Grimmtooth’s Troops

For a while now I’ve been running around dual specced, with Shadow as my alternate. For grinding it doesn’t actually make a big difference and in fact my old Disc Hybrid spec was in many ways more durable. The problem was, that spec was tweaked for survivability and soloing, and I really needed to step up my healing game. Thus, the full-on Disc spec I sport today when I go in for raiding, and shadow spec for soloing.

I have to be honest - I didn’t like Shadow spec at all when I tried it around level 50. Even then, Holy/Disc hybrid seemed to carry a lot more oomph, have less down time, and have a higher survival rate. So I adopted that new (home-grown, I proudly add) spec fully, and pretty much sailed through content from then on.

Still, I am well aware of many successful shadow priests out there, so I did some research. What I came up with appeared to be a viable DPS build. The beauty of this build and Disc is that both share a lot of attributes between them in terms of what gear is good. Right now, I’m focused on Spell Power because it’s rare that I’ll run out of mana during the run of the mill fight anyway. Both like Crit, too - crit heals or crit DPS, we like it all. The down side is that +hit gear is not of any use to the Disc build, and usually takes away from what I need to keep up the healz.

I figured out a rotation, a solo rotation, set up my keys, and proceeded to play around. Still, it was unlikely I’d raid in this spec. Heals are what I do, generally.

Until last night.

Two heroics - UK and UP - gave me insight into my damage potential as a shadow priest, and I am rather impressed with the numbers. There was me, an ungeared DK, and a Naxx geared boomkin. The boomkin was head and shoulders above everyone in DPS, but I came in second with 1650-ish numbers, better than either Grimm or Flora can post right now. And there were misses a-plenty.

Of course, you have to account for the fact that I’m rocking Naxx epics all over the place here. Grimm and Flora have seen Heroics and that’s about it.

We have a fledgling priest in the guild that intends to go full on Shadow for raiding. I whispered him after our runs to let him know what kind of numbers we’re seeing and he was happy. So we’ll see how that works out. It would be nice to have an SP next to me, especially if we can get him to dual spec Disc as well.

And possibly in a future Naxx-25, I’ll slip into shadow form and we’ll tank Raz together.

A few days back, I was coming out of the alliance pavillion at the tournemant grounds and, thanks to camera angle, noticed an odd little detail.

Here, I’ll show you.

No, you’re not mistaken. It’s a clothespin, but only on the Ironforge banner.

Here’s a closer view.

I checked a few out. Turns out it was the same way no matter where I went on the tournement grounds.

I then flew to Shadowmoon Valley to view the banners there, and , well, no clothespins. What I did find was fringe.

Believe it or not, Ironforge itself is more difficult - the devices are all engraved or embossed or otherwise part of the stonework. Except these just outside the keep. And there’s the fringe again.

So what is going on with the fringe?  Why are they hiding it in Northrend, but not in Outland or Azeroth proper? I am no expert on things Heraldic, but from what little I know … that means something.

I googled a bit and found nothing of interest. Yes, they spotted it on the PTR discussions over at MMO Champion, but they didn’t make the connection between old and new and thus missed the fringe aspect.  There was a topic over at the WoW official forums, but it’s just a mention (I had to look at the cached version).

Very odd.

My first tier of WoW blogs - that is, the ones I initially started reading before they lead me to others - included one hunter (BRK), two warlocks (Megs @ OOM and Hydra @ Almost Evil), and one Orc Warrior - Ratshag @ Need More Rage.

Today is Ratters’ birthday, according to the voices on Twitter (who would never mislead me, right?).  He is a witty, talented fellow that is a joy to read no matter the color of his skin or the length of his tusks. These four bloggers  (and ex-bloggers) are my main inspirations for blogging of life on Azeroth, with Ratters bearing a large chunk of the blame for the decision to give each member of the ‘clan’ an equal chance to speak as needed. When I find myself turning into a grumpy old dwarf, I look back at these people to remind me that I started blogging because I was having fun and excited about playing.

And so, know that when I wish you the best of birthdays, good Orc, it is from the heart and with the greatest of admiration and respect. May your nipple chains get yanked for many years to come. And that Maiden business? Old news.

/toast

Remember when I said that one of our Heroic Naxx boss encounters demonstrated that the priest healer (me) needed to work harder or something? And that homework might be required?

I was right. Just not the way I expected.

So, we were taking on Grand Widow Faerlina. In 10 man, when she enrages, you drag one of the adds over and kill it, which clears her enrage. We were doing this. We were dragging them over, and killing them. And yet she stayed enraged.

Those of you that have cleared Naxx-25 are already laughing and pointing.  I know.

Yes, folks … in 25-man, the priest has to MC the add and cast Widows’s Embrace. The one and only priest in this 25-man raid was, in fact, sweating her butt off trying to keep the tank veritcal.

You may laugh now.

On the other hand … we did get the achievement Heroic: Momma Said Knock You Out. Booyah.

Let this be a lesson: always do your homework, and don’t assume a Heroic is just an amped-up version of the normal mode. I should know this by now.

/facepalm

Our GM pointed out that the uber leet DPS druid and warlock pugs that we had didn’t bother to point this out, either, but just left after the sixth or so wipe.   Of course, it’s possible they didn’t realize it. I’ve seen plenty of DPS that just gloss over details not relevant to pew pew pew. And I know that when Meta fires up Grimm or Flora these days, he’s usually confused on some fights because he’s only seen them through my eyes.

Well, that which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

Wait, what?

This weekend we attempted our first ever 25-man Naxx, with two other guilds by our side.  I think everyone is still walking around in a daze.

All that talk of “25 man is easier than 10 man” must not come from tanks and healers, I can tell you that. It illustrates just how different 25-man healing is in comparison. In the usual 10-man, I’d have my healing assignment, but I usually had leeway to toss a shield here and there, or get the frisbee in action, or whatever. About the only time I didn’t have to was for the obvious cases, such as keeping my half of the tanking team up on Patchwerk (even then, I would toss a shield to the poor shammy’s tank when I could).

But when you are MT healer on a 25 man … that’s it. You best focus, or things go down like a wet cardboard box in a hurricane.

Now, I say this, but in the end we could walk out with our heads held high. On our very first foray into Naxx, we stalled on the first boss. On our first Heroic foray … we downed two bosses. Loot was distributed, and achievements were garnered.

But, we have become enlightened as to the true reality of 25-man raiding. The tanks need to get tougher, and the healers need to be better and more focused.

We may return to 10-man raiding for a while to gear up some more before trying this again.

As Ratters might say … so now we knows.

It’s wonderful¹  that a week after you write up a post about how wonderful your guild is and how proud you are at the accomplishment of your guildmates … a couple of divas screw it all up.

Coming off a successful run, we were plodding through Naxx a bit slower this week, nowhere where we wanted to be, and stalling in odd places. Spider wing went smartly, but Gothik gave us fits.

We picked up Saturday, and one-shot Gothik, 4 horsies, Noth, Heigan, Loatheb, and Patchwerk. I had noticed that our off-tank was getting a little happy with chain pulls but figured somebody in charge was dealing with it.

We started on Grobbulus and the OT got aggro on the boss. The MT … stepped aside. “Well if you want to MT, then MT.”  The OT basically says “I don’t need this shit” and DCs. Then the MT leaves the raid and logs.

Leaving two healers and six DPS locked up in a room with one very angry … thing.  With a hypo where his hand should be.²

So this one’s for you, my passive-agressive tanking pals: GROW THE FRAK UP.

Thank you.

1. In some alternate universe [↩]
2. Afterword: Sunday we downed everything up to K’T. Same MT, different OT. No further comment. [↩]

When Grimm started raiding on behalf of the clan back at Kara, and later Flora as well, each boss was a stepping stone to the next, but each was a long, difficult learning curve. I recall clearly the excitement over the guild-first kill of Attumen. They avoided Moroes like the plague, and repeatedly bashed up against the solid wall that is Maiden. Oz was surprisingly straightforward but Romulo and Julianne gave them fits. And Curator … :: shudder :: … Grimm took to the ale hard and Flora invented whole new obscenities to mutter.

Overall, it took several months from our first boss kill to a full clear, which was just before they nerfed everything.  I may have seen one or two forays into Kara before that all fell apart, but overall that was the place where our senior members shone.

Good times.

Things fell apart then, as some guildies felt that the rest of the guild was holding up their forward progress - i.e. not levelling like a fiend - and our numbers teetered on the verge of never raiding again. We perservered. After all, there were Heroics to do and gear to obtain. The GL worked like a coal miner to keep new blood coming in as others broke loose. Old faces returned - and sometimes wandered off again.

But, finally, we got critical mass. At least enough people to where we only had one or two holes to fill from allied guilds. And in we went, just a few weeks ago.We made our first attempt at our first Naxx boss, after wiping on trash en route. We wiped on the bosses, too, of course.

Shortly thereafter, we read up on strategies, and took him down. We one-shotted the next boss and wiped on Meaxxna.

A week or two later, we were fully clearing that wing with occasional wipes, and moving on to other other bosses. Military wing was our next one, and for a while Razz was our bane. One or two tries later, we got him. We stalled on Gothik until we got the balance right, then we ran full tilt into Four Horsemen and hit a brick wall. Ow.

Eventually we got that down. The last two attempts have been like silk. Meanwhile, Plague Wing awaited. One-shotted everything up to the end boss (yes, Heigan was one-shot, even if we only had three standing in the end). We sailed through Construct with a couple of stutters, but within three weeks’ time we went from stalled on Horsemen to staring at Thadd - and we one-shot him.

It took us a couple of weeks to get a handle on Sapph - and it’s still rocky - but two weeks ago we took our first shot at Kel’Thuzad.  Less than a month had passed from when we first stalled on the Horsemen.

This week we set foot into the necropolis, facing a fresh instance. We took out Anub’Rekan before the second plague swarm. We rolled over Feralina before the 3rd enrage. Maexxna went “wtf, dudes?!”  Razz saw us coming and tried to hide. Gothik teleported twice. The horsemen didn’t get the zerg treatment, but I had 20K mana left¹ .  Noth, Heigan, and Gluth all fell before our wrath. And that was the first night.

The second night, Patchwerk, Gluth, and Grobbulus were all one-shots, but Thadd delayed his fate a little due to some bad jumps. But he did go down.  Sapph gave us trouble due to bad luck on the ice blocks, but went down in two or three tries.

That left us with two days to work on the big guy - normally it takes us three days to get here, but this time we had some good vibes kicking in.

Kel’Thuzad has left the building. Feet first.

It took us several tries, but we got him. Phases 2 and 3 really strike me as serious healer fights - if the healers stumble, you lose people. One of our members suggested to me that I save Pennance for those ice blocks, rather than hope for a lucky proc on flash heal, and that really seemed to turn the tide.²

Full clear, three days, two to three months after we started trying in earnest. I am so happy for our guild and especially our GL who has had to endure drama, drama, and more drama along the way.  Seriously, I don’t know why she didn’t snap, disband the guild, and retire on a beach near Zul’Gurub - it’s not like anyone visits there.

Malygos, then Ulduar, are on the horizon. We be small, but we be vicious: beware the vorpal bunnies!

1. ”Nerf MP5!” [↩]
2. So: Disc priests, save Pennance and (if not on CD) PW: S (with glyph).  Personally, I go straight for Pennance as it is most likely to be available. [↩]

Warning: the following is an attempt at humor. Temerity Jane is a real person, and I did not make up her boyfriend on a dare. The internet, however, is fictional.

Aye, there’s been a kerfluffle in the Paladin-verse. If you’re not familiar with the story, WoW Insider has a good overview.

Even after the sniffing, interviewing, and research, there are still conflicting data points. Ferraro’s own “meh culpa” obfuscates more than it clarifies, WoW Insider’s IP snooping is less than comprehensive, and none of the alleged other perps have spoken up.

What, then, is going on here?

Well, I think we’re far from exhausting all the possibilities, so let me list a few that may or may not have come up so far. Print this out, and as each is eliminated, line it out. When all is said and done, you’ll have it narrowed down to one or two possibilities.

1. One person, bad lying. The most elegant theory.
2. One person, multiple personalities. Also fits the facts. In fact, Ms Townsend could be one of those personalities. I used to live with a gal that had MPD, and the differences between personalities are striking. One didn’t smoke, the rest did. One wore contacts, the rest wore glasses. I wish I was joking but it’s a real possibility.
3. Multiple persons, just as “she” said. Only one which ever visited WoW Insider, I guess.
4. She is the Dread Pirate Roberts. There will be no surviors!
5. Jagoex. “She” said “other WoW blogs.” ¹ Where better to hide than in plain sight? And traffic spikes? Well, let’s consider that WoW Insider links usually kill sites dead, and leave it at that. Also, both blogs are on Blogspot. You know how unusual that is?  Wait. What?
6. Sarah Townsend.  We’re totally through the looking glass now, peeps.
7. I’m Spartacus. No, really, it was me. The subterfuge is just too much to bear any more.  I’m also Matticus, Ratshag, and Temerity Jane. That last one is the hardest. I’ve never been able to make Phil as believable as I wanted to. I originally wanted to make him like Phil in Night Court but that caused flashbacks.

Well, as Jong said (post pulled, sorry), “lol@ Ferraro”. Content stealing is such an un-paladinish thing to do.

But it might work for “Death Knight Shmeath Knight”.

Which does not appear to be live yet.

1. ”We run other WoW blogs, as well.” - from the initial bullet list in her “meh culpa”. [↩]

On twitter, a mage friend was musing how she’ll often Ice Block if she knows a particular person is right behind her on the aggro table, especially if she just pulled aggro. She claims that she doesn’t have it in her to play a warlock. I think this illustrates that she does, in fact, have it in her.

She just needs to go back to that special place, the groove she was in when she was “handing off aggro”.

It’s The Zone.

Just what is The Zone? Jong expresses it pretty well HERE and later HERE. Apparently a Belf Ret Pally’s happy place involves flipping out. In that regard, we have much in common. That happy place is The Zone.

In our case, for a moment, we let go of everything that keeps our seething hatred of everything in check. We let that hatred flow out through our fingers as pure rivulets of pain and suffering and broken dreams. For a brief moment, we are not the base flesh that we regard in the mirror, but rather we are beings of pure shadow or fire or agony. We become these things, and we visit them upon our enemies. That is The Zone.

Consider the ending of Return of the Jedi. Palpatine was clearly a Warlock. When he starts to fry Luke’s innards, his teeth are clenched in a grimace of pure hatred, and that lightning might as well have been coming out of his eyes.

He was in the Zone. That is the Warlock’s special place. When you’re wondering where your DPS went, invite Palpatine to help out, and it will all come back to you.

I am led to understand that the basic ennui of being a Shadow priest fuels DPS in a similar way. They have The Zone, too.

Find the Zone. Live in the Zone. BE the Zone.

Meta was going through the archives changing categories and sorting old posts out a bit and came across this entry, when my life attained new purpose and meaning.

The irony is as thick as that fog in Northrend, for the K2 Tankadin I mentioned is now our main raiding tank - and he prefers me healing him in raids. He probably has no idea the part that he played in the resulting circumstances.

And actually - I don’t think he actually killed his priest after all, though I haven’t seen him around.

… almost. So close. But we just ran out of time.

Our final two Construct bosses went down last night, Gluth on what was our third try (our first for the night), then one-shot Thadd FTW.

I didn’t think we stood a chance with Sapphiron, but on our 2nd or 3rd try, the old fella went down.

Then that left the Big Bad himself. We got one good shot in, got to Phase 3, and our second try failed on phase 1. At that point the early workers had to go to bed, so we broke up the raid.

But - what a week! Going into this week, we had at best taken down 5 bosses in Naxx.

Now we work on perfecting it and getting that final clear done.

/fallover

We’ve certainly been a busy little guild. When last I spoke of such things, we had completed the Arachnid Quarter, and were one boss short of the Military Quarter.

Saturday, we crash against the wall of the Four Horsemen, again and again. Part of the problem is that I was calling the switches, and I think I was off. Eventually our two tanks took ownership of the process and we downed our first one, then the second, and moved to the back, and Oh MAI GAWD we’re gonna … WE DID IT!  Despite one of the warlocks in the back insisting that we move on because we’d never be able to do it. ¹

Sunday, we find ourselves outside the entrance to the Plague Quarter. First up is Noth, and with decent DPS we brought him down before it got crazy.

Then came Heigan.

You have heard of the dance. I’ve read up on the dance and watched the videos. The one person in the raid that had done this extensively took 10 minutes to explain the fight, did a good job.

Of course, we were doomed. The first dance saw five out of nine (yes we were nine-manning at this point) fall victim to the dance. Left standing: the MT, myself, a healing Shammi, and a Survival Hunter² . We set about proving that Heigan could be taken down by such a crew … and we did.  A good 10 to 15 minutes later, we stood victorious. To commemorate this, the GM insisted that the four of us stand before the corpse while everyone else lie on the ground before us.  Clever idea.

All righty then, Loatheb! Nine-manned! Two-shot!  /flex   OK, is this a “healer fight” or a “DPS” fight? The two biggest obstacles to overcome here were (1) getting the healing timing down to fit into that 3-second window, and (2) remembering to toss some dots and use my wand during the downtime in between.

The GM is on fire now, so we’re charging hard into Construct Quarter, still nine-manning it. We decide that Patchwerk isn’t going to work on a nine-man configuration, so we get a former guildy to step in to the vacant slot³ .  No training vids now - the raid has outpaced my expectations⁴. We’re taking this one cold, with some instruction from our druid. After one wipe, he shifts to HoT assist mode and we are able to keep the tanks up.

Hey, look, it’s frogger!  OK, I expected a lot more pain here, to be honest. People have problems with this?  I can see lag playing a factor, but that aside, dying on this should be hard to live down.

Grobbulus! We two-shot this one as well but I really think we need to learn more about this boss to make it go smoother, such as how to dump one’s poison bomb, and so on.  In the end we were all dead, but so was he, and we were able to loot, so we’ll take it.

We ended the evening getting omgpwned by Gluth, with the realization that we needed to read up a bit on this one and Thaddeus.

But what a night … five guild-first kills in our Naxx progression. It’s nights like this that make all the drama bearable.

Oh, and this final screenshot serves two purposes.

1) Hey lookies, I haz epic rug now!

2) Fuubar was commenting on his ugly UI. I offer this as evidence that it could be a lot worse. As Grimm told him:

It is the TRUE reason that bin Laden is still in hiding.

It is what actually made Romney drop out of the presidential race.

Someone at Chrysler tried using it, and see what happened there.

McG used it on his WoW account.

Christian Bale saw it.

Seriously, my UI has been weaponized. Classified. Probably going to fight the Taliban.

To which I’ll add: and we totally took down Heigan with it.

Tonight: can we finish Construct? Will Sapph be Our Little Dragon? Will K’T get revenge for Bigglesworth’s untimely demise?

1. This is what we get for looking the other way while he pegs 25s - he starts thinking everything should be easy. /sigh. Can’t have a run without drama, can we?  At least nobody quit the guild, though our MT left the raid until the GM called him out and made him come back (good on her). [↩]
2. Our MT conjectures that we were probably the only ones to watch the vids as instructed. A good guess, I think. [↩]
3. we later found out that the DPS warrior he replaced had gone offline because the police raided a house on his block, and they killed power to the whole block [↩]
4. I’m in charge of finding and posting training materials on the guild site [↩]

It’s nice to report no (overt) drama for a change.

We raided Sarth + 0D on Tuesday, and did an all-guild run on Naxx Arachnid wing tonight. There were a couple of wipes while everyone found the game faces, but we cleared the wing in a reasonable amount of time. I’m concerned that I can’t seem to keep up with the damage from Maexxna during the final 30%, but I’m also fairly certain there’s a trick to it eventually.

Nothing of interest dropped.

After, we hit up Heroic VH for three or four achievements (including “Defenseless” which is pretty cool).  Again, nothing of interest dropped, though a few marginal items that I might be able to enchant / gem up did.

Finally, I taught my GL how to joust.  I record these instructions for anyone interested. It’s spammy, but “I ain’t proud, y’all.”

1. Mount up¹ .
2. Get your shield up to 3 and let the cooldown process out.
3. Get behind your opponent, then open the dialog and start the fight. He will go away from you to the center of the ring.
4. Spam “Charge” (3) until you charge.
5. At the end of the charge (you will go right past your opponent) jump-spin and start spamming ‘2′ (”Shield breaker”). If possible get more than 1 of these off, but get at least 1.
6. Spam ‘1′ (Thrust) and ‘4′ (shield) as your opponent closes and engages
7. Eventually your opponent will go away to get room for a charge. Start spamming “Charge” again
8. Rinse, repeat, win.

The key is to get his sheld down fast. Charge removes 1 rank of shield, as does sheild breaker.  You want YOURS as high as possible.

And that’s it.

Night.

1. Shadow priests, drop shadow form first. [↩]

Elune preserve us, sometimes I wonder how we survive as a guild.

Yesterday evening started innocently enough - our GM and 3 other guildies got invited by a larger guild to 25-man Naxx. Our main palli tank was invited as well. I was, but declined as I had food to attend to.

About an hour in, our Palli tank starts dropping alts out of the guild. It isn’t until the next day that we found out that the inviting guild membership was harrasing him in /tells about how he sucked as a tank.  By the way, he doesn’t. The fight that was the problem was Gothik, who is plainly speaking a DPS race. If DPS sucks - not the tanks - you fail.

To add to that stress, the people ramaining (who had no idea our MT was being  trash talked) started getting hell about rolling on loot with the rest of the host guild. Maybe I’m a traditionalist, but if I attend your raid and contribute to downing bosses, I expect to get paid, and that means I roll on loot, including Tier drops.

Coming off of that day, we were looking at our boss #5 - Gothik. Now, TankSpot’s tutorial has Gothik as the #10 in raid progression for Naxx/10. We got Pwned by this guy a couple of times this past week, so I was expecting a wipefest and more /gquits to ensue.

Imagine my surprise when we two-shot him.

Our GM calmly moved one DPs from live to dead side, moved me from dead to live, and all was well.

So now we’re working 4 Horsies, our MT hasn’t left us, is possibly feeling mollified and vindicated, and we made some new friends from another (not the same as above) guild. Whether 4 horsies go down or not, I call it a win for the week.

Last week we pulled off our guild-first clear of the Spider Wing at Naxx. It was horrific and went as long as your typical Kara run.

Tuesday we did VoA (stalled on Emilon, no surprise) and cleard Sarth + 0D in a fairly business-like manner.

Tonight we cleared the Spider wing with only one wipe. Everyone did their jobs, there was very little confusion even though we had a new OT, and one DPS had never run it before. We one-shot Anub’Rekhan and Maexxna, 2-shot Grand Widow Faerlina due to the OT’s unfamiliarity - but he listened and learned quickly. Last week’s OT was running his ‘lock, which is probably a good idea. Total time in Spider wing: 90 minutes.

We then went on to two-shot Instructor Razuvious - another guild first - and did a couple of wipes on Gothik the Harvester before calling it a night.

For a bigger, more organized, popular guild, this would be pretty lame. For us, with all our difficulties, this is gold. Everyone did great work, had confidence in our leadership, and was once again on board with the idea of learning fights rather than relying on gimmicks. Last week’s clear had a lot to do with it. We entered that instance with the knowledge that we knew the fights and had proven ourselves in the past. What a difference that seems to have made.

I even got a new off-hand out of it.

Yeah, I’m pretty happy right now.