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Introspection

I ended up doing 3 dungeons last night in Looking For Group. The first one was uninteresting except in that we lost the tank and had to call it.

The second was “Culling of Stratholme”.

The mage wanted to get the Zombie Killer achievement, he had a strategy, on the second boss kite him into the town hall and just keep him there for 5 minutes, letting the zombies pile up outside, before killing him. It sounded plausible, so we were prepared to go for it.

Unfortunately the whole of the time we were getting to the second boss the Mage kept complaining that we were killing Zombies. I said “If they hit me they will die” meaning I’m killing anything that has aggro on me. Later on after a whole bunch of zombies had aggroed on me I killed them all with a Magma Totem. The Mage then complained that the healer kept killing zombies and said that they didn’t do much damage.

So that’s the setup. The problem is, I quit group at that point, mid trash. I’m not proud. Just something about being asked to be the target dummy really dissagreed with me, it was me that had the aggro, not him. I’m pretty sure I was only killing stuff that had aggro on me.

Thinking on it, I still think I was right, why would a zombies that had aggro on me leave me alone? If I’d let them alone I would have built up a following of 50 or so all hitting me for a couple of hundred points, dazing me, and generaly getting to the point where I would be overwhelmed.

So the problem, in my mind, isn’t that I was killing Zombies, more that I didn’t try to explain why I was doing what I was doing. We were in a trash gauntlet so I didn’t really have time to chat, which just made it all the more frustrating. Frustration makes me do strange things.

I wonder what I should have done? I’m feeling quite guilty because I messed it up for 3 other players (not counting the whiny mage).

Fortunately the third group was fine, we got our “frosties” and then went on to do another to get the DK some offspec tanking gear from the 5 man “trial of the big round room”.

2010 03 09 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (2) Permalink

Hole in the Road

Every day I ride my motorbike up a small road to see to my horses. This road has been getting progressively worse and worse over the past year or so. So when I found a site where I could report holes I started to use it.

So far I’ve reported two of the worst holes and both times a new patch has appeared within a day or two, pretty good huh?

The last hole I reported was quite a big “dip” in the road at a junction that has caused me some problems. The coucil duly came out and chucked some tarmac at it. This is what the hole looks like now, 4 days after it has been “repaired”…

Impressive isn’t it?

2010 03 08 Andrew.Rowbottom General Comments (0) Permalink

trial and error

In a desperate last ditch attempt to do the weekly raid quest I once again joined a pickup group that was advertising on the trade channel.

The usual Brewfest Regalia puzzles ensued, easily sorted.  I was accused of being a Role Player, she's a RPer i'm guessing :) , though why I’d be on Darkspear and not an RP server is anyone’s guess. At least they knew what one was.

It was a “half-guild” run and I was the last player to join so we started pretty quickly. On entering the raid I did my usual “Inventory on Par” (a much older equivalent to Gearscore) and noticed that many of the characters weren’t well geared or didn’t have much raid experience. I mentioned it but was told these were probably alts. Fair enough.

So, we worked our way through the trash, with me being sortof told off for healing the tank.

Deetre: Hydro = MT
Deetre: I heal Hydro

I just can’t help myself :) .

Anyway, it took 6 attempts. No-one left during the first 4 attempts even though we didn’t make it far past the first bone storm which is pretty surprising given the number of players that usually leave on the first wipe. The fifth attempt we got Marrowgar to 56% and on the last try we managed it! And of course I was chucking plenty of heals on the tanks (see I really can’t help it!).

I was well chuffed!

I was a little naughty and kept trying to explain the strategy, and again, and again. Some of the caster DPS kept on insisting on standing outside the “red target circle”. It was getting so I was looking at the positioning during the encounter to see who wasn’t “obeying orders”, though I stopped short of singling out players. If I’d been on vent I would have!

This “awareness” was completely new for me, though I usually keep my camera zoomed out for “situational awareness” I don’t think I’ve ever actually LOOKED! This must be a bit what raid leaders have to do, heaven knows how they heal or tank while doing it.

The final cap was when the real Raid Leader said too bad your not guildless or i would try ninja u ;P <3

–

Comparing this successful raid to the fail pug on Sunday the healing was very comparable (9.2k HPS vs 9.5k HPS in the fail pug), and the DPS was 20% lower: 15.5k DPS against 18.7kDPS in the fail pug!

So Sundays was a fail pug, and todays was a WIN pug despite a bit less healing, and significantly less DPS!

Mind you the fight lasted over 7 minutes and I nearly went out of mana!. 7 minutes makes me think; I could have used my trinkets 3 times each and Mana Tide twice instead of just the once.

–

Healer tip: at least one of the healers should move towards the middle as bone storm is finishing so that when the tanks pick up aggro they get essential heals, this was mostly where we kept wiping.

2010 03 02 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (0) Permalink

Stupidity incarnate – Mine and others.

So continuing with the Bad Apples……

On Friday I got asked if I’d like to go to a continuation raid of Icecrown Citadel 10 man. I turned it down because it meant that I wouldn’t get the weekly raid (Marrowgar must die) as they had already passed him. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

On Saturday I queued in looking for raid for a Pickup group to do this quest. The first group took ages to get together and what’s worse they had already started but not finished the trash. Ring those Alarm bells! We managed only one attempt. During which Dollydagger typed:

raid Dollydagger: heal
raid Dollydagger: heal me pls

Fortunately I don’t get much chance to read Raid Chat during an encounter or Dollydagger would have been one of the first to DIE!

After the attempt the following conversation took place:

raid Dollydagger: wtf
...
raid Dollydagger: roflmao!
raid Dollydagger: roflmao!
raid Dollydagger: roflmao!
raid Badal: this is not dps
raid Dollydagger: heal
raid Melih: damn healer we lose 3 dpses
raid Dollydagger: heal in impale damn you!
raid Melih: 4
raid Dollydagger: healer great job! (sarcasm?)
raid Dollydagger: OMG U RLY DONT KNOW TACTS
raid deleted: your talking to me right
raid Flowersz: who are you talking to.
raid Flowersz: there are 9 other "you"'s

And then Dollydagger quit. After he’d gone someone posted

raid deleted: Recount - Healing Done for Overall Data
raid deleted: 1. Carline   1197332 (3639.2, 39.7%)
raid deleted: 2. Flowersz  999434 (3204.3, 33.1%)
raid deleted: 3. deleted   756259 (2611.0, 25.1%)

And I can say 3k+ HPS is red hot for me and the total healing was way way above what should be needed on this fight.

I’ve kept some of the names on this log because sometimes you have to name and shame, and Dollydagger definitely comes in the shame category, and Melih is worth naming. 

So the group disbanded and I queued again. After a, pretty normal by my standards, bit of confusion about gear score (Brefest Regalia For The Win) I was accepted,

2/27 18:54:49.708  [Raid] Slothsloth: Errr...1112gs flowersz?
2/27 18:55:01.702  [Raid Leader] Azda: no
2/27 18:55:08.035  [Raid Leader] Azda: 5071
2/27 18:55:14.469  [Raid Leader] Azda: ? see 5071
2/27 18:55:21.041  [Raid] Flowersz: sorry, I'll put on my healing stuff
2/27 18:55:25.950  [Raid] Flowersz: this is my "around town"
2/27 18:55:35.246  [Raid] Flowersz: try again

Only to be kicked (I have to say with my full agreement) because I wasn’t up for doing a full run, just the first boss.

So no weekly raid quest completion – I should have taken up Friday’s invite, at least I’d have been doing something useful and probably gathered a couple of Emblems of Frost while I was at it.

And so onto Sunday, a 25 man guild raid on ToC. Very slow starting, like 45 minutes late because we had to find 5 extra bodies! But we did get as far as downing the Faction Champions, Flowersz got a belt upgrade and passed on two other caster (mainly resto) Mail pieces, one because it was too small an upgrade, and the other because it was a definite downgrade. On the healy meters…. I was worried because the first fight I recorded (Jax) showed Flowersz at 6th out of 6 healers, behind the raid leader! The Faction champions put that right, and she came in at 3rd behind the two druids. She always comes behind the druids, I think that’s just how the game is at the moment. Anyway I’m not worried that Flowersz is going to be a burden on the Bad Apples. Sometimes Flowersz does come low on the meters because I have a habit of not healing if it looks like the rest of the team are more than adequate to the job.

As usual I did the daily Random Heroics over the weekend. Absolutely nothing to say, these are getting very close to a 45 minute quest in difficulty, just: queue, do the kills, leave. The bosses do more talking than the other players. Unless I’m grouped with a Munqui, which happens more often than I’d expect, then there’s time for a bit of fun…

2010 03 01 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (0) Permalink

Escrik Park – Ride

This weekend we took the pony out to Escrick park for his second pleasure ride of the season. There was a lot of doubt about whether we were going to attend; first of all we didn’t receive any maps or ride details leading us to suspect that it had been called off, and then the weather looked like it was going to be torrential on the day. So I’d mentally decided that this probably wasn’t going to happen. Sue made a phone call on Saturday and then it was back to all go!

Sunday morning, a late start so we could avoid most of the 80 odd expected riders, and off we go after loading the route from a couple of years ago onto the GPS watch.

It turned out to be a pleasant 20km, Casper was dutifully drugged up an hour before the ride so he was in a calm mood. The weather had changed overnight from potentially bad to dry. Most of the other horses had left before us so we wouldn’t be getting overtaken. A decent set-up for the day.

The route, though different was generally the same as a couple of years ago, so the pony satnav was useful, and even if it hadn’t been, the route was very well marked. The ground was boggy, but most of the route was on hard track and unaffected. Casper was in a good mood so we trotted most of the way with some nice gentle canters.

We did make an “on the day” change, which we normally try to avoid, this was because the gaiters on the “boots” he’s wearing until we get him shod were rubbing his pastern. So we put some vet-wrap on his pasterns (instead of tights) and that actually worked for the entire ride without any significant problems. There was a small rub at the bottom of the vetwrap, but not enough to actually break the skin. I pulled him up after about 5km to check up on how well this new change was working, if the rub-protection had failed I was going to turn back home. Just after we’d pulled back from canter to trot to walk the dozy little sod tripped and I ended up going ever so gently over his head to land on the ground. No-one was hurt and I got an excellent view of his feet, all was well. Onwards!

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, we passed a number of other pleasure riders, gently so as not to upset their horses by storming pass. All was pretty good. Sue even cycled out to meet us half way, always a pleasure to see her.

The only, less than good, point was when we caught up with a couple of the 30km riders who, looking over their shoulders and seeing us decided to canter off. I find this behaviour annoying, it winds both me and Casper up – If we’ve caught up with you it’s because we’re going faster than you, just cantering off to keep us behind is at best only a temporary measure, I promise we’ll be passing you sooner or later, you may as well accept that and let us pass now!

So we finished sound and only a couple of kph over the maximium limit for pleasure rides (oops!).

All in all it’s a decent ride, not really a barefoot ride, and a little hard if you are concerned about that. I think we’ll probably alternate this ride with the Shipley park ride in future, it’s on at the same sort of time and about the same driving distance, and, from memory, one that can be done barefoot.

2010 03 01 Andrew.Rowbottom Rides Comments (0) Permalink

Looks

Although I wouldn’t say looks were particularly important to me I do find that in WoW I prefer the looks of Gnomes and Draenei. I take some care with my character creation and with Flowersz I found that despite trying different “hairstyles” on her I ended up going back to my very original choice, the same is true of my gnomes. These two races feel “comfortable” to me.

On the other hand the look of the human males is somehow too too “butch” which somehow feels like they are in denial about their “feminine” side, and the human females are just too vacant.

Night Elves simply don’t look right to me, and STAND STILL for goodness sake!

Dwarves look OK, not “pretty” in any sense, but they do look “no-nonsense”, I could definitely stand to look at one of these. while playing 

And finally I’m looking forwards to playing a Worgen when Cataclysm comes out.

2010 02 26 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (2) Permalink

Almost a week in..

So I’ve been a Bad Apple for not quite a week, most of which has been spent waiting for the armory to update my guild so I could gain access to the forums.

My very first impressions? Remember though this is from less than a week’s worth of impressions with not a lot of “down-time” when I wasn’t actively running something,  so my impressions of the guild can be way way off the mark!

Guild Chat: I’ve not been reading the guild chat most of this week, but I have been surprised. It seems quiet for a guild with so many members on, maybe it’s just my login times. There was some name-calling last night, I didn’t pay a lot of attention, it could have been a couple of players “joshing” each other, I hope so, it wasn’t too heavy, but worse than I’ve seen before in GC.

Raiding: This is active, with a scheduled 25 man ICC run, a 10 man multi-day (I think) ICC run and at least one 25 man ToC run. I’m still sitting out on most of these until I’m happy with where I am. The one I attended was well natured though.

Forums: Now this is one area where being only a member for a few days doesn’t limit my “view” much. I have access to a reasonable number of topics, though I don’t know how many are invisible due to my rank. Obviously there will be officers forums. Anyway, again I was surprised. The number of posts a week is pretty much as per my expectations but there are a lot fewer completely “random” social threads.

Anyway, that’s all on less than a week’s experience, I’ll do another re-review just before the month is up.

2010 02 26 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (0) Permalink

French

It’s taken as a given in the UK that the French are “touchy” about their language and don’t like it when it’s not used correctly. This is in any sort of “formal” activity, I suspect that they are generally quite pleased when an ignorant englishman makes the effort to actually speak it.

The question that came into my mind this morning is why do the French get upset when their language is abused, but the English aren’t anything like as bothered. My first thought was colonialism, having a large number of “occupied” territories means that the “natives” are almost certainly not going to do a good job of “speaking the lingo”, but that falls down when you think that the french owned a considerable part of Africa and (I’m sure) several other countries including large swathes of Canada. So the “Pidgeon” explanation doesn’t seem to hold water.

Maybe it’s being conquered. We in England have been conquered a number of times, the last being the occupation that around a 1000 years ago. But to counter this, France on the mainland Europe have surely been conquered a few times, certainly within the last 10 centuries.

Maybe it was this, maybe it was because they’ve been occupied considerably more recently than us that makes them value their language so much more.

Maybe we British don’t care because we’ve got the USA talking our language with their diversity, or maybe we don’t care because that’s just the sort of culture we have.

2010 02 26 Andrew.Rowbottom General Comments (0) Permalink

getting on my wick

How come the armory updates your gear within seconds of logging out, but takes days to spot that you have changed guild, huh?

2010 02 23 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (0) Permalink

Seedling

I got accepted into the Bad Apples this weekend despite a real stinker of a guild application. I’m quietly happy that I was accepted.  I’m moderately familiar with this guild from joint raids and I’m fairly sure that I’ll get along. The guild chat is at about the right level for an baldy “liberal” like me, some innuendo, friendly trashing of other players. From only a couple of hours logged in they seem very like the Munquis in style.

Seedling is my new rank in the Bad Apples. It’s the bottom rank, which I had to request. On joining I was instantly bumped to the next to bottom rank, Jonagold or some such, but I think I’d rather sit quietly at the bottom of the pond for a while before unleasing my own special style of misunderstandings and random spoutings. At least until I’ve had some time to familiarise myself. And at least until the weather improves enough that I can commit to some kind of raid schedule.

What with the weather making my arrival home time late and erratic I could see that I shouldn’t sign up for any raids this week, nothing like a no-show to create a bad impression, so I queued up on Sunday for an Ice Crown Citadel PUG. (did you spot the link?)

I got invited to a group after a while, I had some reservations since the first boss was already downed which usually means the raid had previously experienced difficulties. I was even more worried when it turned out that the group needed yet another healer even after I had joined. Fortunately one was found before I had finished working the Auction House and off we went. It actually went fairly well and Flowersz has now done the last boss in this wing getting the “Storming the Citadel” achievement and a new pair of boots – [Boots of the Frozen Seed] into the bargain. Is it just me or is there something just a little weirdly AI about that name? It puts me in mind of the old joke “Santa comes only once a year, but when he does he fills your stockings”.

So that was a nice pug, not all are nice.

I joined a Forge of Souls group for my daily and it stank. The first boss of two was down (again with the warning bells) and when I asked what happened to their previous healer I was told “they needed pruning”. Finally I arrived at the group, tossed Earth Shield on the tank, arranged my totems according to the group and sat to eat some haste food while seeing what “buffs” I could ask for, when I noticed the tank trotting off to the multi-faced boss! We did manage to down him but two of the DPS died. Serves them right! I gave them a little bit of my mind, cutting back on the swearing settling on “wallys” rather than what I was saying out loud. And I explained that it was a good idea to let shaman do blah blha blah before pulling. I don’t know if it sank in, probably not, they were probably just thinking “drama queen” and “yay! We won!”. Wallys! The only good thing was that it was over quickly and I got my two frosties (does that make me a pug whore?).

–

I’ve not mentioned the Munquis much in this post, and I think I should. I have seriously enjoyed my time with them and count many of them as friends, I keep running /who Munqui and adding them to my friends list. I am sad to leave. But I would be a sadder puppy if I stayed.

One Munqui suggested that it was the new LFG that had caused the decline, I’m not sure it can take all the blame, players are also just getting bored. LFG despite it’s overall “wonderfullness” definitely does have downsides. IMHO the biggie is a reward system that gives you 2 Emblems of Frost a day for running stuff as trivial as Utgarde Keep. Making doing these dungeons almost another Daily grind and stealing away the point of raiding as a guild. I’ll explain what I mean, I’m running just under a dungeon a day netting me 12 EoF’s a week. If I raid ICC for Emblems of Frost I can reasonably expect to get no more than 8 (2 per boss) per week, and more usually 4 or even 2. That on it’s own makes it feel like it’s only just worth it.

And let’s not forget the older places like Naxx, Ulduar and Trial of the big round room. No frosties to be had there. Even if it’s the weekly raid quest, players only down 1 (sometimes 2) bosses to get their rewards and don’t go any further, there’s simply no profit in it.

I raid for a few reasons, one: the companionship, two:the joy of rewards, and three: the challenge.  I’m at the point now where all that was left was the companionship, really nice, and it would probably be enough on it’s own despite being only one of the essential “food groups”. But it wasn’t happening making for a sad Rummy.

2010 02 22 Andrew.Rowbottom World of Warcraft Comments (0) Permalink