What happens when you don't research

World of Warcraft is a wonderful game, there are a lot of naysayers and wow bashers but I just can't help loving the game. I've levelled a hell of a lot of characters on multiple servers and am usually pretty up to date with patch notes and whatnot. I must say I missed something pretty significant, I'm not sure when it happened but it's mildly embarassing. Since when could we buy Tier 9 gear from that guy at the Argent Tourney? How could I have missed something so significant? There I was with 45 triumph badges and running around with blue shoulders that dropped from H Grundrak! I've been sitting in front of my wow screens bemoaning my low gear score, bemoaning my lack of oompah, looking at all my purples except for those damn shoulders!

You know how I found out? Was it through mmo-champion? was it through regular chats with my wow mates? nope. I found out by looking at someones armory page, someone posted something about something I can't even remember and they mentioned something like they'd never raided and I decided to check out their talents as I often do when it comes to pallys because obviously I have the best talent spec ;) and this was confirmed by looking at this guys talents, I mean what prot pally spends points in ret and doesn't aim for 3 points in crusade! MADNESS! you don't like 3% extra damage in general and another 3% on top against humaniods and whathaveyou? anyway that's just my totally justifiable opinion and it's my blog.

<-- you see that?

Well I digress, but after seeing his dismal choices in talents I noticed his achievements....not bad, not bad at all. I checked out his gear, some interesting choices, some very nice gear and .... WTF are those T9 shoulders doing there?

That's how I found out, which brings me to one of the major downsides to boxing, we boxers play in a vacuum. There's is no guild chat, no general chat, no advice, no-one saying "Hey did you hear about the guy who sells T9 gear for triumph badges?" but I now have T9 shoulders for the whole team and am looking forward to 3.3...tomorrow? And now for the upside, triumph badges from heroics and I can farm heroics all day whenever I choose or not choose, shouldn't take long and my team will look very spiffy indeed, gotta love the flaming shoulders on my shammies:)

Nice Drop!

I've been taking a break, occasionly doing dailies but certainly no instances. Well I was at the argent tourny turning in the dailies and thought to myself "lets do HToC, you never know the Peacekeeper Blade might drop". The thing with this blade is that it drops from Paeltras - one of the second bosses so it's no biggie to get to. I wander into the instance, finish the champions with 3 shammies dead (wasn't really paying attention lol). So I wiped on the champions because I pulled the rogue too close to my team so his blades cut everyone down, second run I got through them and there was nothing of interest in the cache so it got sharded. The second phase lo and behold it's Paeltras - woo hoo! So I down her and look in the cache..........Peacekeeper Blade, I nearly wet myself with joy and also a really nice shoulder upgrade for one of my shammies. Gotta say the blade is one of the funkiest looking weps I've seen in ages, it looks like some sort of chainsaw, I got my lock to wack +26 agility onto it and had to swap out my boots for the boots of heartfelt repentance as the new blade dropped my defense to 533. Doesn't matter, it looks awesome and I finally got the EPIC achievement :P

Heroic ToC

Well Heroic ToC is definitely a humbling experience, I don't think I've wiped so many times, ever. At the moment I'm up to 4 clears of this place and got the achievement for completing it but that was with an amazing amount of wipes on the Black Knight and I'm running out of gold for repairs so it looks like I need to do some dailies >.<. But, and this is a big but, this place is worth it, the drops are pretty amazing, so far I've managed to get a nice pair of mail shoulders and a scarlet kris for Withthose and a nice tanking ring for Aztrid. I received some other bits and pieces but they're not suited to tanking. I'm building up ret and holy sets of plate gear, you never know, it seems a shame to waste this gear on DEing and I might want to use it one day.

Strats:
Create 2 macros:
Macro 1
/focus aztrid
/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton1
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton2

Macro 2
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton4

and bind these next to each other, the first macro sets your focus onto the main toon, in this case Aztrid, it then assists the focus and then then clicks your mounts 1 and 2 button. So what's so great about this? Well my little padawans, when your main changes mounts the team will automatically refocus and assist the main and click the appropriate spell.

The second macro gets your shields up, you really want to be mashing these buttons one after the other.

Champions: Park your team all bunched together inside the star point on the floor opposite to where the mobs enter and get them off /follow. Get 3 shields up. With your main target a mob and hit the first macro button which will cast shield breaker and run back to your team, as the mob gets closer they will all be casting shield breaker and then automatically start hitting thrust when the mob is in melee range. Repeat till the 3 sets of 3 are complete, when you nearly finished with them make sure all your mounts are healthy, otherwise get a new mount. OK so the champions charge over, the strat is very similar to what you did with the first 3 waves but I find that having the main hang back a bit and cast shield breaker works really well. Your main then can just do shield breaker duty and keep trampling the dismounted mobs while the team is pummeling them. Works really well.

Drakes! WOOT!

The team have their drakes and yes they look magnificent lol. Each drake farming run went very smoothly except for the last one, I got cocky and thought I was so leet that nothing could even touch me in this instance (given that I rarely dropped below 80% health I can be forgiven for believing that lol), anyway back to the story, on the last run I park my shammies, totems out and pull Meathook, but I pull him too close to the shammies and somehow they all died, I wasn't watching them as it never occurred to me to look out for them as I've never had an issue with Meathook, I think this boss must have some sort of cleave, so they died and Meathook was at 5% maybe, he was nearly roasted anyway so I finished him off on the pally, rezzed the team, buffed up, drank and still managed to get the last drake with 1 minute to spare.....I guess I am pretty uber lol.

Culling of Stratholme - magma totem ftw!

Remember a few posts ago I detailed my utter failure in CoS? I went in again yesterday expecting another failure, well noone in the team even got below 80% health, amazing! Magma totems are the key here, I have on my standard set of totems 3 magma and 1 tow as I find that the magma are more useful in more situations that the other fire totems for their aoe damage. I just dropped those whenever and they ate up all those undead adds, very nice. I didn't do the instance in 20 minutes and so didn't get the achievement/drake because I let Arthas die a few times which ate up time but all the bosses were trivial. Next time (today) I know what to do so maybe I'll be drake farming soon :P

WoW Faction change service

Back in the day - pre bc, I remember creating my first character. Naturally I created a human male warrior and named him Talloch - may he rest in peace /cry. It never occurred to me to create a horde char, they were so damn fuggly! I was no good as a warrior and so created a female human mage named Ameggy - I was much better at maging so I reached level 60 reasonably quickly and became a GM of a really nice levelling guild but mages got hit with the nerf bat and became vending machines. I found it hard then to get groups, I became a bit of a server whore and jumped around a fair bit thinking that it was the game mechanics that were causing my fellow players to be such unwelcoming asshats, I finally landed on Tichondrius (pvp). One day a horde destro lock fell out of the sky and blew me away in around 3 seconds. I realised then that locks were where it was at and maybe it was time to checkout what horde was all about too, I was so sick and tired of Alliance, the constant mewling, cant find a group and losing at AV. BC came out a few weeks later so I stood in Ironforge completely naked and screamed 'Burn in HELL you Ally filth!' and rolled a BELF Lock two seconds later named Sminky - I chose Sminky so that it would strike terror in the hearts of all Alliance!!. I've never looked back and bemoan the wasted time on alliance. I played my lock for ages and still do even though I box now, I love it although I found that the name Sminky wasn't having the desired affect on alliance so I changed her name to Pheardotdead and truly became the terror of av with countless seeds of corruption and topping the damage chart time and again mwahahahahaha - very enjoyable.

I spent 2 years in the Alliance on different servers (5) and have spent approx the same time on horde on around 3 servers. Horde is a completely different culture, there's more cooperation, easier to find groups, more willing to trade, less judgemental, more helpful. There's just something about the faction that attracts more mature players, of course there are exceptions and being such a server whore I can name quite a few. Never on horde have I been in a group on the final boss and the healer shouts 'LEARN2PLAY' and logs, that kind of thing was not a rare occurance in alliance pre bc, with groups just exploding with teen testosterone. I don't know what ally is like now, but it only seems to be ally who I get rude gestures from and level 1 horde alts having a go at me for boxing. Horde just accept me.

Faction change? Only to bring Ameggy over to the dark side

Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle

A couple of days after my last post I entered Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle with trepidation, this instance has been a killer for me as I've never made it past the gauntlet. I did once on normal and then wiped on trash trying to shoot Skadi down. The big issue here was the constant movement and mana drain. This time I completed the instance - yay! So what was different? I don't think it was gear, although I am much better geared than on my last attempt, I think the major difference is the new totem sets. Now that you can drop an entire set of totems with one button you can drop them without even thinking about it. I had 3 magma + 1 ToW and that just burned through the ads with chain lightning. Awesome.

easy upgrades

How good is being able to get Conquest Badges in heroics? Awesome, simply awesome. I've managed to get loads of gear for the shammies and some nice upgrades for the pally. I noticed that over the last week or so that my Heroic Grundrak, Halls of Lightning, Draktharon Keep runs have been easy so I decided last night to try Violet Hold which I'd found quite difficult earlier this year and placed it in my "to be avoided" basket. I cleaned up, so how easy is that instance? amazingly easy, but I guess that's what happens when you totally outgear a place. It was funny getting the achievement for completing the instance x 5 in guild chat, one of my members said:
"achievement fest!!!!"

So, now maybe is the time to go take a look at Utgarde Pinnacle and Culling of Stratholme. I've always found these places difficult due to the movement required, UP kills on the gauntlet and CoS just drives me crazy with all the running around but I want those Drakes :)

In other news I resurrected my Warlock: Pheardotdead because of the AV xp boost and levelled her from 71 to 80 just in AV in just a few days lol. I rotated it into some badge runs and found I could easily 4 man my usual content so she got some nice upgrades but I've decided to shelve her for awhile until I get the last of the badge gear I need for the shammies.

serious instance burnout

>.< I went too far on the instance grind - burned out and couldn't face another boss so I decided to take a break and level up herbalism/inscription on one of my shammies named Shoez. I got really sidetracked and 7 days later he's 450 herbalism, 150 fishing, 170 inscription - it's been a lot of fun but after a week of picking flowers it's time to get back to team SPLAT.

Although I must say it has been interesting and while doing inscription you get to make this scroll that transports you back to Dalaran but doesn't work to well if you're over a certain level. Well Shoez is 80 and it's guaranteed not to work properly and I ended up is some parts of Azeroth I've never been to before. I even died once because I was teleported about a 100 feet in the air over the coast of Swamp of Sorrows - lucky for resurrection on Shaman.

Places teleported to so far:
STV twice - on the point in bay of BootyBay
Tarren Mill - in the field near the repair man
Swap of Sorrows - on the coast 100ft in the air
Crossroads twice

Some pics:

Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep

Well I decided after a short break farming HG that I'd go to Drak'Tharon Keep, there's a few nice items in there that I wouldn't mind for my team so off I went! Well, 3 hours, 6 wipes and 240g in repairs later lol I finally did it all.

Here's the team in front of the Prophet, he be dead :)

So! why did it take so long and prove to be so difficult? That second boss Novos the Summoner was a killer, I wiped 3 times because I thought that I could just burn her down. The adds were no issue at all. Finally on the fourth attempt I popped out 4 earth elementals and it was cake. For some reason she couldn't damage them too much and they lasted for ages while the shammies DPS'd her, the pally was just doing her nails and yawning.

The dino boss King Dred caused 3 wipes until I decided to use 3 staggered Tremor Totems for the fears so I had an anti-fear pulse once a second, he went down too easy. Well that was it! The first guy Trollgore was just a T&S where I got some nice boots and the last boss was a joke. All up I really rate this instance and will be back for more punishment.

Culling of Stratholme

I was running around dalaran on my pally just having a gander at everything and noticed these big stairs. I run up them have a look around and run up some more stairs and there's a portal to the Caverns of Time WOO HOO!! I loved those instances and hadn't been back because the journey took so long. Remember this is a box team created with RAF so they didn't have any rep to use the portal in world's end tavern in Shattrath, only my lock has that. So I think GREAT! and grab the team and off we go to CoS. Bad move, really really bad move.

my WoW rules
Rule number one: leave hubris at the door
Rule number two: read about the instance
New Rule number three: read what Arthas is saying to you, READ IT you DUMBASS

So completely ignoring my rule set I enter CoS, I do not listen to Arthas and stand there at the entrance with him for 10 minutes, why? Er wasn't this an escort quest? I /tap my toes he doesn't move, I /poke him he doesn't move. So I decide to run around and kill stuff all the while seeing there is some text displayed on my screen but can't really read it because I have xperl unit frames and have a frame right where the text is, but hey it's not important right? >.< Then there's messages in chat saying saying something about something at somewhere but I have no idea where that is. I get bored, very very bored and hearth.

I left the instance unhappy but then remembered that there was a 26g quest at the start that netted me 5x26g woo hoo! plus some greens to DE not bad, not bad at all. I then read up about CoS, and realised I'd just missed meathook - damnit. Oh well, I'll know next time.

Heroic Grundrak Down

this happened a few weeks ago but in wow time was only 3 days ago, I had to go to the UK for work (22 hours flytime >.<) and only got back 3 wow sessions ago, the day before the flight I attempted Heroic Grundrak and here we go - nice glove upgrade :)

multiboxer

there's a multiboxer addon for wow named multiboxer, I really like descriptive names for applications don't you? I didn't write this excellent mod and it looks like it's no longer maintained which was ok until the 3.1 patch came along and broke group invites, so I fixed it but since I'm not the owner and the owner isn't replying to my messages I'm hosting it the my files section. So if you need multiboxer v2 that works with wow 3.1, help yourself. I think there maybe 4 of us in total lol due to jamba taking over the world.

new kit

5 weeks ago my trusty gaming rig died, on a staurday morning no less >.<. I was all ready to start my first boxing heroic and this happened. Anyway in my area we don't really have pc component sellers so I checked out the 3 local pc shops. Needless to say they just didn't have a gaming rig lying around and yes I would have to get one built. Well $AU1600 later I ended up with a Q9550, 1tb drive, Gigabyte 250 video card etc etc. I was able to reuse my old ram. It's amazing the speed this thing flies at, silently too. I couldn't afford the i7 so this was it for me. My next purchase is a 60g SSD which should arrive within a week, the idea here is that I'll put the wow data directory on the SSD and nothing else, no other writes at all and with a seek of .2ms I'll be able to run around dalaran without lagging.....maybe....

sendmice

there's an opensource mouse utility (not written by me) that I've been playing around with that allows you to send mouse commands via a dos batch file like right click, left click at screen pos etc and then batch up the commands. The utility of this is amazing for multiboxers who control multiple screens. The problem with a lot of multiboxing applications for single machine boxers is that you can't replicate mouse commands on multiple windows, sendmice gets around that for predefined moves ie you have multiple mages and want to cast multiple blizzards. Well you could create a wow macro to centre the screen on each window and then hit the sendmice bat file to click each blizzard button/move to centre of each screen/cast blizzard. You can find it in the my files section of this blog, enjoy.

wow - I'd forgotten all about this blog while levelling

Best intentions are funny things aren't they? The road to hell and all that. Anyway there's been some huge changes in my boxing setup since the last post, in brief:
Those level 7 chars got to level 70 and I ditched all but the Paladin when RAF came out. I then used the Paly to powerlevel 4 Orc Shaman and the Paly/Shaman are my main team now. Last night I cleared Heroic Utgarde Keep on the first attempt. Not bad, not bad at all.