass and when wipes are costing my group 100g a wipe (15-20g per guy, of course), I'm over it. I'm over wiping. In WoW, at least. Anyway, third, I love Master of Ghouls. Having the ghoul out perpetually is key for me because of the number of times I 'oh shit!' sacrifice it for the health. I could just try to bring him out a minute before I need to sacrifice him but the way I play, that's just not predictable and I'm too scatter-brained. I constantly play my shadow priest without shadowform after a wipe. I need all the help I can get.

Hello, Mcfly

One thing I don't do enough of is Think. Too often, I hit a boss, give it the old college try, if I drop him/her/it, great! If not, I go to wowhead and read what others have green-lit as the best technique. Then I do that. If that fails, I bag it.

I once read an article about how Japanese gamers love a fucking hard game. Love a challenge. And American gamers basically never want to be challenged. They want to succeed but the effort they put in doesn't really affect how much they enjoy the success. I'm an American, unfortunately. I realized that I don't really mind a cake-walk at all. And this "wowhead, show me the way" mentality is really crippling me.

My point is, I've been farming Gundrak, DTK, and CoS the last few days for badges and to gear up my new crew a bit. They are, I find, the easiest instances, although I skip 2 bosses in DTK, which is sort of stupid. Anyway, I'm fighting Eck the Nimble Little Mynx and this thing really fucks my crew up. The problem is basically the same every time: when it drops aggro and pounces on someone else, it can get positioned behind my team and I don't realize it immediately. Then either no one is DPSing or it vomits on my crew and things go bad from there. This fight is a total DPS race (not a hard one, I'll grant you) because Eck has an enrage timer, so any time spent with your thumb up your digital wazoo is .. undesirable. I've been trying the wowhead technique of positioning my team on one side of the doorway and the tank on the other side, with it in between, a little Eck sandwich that should be easily tauntable off my crew and should stop it from springing all over the place. But the little fucker kept wiping me. Something would go wrong, my taunts wouldn't take, he'd facial my team, the enrage timer went off.. whatever.

So I repositioned myself a bit to adapt and whooped that trick. Here's a shot of my team. The key was that any where Eck went, everyone was always able to DPS and it was just easier for me to control him. I need to think more and step up more and stop relying on people to hand feed me this shit.

One last thing, if any of you have watched Hachoo's fantastic multiboxing heroic videos, I have to say that sometimes I find the strategy revolves around "my shaman crew are fucking awesome." And that is a valid strategy. But, no one really needs help when they're geared. They need help when they're in shitty 78 blues and just starting out and need a strategic edge. That being said, I completely love his strategy 90% of the time.

A few other points of interest today:

• I moved my mage and lock to other accounts. My A-team is now a DK tank, Hunter/lock, ele shaman, mage, priest. They are bringing in the emblems as fast as I can spend them and I'm having a much easier time with every piece I get. The DPS has broken in to the 2.5k to 3.3k range overall, which just makes a monstrous difference.
• I was not healing correctly with my priest. I now have a macro sequence that throws up shield, renew, and PoM. Starting every fight with this combo on my MT and redoing it during battle has probably doubled my success rate. It's stupid how little of my priest I was using before and probably still am. I had no idea how much PoM would help AoE healing in general. Probably because I'm a moron.
• It is insane how much better you can play a character solo vs boxing. I was DPSing w/ my DK on a target dummy and put up, I'm not exaggerating, 1.5k more DPS actually playing vs my macro. Now, my macro probably sucks balls, I haven't worked on it in ages and it's not what I use for tanking. But still. That's ridiculous.
• I know I've bitched before about Hunters but I'm throwing one more thing in. When Eck, or any other boss, charges my team, my hunter is the only one who can't carry on doing what he does best. I remember vaguely that they lessened the range needed for using bows/etc. but still.. a mob can be right up in the grills of my casters and they don't care.. they keep on blasting. But my hunter starts swinging his polearm. Weak. Maybe I should macro a disengage button... is that the one that makes him jump like 20 yards backward?

Here's a CoS kill shot, just because I remembered to take one.

Too many strands in the old duder's head

I have 9 80s on one side, across 5 accounts, and I'm having a hard time settling on what the fuck to do with them. And I have to settle. At 80, these guys are only as good as their gear and I have to stick to a few of them and gear them out or they'll never succeed at anything. Here is a short list of my options as I see them:

• Spread them out across 9 accounts (i.e. get 4 more) and start to raid 10-man content. This was always the goal but here are a few reasons I might not do this yet. Unless I'm actually ready to raid, it's a waste of $60 a month (assuming the purchase of the game and expansions will happen at some point in the future). And I don't think I'm ready to raid. I'm just not good enough. I can't survive basic heroics like UK. It's all my healing. Once I figure out how to tighten that up, I will be fine.
• Leave my MT and my main healer on 2 separate accounts and move everyone else to the other 3. One of the toughest things about bringing up this new crew is having an ungeared healer and tank. If I take them out of the equation and always use geared guys in those slots, the dps can rotate in and out and get geared fairly easily. The drawback is that only the 3 dps will be getting that vertical improvement of stepping into heroics and ToC where every piece is a huge upgrade. On the plus side, with the new badge system I will be able to hopefully OP my MT/healer, even if none of the drops are relevant to them.
• Make one team of 5 and stick with it. Move 1 or 2 toons around to make the ideal 5-man, don't worry about the other 20 guys, don't worry about 10-man stuff, just try to OP one perfect 5-man team. Who would this be? My DK tank, priest healer, ele shaman, and 2 more ranged. I have a balance druid, mage, lock, and hunter. Am I missing anyone? Don't think so but I am tired. The hunter is nice b/c so much gear drops that really only he'll be able to use. The lock can DE and the mage has all the portals/food/etc. The druid would be nice because, again, he could take so many different drops for specs and off-specs and in the end, druids are fun as hell to play. It'd be nice to have a geared druid for solo'ing.
• Shut fight club down and move my favorite toons to my main account. Go back to pug'ing and just building up single guys at a time. I miss pug'ing. I miss the focus you can put in to one toon. I love making 1k gold for 5 toons doing about 30min of dailies though. Toss up!

I suppose what I should really do is put all the dps on the 3 accounts, start with my "ideal" team, and rotate in other guys for fun or when the old guard get too geared and aren't benefiting any more. At the end of that process, I would have a seriously geared crew to move across other accounts for raiding should I still want to.

I'm sorry, I know this is dreadfully boring shit but I need to see it all on paper to decide wtf to do. Right now I feel like I'm spread too thin in WoW. I even logged in with the C-team because I'd kill to just have 4 shaman right now. And the C-team has 2 at 65, plus another at 51 that could join them with a bit of leveling. I need to focus.

Alright, game time. What will I do... moving toons around costs money and I don't feel like doing that until I really need to. Right now, one account only has melee 80s which makes it tough to have an ideal team since neither are my MT. I need to move 1 ranged guy to that account. The others will be my MT, priest, boomkin/shaman, hunter, .... I got it. I need to move my mage to my hunter's account and my lock to my pally/rogue account. Done and done.

The final team will look like this, by account:

DK tank

Priest healer

DPS 1 - Hunter/Mage

DPS 2 - Boomkin/Shaman

DPS 3 - Rogue/Lock

I have already set my pally up to be my PVP toon so that works out fine if he never gets in the rotation. Although I could move him to my DK's account and set him up as MT... FUCK, what is wrong with me? Lesson learned, though. Keep accounts separate by their "role". Keeping an MT account is easier than having MT, DPS, and Healz on each, imo.

Blizzcon

I watched Blizzcon with my friend on DirectTV this time. I've been there in the past and I certainly would have loved to swing by one of the days, but the telecast was a pretty fantastic way to enjoy it, pause it, get some food, go see District 9, come back and watch it, etc.

After the Con, I bought the Diablo Battlechest and started playing Diablo 1 again. My friend and I are going to blast through 1, 2, and LOD real quick, just so we can even follow the fucking questions that were asked at the dev panel. Also, I realized I need to get my shit straight with WoW's lore. I'm sick of just not being in the loop with these freaky dragons and elementals and the history of the world. I actually got stuck in Warcraft 3 (might have been in frozen throne) but I need to go back and L2P. I'm sick of not being excited when Metzen mentions some obscure badass that everyone else gets jazzed about.

Speaking of which, if you had taken a shot of vodka every time a Blizzard employee said the phrase "geeked out", you would be dead.

But my favorite quote of the Con came from my friend while he was waiting at the airport to head home. There were apparently quite a few attendees in the terminal with him. "This one guy went by and the earth shook as if Stiches were near." I miss Stiches murdering noobs in Darkshore.

I took the old guard and the hunter from the B-team through ToC today. It was a pain but I got 3 epics to put on (at a bit of a cost in repairs). I should have regular ToC on farm but I don't. It's my healing. I use a priest healer and I just can't take care of my shit when things get rough. Also, on a side note, I sort of hate ToC. I'm going to take the crews through some heroics and just go back to get the badges.

The Update

The B-team hit 80!! Aaaaaand I immediately stepped in to ToC. Aaaaannnd I immediately got exploded. Just a few moments in the rogue's poison cloud and my druid fell over and didn't get up. I ported to Og and dropped maybe 500g on tanking-out my MT a bit. I went back in with my brother as the healer and dropped the champions twice. But that whore Paletress wiped us until I was too bored and frustrated to try again.

So, I'm busy making sets of gear for everyone to at least get them in the ballpark of 80 instances. I leveled them entirely in AV, so they have no gear and no money. Just honor. I checked all their DPS on the dummies in Og and they were not as bad as I would have thought. The range was 1200-1600. The hunter was the weak link.

Some random thoughts:

Pallys are fucking fun as hell in pvp. I would let my entire team die and just play my pally and easily hold down towers, graveyards, whatever... Amazing pvp toons. He's def specc'd, by the way, with a few of the resilience plate 78 pieces on.

Druids have to pay maybe 5x as much as anyone else to get their talents and skills. I sent everyone off with around 300g to get their level 80 spells (it'd been a while since I'd gone back to a trainer) and the druid might have ended up needing 1k more. It was just amazing.

Hunters having to pay for ammo (these saronite arrows are going for 15-20g a thousand on the Kilrogg Horde AH) seems a little like bullshit to me. I know, it's probably old hat for hunters, but why does one class have to pay a few gold a battle just to be in the same range (I think on the low side, actually) as all the other DPS classes? Slightly bizarre to me.

What the fuck is up with epic level gear repair bills? It goes from like 20g for 80 blues to 60+ for a handful of epics in there. Really? Raiders are the ones who need to be forced to do dailies and farm mats to pay for their repairs when they already have all the pots, enchants, foods, scrolls, what have you, that drain their weekly funds? I get the whole 'take gold out of the system' aspect to WoW, but this seems like misplaced overkill to me.

Are pallys hard as hell to heal as tanks? A pally that out-geared my main DK was impossible to keep up with chain healing in heroic ToC. He wasn't def capped but he was at 533 with 27k health. I just don't get why he was so much harder to heal than my guy though he had generally better gear.

If you're a hunter and you're leveling in AV, your pet won't level with you. At all, as far as I can tell.

I have an 80 of every class. I'm not an expert on any of them but from a casual standpoint, there is absolutely no balance to them. Between what they cost, how hard they are to get similar results, their utility, how hard it is to gear them... There is no equality.

Trial of Champions, SM in 1 min, xp in bgs, holy shit, batman

The ToC 5 man dungeon:

I switched all my follow macros to the form:

/focus MAIN

/follow focus

and now following works in vehicle (and mounted) combat. Thanks to the Dual-Boxing forums for that, of course. Assist button remained the same (just /assist main) and I moved all of my keys and bindings off the main toolbar so that I didn't have any weird bindings show up when the mounted bar swapped in. I haven't been able to kill the last champion or so in the mounted portion of ToC but I'm also 4-boxing it and think with this post, I should be fine. I was already doing something similar but this really makes sense.

I brought in my brother and collected maybe 5 epics already for the team? All ilvl 200, so heroic stuff (on normal mode) but still, I love the color purple and I love new gear. The nice thing about getting epics of any level is that I don't hesitate to gem and enchant the fuck out of them. So the net benefit to the group is much greater than just the piece itself.

SM in 1 min:

Diwa over at DB posted a 1 pull 1-min SM clear that I love. I've done SM a few times to boost the teams up (my horde main has 57 Mograine kills according to the armory, 86 on my alliance main) but always in 3 pulls and in probably 7 min. I know, I know, amateur night, but still, since you can't do it more than 5 times an hour, I didn't really care. But this is just lovely and I want to save it here.

XP in BGs:

Again, scouring the DB forums, AV is giving people 130k xp per win? Holy shit. I don't know what I'm getting now, to be honest. I've been questing hard and in familiar areas (just blasted through dragonblight again) so it's probably a pretty decent rate. And I get gold, items, rep, and variety. But AV won't have drop quests, travel time, and matches can go fairly quickly. Do I get the rep for killing people? For turn ins? I need to find out more.

Update: Well, I read up a bit on the official forums and it looks like the xp is from victories and dropping mobs like Belinda (you whore). I'm going to give it a whirl but 4-boxing AV a few weekends ago sucked balls. The lag, the split-group, the fact that I was probably one of the reasons we lost... And I'm horde. We always lose. To be honest, if the 71-80 bracket is the same way, consistently losing every match, I may just use this for my alliance team on AV weekends.

Ideally, I would do the easiest quests in an area (wanted posters, arena chains, etc), do an instance here and there, and do a few AVs to keep me out of having to grind out so many drop quests. We'll see today how it goes.

Last but not least, you'd totally hit this, right?