Monday Morning Warcraft - The Return!

Monday Morning Warcraft is a weekly post that illustrates random thoughts and events that occurred over the weekend in the life of a wowhead. Feel free to e-mail me with questions, suggestions, hate mail, ect... mlange0385 at yahoo dot com

Morning blog lovers!

As you probably already know, I work nights, the graveyard shift. The reason for the shift is to deal with European operations. Now, when the entire UK is on vacation, I pretty much just sit on my ass and do ABSOLUTELY nothing.

You are probably thinking, wow, that's freaking awesome. Not really. Its rather boring. So what to do with all of this extra time??? While bring back Monday Morning Warcraft from its hibernation of course!

WTFspaghetti's 15 man choir - "Ceeeelebrate good times, CMON!" /dance

I feel that. Lets get this crackin...WTF style!

Alchemy, Cooking, Fishing and my Laziness

During my leveling up to 80 phase, about 4 months ago. I dinged 80 and had cooking and alchemy around 425ish. I did the cooking daily almost every day and I was always making exilirs and pots for guildies in raids.

However, I was too F'n lazy to actually level them up past the 425 marker. I am happy to say that I finally stopped being a noob and leveled both of my professions to 440. Hopefully it won't be another 3 months until I get around to leveling the last 10 points. I am pretty excited that I can now make the 4 main WotLK flasks. Before, I would always rock a battle and guardian exilir. However, this past week I found out that it is so much easier to just make one flask and I would be set for the entire raid time.

I am going to make an solid effort this week to level up my fishing to 400 so I can fish somewhere besides Org. Currently, my fishing skill is only 277. It is going to take ALOT of time and effort if I plan on getting my fishing level to 400 this week. In all reality, I highly doubt this will happen. Who knows though....its kinda possible =P

The Raiding Front

This was probably the worst raiding weekend our guild has had in awhile. I kinda knew it was going to happen due to the holiday, but it wasn't SO bad. We did clear Naxxramas 25 man in two days and 10 man Naxxramas in about 3 hours. We went into Malygos on Friday and got him to phase 3 with almost 5 minutes left!!

Tell me why we didn't kill him? Freaking unbelievable. After 3 times in a row of getting to phase 3 with just under 5 minutes left to kill him, I called it. Too much inexperience with that one.

As the guild leader, it is kinda hard to decide what exactly to say to your guilies when they failed. I don't want to come off mean or hateful with a 50 DKP MINUS! Then again, I don't want to say screw it, no big deal. I just said over vent that they really needed to slow down and concentrate on whats going on. Everyone's learning curve is different, just need practice and have more focus.

Not a terrible speech lol....I had to say something though. One of our officers has the worst luck in that place. He has never actually killed Malygos even though he has been there 4-5 times. Funny thing about it is that he actually knows what to do and executes properly...he just always seems to go with the most inexperience guildies.

I am an Elitist?

After reading over what I just said....I couldn't help but to notice what I am sounding like. Am I turning into an elitist? Lets investigate.

Wikipedia states:
term is often used to describe people as out of touch with the Average Joe. The implication is that the alleged elitist person or group thinks they are better than everyone else, and therefore put themselves before others. It could be seen as a synonym for snob.

Am I out of touch with the average joe? I would like to think that I am not, but hell, I might be. I try to find out the type of players / people that visit my site with polls and reading through comments. I think I have a good graps on it, but like I said....who really knows.

Do I think that I am better then everybody else in regards to WoW. No. However, I do get upset when things don't go right and we end up doing silly things. Like wiping on phase 3 in Malygos or wiping five times to the Instructor in heroic Naxxramas. Does that mean that I think I am better then everyone else? I think it does a little bit. I would be a liar if I said it didn't.

Take this into consideration. I stated earlier that

"this weekend was the worst weekend our guild has had in a long time"

I then went on to say that we cleared 25 man Naxxramas. If another blogger would have said that and I read it a few weeks ago. I would think to myself, PFT, silly elitist...always complaining about something.

Pretty wild how that transformation happens. What do you guys think about that whole situation? Do you think that I am an elitist? What about yourself? What kind of opinion do you have about yourself in regards to elitism in WoW?

That is pretty much it for today. The rumors are flying around the world (of warcraft) about patch 3.1 dropping this Tuesday. Make sure you finish downloading that 750mb patch before patch day. I bet downloading it on patch day is going to as fun as leveling my fishing from 277 to 400, lol =P

Woot to that. Until then people, I'm WTFout!

fo shizzle (RIP BRK)

Friday Food for Thought - First Ulduar Boss and you

Morning blog lovers!

TGIF!

Wooohooo. Unfortunately my weekend is filled with crap to do and I am going to have very little time to do anything wow related. I am pretty much a sad panda. That is ok though, hopefully my guild will clear heroic naxx without me leading it, only time will tell....

Uldaur? Udaur? Ulduar, there we go

That is right, the new raid instance is right around the corner, how exciting! I have been reading alot about this new place and its 14 bosses. Seems like Blizzard has decided to make the first boss in here a vehicle fight! I know, I know, your excited right?

/end sarcasm

Flame Leviathan is his name and he is a HUGE rebot that you don't actually tank, but kite around. There are three types of vehicles used in this encounter - motor bike, siege tankers, and siege catapults. In the 25 man version, you can only have a maximum of 5 of each.. That means that 10 people in the raid are going to have to be passengers on the sieges.

But have no fear, you have stuff to do as well.

Lets back track a little though. When the event begins, you actually have to go through a gauntlet. I think this is blizzards way of getting you used to the controls of your vehicle because unlike the Malygos fight, there isn't any sort of daily quest to get you "used" to the controls. This gauntlet is rather easy and should be a breeze due to the lack of raid damage that is going out.

This doesn't mean that you can't wipe, just means that you shouldn't =P

Item level issue with the vehicles

Lets make this clear. The higher item level gear you have, the stronger the vehicle is going to be. That does not mean that it goes off of any stats, just item level. Confused? ok...an example then.

You are a caster. You are a good little raider so you are hit capped. Once you get into your vehicle, it doesn't matter if you are hit capped or have zero hit. Your stats dont matter, only the item level of your gear. Still not 100% clear? Bring on another example!

You are a tank. You are a good little meat head, so you have 35-40k hp buffed. Once you get into your vehicle of choice, it didn't matter if you have 10k hp. Your stats don't matter, only the item level of your gear. 100% clear now? Fantastic!

Lets do some math and find out exactly what the difference is.

Me? do math? I am too lazy for that lol. Have no fear! Ferrante, a Death Knight in The Goon Squad on Kel'Thuzad did that math for us. Yay Ferrante! Lets see what he came up with.

Shirt, tabard, offhand, and ranged/relic slots do not affect vehicle scaling. This does mean an ilvl 226 1 hand weapon is better than an ilvl 213 2 hander.

Enchants and gems do not affect it either, it is based solely off item level. - An ilvl 200 blue is equivalent to an ilvl 187 epic.

Experimenting with other combos of blue/epic gear gave me reasonable confidence that a blue item is equivalent to an epic 13 levels lower. An empty slot is equivalent to an ilvl 0 epic this does mean equipping an ilvl 0 blue such as Insignia of the Scourge will be worse than having nothing at all in the slot.

Empirically, taking the average ilvl of your gear (subtract 13 for each blue, 26 for each green)and dividing by 15 (total number of applicable slots), then subtracting 170 will give you the percent increase of the health points of your vehicle compared to base - it cannot be decreased though (naked is a 0% increase).

Thus: All ilvl 200 epic gear => 200-170 => 30% increase in vehicle hp. All 226 would be a 56% increase,

I did some limited testing of vehicle damage:

Naked: 2148 average attack with 171 attacks Avg 213
Gear: 3038 average attack with 160 attacks 3038/2148 = 41.4% so that seems to be within the margin of error for the expected value of 43%

Confused? I'm not going to lie and say that I get all of it, but I get the idea.

So now, back to that big ass robot that drops our preciousshess.

The boss will attack one of the siege tankers for 30 seconds and then switch to another one. The moto bikes need to lay down tar which slows the boss down. The siege catapults are going to lite the tar on fire and the tankers are going to kite him through it.

And that is the boss fight in a nutshell. Of course there is a boat load of other things that are going on, but I am not going to get into that now. For a full strategy and a video of the encounter, check this site. Good stuff I tell yeah, only the best stuff for the readers of WTF lol.

So...like...what vehicle suites me best?

Great question. The answer is simple, I have no F'n clue lol. From reading the description and watching the strat, I kinda want to try out the moto bike one. Seems like my kinda of role lol. Try not die cuz of low hp, zoom in and out and drop black tar. Pew Pew when I get the chance, seems fun, but who really knows.

Getting catapulted on top of the boss also seems very entertaining. Nothing like a big ass cow flying through the air and landing on top of a giant robot.

What about you guys? Which siege vehicle would you like to try out?

Until then people, I'm WTFout!

Don't Hate the Playa

Morning blog lovers!

Yesterday I told you about how much time I had to sleep before work. How did it work out?

Yeah....I called off lol. I got a metric ton of sleep and I am SUPER refreshed for the day ahead of me.

The main reason for this post is to mention some new additions to my blog roll. To be on my blog roll, lets face it. They have to be unique, funny, or information, and they all have to be entertaining. I think that these 3 blogs fit the bill and I welcome them to my blog roll.

Without any further interuptions!

Skrooge - Skrooge is on the mission to make THA CASHMONEY. He reminds me a little of the Greedy Goblin, but cooler. His post are informational and harilous. Check him out....funny little gnome he is.

miss elf - Long time blogger and there is a reason, she good at what she does. Lots of good information for Mages and all other classes of WoW.

Shadowy Goodness - New blogger and started for the same reasons why I did. I found out that he is on my server, yet I do not know what faction he is. He has some pretty funny posts so I figured, what the hell. Maybe I will bring his blog into a bigger light.

Until next time blog lovers, I'm WTFout!

Google Reader FTW!

Thanks to an awesome email sent to me by one of my viewers. I have now restored my original post using the power of google reader. I lost my comments, but I am glad that it is back up there.

I appreciate you taking time out of your day and emailing that, mucho appreciated Marleen.

Currently, I have been awake for 26 hours, 42 minutes, and 38 seconds. I have to be at work at exactly 4 hours, 11 minutes. Which gives me less then 3 hours of sleep before I have to drag myself out of bed and to work.

Hope my alarm actually wakes me up lol

Until next time, I'm WTFout!

Sleep 1, Blogspot 0

GRRR

So here I am at work cleaning up my site a little bit. I go to the edit post option and then something happened....I got really sleepy....

So now, 2 or 3 minutes have pasted and I am zoned out in a half wake state. I try to wake myself up by deleting two draft posts I have saved.

No big deal right?

Expect I deleted an actually post!!!! My most recent one at that...

I just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get it back and I have come to the realization that I can't....

So now I am wide awake, pissed off, and I am down my most recent post.

My sleepy half wake ass has won this battle with blogspot. This place, blogspot, has failed me however. How can they not have a restore button or atleast a prompt stating "HEY, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE THIS?"

That might have saved my most recent post....highly doubtful....

I have also run into numberous issues with my post in regard to blogspot acting like tard. Could this be the straw that broke my back in regards to keeping my blog at blogspot? I have always thought about moving over to wordpress. I have heard nothing but good things from other bloggers that have done it. More customization options, multiple pages, some neat gadgets, and the ability to RESTORE deleted posts!

So far I have been blogging for 7 months and have over 85 posts here at blogspot. It would be a pretty big operation to move everything over. Then you have to think about your readers and how they would be affected...all of the people that have you on their blog roll would have to be changed....plus its alot of work...

bah....this blows.

What do you guys think? Stick it out with blogspot or go to "where the grass seems greener" at wordpress? I would appreciate your comment if you do. Thanks for reading, sorry about the rant...<3

/endrant

Tuesday Maintenance Boredom - Success!

Morning blog lovers

What is going on with everyone on this fine Tuesday morning? For the first time in a few months, the evil the good people at Blizzard decided to just do some rolling restarts instead of a full maintenance day. Do note that the supernatural beings Blizzard did also state that "may" have to do some additional maintenance on some realms.

So who really knows....

First things first, I want to give a shout out to Drug over at Shields Up!. He gave me an honest scrap reward after I already posted mine. So much thanks goes out to him....and btw Drug, you don't trust me enough to babysit your cat or mow your lawn?!? LOL...whatever that means, I still got a kick out of it and it definitely made me chuckle lol. So lets get down to busy mmk?? WTFstyle!

REFRIGD-A-RAIDER-RAIDER /HEADBANG!

The weekend comes and goes by way too fast, we all know this. So how did our raids go this weekend? I couldn't have been happier. Seriously....our guild is really starting to actually look and feel like a real guild.

Friday raid begins by 1 shotting 10 man Malygos and clearing out 10 man Naxxramas in 3.5 hours. Coolest thing about this is that it was all done by guildies. Some people only had time to go to Malygos, and had to drop out. No problem, we had multiple 80s online that were willing to go. We also had a few people that had to drop out during the Naxxramas raid. Same thing goes, they dropped and was immediately filled with a guildie.

Heroic Naxxramas part 1

Saturday started off a little rough. We had to pug 5 people into our raid, 2 which were tanks. We started about 20 minutes late, which is a huge pet peeve of mine...but what can you do? Anywho, our dps was amazing. The lowest DPS class was doing 3.1 dps, freaking awesome in my opinion. We cleared the Spider, Construct, and Military wings in 1 hour and 40 minutes, one shotted everything.

We had some people signed up for Sunday, so we decided to call it until then. The puggers were super pissed, but oh well, that is the chance you get when you are pugging. We then broke off and did a 20 man OS run for the achievement. Which I will say, was alot easier then ANY 25 man pug I was in...so that was pretty neat.

Heroic Naxxramas part 2

Sunday started off great, alot of people were on and were willing to finish the 25 man raid. We had a full guild run minus 1 pug healer. We one shotted the plague quarter and actually almost had the heroic safety dance! However, one of our healer's wife plays until he gets home (30 mins after raid time) and she died to the DANCE.

So this is the first time I have ever made it this far in heroic Naxxramas. The 25 man version of the Saph is the exact same except for more curses. We actually wiped once, but killed him on the second attempt. One of the cool things about being one of the three guild leaders is that you pretty much guaranteed the heroic key to Malygos, so that was cool and I am now "keyed" for heroic Maly.

So now the big boi, Mr. KT. I was a little worred about whole mind control aspect of the fight, but overall I liked our chances. This raid was full with guild members and they all know what to do.

Phase 1 went smoothly and was super easy.
Phase 2 went smoothly and was slightly harder due to the mind control and aggro wipe, but wasn't that bad.
Phase 3 was sloppy because one our tanks died and his adds were rolling around 1 shotting clothies for a second lol.

However, we 1 shotted him and I can now say that our guild, Explicit, has cleared 25 man Naxxramas. It was a good feeling, even though my shield didn't dropped lol.

Weekly Dumb

Back by popular demand, its WTFspaghetti's weekly dumb! This lady is pretty freaking awesome. Judging my her mug shot, she was destined to be in my weekly dumb report. Check out the story here. This story is work safe, I promise.

Song of the day

Feel Good (featuring Serj Tankian and Morgan Lander)
HED PE
Broke
2000

Quote of the day

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
-Al Capone

You guys have a great rest of your day. Thanks for reading and until next time, I'm WTFout!

Friday's Food for Thought - Naxx Haikus , Ideal Raider

to update the blog
random thoughts exist, friday
abe freed the slaves

This may seem a little stream-of-thought. No prose written out and meticulosly edited. (only half -assed editing goes on here at wtf!) I want to discuss a lot of different subjects today. I'll start with WoW as that is why most everyone who comes here, comes here. (you like that??!?!)

Naxx Fights in Haiku form:

Anub' Rekhan: Kill the adds quickly
Tank kite, Heals avoid silence
kill more adds, loot boss

Grand Widow: Stop enrage,kill adds
What makes this Widow so grand?
take pity on her spouse

Maexxna: Big spider scares me
kill spiders, web wrap, web spray
I always die here


Noth: Tank adds, D P S
decurse, decurse, decurse, NOW!
why have we wiped here?

Heigan: Dance if we want to
You died? Feel shame. We finish
Leave your friends behind

Loatheb: Timing your heals here
wait for it! wait for it! NOW!
get spore, d p s


I will try to do the rest of them some time next week. That is assuming that 3.1 is not out, because we all know that our blogging is often related inversely to the amount we play. If 3.1 comes out I expect to be off dpsing somewhere or trying out new tanking specs. But hey, maybe then you will get actual information out of my ramblings (wishful thinking).

On the Raiding/Guild front: I finally got a chance to try Maly! It was a fun fight. We spent a few hours in there wiping and never actually cleared him, But it was good to experience a new fight (Naxx is getting WAY boring). Our troubles, as with most groups, came about in phase 3. We got pretty close one time but people started dieing and letting stacks drop. I am confident that I will be able to kill him within the next week. I sure hope we do because I would really like to get Champion of the Frozen wastes before 3.1.

I am very happy with the progress of our guild. It seems to me that 80% (number pulled directly from my ass) of running a raiding guild is in finding the right people. When you get a solid core of people everything seems to go smooth. The most important thing you can do is have a vision for what you want the guild to become, and recruit those who fit the mold.

Fish over at Gnome Warrior is an Oxymoron had a post that says there are two types of raiders, that while flawed did hold a lot of truth. He basically said that one type of player is constantly looking to improve there toon through any means possible and the second type of player is basically a social player who goes to raids because they enjoy the people they raid with. He calls the first type of player a gear whore and claims he wouldn't want to be in a guild with them.

The main issue I take here is the connection he draws between improvement and gear. While obviously an important factor when talking about character progression or improvement, gear is not the end all be all of improvement. Take for example a hunter in our guild. Over the course of a month, with minimal gear upgrades, went from doing sub-par dps to topping the charts. Huge improvement. very little of it gear related.

I think the issue I take with people not in his group is that if their performance is bad or even average, they will often blame it on gear.
"If only I had more epics I would do more dps" Instead of trying to improve their rotation, cooldown usage, or even spec.


Fish has since updated his thoughts to a two variables of raiders (which I like much more)
The ideal raider has high motivation to improve, AND enjoys the company of their fellow raiders.

Real Life

With the economy in the toilet, I have been of the mind that it is a great time to be broke. If you do not own any stocks, or have a 401k. Then a lot of this mess doesn't directly affect you (me). Now though I am feeling a bit of the heat. My job is cutting hours. Voluntarily at first, and then possibly involuntarily. While this might give me more time for WoW, This is NOT a good thing. The writing is on the wall and I really don't want to have to find a new job during this economic downturn.

It is OK though. For I have the answer! Why Legalizing Marijuana Makes Sense
Would give a whole new meaning to the term "green jobs"

Well at least the economy isn't as messed up as our judicial system! Sexting
teenagers with naked pictures of classmates possibly charged with child porn. The girls who took the pictures of themselves getting charged with distributing child porn.

My only question, Where were these girls when I was a teen?

When Recrutiment goes bad...

Morning blog lovers!

I must warn you, this is more of a rant post unfortunately.

If you follow my blog you know that I am one of my guild founding fathers and guild leaders. A raiding guild isn't going to go far without people and due to this fact we have been non stop recruiting.

We believe in quality players over quantity, because of this we force everyone besides people who are just social / casual to fill out an application. Our application isn't very long and from start to finish it shouldn't take over 10 minutes. No big deal right?

WRONG

I am super amazed of all of the people that refuse to fill out an application on the website. I think that 99% of them think they are too good and should be able to join ANY guild. Look, I don't care if you have cleared Naxxramas and Maylgos. I don't care if you can do 3k dps and have (insert redonkeyous number here) spell power / attack power / crit.

That is not why we have the application process. If you refuse to follow one of the MOST basic rules of the guild, then why in the hell would we want you?

Raid Signups

Another problem that some people seem to have is how we sign up for raids. We have a guild website and we have ALOT of good and useful information there, so we have decided to use it as a place to sign up for raids.

It will force people that want to raid to go to the website. This greatly helps with member interaction in our forums and it also gives them a chance to read all the useful information.

Again, some people are just too lazy or think that they are too cool to sign up for raids.....its unbelievable. Now I would understand if we werent a good guild or just starting off...but we ARE a good guild and we raid frequently. Two 10 man groups clear Naxxramas and Malygos weekly and we are working on 25 mans. (need more skilled raiders)

Typical conversation with "I think I am too good" type of recruit:

Potential Recruit: I can make your times, I can do 3.5k dps and I have 4k attack power

Myself: Do you have any raiding experience?

Potential Recruit: Duh! I have cleared all content. I am not a noob, I know how to raid ok?

Myself: ok...well, do you mind filling out an application or signing up for raids on a website?

(bare minimum 2 minutes pass)

Potential Recruit: yeah...I don't sign up for raids on websites. About the application, that probably isn't going to work for me. Believe me, I am not someone you want to pass up!

Myself: Sorry this isn't going to work out, we are looking for a certain type of raider. Good luck in your search.

Potential Recruit: lol...wow...ok...good luck wiping on VoA

It seriously dumbfounds me. Moving on...

I got called a Terrorist...

Yes, I got called a terrorist. I didn't even know what to say...the worst part about it is that the person that called me this, was a US solider.

WTFspaghetti's 15 man choir: "WHHHHAT THEEE EFFFF EF EF EF?!?!"

This gentlemen informed me he can make our raid times and he is interested in joining our guild. I shift+click his name and he is guildless...ok...lets investigate shall we?

Myself: Do you have any raiding experience?

Solider: Sure do, cleared most of Naxx, I have not cleared Malygos.

Myself: Have you been in a raiding guild before?

Solider: O ya, a really good one too..Represent. It fell apart because the guild leader stopped raiding and kicked a few people.

Myself: Eww...Represent uh? I never liked the guild leader, he was a pretty big douche bag

Solider: You say eww, but we had FULL 25 man guild runs. The guild leader is an awesome tank.

(aggravated now because my recruitment macro said looking to "fill our 25 mans")

Myself: Well, I have talked to him before and he raided with us once. He was a douche bag to us and he didn't perform like a good tank in my opinion. He probably treated his guild mates alot
nicer.

Solider: Well I have played with this guy for awhile. He has become my friend and as a US solider myself, I have the most up most respect for him. Anyone that would say those things is as bad as the terrorists that we are fighting in this war. Please don't talk to me anymore, I am no longer interested in your guild.

Myself: /ignore Solider

First off, screw that guy. I love and respect our troops and for him to say something like that to me over a conversation in a video game is a huge douche move. Secondly, WTF? A TERRORIST?

/sigh

It really pissed me off and discouraged me from playing for the night. I logged off and did some reading with my girlfriend. I also got a few hours of naptime before I had to go to work.

Sorry for the rant....F'n terrorist.....who would have thought...do I atleast get a title?

/end rant