scarypants

What to do hey? While waiting for Cat to hit, when I should be doing dailies and becoming rich, I'm leveling my Death Knight named Scarypants. She's currently at 71. I created this toon way back in April 2009 as something to play on the work laptop while I was working overseas for a few weeks and left her at 62 in Zangamarsh. So it's taken me a couple of weeks of very casual play to get her to 71, just questing and teaming up with the shammies for an occasional instance. It's tempting to level through BGs to 80 now as I did with my lock, the downside of that is rep loss so I've decided to level properly and last night got the Toured the Fjord achievement. It's amazing, at level 71 this death knight hits like a truck and has incredible survivability, I'm able to take on level 71 elites with little issue, very nice indeed. Being able to fly for only 500g has had a huge impact on leveling speed.
I'm running the Blood DK diseaseless, in some cobalt tanking gear and quest rewards and am finding that mobs are dying very quickly (much faster than my tankadin). Even after 11 solid levels I'm still getting used to the playstyle and rotation. With some help I've come up with this set of macros:

"tank0"
/cast dark command
/click MultiBarRightButton1
/click MultiBarRightButton2

"tank1"
/castsequence reset=combat blood boil, heart strike, death strike, heart strike
/cast Rune Strike

"tank2"
/cast Rune Strike

They're a work in progress and have just noticed that I have Rune Strike twice lol, I was experimenting a bit last night and having the Rune Strike in the tank1 macro seemed to work better. Any comments are welcome, the macro is ok but still not quite there due I think to my lack of DK knowledge.

Yawn - hurry up Cataclysm!!!!

It's a bit cbf at the moment. I log in, do the headless horseman, logout. Everytime I select a random dungeon it isn't random, seem to always get ToC - ughhhh. I really hate that place, gimmciky vehicle encounters just leave me cold. So I just leave the instance and logout. Last night was different however, I decided to visit some old content :) and went to Shadow Labs, what fun lol, killed murmur in less than a few seconds on heroic. What a difference 10 levels and good gear makes in these 70 instances, it's like being on a sight seeing tour. I remember years ago wiping again and again here and getting really frustrated. After that I went to Sethhek Halls and lo and behold there was Anzu - oohhhh! Looks like he's farmable without a druid now for the mount. After some quick research it appears that the drop rate has been increased significantly, which would explain why I've seen so many of the Raven Lord mounts strutting around Dal lately. Only bit of news macro wise is that I'm using the AoE macro on the pally all the time now, it holds aggro better.

macros updated for 4.0

I've updated the macros I use in the macro section with the addition of the shammy dps macros. Posted here as well :)

for single target

/cast elemental mastery
/cast blood fury
/castsequence [@targettarget, harm] [] reset=combat Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Earth Shock, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
/cast Lava Burst

 for AOE, subbed some chain lightning in to match the Pally AOE macr

/cast elemental mastery
/cast blood fury
/castsequence [@targettarget, harm] [] reset=combat Flame Shock, Chain Lightning,Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Earth Shock, Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
/cast Lava Burst

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