Rummys Blog An world of endless Monday

Roleplaying – in the Roleplaying Game sense, phlebologist not in the 18+ “doctors and nurses” kind of way.

I’m not on an RP server in WoW, order but when I read the like of Anna writing about RP, sickness and the occasional other blogs like A Cheerful Corpse, I feel tempted. More so when I realise that much of what I write must be pretty dull and a little too he did this, she did that. I mostly write as a memento for myself.

Anyway, I’m gonna try and bring a bit of life to Flowersz and maybe some backstory. I’ll be reading what Anna says, and checking out what I most like about other RP blogs ‘n’ posts and trying to mimic that with a Shamanka‘s twist.

Wish me luck.

Not a very original title, clinic not an original post.

This Sunday Flowersz PuGed a Heroic – Slave Pens, allegedly the easiest one. It did not go well, I bet thad that didn’t surprise you, dear reader, did it? It started to go bad at the summoning stone when our original tank got threatened with a kick because they didn’t respond to a couple of summons, in response the tank left the group (and I didn’t blame them at all even then). After a bit we got a pally tank, and started in, it wasn’t too bad, we might have wiped somewhere, but not importantly, pallys are still quite hard for Flowersz to keep upright but it was going OKish. After the first boss though it fell apart, the party got split with the leader wanting to go one way, three others going the other (more usual way) and Flowersz getting killed by a partrol. Then a wipe on an unexpected pull, another wipe on another Patrol pull, and the group disbanded with the party leader claiming we deserved it and we should all have followed him the first time.

IMHO the Group deserved worse than disbanding! Though I do think Flowersz could do a reasonable job in a Heroic if the group “gels” at least a little.

After the run I apologised to the Pally for their repair bill, and in response Jokerellone said they were adding Flowersz to their friends list. I dunno, it’s kinda weird, is Joker being genuine and really doesn’t associate me with wiping several times, or is Joker just in fact a male reacting to a female toon? I only ask because I don’t really see Flowersz performance as deserving any kind of positive response. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen if you’re a bloke. Hopefully I’m overcompensating.

After that I hijacked the healer spot on a Guild Mana tombs run which was much more fun. I’ve been an overpowered healer a few of times, and it really is (sadly) quite fun. Especially later in the run as the group starts to push their combined limits.

On the honor front, this weekend has seen Flowersz ding exulted with the Shattered Sun Offensive and the Mana tombs run pushed her over to Honored with The Consortium.

So that’s not too bad a weekends work, two reputation dings, and a little look inside a heroic dungeon.

Don’t you love it when a blog you read catches you unaware.

A few months back I was feeling a bit down and thinking about quitting but decided to play until my time was all spent up.

I’ve just paid up for some more time, info so it doesn’t look like I’m ready to quit WoW just yet.

I can only thank my guild for changing my mind. As a result of my guild dragging me into Karazahn undergeared and underprepared I’ve not had to join LFG for months. So I’ve not had to suffer the frustration of being just another one of the three healers and two hunters looking for a PuG. That has really helped a lot, physician I don’t deal well with frustration.

I can’t say I enjoy the non-dungeoning part of WoW, the reputation grinds, the reputation grinds and of course the reputation grinds, but I’m OKish mooching along doing a few dailys, and the odd quest for money.

Talking to my girlfriend the other day I realized that playing WoW  at the level cap (outside of grouping) was really just another way to occupy my mind, more enjoyable than watching the same old repeats on telly, or reading a poorly written book, but essentially just moving wallpaper.

OK so I’m pretty happy with casual raiding. It’s unfortunate that I can’t really schedule two nights a week without the lack of sleep affecting my work, buy information pills fortunately the guild seem OK with that. The Munqui Tribe are usually oversubscribed on the first night, here and slightly undersubscribed on the second so I can usually get a place. Actually I don’t think I’ve been turned down recently as long as I sign-up on the calendar.

I am beginning to feel like I should be doing something else, I think these are the things  I could be doing in WoW (no particular order):

• Run all the dungeons in normal mode – there’s 7 outland dungeons I’ve never done!
• Get my Karazahn key – just because, ya dig?
• Do the quests in Shadowmoon Valley – truly I’ve only been there to pick up my flying mount.
• Run at least one Heroic dungeon – again I’ve not done a single one.
• Get the scholomance key – only one more kill to go I think.
• PvP – yeah, well, I’ve only ever done WSG and you never know, I might learn to enjoy it.
• Rework my UI so I can actually see the world – I’ve been playing with ALT-Z and bits of WoW look quite good when you can actually see it.
• Become such an invaluable part of the tribe that they have to make me an officer – (laughs).
• Take my warlock out of retirement – he’s not been out of a city since this time last year!
• Level my druid – I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the lower level players and there might just be an opportunity to do some pair levelling in a week or so (or not).
• get my epic mount – not gonna happen!
• re-roll horde?

This has turned into a longer list than I expected, it’s a big game!

Gah, sanitary what can I say about dailys that hasn’t already been said better by others? Nothing really, page but a little thing like that won’t stop me.

I’ve not run the Shattered Sun Dailys for long enough to get completely bored,  though I have fallen into a routine. With the extra damage from Flowersz healing gear I can now do around 8 dailys in an hour, after that the gold/hour ratio starts to drop off significantly. An hour isn’t too bad, it’s pretty much the length of time I have in a casual evening for playing, and it doesn’t quite drive me mad.

I’ve been doing these dailys to fund raiding and it’s quite effective at that, and as a convenient side effect I think I should hit Exulted with the SSO in another day. Then I’ll be able to buy an epic necklace from them, which will be nice.

Whee! Last night we downed Arran, click Netherspite and Nightbane! I’ve seen Arran twice before so no biggie, rx but I’ve never even seen either dragon, this let alone downed them. /dance

So that means in two nights the Munquis downed all the (real) bosses but Illhoof and those who were present both nights earned something like 20 badges. We would have taken Illhoof out for a long walk off a short cliff but it was getting late.

Still /dancing!

Analysis.

The good

• Overheal was considerably down on my usual – 15%
• Mana wasn’t an issue, pots, mana tide and the awesome Seaspray Albatross trinket meant a couple of times I hit full mana mid fight!
• I’m almost within 5% of the Pally Healer on the WWS meters, that’s close enough not to be embarrassing.
• Talking totems definitely work as a good prompt, I didn’t need the prompts much, but sometimes I did, and that’s why I modded GotWood.
• I actually managed to get out of/avoid the Charred Earth and Void Zones. Improved mobility! Could do still better though.

The bad

• Where was that Fire Elemental?
• Heroism was sadly missing too.

The ugly

• I got rude at one point when I couldn’t hear the raid leader over another member of the party talking on VC
• I swore when we downed Nightbane. “It was the excitement of the moment gov’nor“

So still plenty of room for improvement.

This weekend has been a busy little weekend for me. I seem to have actually achieved stuff, sovaldi nothing very important, clinic but all progression of a sort.

Firstly I got GotWood to say the type of totem that has just expired; “air”, “water” and so on. There’s no filtering so when I do a totemic recall all four elements are announced simultaneously – it makes quite a loud noise, but I can live with that for the moment especially since I don’t usually wear headphones when soloing. Hopefully this will make me as responsive to totem expiry as healbot made me sensitive to Earthshield expiry.

Then I did some more Shattered Sun grinding for money and got all the way to 500g before I started spending it! I got my gloves and bracers enchanted up adding around another +100 healing to Flowersz kit (now standing at almost exactly +1400).

And, TA DA!, I bought a Seaspray Emerald to make a Figurine – Seaspray Albatross! Epic win! An extra 18mp5 and 900 mana every 3 minutes! Flowersz is practicing using it regularly. She’s replaced her Pendant of the Violet Eye with the albatross because having two mana trinkets and no healing trinket simply doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Flowersz now has only a little more gold than my level 41 druid!

Oh yeah and talking about Flowerz the Drood, I leveled her up from 40 to 41.

A curius thing happened on Friday evening, there I was tootling around doing my SSO dailies, all solo like, as per usual, and three times I got asked if I wanted to join a group. Two Kara’s and a MrT. Looks like people are giving Flowersz the once over. Hehe, I should have gone just to teach them not to assume an epiced player is any good ;-). Still, I’ll remember that friday evening is a good day for dungeoning.

So I edited the GotWood.lua file yesterday to print to the console whenever a totem “died”. And it’s looking fairly good.

Issues at the moment are:

• Totemic Recall sees all totems as dying
• Going too far away from a totem or catching a “Taxi” cause the totems to “die”

Still, drugs even with these spurious announcements the change will meet my raid needs. Time to generate some noises I think.

I can probably work on suppressing spurious announcements by delaying half a second before announcing totem death and if more than one totem dies in that time it’s probably a recall or distance issue rather than a simple expiry. If it becomes necessary I should be able to spot totemic recall through hooking into the combat events and looking for the relevant spell.

I’ve been looking to make a “talking” totem manager so that I can have audible indications when my totems are expiring so that I can refresh them promptly.

The idea is that when a totem “expires” I get to hear some sort of sound.

Initially I though of writing an entirely new addon, bulimics and that may yet happen. Until then I’m looking to modify an existing addon. The problem was finding one that was simple enough to understand.

TotemTimers looked good, site but has an awful lot of extra capability meaning it was difficult to “see the wood for the trees” <smirk>.

I’ve since found “GotWood” which displays the totems you have dropped and how long they have left to go. Which in a way is what I want to do. So I’m going to hack GotWood to produce sounds and then perhaps re-hack it to remove the display bit so I’m only left with the sounds. At that point, obviously, I’ll be renaming it.

Source code lifted from http://svn.wowace.com/wowace/trunk/GotWood/GotWood.lua

So, onto the analysis…..

GotWood uses a lot of ace libraries – I don’t really care which libraries it uses.

It has a number of translations, these seem mostly to do with the UI. One oddity is that they have translations for foreign languages, and true for en_US. I guess at some point I’ll be adding in some options for notification (disable/enable etc). At the moment I’ll just hard code.

GotWood:UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED(player, sName, sRank)

• usually calls self.view:SetTotem(sName, rank) and self.view:RemoveTotem(v) for totemic recall.

function GotWood:PLAYER_DEAD()

• calls self.view:RemoveTotem(v) for all totems

function GotWood:PLAYER_TOTEM_UPDATE(slot)

• calls self.view:SetTotemFromEvent(name, startTime, timeleft, icon, self.slotmap[slot])
• or self.view:RemoveTotem(self.slotmap[slot]) (totem death)

function GotWood:TotemDamage(msg)

• not interested and commented as useless after 2.4

Alternatively I could implement a new View that “subclasses” CandyBarView and responds to the abstract methods…..

SetTotem,- when a totem is created (UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED)

SetTotemFromEvent,- when (PLAYER_TOTEM_UPDATE)

RemoveTotem, when – (UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED-TotemicCall, PLAYER_DEAD, PLAYER_TOTEM_UPDATE)

overloading remove totem would result in a bundle of sounds for totemic recall 🙁

So modifying GotWood:PLAYER_TOTEM_UPDATE looks like the way to go to get “expiries” and overloading the view might help in getting timings.  The View code probably has good tricks for discovering if a totem is going to expire in x seconds.

Totem names etc…

GotWood:PLAYER_TOTEM_UPDATE has a “slot” for earth, air, fire, water and would be a good place to start, just four sounds, in addition there’s a totem name which I think is the name of the current totem (if any)