And I finally downloaded the patch last night and healed a heroic. My first impressions? BUBBLES!

And so it begins, my reign of terror returns in the form of bubbles, POM’s and Penances. Thank you blues, I will show you my appreciation by not letting anyone die, and last night I didn’t let it happen.

My lack of updates lately has been due to an ever increasing RL Aggro, thou I absolutely promise that I won’t be leaving indefinitely. I just need to set aside time to play again before I can start calling up some post ideas into play.

Quick side note: Two resto shammies and a disc priest are infinitely OP in Tol Borad, just saying. Trust you healers, they are never far behind.

We seemed to have a good raid comp, everyone was buffed to the teeth, and everyone had watched the video on Tankspot (this only known because of the amount of people who find Alienia a tad annoying) and the guild leader had a strategy.

What was causing the wipe? Me and my hunter buddy…..

About 15 times.

If you don’t know the Conclave of the Four Winds, it’s this simple; there are three Djinn (Nezir, Anshal and Rohash). They each have some mechanics to dance around along with some unavoidable damage. On a timer they recieve energy, when that energy tops out at 90 they each do an ultimate. You are suppose to rinse and repeat the rise to 90 energy twice and than burn down Rohash and Anshal, than you have a minute to kill Nezir before the other two ressurect.

The hunter and I were stacked with the job of running down Rohash as he needs no tank for the encounter, just someone on his platform doing damage. His abilites aren’t anything major; he does a 10k-12k ranged nature attack, he summons cyclones, his ultimate is a Malygos like vortex that drops you after it’s done slicing away approx 75% of you health from full, and the move to end all moves is a wind wall that he projects out of his arm and rotates clockwise about 120 degrees that when comes in contact with a player it pushes that player 200yds back.

We had most of mechanics down, except that wind wall. Predicting where Rohash is going to put it was becoming an issue. It is confirmed random, and there is a 2second delay from him starting to rotate and it actually going off, but the hunter and I, we just couldn’t judge it. As the night progressed we tried multiple strats to combat this stupid move. Half of our raid inducing wipes didnt even come from not paying attention, if all three cyclones are in the right spot you can’t even see Rohash spin. Good job on blocking sight Blizz. The successful dance came in the last four or five attempts, and boy let me tell you, after figuring that out it became a whole different game.

For Rohash’s platform we stacked for the first one on infront of the jet stream that takes you to the entrance, after the encounter started. I watched for Rohash’s arm to point out than called out whether or not to move. After the first wall we sat tight until the first ultimate. When the ultimate was done we devised that getting in close to him was doable because he had no cyclones out, so we would hug him and dance around him until he stopped than group back up and wait for it to come back. The pattern was one wall, an ultimate, two walls, an ultimate.

The hunter and I had taken that dance out of the problems, where did we get stuck next? Taking out Rohash and Anshal at the same time, or at a convienent time. And that’s where we are stuck, something we as a group will have to figure out on our own.

I was very proud of the work last night, and wish the best of luck to the group if they go in tonight, 2 bosses in one lockout would be awesome.

Good Effing Luck in Azeroth

I am an individual who doesn’t like change, at all. All this new Cataclysm stuff has me feeling uncomfortable, almost irritated at times trying to adjust. The last thing that always irks me once I reach level cap is my UI, but never fear, I have optimized my screen for healing, at least for now. It’s still a little uncomfortable, though it does what it suppose to for now.

I present:

What’s that?

The add-ons I use shouldn’t surprise anyone, but let me run down through them do give you an idea of why.

1. IceHUD

IceHUD is the most recent addition to my line up. It gives me clear and concise information about my health pool and remaining mana pool. Both of those are key in dungeon running and raiding as sometimes tunnel vision sets in and I forget to look at my own health bars, even within Healbot. So this “Heads Up Display” is exactly what I need to make sure I don’t die, and so I can watch my mana in realtime without looking for a character portrait.

2. Bartender

Bartender has got to be the add-on I’ve used the longest, it is almost part of my core UI package on all my characters now. The ability to stack all the needed buttons in a confined yet to easy to see space allows more viewing area of the screen. I was even able to place some damage dealing spells up under my IceHUD for questing/dailies which has been a huge help. The standard Blizzard button system has things spread too far out for my liking so Bartender is in!

3. Sexy Map

The standard Blizz UI as the most inconvenient map in existence.  It is out of the way, unmovable, and not scalable. Hence the need for SexyMap. As you can see it isn’t anything special, just a regular square with the time and some buttons on top. It fits nice and snug into my setup.

4. Prat

A simple chat add-on that allows a little more tweaking and customizing than what comes standard in the Blizz UI. I do enjoy the instant copy to clip bored of URLs and the fact I can move the type box where I feel like on the screen so it’s in eye shot when I’m typing quick in a Heroic or something of that nature.

5. Xperl

Xperl has been a bit of a demise for me, all the functionality I want in a player frames “ass”-on is there, but they are constantly plagued by bugs and glitches that cause headaches when I go to rely on them. The plus of having this unit frames add-on is my ability to move frames around my screen to make it easier on myself. In addition to having my own player frame on the bottom right hand corner, when I am in a raid the lower left hand block of black is where the raid frames appear.

6. Minimap Button Frame

I like neatness to an extent, and when it comes to having a plethora of buttons wrapping around my minimap frame I go bonkers. This little handy add-on places all map buttons I define into a neat little holder for quick and easy use, that stays out of my way.

7. Healbot

Here is the bread and butter of my healing efficiency. I am far from one of those crazy target healing types, and from what I’ve read it is almost needed to have a UI just for it, but there are a few rare players (like my GM) who can target heal near flawlessly. I’ve come to love Healbot for a number of reasons, mostly being how comfortable I am with it. There’s no real set-up with it either. I go in, set the spell I want to use with the click combo, and then I go raiding. My few qualms with it lie in the fact that it defaults to color “dispel magic” targets with the same shade of blue that shaman’s receive, so if a shammy needs magic dispelled from it I would occasionally miss it and watch the shaman fall over not knowing that it was preventable. I’ve always had a mindset to try something new, but with my constricted play times and my muscle memory not being that quick sometimes I haven’t tested anything else.

8. Recount

“post dmg meters plz?” NO! GTFO! This is a learning tool, a mistake fixer, and most of all a “Get yer ass in gear” tool. As you can see from the screenshot I have “Healing Done” showing as my chosen veiw. Not because I like to be on top of the healing meter and watching me climb is how I play the game. To identify if I need to up my performance or if I’m holding my own. Other screens I look at on here are; mana gained, interrupts, deaths and overhealing. The DPS and Damage Output to me are non-existent, and mostly used for the Raid Leader and the DPS who needs to learn whats wrong. The ability for all players to click on a given name in the frame and parse what spell percentages and output from each spell can be a game changer in discovering why someone is over/under performing. This reason is what makes Recount a “Tool”, that is all it is.

9.  Other Add-ons

Satrina’s Buff Frame: In the upper right-hand corner I have strayed from the Blizz Buff/Debuff UI and gone with this as it allows me to shrink the icons and make my debuffs in to timer bars under the buffs, allowing me a quick visual of when I’ll lose a debuff.

LootRollMover: This doesn’t show up unless I have loot screens up, but it allows me to move the roll for loot to another location on my screen. Very helpful when someone “combat loots” and the boxes don’t appear over my healbot anymore.

I’m always looking for advice on thing, maybe tips people have come across using these add-ons, or maybe you have an add-on I should look into (I know someone is going to trash my Healbot). I have pretty much gotten this thing tweaked for normal usage, but as any working world adult will tell you “There is always room for improvement”.

Just One More Thing……

Last night, <Revenged> got the dragon pair of Valiona andTherilon down after what seemed like 5 attempts. Gratz to them/us! Tonight we are going in for Conclave and maybe the welcoming party in Black Wing Descent. Wish us luck!

Good Luck in Azeroth User Interfaces!

02/02/2011 @ 19:24 EST Edited: Quoted because Zel made me realize something

Looking at mine and reading his, I think I would have somewhat double posted, so instead of being a parrot in a room of canaries I’ll just give his post some commentary (and attitude).

Disc healing is changing, for the better from what I parse from patch notes. The biggest changes mentioned are the buff to PW:Shield and the ability to stack grace on multiple targets.

The buff to the shield has been a long time coming. The giant scaling of health in this expansion as basically nullified any use of the bubble besides to give you back some mana due to rapture. Thus making the bubble a 12 second mana cooldown, that primarily saved for one target…the tank. This was good and everything, but it didn’t really assist with healing or mitigating any damage that was coming (“10k…har har har” says the raid boss as he mushes the tank for a 50k hit), and on top of it all it cost way too much mana per absorb.

The buff combines a bunch of good things, and really only has two points of madness to it. The easiest things to qualify as good are; more damage absorbed, a bigger heal to target if glyphed and not fearing too much if you prematurely throw it on a DPS and he stops taking damage. (It’ll be there if he needs it). The points of madness are thus; the amount of mana to use PW:S is being increased by 31% which I did expect to see coming from any buff to it as Blizz is trying to steer away from the “bubble-spam” healing model, and the other point is expect to see “A more powerful spell is already active” tied to targets that got a bubble when you had increased spellpower at the time of casting it.

The Grace buff/change kinda has me foiled a bit. I see this as a good thing overall, but for the life of me can’t recall when I had an issue with Grace not being on a target. It kinda nullifies it’s uniqueness, and makes it a bit of an expected thing on tanks now. (“Coagulater, you let Grace fall off the off-tank and that is why he died. Don’t let it happen again.”) First Priests get the smack of Lifegrip being taken as a tool so people can mess up, now Grace might become an expected tank buff that we must babysit multiple targets, like a DoT on a boss. This could got either way, my opinion on the matter, Grace one target….it’s not a game changer…..

I have small hopes that the patch drop tomorrow, mostly being that my chances of raiding are high tomorrow and getting opportunity to test the new and improved Disco spec out would be something I wouldn’t miss for the world. Plus with a little begging maybe I can get Gurhulk to to get some WoL parsing going…..just for some base data.

Off to make RL Gold tonight.

Good Luck in Azeroth Bubbles

The BA Shared Topic this week is: What makes an encounter click? It was submitted by Naithin who hails from Fun In Games.

So let’s get to it

I have the “click” from two perspectives, one more than the other, but both with enough time to tell you that between a healer and DPS they appear different.

As a DPS, there is usually a wall that forms for you.  Each attempt on a boss sees that wall get progressively further in relation to the boss’ health. Whether it be the ability to down an add quick enough, finally. Or there could be some mechanic that the DPS MUST cope with/handle, getting through that part starts to turn the adrenaline on. As a DPS, it comes full circle when you notice the boss is doing down, the other damage dealers are staying alive and the DPS charts look healthy near a choke point in an encounter. Boss dies. Encounter completed.

For the healers, it goes a bit different. Fluidity, all fluidity. From the first few seconds in the encounter you can tell whether you’ll be playing catch up the entire encounter or have everything under control. Boss encounters these days are riding in the 9 minute mark, and as a healer, everything is time dependent when it comes to making things click. Are my cool downs being remembered? Am I sweating over tank health? Are the DPS staying out of bad? These are the questions that are always flowing through a healer’s head, and if at anytime one of the questions is answered “no” then the rhythm falls and than you worry whether you’ll have time to get caught back up. The “click” can happen anywhere, in the first 10 seconds or when the boss is at 5%, your healing UI will look like a mixer in a recording studio. Up, down, up, down, all the way up, down and then down a little. Never once in that recording studio of healing will you ever think that the music will die, and that my friends is when it clicks for healers.

To sum It All Up

It just happens, I’ve gone face smashing against many encounters that I thought we’d never get down. Than one night, you go in, and *BOOM* the boss is on the floor 5-10 minutes later and you have no recollection of how it happened. You just feel it clicked.

That’s all I got for now.

Good Luck in Azeroth Clicking

A Rise in Views

So I noticed quite a rise on a Friday for blog views, more abnormal than usual. As any blogger would have done I investigated what could be the reason behind this. Zelmaru over at Murloc Parliament linked me under “Guildies Who Blog”. Why in world would I be under under that classification? Let me tell you……

Eff the Ineffable

Because I’m a friendly socialite I saw the invitation to roll on a server with some bloggers that I keep up on almost everyday. So far I have a level 7 warrior named Cambot (MST3K Reference…..Nerds) that hasnt done much other than inflate the number of critters killed. I have met some interesting people in there, and everyone is very nice and has an opinion on everything. I definitely will make sure I visit when I can, I am the self-proclaimed cheerleader of guild.

Guild Morale

So upon finding a fun place to interact with those whom I don’t get to play with everyday I have had some new sparked interest in maybe pushing some morale in Revenged. Our raiding progression hasn’t been the best of  days this expansion (1/12), so I’m searching out fun things for us to do as a way of building confidence in each other…and have fun. Gnome races, scavenger hunts, fishing tourneys, anything as a way of promoting guild entertainment.  If anyone has any ideas I’d greatly appreciate them.

In all the commotion

I have been able to get Coagulater’s Tailoring up to 520, and his Alchemy is at 525 so I’m pretty happy. On a trading contract with Gurhulk for his cloth so he doesnt use it for bandages. Grrrrrr First Aid!!!

That is all for now! I’ll try to whip some posts up in-case work aggro succumbs me once more and I don’t have time to write full posts.

Good Luck in Azeroth!

Once in awhile I catch something from the threads that makes me giggle a bit, and then there are the helpful images or placement images for boss strats. Good stuff. The most recent thing actually front paged on MMO Champion and so I thought I should share it with all my awesome readers. Without anymore wait, here it is…..

Flowcharts and I have always had a loving relationship, their intended teaching purposes coupled with the sarcasm of a 90′s hipster always have drawn me in. This one is a well-defined chart, giving complete directions with little wording. I can’t read, this do me gud.

Nothing much else to say, I have a ton of ideas posted out in a saved email so be expecting some fun posts in the coming weeks.

Good Luck in Azeroth Flowcharts.

With the simplest of materials I can make nice shirts for my friends, with rarities from around Azeroth I can sew and stitch epic wares for the masses. I’m a master of a thread and needle that employs all his knowledge of being seamstress into producing fine wares from fine raw materials.

What could ever make me want to cry about such a glorious profession so much? The Black Embersilk Gown….

“But why would Coagulater cry over such a puny item that isn’t even of epic quality?” you ask. Well folks, I’m about to tell you why….

First: The pattern for said dress cost 8 Embersilk Bolts to buy. 8……eight…..EIGHT! Well holy paladins Blizzard, at the same time that people leveling First Aid are causing me to have a spinal rupture over their frivolous use of cloth, YOU are making me spend waste 40 precious pieces of cloth to even buy patterns. Curse you Blizzard! That very notion is blasphemous, it’s even more preposterous that you make me spend 40 cloth on a COMMON dress….I mean gown, my apologies.

Second: You need to grind out to level 84 to even access the pattern, but it’s wearable by everyone! What in Thrall’s name is an NPC in what’s suppose to be the last zone in the game you level in, doing with a gown pattern that is common and has no level cap on it. Lorewise…this makes me puke, no high level person in their right mind would trudge all the way through a harsh land carrying a pattern for a dress that has no benefit other than to make you look like you are a 2nd degree burn victim. Yea, I went there….

Third: The mats are a little on the high end, let’s take a look: 8x Bolt of Embersilk Cloth is another 40 pieces of cloth that is a waste. Continuing on…8x Volatile Fire is okay, it isn’t that hard to farm up 60 of these in an hour or so, my anger about this isn’t as raging as everything else in this post. How else you going to make the gown appear to be a burn victim? 8x Eternium Thread was also expected, with the rising of skill points I expected the needed thread to go up. Whats the last thing needed? Oh yea, a Chaos Orb. Wait a second…..BLIZZARD! *smitesmitesmitesmitesmitearchangel* Are you serious? Lets do some math. Most, if not all, high end crafted gear use Chaos Orbs for creation. Crafted gear on my server is going for about 1k to almost 2.5k for obscure pieces. An AH check for the Black Embersilk Gown comes with nothing….NOTHING Blizzard. That isn’t to say that on a RP-Server the demand for this wouldn’t be insane, but I’m not on a RP-Server. What justifies making a high-end crafting mat required for a common unfashionable dress? Shrooms? Too much drinking? This gown should at least act as a fear making no mobs attack you, ever….just for cost of the Chaos Orb.

In conclusion, I know that I don’t have to worry about crying over it because I’m not forced to buy it. I just feel a little under-rated by Blizzard for putting such mockery into my profession. The Tailor’s Union will not be happy to hear about this if they aren’t already aware of the situation.

Good Luck in Azeroth Tailoring

Want it short and sweet?

The answer is yes, it was more than enough.

With the amount of content Blizzard threw at us in this expansion it was just a welcomed addition. The entire old world became new, except for a few ratty places.

A new secondary profession, all new quests in almost every zone, remapping the old world for flying. For god sake’s, they rebuilt the game basically. Boosting our level cap to 85 gave us time to level up and then experience the content at end game which there is plenty of for the casual person.

I dont have paragraphs on this cause I’m still discovering content, so bring more on!

That’s my take..

Good Luck in Azeroth!

I didn’t really do much in-game this weekend. Mostly farmed herbs and leveled Alchemy on Coagulater. This proffesion stuff isn’t a joke in Cataclysm, but the nerf is coming….and it is needed.

The slicing of herbs needed to make flasks is much called for. The allure of Wrath consumables when matched up to the materials to make them in comparison to Cata consumables and their materials is a no-brainer right now.

The time it takes to farm enough herbs for 2-4 hours of raiding is quite a bit much right now, and to those who don’t farm and get their flasks and pots from the AH are feeling the time=money correlation as herbalists and alchemists raise the price of Cata herbs and flasks respectively to points of being 250g per flask. Kinda ridiculous…

On top of the added cost and materials needed, Blizz stealthed in and took away the 2 Flasks per creation.  I also took note that in all the leveling I did this weekend there wasn’t one time I created more than 1 flask. I remember when I’d create an extra 2-4 almost every other time, what gives Blizz?

It’s almost like they are attempting to constrict the alchemist so not everyone is running around with +300 flasks attached to them….but if they wanted that, than why even have them in game?

One good point I did notice is that when creating Cata flasks I have the chance to learn Wrath stuff as if it is acting like “Northrend Alchemy Research” which good I guess from a ‘I want to know all the recipes’ standpoint.

There’s my alchemy grumble…..what’s yours?