Winging it

Morning Blog lovers! I checked in this morning to take a look at the Monday morning Warcraft post but alas, it was not there. It's always disappointing when we have to miss out on the magic that is the doctor. I know the guy in real life and still can't get enough of his wisdom. So I guess we will just have to fill the Monday slot with a story of my weekend in the world... of warcraft.

Before I start with the Wow talk I need an opinion. I am a huge fan of hockey. I love the sport. A coworker sent me a picture this morning and I need to know if it is hot. Not that I don't have my own opinion, I just am curious what everyone else thinks.



It's got to be a little cold.


Trial of the Crusader

So I post last weekend that I have no raided since my last guild folded. Between not wanting to find a guild and the lack of desire to raid, I have just missed out.

I log on Sunday morning hoping to continue my quest to do all the Outland heroics. One of the guys I ran with last weekend wasn't on and the other is on an alt mission. So I figured I'd just finish my dailies and go watch some football. As I am logging off I get a message from a former guildie (who I completely love btw). She asks if I mind tanking 10 man TOC. I told her that I had never been before and not taken the time to read up on the fights either (fail!). She tells me that it is no big deal, they will teach me the fights.

After zoning into the instance I get a nice little surprise. Most of the group is made up of former guildies! By this point I am completely stoked. With all the "how have you been" chat going on in vent and the raid chat it gets lost that I don't know the fights. We buff up and the ready check comes up. I get a message from the other tank telling me he is going to be the main tank. Then he asks, "you no the fights, right?". I respond, "nah, I am just going to wing it. You can imagine how well that went over. Luckily at the same time the raid leader gets in vent and calls me out and starts explaining the fights... Either way I could only imagine what the other tank was thinking at this point.

First impressions

I enjoyed the first fight. The main tank made the fight pretty simple for me. Gormok was exactly like Gluth minus the annoying decimate. After that all I had to do was pick up Acidmaw. I was shown before the fight exactly where to stand. I didn't pay much attention to the debuffs because every time one of us got it the other tank ran to me. Right as Acidscale went down Dreadscale destroyed the other tank and a couple dps. There were some concerns on vent that we might not make it but I was able to step up and we downed Dreadscale and Icehowl with no problems.

Jaraxxus was a lot of fun too. I of course was stuck on adds. I for some reason always get stuck with adds. After a quick wipe I got a tell from my friend telling me that I had actually been invited to their "B group" and that's why the dps was so bad. Which actually explained a lot. I told her it was no big deal, that I was glad to get the opportunity to learn the fights.

The next attempt ended very much the same as the first. This time after the main tank went down I was able to pick up the boss with a mistress on me. Next thing I know I have infernos after me. I love nothing more than to go out in a blaze of glory. We actually got him down to 5% this way. After this attempt the other tank had to leave. Once he was replaced I found myself main tank. Jaraxxus didn't stand a chance at this point and was downed the next attempt.

The faction champion section was a different story. I don't even want to tell you how bad that went. Apparently we got a bad combination. With our lack of dps we gave it a few attempts then called it a day.

Overall I had a great time. I think this may motivate me to start raiding again.

The Brood Mother

After my brief trial in TOC I received an invite to Onyxia. I never attempted this raid before. Well actually I two manned it with a buddy of mine a few months ago but that was the wimpy version. Luckily I read the doctors explanation of this the fight and had no problems with the strategy. After arriving I was informed that I was to be the main tank. This of course made my day. I love nothing more than to be the main focus of the group. Of course I didn't tell them that I had never done this before and I was winging it.

After clearing the original trash I got my first look at the Brood mother. I am not going to lie, I was a little intimidated. Luckily I had the calming presence of the tree standing next to me. I don't know if I have mentioned it before but I love Druid healers. After seeing my hots go up I was all pumped up and charged in head first.

It's a pretty simple fight if you're not a moron. It was a ton of fun too. I am just glad to get it out of the way so I can say I've done it.

So it was a pretty eventful day. Almost enough to get me pumped up to do more than dailies. Almost...

At a standstill

Sometimes having a real person job can have a negative affect on my WOW career.

I have a job that I am required to do quite a bit of traveling. With the economic slow down things have been slow at work for the last six months and I have had a lot more time at home. This has allowed me to get a lot accomplished in the game. I have got to see a lot of content, get a ton of achievement points, level a few alts and even start blogging a bit.

The last few weeks things have picked up a bit and it couldn't have happened in a worse time. I have come to realize that hotels have some of the worst internet connections ever. Most of them if you can connect at all, you get disconnected at regular intervals. This is devastating to my WOW time. I wish that I wasn't so lazy and short on time. I could probably look around and find a local cafe or some place with real wifi that I can sit and play. Since that hasn't been the case I just haven't played while I am out of town.

Fail

On my first post on this blog I mentioned how I was going to try to get all of my seasonal events done before the Doctor. I even let him miss one so that I could laugh at him later. Due to fail internet during my recent trips I was unable to get all of my drops from the Headless Horseman. I had just the last three days of the event to try to scramble and get it done and it just did not happen. That's right... I completely failed!!! I haven't gotten too much lip from the doctor yet but I know it's coming. I have a feeling he is going to wait until he gets every one of them before he gives me a hard time.


What now?

Since my mad dash to get my Halloween achievement I have logged my account only one time. I have just been way too busy and unmotivated. My only log in was this past Sunday. I spent some time with some real life friends doing Outland heroics for fun. I am not usually one to waste time on nonsense but I am a sucker for achievement points.

I keep telling myself I need to get into TOC and Onyxia. Believe it or not I have still not made the attempt to do either. It's not that I don't want to. I have just been too lazy to find a guild and most pugs I see want you to link your achievements. I also need to spend some times with my alts. I started my Druid shortly after the doctor did. After getting a few levels ahead I have let him collect some dust. I need to get on that before he does so I don't have to do any all nighters to stay ahead.

Until I can get motivated to do all of this I guess I am going to continue to mess around here and there and do misc achievements and my regular dailies.

What fun things are you doing? There has to be something out there for people who are too lazy to raid, bored with heroics and short on time to play...

Monday Morning Warcraft... kinda

Morning Blog Lovers!

It's another exciting Monday morning. I usually spend my first few hours of work on Monday getting caught up on my news from the weekend. Since it seems that I can't do anything but play WOW on my home computer, I usually get backed up a couple of days on my blog reading and email.

Thank you to everyone that commented on my first post, I was glad to get that out of the way. I noticed that the doctor decided to skip Monday Morning Warcraft, so I figured I would put something up.

Heroic Failure

So what is the deal with people leveling to 80 and going straight into heroics? I know that the nerf in leveling has everyone under the impression that they are a lot better than they really are but don't they realize that they are a drag on everyone else? It usually happens too that most of them leveled so fast that they don't completely understand their class or the game itself for that matter. I saw some dps this weekend that I can rival with my 71 druid or hunter. It makes me sad.

I usually try not to get annoyed or involved with this kind of group. I usually only run with real life friends, having to grab maybe one person out of the looking for group channel. This weekend was a little differnt. I have a real life friend who used to play the game. While he played he got a few family members involved and I got a chance to meet and play with them. Even though he hasn't played in 6 months I get invites from his family members to groups all of the time. I usually have a great excuse with farming or raiding but with my lack of heroics lately I finally ran out of excuses this weekend.

The fail

I am running around trying to get my dailies done and I get an invite from my buddy's niece for heroic TOC. I am automatically annoyed because I don't prefer Paladin healers. I try to get my Druid buddy an invite to heal but she already has a full group. So reluctently I accept the invite. Before I get a chance to type "hi"in the party chat I see a message from this shammy, "Oh man I think I can get a better tank than that". I don't really pay much attention to this. I assume that he is a noob and that he is looking at my hit points assuming I am acutally going to tank with 22k hps. My friend politely informs him that I am in my ret gear and sends me a tell apoligizing for the noob comment.

This shaman continues to run his mouth my whole ride there. Giving everyone tips about their class or role before we even get there. So as soon as I zone in I inspect his gear. Wouldn't you know, all greens but 2. I ask and he informs me that he is a fresh 80. I thought to give him a few suggestions but he seems like a know it all. So instead, I sigh again and figure there is no harm in trying.

The three champions come out and again it seems like someone is out to get me. (You'll have to excuse my lack of knowledge on names) We end up with a rogue /warrior/mage combo. Of course it is a quick wipe. No one seems to understand the concept of kill skull first or avoid the aoe.

We go a second time. The first whirlwind/poison combo and I watch all five of the health bars plummet. I don't really understand because besides the DK and me, we have all casters. The second time around both the shaman and warlock die. The shaman /yells "great healing noob!". I check my dps meter and see that he is barely putting out 1k dps so I kick him. Yeah I know what you're thinking, I am a huge jerk for kicking this guy in the middle of the boss fight but by this time it's him or me. Besides, it's a wipe anyway.

The lock and healer laugh at my annoyance after the fight. The DK had some choice words for me kicking his buddy. I informed him that people that are that bad should never comment on the play of others. Just like his friend he starts to critisize the healer and even throws a few shots at me. I link the dps meter and then kick him from the group as well. I would tell you what I told him after that but then I would get into my rant about tanking classes that don't tank and complain about you (gonna save that for future material).

I added a couple of hunters just be be sure that we had no more issues with the aoe. One of them was a real life friend so I knew that I had at least one other person in the group that wasn't a rtard.

At this point I have nothing left to complain about except the healer. She did a pretty good job considering. It just makes me nervous to see my hps go down that far before I get a heal. I do my best to help her out though. Since we all know that tanking as a pally is stupid easy, I get enough aggro then help her heal. We do fine all the way until the 3rd phase of the Black Knight. Both hunters died and zoned back in twice. After their 2nd death the healer died. I stood there and healed myself and the lock for the last 10%. I gave it a /flex and quit the group without looting.

I later apologized for leaving so quick and even offered to tank the next instance. That story isn't as interesting. I will say that I learned it's possible for a tank to lead a heroic Violet Hold in dps and have two people doing around 1k dps and still not fail.

Potts' noob guide to being 80

So I am going to try to help out and make my own noobs guide of being 80. I won't include the first point which is obvious. If this is your first toon I would suggest trying all of the low level dungeons when it comes time. I know that you level faster without and the gear is worthless a few level later but it's nice to understand the concept of how the group works before you get to the top level and embarrass yourself by not knowing what a tank is.

1. Understand your class. Read a guide and find a rotation. Understand all the spells and the tricks you may need to get yourself out of trouble.

2. Turn 80

3. Gear. Hopefully you have run a few instances before 80 and have a couple of pieces to start with. If not, there are enough craftable pieces out there to get a good start. Hopefully you have a profression that you can make your own or at least made some money to do so.

4. Run regular instances and do some kind of dailies. The money from the dailies can be put toward those craftable items that I was just talking about. Heck while you're at it you may get a cute little pet to go along with it.

5. Start heroics. DO NOT start them if you are not wearing mostly level 80 blue gear. I understand that there are some exceptions but with the craftables and boe gear there is no excuse to come to a heroic green from Howling Ford.

6. Collect a few pieces of badge gear, join a guild and start raiding. Yes join a guild. Find one that is just starting out. Actually learn the fights instead of getting me killed in a pug.

7. Have fun. That is why were here.

note: you can skip steps 3-5 if you have patient friends that want to run you through stuff. However you CAN NOT get around having to learn how to not be a noob. Only you can prevent this.

My suggestions to Blizzard

I realize that there is no real incentive to do a regular instance. Why do pointless grinding if you can go with a skilled group and ride them to a 4 badges a chance at a nice piece of gear? Maybe along with downgrading badges blizzard could do a badge system with regular instances. Offer one badge on the final boss of the instance. This could get the noobs off my back. I mean it's not like we aren't nerfing everything else.

My First Post!

So it’s long overdue but here I am! My name is Potts. I have been playing WOW since back in the Vanilla days. I am a real life friend of the Doctor and P. After 50 or so drunken comments on how I need to contribute to the blog, I finally got invited to do so. Now all I have to do is not fail. My goals are simple. Say something funny every once in a while and be around long enough to get my toons linked on the main page of the blog. Anyway, here goes something…

(Not sure I'm quite in with the choir, so we can skip that. I'll just insert a random cat pic instead.)



What it do?

Recently I have taken a break from raiding. I was a little burnt out with raiding after that fail guild I was in with the doctor .While he was on his mission to find Jesus I ended up just pugging a few raids and doing some heroic grinding. After I got all of the badge gear worth getting I had to look for something else to do.

I didn’t have to look far. I am lazy but I am a competitive person. I found my calling in all things WOW that I used to find annoying. I have spent an obnoxious amount of time in the last few months grinding achievements and titles. I say competitive because the biggest reason that I do this is just to have more than my friends. The doctor gets his cooking title so I have to get it. He does a couple of the tournament dailies so I go out and get the Crusader title. He gets a new mount, so I go out and get 50 so I can get an Albino Drake.

You can guess where it goes from there. I almost forgot to mention that I didn’t call him during his WOW hiatus and tell him that he was missing one of the seasonal events. I knew that if I could complete it while he was gone I would have a better chance of finishing them all and getting my drake before him. What a friend, right? I just hope this doesn’t provoke him too much. If he did the exploration achievements he would gain a lot of ground on me. Even though I would still be crushing him in titles.

Cooking

The cooking title is coming along pretty well. I am just waiting on enough dailies to buy the rest of the recipes. The only one besides those that seems like it’s going to be a problem is the recipe for tasty cupcakes which is a drop. I need to find some time to go after that. I kind of wish I was paying more attention from the start. I have probably already seen it drop at one time or another.

As far as all of the outland recipes, those were all a piece of cake. I looked at the doctor’s previous post about his chef title and laughed a little. I got all 4 or five recipes I needed in just a few days of doing the Outland cooking dailies. There was only one barrel that I got that didn’t have one. Of course he was on and made fun of my frustration. I love it though because it adds fuel to my fire!

Boredom at it's best

While doing my cooking dailies in Outlands I decided on a whim to go and try some Netherwing dailies. Does anyone remember those? I can remember spending countless hours grinding out these dailies. Then you would almost all of the quests done and spend 30 minutes fighting your way through all the other people trying to find those elusive ravagers.

So I figure I could also use this as an opportunity to level my 2H mace skills. I recently acquired one in a pug and didn’t realize my skill was 1/450. I was amazed to find the ease of doing these quests. Well besides the fact that I could taunt the mobs to death, there was no one out there. I had all of the ravagers and EGGS to myself. The first day I picked up more eggs than I did the whole time I grinded this rep with my priest. Most were out in plain sight and didn’t require a scavenger hunt.

If you get bored and have never done this now is a great time. If you’re one of those fancy, hardcore type you could probably do it in 3 days. Soon I will dance around the doctor with my fancy mount and he will bow in all my glory.

Until then... I am WTF out!