Back-to-school! Raids are 50% off!

Shout out to Tuscaloosa County! I actually have no affiliation with the aforementioned county. :P

For a lot of people, this week is probably the beginning of the school year. Like the summer churn, this time of year brings its own set of issues (and perks!).  Some people will cite this time as worse than the summer but for me, this is a welcomed period of regularity. There are things that will change though…

The College Raider

For the seasoned college students, they’ll keep raiding if they were raiding the year before, provided classes don’t conflict with raid times (Monday through Thursday anyway). The difficulty comes with college freshmen. They’re going to be less available for the first few weeks of the school year (if they are to come back at all). They’ll be going out, making friends, studying, or partying it up. I don’t blame them. College is a great time and to be honest, I don’t know if I would have spent my freshmen year raiding 4 nights out of the week either if I was playing back then. Or during any subsequent year, really…

Things to expect:

- absences to study for exams, midterms, finals, or time needed to work on projects
- absences for social events (both planned and last minute)
- absences for extracurricular activities (Greek life, clubs, sports, etc)
- logging off earlier for early morning classes
- freshmen will probably stop playing for a few weeks

But if these guys make it on, they’ll be good to stay for the night. And if anyone decides to pledge for a fraternity/sorority, forget about it. They’re not making a raid until next semester.

The High School Raider

High school students are a different story. They’re younger, first of all, and classes start at a standard morning time for most schools. That means an earlier bed time! If your raids go late, you can expect them to leave early on a week night. If your raids also start early, they might be late due to homework. But generally, being back in school will make their schedules more regular. You can generally expect them to log on and log off at around the same times every night.

Things to expect:

- like their college counterparts, expect absences to study for exams
- absences due to extracurricular activities (sports, clubs, etc)
- tardiness or earlier departures due to school assignments
- earlier departures due to an earlier bed time (or parents)
- schedule regularity

The [Child-less] Working Adult Raider

Working adults – this is the end of the summer vacation season. September is the time where many of us shake our heads clear of the lackadaisical summer work ethic and get back down to business. Other than maybe some more work stress, I would hope that the back-to-school season doesn’t really affect them.

Things to expect:

- not much difference, I don’t think

The [Working] Parent Raider

The parents (who may or may not work) will have more to tend to in the evenings, getting their kids ready for school the next day. On top of tending to these things, I would be ready for illness too. With upwards of 15 kids trapped in a room for 6 hours a day, the poor kids are bound to bring something home at one point or another. There’s also the possibility the parents will get sick.

Things to expect:

- more AFKs (dinner, packing lunches, helping with homework, putting kids to bed, etc)
- occasional bouts of sickness (this will apply to everyone else as we approach flu season, etc)
- less availability on weekends (gotta spend time with the kiddies!)

I think overall, you can expect everyone in your guild to be more tired. Be it school or work, everyone’s just going to feel a little more overwhelmed. If not managed correctly, it could lead to a lot of unwarranted frustration and outbursts, a lot of “I have better things to do than to sit here wiping!” It’s even more important now for officers and leaders everywhere to stay upbeat and patient. Maintain focus and make the most of the (now) limited time you have every night because it’s only 2-3 months before we head into the abysmal holiday raiding season! And at that point, it’s probably a good idea to consider a one or two week-long vacation for the December-January holiday season…

Two-Healing Some Ulduar 10-man Hard Modes

I spent most of my weekend leveling my shaman (who’s 49 now) and attempting Ulduar 10-man hard modes. The current set up in the guild regarding 10-mans right now is we have a veteran in the guild who took it upon himself to organize his own group for hard modes beginning a couple weeks ago.

So he started his group up this past Friday and the rest of us were kind of just sitting around bored and decided to start one too. Since it was a Friday night, we really didn’t have that many people on and ended up having to go 2-tanks (prot pally and a DK or prot warrior depending on the day), 2-healers (disc priest and resto shaman), and 6 dps (this kind of changed a little bit through the weekend).

We were pretty successful for attempting hard modes for the first time. We managed to do I Choose You, Steelbreaker, Lose Your Illusion, and I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare.

Some other achievements we got were Orbital Bombardment, Knock on Wood, and With Open Arms.

Some failed achievements were Crazy Cat Lady, I Choose You, Runemaster Molgeim (glad we failed this one actually lol), Firefighter, and I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning.

Using 2 healers was definitely manageable for the achievements we did get. The trade off is more DPS, which gives you the opportunity to nuke things faster and seemed to solve/prevent a lot of other problems.  Smart mana and cooldown management also made the difference long enough for the boss to be downed (all it comes down to is just a few extra seconds sometimes).

I Choose You, Steelbreaker

We tried doing this 2 ways before we downed him on our 3rd try. The first way was killing Molgeim first and the 2nd was killing Stormcaller first. We had used both of our soulstones on these 2 attempts so for the 3rd one, DPS needed to stay alive and get Steelbreaker down before our 2nd tank died.

In the end, we decided to kill Molgeim first because Stormcaller is just easier to control in terms of his AoE damage (stun/interrupt/counterspell) while healing through Runes of Death proved to be more mana-intensive.

Our prot pally tanked Steelbreaker and self-cleansed until he died to Meltdown. The part where we lucked out is instead of our second tank getting marked for Meltdown, one of our warlocks was such an aggro whore, that he got the Overwhelming Power debuff when our prot pally died.

Heroism was saved for only Steelbreaker.

Lose Your Illusion

This wasn’t particularly different from not-hard-mode. We split the raid into 2 even groups (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) for both gauntlet and arena. DPS was able to rock through all the adds and the first mini-boss. When the doors in the gauntlet opened, we killed the 2 adds right behind the door and sheeped a Guard as we ran up the stairs. The tank pulled the second mini-boss while DPS finished off the Acolyte that is guaranteed to spawn with the Guard. We had about 50 seconds left on the timer when the second mini-boss died. We took this time to go back and kill the Guard.

In the arena, placement is key. Sif’s Blizzard travels around the outer ring so everyone stood in the inner ring yet outside of the circle in the center. And then – you guessed it – we blew Heroism proceeded to nuke Thorim (common theme, no?).

I cleansed Frost Novas and sometimes Frostbolts if the person was in the way of a Lightning Charge but otherwise, don’t expend the mana if you can avoid it. Running around the arena to avoid Sif will undoubtedly get some people hit by Chain Lightning.

Sif’s Remembrance, you’ll be mine next week!

I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare

Our prot pally tanked this (for no reason other than our DK tank is normally DPS so his DPS is significantly better than having our prot pally go ret). I’ve heard that because pallies use magical abilities that to gain threat, they have an easier time staying ahead of the casters and their crazy hasted crits on this fight.

Besides being a straight DPS race, we used all the buffs the NPCs gave us. I think DPS broke out all of the NPCs but I’m can’t really remember. Everyone stood in a moonbeam when possible. This also meant that the person hit with the crit buff was usually already standing in a moonbeam.

Healers should try to use both buffs also but if you had to choose one, take the moonbeam. For disc priests, the name of the game is chaining hasted (PW:S + moonbeam) PoH during Frozen Blows. Exciting, right? Holy Nova is nice for when you have to move to avoid Biting Cold stacks, since everyone is stacked up.

Heroism was used the second we saw the NPC buffs come out.

I would say this was the easiest hard mode fight to 2-heal thus far.

Rusted proto-drake, go go go!

‘Mazing Mod Monday: QuestGuru

What’s insanely useful while we’re all racing to 80? Besides QuestHelper, of course! The default quest log is severely limited in its simple, single-paned interface lacking in visibility and readability. The tracker is limited to 5 quests at a time, which is insufficient most of the time. It needs a mod!

In comes QuestGuru, providing double-paned view, a color-coded tracker, and keeps a history of all completed and abandoned quests so you can go back to complete something later if you so wish:

Double-paned view with lots of options

The quest log shows you who gave you the quest and who to turn it into, complete with coordinates. All key information is color coded (sky blue by default) so you can pick up the info you need without actually reading the entire quest (losing out on the WoW experience if you don’t read the quests, imo).

You can also mass track/untrack quests by clicking on the check box next to the name of the zone. This will hide all quests in that zone from your tracker and vice versa. Some of the simplest features are the best, aren’t they? No more shift-clicking all the quests I want removed from my tracker… >.>

We’ve said so much about the tracker but we don’t know what it looks like! That’s the most important piece right?! No one quests with their quest log open! Okay, okay:

Color-coded for the not-so-colorblind

Clicking the little “-” in the upper right hand corner will minimize the tracker. The “O” brings up the options pane. Most notably is the pink font – if you leave the default settings, the tracker will color code your quest requirements in terms of progress/completion, going from a bright magenta at 0% to a bright cyan at 100%. Are you blind yet?

The transparency of the tracker can also be set in Options. Probably a good idea to make it a little darker so your eyes don’t start bleeding from looking at the bright colors against the scenery.

QuestGuru also plays a sound when you make progress on the objectives. For example, when told to kill 10 mobs of X, it will ding when you kill each 1 mob. If the quest has 3 objectives to kill 10 mobs of X, Y, Z, it will ding twice every time you kill 10 of each. Upon quest completion, it will play a different sound. I changed mine to the WC3 peon saying “Work complete.”

You see here you can also minimize quests by zone using the little arrow on the left. Helpful if you tend to forget quests you have when they’re not being tracked (like me… uhrrdurrhrr).

Other options include quest progress/completion announcements to say, party, or raid. I went with party for questing in a group to avoid the “hey r u done yet” and “how many left” interrogation; “No” and “I don’t have any because you ninja’d all the spawns. Jerk.”

Actual results may vary

As you can see, there are a lot of options that you can play. All in all, even leaving all the settings to their default options will make your questing experience easier and more enjoyable. You don’t have to be a dork like me and enable WC sounds because you’re nostalgic for what brought about WoW in the first place.

All images are property of the developer as posted on http://wowui.worldofwar.net.

We’re all going to die!!

Okay, so I had half a post written up yesterday but didn’t publish it. I wasn’t going to until I got home from work but by then, I had learned about the LK world event in SW Harbor. I decided to just save my post for the world event instead.

It’s been a long time since the guild has gotten together for a world event (I think the last time was a bad attempt at raiding UC). Anyway, I rounded up the guild at 6 server to head down to the harbor to wait for the event, going by rumors. I saw all the posts at WoWInsider.com about the attacks on Orgrimmar so I was trying to see when it would come to the Alliance side. I even hopped over to my Horde server and checked out the Thrall vs. Hellscream fight (anyone but me feel like it was way cooler to be Horde last night?).

Anyway, I made it back on to my own server in time to see the event. As much as it paled in comparison to the Org event, it was still pretty awesome. I’ll admit, I might have been a little more excited than everyone else but I was kinda hoping it would rub off on them instead of rub them the wrong way. (Heh seewutididthar?)

I got some very nice SS’s and shot a video a la Blair Witch/Cloverfield. Take a look and enjoy patch day!

And this next shot is somehow cool and creepy at the same time…

Uh oh...

Keep the world events coming, Blizz!