Garfrost

It was pretty late last night and I really needed sleep but wanted to test out the macros I'd been working on and an instance situation. Using BindPad I bound my single target and aoe macros to buttons on my xkeys, then I created two identical dps macros on each shammy and bound both to the same keys as the pallys. The handy thing with /castsequence macros is that if two are the same they keep there place in the rotation even when called by a different keystroke so you can maintain the rotation, try it, you'll be surprised.

I chose to do Heroic PoS as Garfrost is pretty easy to get to.The trash packs went down far quicker than my expectations, the large skellies didn't even get  a chance to cast a fear. Garfrost himself went down after the first phase when it used to be after the second phase, gotta be happy with that, didn't notice any aggro issues when I remembered to use the aoe macro :P

An achieve I just had to have before the patch

There are loads of achieves, some really silly. But there's one that always appealed to me: Did somebody order a knuckle sandwich? pretty hilarious for a caster :P

4.0 and some lessons learned

It's been an eventful few weeks. 4.0 patch and the arrival of my second son. Hence I've had little time to even log into wow >.<. Although delightful as it is to have a new baby, it's also very stressful and since I neither drink nor smoke nor do drugs my only source of stress relief is kicking butt in wow :)

In those rare moments when I can actually sit down at the pc and read something for more than 3 seconds, I've found these posts to be the most informative for my tankadin as they are concise and without epeen:

4.0 Tankadin FAQ
4.0 Talent Spec & Glyph guide

Macro wise empty parms in castsequence are no longer supported so /click + /castsequence doesn't appear to be as alluring as it once was. I only switched to /click + /castsequence in the last year so it's not much of a drama for me. I've been spending time at the training dummy fine tuning new macros which are not so surprisingly similar to my pre click ones but are now called by /click

Pally:
maintankadin assures me that I need two rotations, one for single target and the other aoe. I've come up with a /click approach utilising a castsequence and direct casting of spells which appears to work very well (on the target dummies in org at any rate). It appears that /click and macros are able to not get stuck on a spell that's on cooldown when called from /cast or /click. They just fallthrough which is great for picking up procs like the tankadin instant AS.

My single target setup
this is the click macro
/click MultiBarLeftButton1
/click MultiBarLeftButton3
/click MultiBarLeftButton4
/click MultiBarLeftButton5

on MultiBarLeftButton1 I have this /castsequence macro
/startattack

/castsequence reset=combat Judgement, Crusader Strike, Shield of the Righteous, Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous

MultiBarLeftButton3 has Avenger's Shield
MultiBarLeftButton4 has Holy Wrath
MultiBarLeftButton5 has Consecration

For AOE the click macro is
/click MultiBarLeftButton2
/click MultiBarLeftButton3
/click MultiBarLeftButton4
/click MultiBarLeftButton5

On MultiBarLeftButton2 I have this macro
/startattack
/castsequence reset=combat Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Righteous, Hammer of the Righteous, Hammer of the Righteous

It's good to have Shield of the Righteous early on so that you get Holy Shield asap, otherwise you'll be too squishy:

that's it, so they both use the fall throughs and get all the procs. Nice.

Added a link to a blog I found the other day: Kate's adventures in multi-boxing. A really well written blog full of info, also means I never have to visit the dual boxing forums ever again and wade through all the epeen as Kate has distilled the good bits :P

Thanks Kate - you're a legend!

I'll talk about shammy macros when I get some time, I can hear the baby crying...Yawn.

Targeting

When WoTLK came out it brought with it a lot more gimmick encounters, I'm alluding here to vehicle based fights. Now I was always a proponent of targettarget based macros but the vehicle based encounters severely broke them because you could no longer target your brain and had to use a focus/assist based approach. Well I was in a hurry and since a focus/assist approach is so easy to setup I threw away all my targettarget macros and did a complete switch. This worked well and although I suffered a little with focus switching lag it was successful. Then something happened with wintersgrasp, I can't remember which patch it was but suddenly noone was the raid leader, it was all automatic which meant I couldn't ask the raid leader to move my team into 1 group, why is this important padawan? you can't focus on a player who isn't in your group. Arg. It's ok until one of your team dies because they remember who was focus before joining the raid, but after death focus is cleared. So what to do?
Back to targettarget with a caveat. I switched all my macros back to targettarget and had specific macros that used focus/assist just for vehicle based encounters. This is really working well and after running with a focus system for so long I'd forgotten just how snappy the target system is. So the lesson learned here is: there is no one best way of doing something. Which is probably a good lesson for anything.
 

solo for awhile

boxing is great!! isn't it! isn't it? meh. No, seriously, I like it, a lot, but I gotta say it gets a bit special here and there. Well the news is this: the shammies and pally are in great T9 gear with a piece of frost badge stuff too. Nice, I can blast through instances like nobodies business but really, so what.
Some history:
Why did I become a boxer, what was the defining pivotal moment? I'm glad you asked! Some two years ago I had my main Pheardotdead sitting in Shattrath, I was trying to get Kara attuned and only needed to get an Arc run. You know what? and I'm serious now, no BS whatsoever, it took 3 weeks. 3 friggin weeks to get an Arc run and when I finally did get one the pug was shite. But in the end after too many wipes I got what I needed and moved on, a week or so later I started boxing because I never ever ever wanted to wait that long for anything ever again. I levelled a team to 70 and then started another team and levelled them to 80 and I gotta say I've had a lot of fun but you know what, it's really quiet. I feel the need to get out and group.

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