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?

The Wall

I burn out so quickly in WoW. I may be back at that wall again. My one team is at 80 and, as is the case for everyone, a whole new grind presents itself ahead of me. Why is it a grind and not just the fun of playing the game? Well, it is. But I've seen all the dungeons now. I've been to all the areas. No, not Naxx yet, but I'm trying, I'm trying. I don't feel like leveling up any of the lower teams today (or this last week, for that matter) either.

But, I don't think it's a long term slump. I'm looking at these ill spots to move to in the RL, and have become mildly obsessed with work again (in a good way, i.e. by choice), but when you're multiboxing, I think you might be quicker to pull the plug on 5 accounts where you might leave 1 account active for months after you've moved on to other entertainments.

I took up inscription and jewelcrafting on my MT, am 3 days from getting team 80 their epic weapons from the argent tournament, and got my first arena points last week. Oh, that might have had something to do with it... arena was a real quick in the balls. And the teeth. And the wallet. A lot of kicks landed. My teammate and I charged out and SPAGHETT!... we were spooked.

Pics and actual content to come. I'm going to post my current boxing-friendly daily quest route for icewind next. Hope you're having a blast.

The C-team RISES!

ooooooh snap! I brought out the c-team today. I guess I'm just an alt-junky. Yesterday, I gave some love to the 80s and finished off a good chunk of Icecrown. I haven't touched the b-team for a few days. I just don't feel like doing the beginning of Northrend again so soon. And this game is all about having fun so I don't sweat it: I just wander off and do whatever strikes me as entertaining at the time.

So, I got the c-team (DK tank, Resto Shaman, Ele Shaman, Frost Mage, and BM Hunter) together. Their armor was entirely red which reminded me that I'd quit playing them because they'd failed so completely and miserably against Nazan (I think). But I fixed them, started questing, and quickly discovered that, like all my teams, this one is fucking good. By the end of the day, they ranged between 62-64, cleared Slave Pens, and were rolling through Underbog before I realized I was about to burn my ragu (which is such a sick recipe.. like an epic drop of a fucking ragu recipe).

I was looking over my 10-man team. I want to get the c-team up to 70 so I can really take a perfect team to 80 (I'm not sure the b-team is perfect.. I might sub out a mage for a shaman or a hunter for a balance druid). After that, I'd guess in a few weeks, I will have 8-10 80s and will really have to put my money where my mouth is. Should I just keep a nimble team of 5 and group up with a pug for 10-man content or should I bite the bullet, get 5 more accounts, and see where this demon lies?

I think we all know how this is going to end.