Freitag, 4. September 2009

Who need PuGs when there are friends around?

Again a month has passed since my last post but I have been busy. My wife and my druid hit 80 and we started to farm the heroic instances and are quiet geared by now (thanks to the new emblems, how I love thee :-D).

First I was tank/healer with dual-spec and my wife was DPSing with her shadowpriest. But one day we had quite a few problems with the first boss in Gun'Drak and I asked her to heal. We barely killed Sla'Dran but since then my wife is discipline by heart. Now we find groups fast and I respecced to tank/dps (cat^^).

But most of the time, we hang out with the same people and our friend-lists grew up fast. We hardly use the LFG channel and fill the missing spots with our friends. Even some goblins think social behavior is some kind of waste I think we save something more precious: time and fun!

When we had to search some randoms it took us time. Some of them were bad and so we lost time in the instance, too. Some had great gear and tried to finish the instance in 5 minutes. Those created stress and were less fun.
But now we ask a few friends, the answers come quick and we know they know their business. This makes the runs fun and fast. Sometimes we push their alts because they need a bit gear, sometimes they push us with their Ulduargear. But always it is fun and nothing can beat this.

You can make a lot of money but why when you don't want to spend it? ;-)

Dienstag, 28. Juli 2009

RL interferes with blogging

Sorry, RL kept me again from blogging (if anyone read this at all *G*). But now I have some time so get it on!


My wife started playing again because she does not want to loose her character. So she decided to book a month and we got our druid/priest group to 76. We also did a few instances (Drak'Tharon, Violett hold and An'kahet) for the quests and some loot. Despite my wife wanted to heal in first place she decided to do some DPS because she wanted to learn the instances. But my druid is a tank/healer and so we had no problems to find groups fast.

I also searched for some videos on youtube to show her the instances before and give her some hints. An'kahet was a different story because we went in without preperation but it did not matter much. She did fine and her DPS was well over 1.1k! As a lvl74-76 without experience in instances or the knowledge of timers and FCFS! I will never understand how someone manage to do less than 1k at lvl80. *sigh*

Anyhow: Drak'tharon went smooth with me tanking and some random druid healing. As always druids got bored because I tend to pull carefully (not slowly, I love to use my rage instead of wasting it). But we had a warrior and a warlock who would ALWAYS use a different target, even charging or dotting a caster outside my swipe range. To bad they never died but I guess they did not learned their lesson.

Violett hold was a different story. Again a druid was healing (lvl73 and dinged 74 in the instance) but we had a lvl76 DK and a lvl77 (dinged 78) mage as DPS. And those two would ALWAYS start with some kind of AoE before the mob was visible. I had a hard time fighting against their threat and the mage had to iceblock a couple of times. First boss was easy (the core hound) but the next portal bugged and it took a while until we could proceed (at least we could!). Second boss was the void walker but the DK did a great job killing the sentries and he went down fast. My wife was doing 1.4k DPS on the bosses with her random rotation and I was quite impressed. Of course the endboss was no challenge and went down really fast.

After that the group wanted to play another instance and my wife agreed. So we entered An'kahet but the DK hat a disconnect and would not join the whole instance. We did not search for a replacement and finished the instance with four people. Again, my wife did a great job in silencing various casters and switching between AoE (more than 3 foes) or single target mode without any further advice. I did some nice pulling, never adding a second group and the mage lay down some serious DPS, this time with more focus or waiting a few seconds before he would start AoE. He iceblocked once at the second boss and I could hold aggro much better.

The final boss of An'kahet, the herold, was the one who made me a bit nervous. I wiped a few times in the past because no one could kill the tree (healer) and we would die in the insanity phase. Plus my wife is very inexperienced in PvP so I gave her the advice to survive with shield, renew and fear until we could help her.

The first insanity went fast because I used my berserk to kill three images at once and my wife survived without a scratch. The second phase was a bit harder because I had no berserk ready but she managed to kill 2 images before we could help her! I was impressed :-D After this we were 98% percent and did two quests to level up. Now we quest in Sholozar bassin but I am curious when we will hit 77.

Why? Because when we quested yesterday my brother asked me to join a BWL retro raid. I convinced my wife ("We can level tomorrow, today I will show you how I spend my time before I met you") and we went on.

First we had to do some UBRS for the attunement. Then we entered BWL (both time we had some trouble with too many instances) and the first boss bugged a bit because when he died the waves would spawn again. We killed Vael with a few adds (loosing 5 out of 7 due to BA, only my wife and I survived the explosions) and the supression room was quite annoying to her (moving sloooowwwwllllyyy and the knockback from lashlayer was frustrating, too). They pulled the first dragon when I was in the kitchen to get some drink and our healer was sneaking to the first boss because "I want my sword!" (he won the the untamed blade but was outside of the instance when all the rolls had passed). Because of this my wife died, not knowing what to do and the elemental shaman could hardly keep the tank alive.

We went fast through the instance but it was very chaotic. When we arrived at chromaggus our tank went for a smoke. We cleared some trash without him but waited a few minutes doing nothing. Because my brother would not let tank me I declared my wife and I would have some espresso.

When we came back, the fight was ongoing. My brother knew two people were afk but he had pulled regardless. The fight went chaotic with the debuffs getting higher and higher until my wife got transformed into a drakonoid. I never had seen this and somehow we wiped a few moments after this. When we run back, I noticed her still being transformed and confused what has happend so I asked her to quit the game ("Does not work" Me: "ALT- F4".. maybe I was not very kind but I feared this would not work) and now she was really pissed. When she entered the game again, she wrote some sentences in /p (because she does not know that only I could read it in a raid. My bad :-( ) and left the group.

By now she is still angry because she wanted to play a nice game and it ended in chaos with no fun for her. I wonder when (if?) she will play again :-(

To get some icing on the cake I got yelled because I did not explain enough etcetc and ingame my brother bugged me because she had left without a single word (I told him she did in /p because I forgot to tell her to post in /ra but now HE bugged me for not explaining enough ...). So I had some "fun", too and all because I wanted to show my wife a nice old instance .... *crap*

cheers,
chaoskas

Donnerstag, 9. Juli 2009

Skill > Gear

A few days ago my brother started to play WoW again (his girlfriend has convinced him to play a bit) and decided to level his paladin alt. He made 12 lvls in two or three days and is 68 by now which I think is very imperessive. But the story I wish to share happend when he was 66.

I saw him online and asked to do some heroics. But he wanted to do Utgarde Keep normal with his paladin and so I logged onto my Deathknight (Blood Tank dual spec), ready to be healed by him. His girlfriend joined us on her hunter but it took awful long to find two DPS (in fact I rode from Borean Thundra to Utgarde Keep and found none!). We just wanted to quit the experiment when I found a paladin tank (respec to DPS again *g*) who asked a lvl76 to help us with the missing DPS.

So we entered the instance with a lvl 70 tank and a lvl 66 healer (mostly clad in sholomance or stratholme gear). We made it to the second boss without any wipes or death because my brother had no problem to keep everyone alive. I saw lvl 70 paladins with some kara gear do worse than him!

The second boss forced him to log onto another alt of him because both guys would one-shot him (we killed one and got the other down to 20% until we died). If they would use the normal aggro list we would have killed them easily. At this point, his gear was not enough to let him survive. But his skill was enough to get us to the second boss in first place. And this is something to remember!

It is always skill > gear. But sometimes a minimum of gear is required ... :-)

BTW the scrolls from the last post haven't sold yet. So I am sitting on a ~100g loss when I expected a ~400g win. Stupidity at its finest :-D

Cheers,
chaoskas

Montag, 6. Juli 2009

Stupidity at work

I did not play a lot last week (again, my wife would disagree) but yesterday I did make a very stupid mistake. Listen to me and don't do it on your own:

When I checked my gold-addon it told me I had about 20k to spend. But with serveral things to buy (gear and mount for my death knight and my rogue) I thought the safety margin was too low and I had to make some money. And I proceeded to make money like I was used to do two month before....

NEVER EVER DO THIS! I made a couple of stoneguard bands (worth ~17g each) and disenchanted them. But I did not check the prices and so the average profit of a single band was 15g! A net loss of 2g per band. How stupid!!

To cut my losses I made a few scrolls from the last stack of dust so I may end up with a minor win but next time I will check this in advance. I promise ... :-)

I also bought a few stacks of saronite ore to prospect them and get some gems. 100 ore and only two scarlet rubys (no other blue gems!). *sigh* At least this will result in 50% profit. You have to be lucky if you are stupid :-)

cheers,
chaoskas

Montag, 29. Juni 2009

Dual-spec is good

In my last post, I mentioned my AH Buisness. This is how I finance my alts, their epic flying mounts and all professions blizzard created. I hardly farm mats, I buy them. And when dual-spec hit the puplic realm, of course I bought it for my "main" charakters (priest, paladin and warrior). By now I have seven charakters with dual-spec and when I play the others, they will get it,too. So you could see: I am a BIG fan of dualspec.

Why? Because I am able to swap spec when needed and have all the glyphs ready. Here is a little story of it:
Friday I wanted to go Ulduar 10 with some old friends but a few guys decided to do other things and so all my planning has been futile. I logged onto my rogue and saw a Deathknight searching for one more DPS for Nexus. So I thought: It may not be Ulduar but my warrior could use the belt for his DPS- Set. Of course I got an invite (or I would not share the story) and got portet right after.

Great! We had a mage, a hunter and a disc priest for healing. The tanking DK had a lot of tempered saronite and was wielding the arena axe. *gulp* Somehow he sportet 30k HP but I guess his avoid was abmyssal. The mage was decent and the hunter was well equipt... well, at least for the end of TBC. *narf* He was wearing his "early-BT" raid epics, even when there are so much better crafted pieces around. The healer had medicore equip, no enchants but definitly knew his buisness.

We started the instance and slowly made our way down to the frozen boss. The mage aoe'd even single targets ("I have lag, I hardly could do anything beside aoe."), the tank was trying to get himself killed (but the healer prevented it) and the hunter did not a single misdirection but keept shooting the wrong (read: not tanked) target. At least he used his feign death quick. Myself was fiddeling with the buttons, pushing randoms skills and still topped the charts (afterwards I checked rawr and I was close to the calculated DPS so I guess I did something right). We killed the frozen boss after some time and procceded to the next boss.

And here drama begins:
The trash was taken down and the tank charged the boss. Everything went smooth until the first transition. Noone went after the blue lady and I ended up tanking her. It seemed as if they wanted the achievement but when I finally got the blue girl down I was the last one alive. We entered the instance and repeated the fight. In every single aspect ... including the wipe ... *sigh*
On the third try I asked for a killorder and suggested to kill blue first. The others agreed and 4 of us survived the transition. Too bad, our healer had died because the tank had switched to single target mode...
Try #4 ended when the tank died because the healer had bad luck getting interrupted and he did not use a single cooldown. And now I was pissed.

I declared to tank the boss myself. The DK asked "Do you have more life than me???" Well, I did not because I gem for thread but my avoid is better. Although I did not make a sharp remark (like: "No but I have a brain") the mage whispered me ("Not more life, but more skill" .. he was happy after the boss because finally he could bomb without aggro issues).
First try was a wipe because I blew all my cooldowns in the first transition and in the second transition the healer had bad luck again. Second try the lady went down but I was a bit nervous.

The rest of the instance I keept tanking. We flew from boss to boss and did not wipe once again. At the endboss I got a bit nervous because the priest did not dispell the roots but I survived the enrage easily because I blew all my cooldowns.
When we tried to get out of the instance the DK took a wrong exit and got smashed, luckily he was to far away to get us into combat.

I did not get the belt (and in the run next day I was unlucky, too) but without Dual-spec the run would have been over at the second boss. So: CHEER FOR DUALSPEC! :)

cheers

chaoskas

Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2009

AH Business and a little suprise

Yesterday I logged in for some AH Business and maybe do some dailies with my hunter. The latter has some nice gear from the AH and fellow guildies thanks to the BoE Epics from Naxxramas and now tries to get some reputation items.

When I mean "AH business" I do the following steps:

  1. I log onto my mage,
  2. grab the daily jewelcrafting quest,
  3. empty my mailbox until I have only 5ish bagslots
  4. do the daily
  5. port to ironforge
  6. play the AH
  7. hearth to dalaraan (saves 10s for the Rune of Teleportation)
  8. return the daily and log off.

Only by doing this my mage got up to lvl73. Maybe I do the cooking and fishing dailies someday, too. Just because the reputation for the Kirin Tor and the Design: Runed Scarlet Ruby. ;-)

And because I am a JC with lots of Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Tokens I was happy when I read, that the epic gems are just to be introduced. The design's will be purchaseable whith the aforementioned tokens and the raw gems can produced by inspecting titanium ore. Too bad there was only one stack of titanium ore in the AH yesterday. But I think I will invest in this kind of field :-)

And the suprise yesterday? Well, I was not in the mood to do the dailies with my hunter and so I logged in with my warrior to do the daily fishing quest (to be honest I did not know what to do and I have this quest since weeks). And while I was fishing I saw a group for Utgarde pinnacle (heroic) which was "ready to go". After a few minutes of thinking and two more requests I applied and get an invitation.

But there were only four people in the group. Apparently the healer left just a minute ago (and went offline) and now the group was searching for a healer. *sigh* So I prepared to finish my daily, return it and "disconnect" right after. To my suprise they found a healer and two people were already on the move to get us ported (and none of them was the healer! Suprise #2).

Suprise #3 was the healer who was dressed in Naxx25/Ulduar drops and quite good. The other DPS was ... well, I thought it would be a joke. All three with the usual lvl74 blues and no enchants but atleast a few crafted epics now and then *sigh#2*.

We started and -Suprise#4- we steamrolled this place. The DPS was *great* for their equip (1.5 - 2.5k. I saw Naxx25 people do worse) and when someone (especially the mage) got aggro he would do something smart to survive. Skadi managed to kill the mage but the druid quickly brezzed him. It was a demonstration of teamplay and we completed the run in less than 30 minutes! And for some icing on the cake I got the Meteorite Whetstone. *yeah*

It showed me (again) that gear does not matter much when smart people are on the keyboard. I had a blast and I think the worst player in this group was me because I lost aggro sometimes. Well, that's why I love this game: once in a while you find four strangers and the fun you get from this is worth everytime you are trapped in a PuGfh.

cheers,

chaoskas

Dienstag, 16. Juni 2009

Breaking the silence

Well, I once decided to make this blog just to talk a bit about my hobby. The first stories went fast but then ... well, then RL hit me hard and I had the time to blog OR to play. I decided to do the later and almost forgot my password for the blog (Hail to the recovery!).

But I think, blogging maybe as funny as playing and it helps a lot to get rid of the bad mood after a bad PuGfh experience. At the official forums I found some "Hearthstone-stories" and i saw other people with the same needs. There are so many smart people but unfortunalty they are only a few against the hordes of the "un-skilled and learn-resistant". It's kind of sad.

Anyhow:
As mentioned before I played. And I played a lot. As my wife tends to say: I played too much (well, that's another story).

I leveled my warrior to 80 as prot and it was a blast. He tanked serveral heroics but somehow only when he is DPS he get the items he wants. And he never gets them easily. I went into Utgarde pinnacle 8 times for the sword, 9 times into Violett hold for the legs and 7 times into CoT4 for the shield (which never dropped but I got into a PuG which killed Saph+Kel and I was the only one who needed or wanted the Wall of Terror). *happydance*

Also my Hunter reached the levelcap and is now busy by leveling his pets (2/5 so far). I was Beastmaster by heart for 80 levels but when I switched to survival I never looked back (by now), Explosive Arrow is so much fun :-) I spend serveral thousand gold to get his equipment and to skill leatherworking but now I log in only for a daily or two to get some reputation. Well, my expectations for a fresh lvl80 are much higher than others I guess. ;-)

But now I am a bit unsure what to do. My wife quit playing and so my druid remains 73 and spends his time maxing his tradeskills. I leveled a couple of alts and even created a new shaman and gave him some heirloom items (those for shards, I don't have the emblems to get the "real" ones). The logical choice would be the rogue as I have quite a few lockboxes and I want to open them by myself (silly but that's me ;-) ). But it's quite boring with shadowstep and I didn't get the concept of mutilate by now (he is dualspec as 6 others, too ;-) ). Any suggestions what to try out?

Cheers
chaoskas