2fps

New Rule – Update on a weekend every once in a while

Come on guys, come oooooooonnnnnnnnn. My feed reader gets so empty so fast on weekends. I know the weekend generates very little traffic compared to regular weekdays but I still find myself checking my reader constantly on Saturday and Sunday. Being stuck inside sick on the weekend with nothing to read is just entirely unacceptable.

New Rule – Never again

See this? It should all be deleted.

The whole frost wing of Icecrown can just die forever as far as I’m concerned. It is aaaaaaawful. From the maddeningly boring/frustrating/impossible to troubleshoot Valithria encounter to the WHY THE HELL ARE THERE THREE FROST TOMBS UP AT ONCE OMG I CANT EVEN BELIEVE bitchslappery of Sindragosa, and the longest-most-boring-but-omg-seriously-how-many-adds-could-there-still-be trash in between the two, the entire wing was one nightmare-inducing prison rape scene.

NEVER AGAIN.

New Rule – This still doesn’t let you off the hook

This is me dueling with Arthas on the edge of the top of Icecrown’s spire. A waterfall of ice and frost cascades down to the frozen pit of Northrend below and only the tumult of thunder and lightning hangs over our heads. Truly, an awesome place for a final showdown.

Regardless, we’re still waiting for an apology for the Trial of the Crusader.

New Rule – If you’re trying to screen bad players, don’t be bad yourself

Nothing makes me lose interest in joining a pug raid then one particular question.

You see the call go out in Trade chat: “LFM Nan Dungortheb, need 2 dps, 1 healer.” The announcement doesn’t smack of any particular idiocy and you’ve been meaning to pick up some loot from Ungoliant’s spawn so why not? You send the raid leader a whisper volunteering your pewpew services.

“Wats ur dps?”

…

Aaaaaaaaaaaand I’m out. Done. Do not care at all whatsoever anymore. That question tells me that you don’t really have any idea what you’re looking for and unless the number I give you in return is beyond ridiculous you aren’t going to be impressed anyway.

I could answer that my dps is over 10,000. That’s 100% true. I could also say that my dps is 3000, also true. Damage done is dependent on context for meaning, elsewise its only use is to flaunt your wowcock.

New Rule – Know where the hell you’re going

When I dinged 70 back in Burning Crusade on my first character I made a point of going back and soloing as many of the old world vanilla dungeons and raids that I could. I had to get help for Upper Blackrock, not only because of the numbers requirements to get past the door but also because Drakk’s conflag was still pretty wicked at the time without a healer. I got attuned to Onyxia, I got the Seal of Ascension, I got the hammer to summon Gahz’ranka even.

As I was doing all this old world stuff I was also working on my Arcatraz key, figuring out which floating barge was the Botanica and which was the Mechanar, learning where the Caverns of Time were and which portal was which, etc.

Why?

Because I never wanted to be the clueless one in the group. If I got a whisper inviting me to do Heroic Mech, I don’t want to be freaking out about trying to find the damn place on a map. Its discourteous to the rest of the group in my opinion.

The dungeon finder tool has bestowed upon us all a slew of people who have never been to the summoning stone of the instance they’re queued for, people who may have never even been in the same zone as the instance they’re in. This has led to a metric ton of people who, after wiping in say… Halls of Reflection, flounder around in Icecrown for twenty minutes before leaving the group in embarrassment because they’re completely incapable of finding the entrance.

Know that kind of thing before you queue please and thank you!

New Rule – So help me if you still have your hearth set to Dalaran Zulrohk I will murder your face off

I THINK THE PEOPLE THAT NEED TO HEAR THIS KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

Yesterday I said the two problems I see over and over again in raiding were overcautiousness and overexplaining.

I think the overexplaining problem may actually be caused directly by the problem of being way way way too cautious. After all, nobody likes to make mistakes and nobody likes being underprepared.

When my first character reached Outland and started tanking the Hellfire Citadel instances I had a dungeon guide book that I kept open while we ran through each zone. Before each pull I’d consult the book and hold the group up for ages and ages just so I knew exactly what I was doing.

This approach turned out to not be so great unsurprisingly. It instilled some extraordinarily bad habits that took some time to unlearn. Its never good to insert long artificial stopping points in the flow of an instance. If you just finished a pull and nobody died and the healer is sitting at 80% mana or above, what are you waiting for? Keep pulling!

But wait! What if you don’t know what abilities the mobs in a certain pull have? Surely you can’t just barge in and start hitting stuff right?

Bollocks. Most of the time you don’t need to know much of anything about a pull before you launch yourself headfirst into the closest enemy.

Does any mob in there have a cast bar? If so, its likely they won’t run towards you and they may very possibly be capable of healing. Spell reflect, strangulate, death grip, charge, or otherwise do something to get them near you.

The point is, don’t be a sissy. Don’t stand and fret about whatever shall we do when you’re pulling trash. Often the best way to learn how to handle trash packs is to just get in and start swinging away. Afraid of wiping? Nonsense! All you did was a controlled experiment to find out the limits of your group!

Ok maybe that last one doesn’t apply so much to pugs. Don’t pull that recklessly with strangers.

So here are some more examples from Icecrown Citadel.

Deathwhisper’s room has two trash pulls consisting of a handful of mobs. Some casters, some melee. They sit in the middle of the room more or less. How do you pull them?

RUN IN AND HIT THEM WITH YOUR FACE, THAT’S HOW.

Why the hell do you need to line of sight them around that corner? Your raid group has every tool they need to handle these mobs without resorting to an antiquated method of pulling that just wastes time. Oh you accidentally pulled both groups?

PROBABLY NOT A PROBLEM.

Obviously this is going to depend on the skill of your tanks to pick things up and your healers to not panic and lose their shit but really, these mobs are not that threatening.

In fact let me take a shortcut here and show you the only mob in Icecrown that you may actually want to line of sight. Its an annoying mob unless your death grip is off cooldown so sometimes it helps to put a wall between you and it: Plague Scientist

For better or worse, this isn’t Burning Crusade anymore and its certainly not the vanilla game either. The overwhelming majority of pulls in the game do not require much thought at all so stop worrying and fidgeting and just pull already.

To sum up what I’ve been saying today and yesterday: Shut up and pull already.

I’ve been spoiled by raiding with the good people of Nocturne. I am more aware of this fact now that I’ve recently participated in three pug ICC raids as my mage and my tree droodle. These pickup groups have reminded me all too well of horrible moments from Burning Crusade that prompted me to start my own guild in the first place.

The problems I see over and over again are overcautiousness and overexplaining. In this post today I’m going to focus just on the overexplaining problem. Tomorrow I’ll talk about being overly cautious.

Keep in mind that if longwinded, boring raid leaders who recite bosskiller strategies verbatim to the raid over ventrilo don’t bother you then great, nothing in this post applies to you. That said…

Dear raid leaders, you talk way too much about nothing and it makes people cry, plz stop.

For instance, trash in ICC. There’s kind of a lot of it in some places. For some reason this makes some raid leaders feel compelled to explain every particular nuance about each particular mob in great detail before proceeding.

For the love of all that is good in this world please stop that now.

Here’s what dps needs to know about trash in any raid instance:

• What do I kill first?
• Do I need to interrupt anything?
• What do I need to do about the debuff?

Conveniently, answering these questions takes less than thirty seconds.

The things that healers and tanks need to know are not much different at all.

Example: Deathspeaker High Priest in Icecrown Citadel

You’ve cleared the rest of the trash in Lady Deathwhisper’s room and now there are only two of these High Priest mobs left to kill. As the tanks are running to pick the first one up the raid leader says on vent: If you get a debuff, run away from the raid until its gone.

And that really is all the explanation that’s required. Yes the priest has a damage aura that will tick away at everyone in the raid. No you shouldn’t need to specifically instruct your healers about the exact mechanics of said damage aura. Why? Because they’re healers and they’re already watching people’s health bars. If they see everyone’s health bar slowly tick down at a steady rate they’re going to… wait for it… heal people back up.

Its simply not worth bringing the raid to a halt to explain all of these minor issues. If you feel you must explain them, explain them as you’re clearing. Telling the healers the reason they’re seeing the raids health bars in flux is because of a damage aura links what is actually happening in front of their eyes to the mechanical explanation in real time.

Another example: the last trash pull before Marrowgar in Icecrown Citadel

This pull has a few skeleton warriors in front, two giant spiders and a pair of skeleton casters. As you prepare to pull the raid leader says: Kill the casters first, interrupt their casts. Kill spiders next, focus interrupts on their heals, then kill the rest.

Again, that’s all you need to say. Nobody really wants to sit there doing absolutely nothing at their desk while a raid leader drones on and on and on about things that barely matter to anyone. Oh we’re supposed to interrupt the casters because otherwise they hurt people? Get out of town, I could have never guessed.

One last example: Marrowgar himself

This all applies to boss fights as well.

Chances are extremely good you’re taking way too much time to explain boss fights.

Let’s listen to our theoretical raid leader again: “In this fight, one random person will be gored on a bigass spike. Wake up ranged dps because if you don’t kill that spike immediately nothing else you do matters. He shoots trails of fire, obviously you’re not going to stand in them. His cleave splits damage between the tanks so the tanks have to be on top of each at all times or nothing else they do matters. Sometimes he whirlwinds. When he whirlwinds he moves around the room four times and then stops to go back to what he was doing before. Let the tanks get him after he stops whirlwinding. Kill spikes, don’t stand in shit, tanks on top of each other, pull.”

Great, that’s all the basic stuff you need to know for the fight and it took about a minute to go over. If individual healing assignments, remarks about positioning and other miscellaneous instructions are equally concise (which they absolutely should be), you’re ready to pull Marrowgar after only about 2 to 4 minutes.

Spending over thirty five minutes going over just these details I’ve mentioned here means you’re wasting a lot of people’s time and you need to get your shit together. And yeah, in one of my pug raids each boss (including Precious and Stinky) got a half hour’s worth of explanation. Guess how much we got done in three hours?

Tomorrow I’ll talk about why line-of-sight pulls in Icecrown make me want to stab people.

New Rule – You’re not a pirate

I don’t know how this got started but it makes me roll my eyes every time I see it.

Ignore what the healer said about the ghoul by the way, that’s just silly talk.

No, instead focus on the top part. Really guys? You can’t type out even just one full word? “r” is all you can muster? Gosh it must be tough getting out of bed every day if you can’t strain your muscles any more than to type just one letter responses.

New Rule – Wrap up the blues

As I’ve said before and as Chastity says here, the whole blue dragonflight plotline is a pretty awkward piece of work. I suppose its just another case of Blizzard royally mucking up when it comes to storytelling but this is the first bit of that you find in this expansion. Later you’ll come to appreciate the odd sidetrack to kill Yogg-Saron and then at the end you’ll find that every quest and npc lied to you about the nature of the Lich King and everything that was set up as truth ended up being scrapped and tossed aside in favor of one of the most egregiously terrible pieces of plot that WoW has to offer.

What happened to the blue dragonflight? What happened to the Scarlet Onslaught? What happened to Malganis? What happened with Azjol-Nerub? Why was the Lich King plot so radically changed?

The Malygos plot line is a story that could have really gone places but was brushed over entirely for more “important” things like jousting and… more jousting. Could we stop doing that please? Thanks.

New Rule – Moar buffs faster nao!

Say what you want about the ICC zone buff but I love it and want more stacks of it forthwith! After you spend week after week flawlessly downing early bosses in any raid you start to get a little crazy. Its repetitive, there’s no danger, there’s no excitement, its just the same hoops to jump through on your way to new things. Bring on the buff so we can get to the parts everyone wants to do darnit!

Hi I’m every tank ever! Glad to meet you in this here random heroic that you’ve been desperately trying to get into for the past twenty minutes. I only have to wait a few seconds for my queue to pop so sometimes I just decline it for a few minutes for fun lol!

I’m a tank which means I’m awesome. I’m also infallible. I don’t know what that word really means but I heard it in sunday school and it sounded awesome lol!

Here’s how this run is going to go: I’m going to sit absolutely motionless for about five minutes in between each pull and then without a word I’ll spring into action. I’m like a fuckin’ ninja cat man, they never see me comin’. I don’t really care about your mana bar or whether you’re still patiently waiting on me to move talk twitch dance so if I pull three packs of mobs at once and I die, its because you were a twat and didn’t heal me good enough. Weak man, weak.

What’s that? No I didn’t know you could just mount up after Ick and Krick and run by the next trash pulls. Does that mean I can mount up and run past ALL the trash up to the cave entrance in Pit of Saron?! No way, that’s awesome!

…

Oh ffs you guys are scrubs, that’s some weak heals man, weak.

Anyway I’m just going to start calling you out as the healer because you’re the obvious target to go after here and I can probably rally the support of the brainless pvp rogue, fury warrior and frost death knight against you. So again, real weak heals there son.

Here, I’ll make this easy for you. I’m going to go tank those things up there. Yes the skeletons in the big group with the two casters. I’m not going to throw my shield at the casters or whatever the fuck that warrior thing is (heroic/stupendous/megalopolic/ultrahumanityslaying throw) because dude, its just a heroic. Also, I’m going to put my back to pretty much all the melee mobs because man if you can’t heal through even that then we have a serious problem.

Hey you know what? Maybe you’re just not good enough to run heroics with me yet. Why don’t you go back to normal mode Nexus and gear up first because there’s no chance I’m being the world’s largest supertwat without fuckall of an idea what I’m doing.

Oh shit, I forgot its almost raid time. See ya guys, I’m off to raid with my super leet guild of Arthas-slaying fame. Peace, bitches!

Just one new rule today because I’m too focused on this issue to let it be just one of many on a list.

New Rule – Shut the hell up

A couple of pugs over the weekend helped reduce my lifespan by heightening my blood pressure and lowering my overall view of humanity.

In one, the group mercilessly and relentlessly mocked the tank in ToC5 for what one might call general “noobishness” and tomfoolery. The tank had apparently not played the game for quite some time (judging by his gear I’d say he stopped raiding before 3.1 even hit) and was quite slow and fumbling before pulling the faction champion riders. He had to be reminded to switch out his lance for an actual weapon. He then unequipped his lance and ran in to pull. Unarmed. Two dps went splat from pulling aggro pretty much instantly and the tank never equipped a weapon throughout the entirety of the fight. The healer did his best job of spewing hate at the tank even going so far as to talk about him as if he wasn’t there at all. As we continued to clear the zone it became apparent that the tank actually was just a little rusty and after a few minutes more we were collecting our Frost emblems.

The healer never let up on insulting the tank he was furiously healing.

In the second group, I joined a Violet Hold run already in progress. Immediately upon joining I was greeted with the tank saying “Man I hate black people, you aren’t black are you?” Of course I’ve cleaned up the grammar for convenience. He’s immediately joined by his guildies in the group who alternate between asking whether I’m black or simply stating I probably am and should leave the group.

There’s a chance that these idiots were just saying inflammatory things thinking they were being very very funny. There’s a greater chance in my opinion, based on some of the other things they said and did, that they were being more or less serious about their racism. Either way, wildly inexcusable.

So as I was filling out the ticket to the GM against them they decided I was afk and began dishing out ever more despicable racial slurs at me. By this point they’d already cleared through the first boss while I was filling out the ticket and then I realized it: if they were in fact trying to get a rise out of people by feigning/demonstrating their racism and seeing whether I would leave, why not make them go through the entirety of the instance getting emblems for me while I sat and played Bejeweled?

Oh the horror when they found out that they had cleared the zone too fast and the LFD debuff was preventing them from kicking me from the group on the last wave. As Cyanigosa landed I had about 40 seconds on my debuff left. It fell off when the dragon was at 15% health but they didn’t try to kick me again after the first try before they pulled the boss. I collected my Frost emblems as they gnashed their teeth and then left group.

Both groups failed miserably at treating other human beings with respect. The lesson to be learned for these people is to shut. the. hell. up. You know the saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”?

Fuck that. For you people, just don’t say anything at all ever period.

The world is a lot better off when jackasses keep their idiocy and hate to themselves.

Also when they get hit by cars.

I don’t know what gods I angered but man have I been hit with a heavy curse of late.

Every time I sign up to tank a random heroic it becomes the most epic kind of fail. Case in point circa two minutes ago. The queue pops instantly of course, zone into Gundrak. Hey, easy stuff and a lot of emblems I think to myself.

Wrong. The other death knight in the party jumps down into the water first and immediately pops path of frost once he’s safe. All the rest of us are slightly behind him and therefore all drop to 30% health on impact. Douchebag.

Oh wait he’s not done. He instantly pulls the first pack of snakes which wipes us all.

Are you kidding me. And why the hell can’t we kick him the fuck out then?*

EDIT – Oh yeah I forgot to give the name of the jackass death knight! Cazt from Drenden.

*Its rhetorical, I know why already :P

It just ain’t the same yo.

Once upon a time you could get into a battleground without having to wait thirty minutes. Once you got in you wouldn’t always find yourself staring at a perfect win for the other team already in progress.

Tell me again why it takes half an hour to get into Arathi? I’ve entirely given up trying to get into anything else. Tell me again why I’m getting killed in two hits once I do get into Arathi despite having nearly 900 resilience? Tell me why its the last patch of the expansion and victory is still decided by which team has the most Ret paladins and DK’s?

Even more importantly, tell me why I always get killed at the precise moment that ensures I will have to wait the full 30 seconds to spirit rez?

But most importantly, why the hell can I not queue up for more than two battlegrounds at a time?

Grats on making pve content so readily accessible but I hope that accessibility didn’t come at the cost of one of the other majorly fun parts of the game.

I dedicate the references to nudity and all euphemisms both real and imagined to Jamie.

New Rule – More fast one-handed maces!

My rogue was Shadowstep maces in BC and it was super fun. I did this because I was only going to be pvp’ing with the rogue and wanted a unique look. Seeing as how everyone and their dog had gladiator swords I chose maces.

Lo and behold, maces and armor pen get boosts in WotLK. Huzzah! There are lots of awesome dps maces. Huzzah!

EVERY ONE OF THEM IS FOR YOUR MAIN HAND. FFS! There are two offhand maces I can potentially get for my rogue. One is from Maexxna in Naxx10 and is not only completely outdated by weapons standards today but also clocks in at 1.6 speed. The other mace is pretty good, clocking in at 1.5, but its a trash drop from Ulduar 10. Yeah, my rogue ain’t gettin’ that any time soon. Come on Blizz, this one is an easy one to fix!

New Rule – The Deathchill cloak has to be upgraded to be the best cloak ever

If I have to sit here questing through every frickin’ zone just to get Loremaster of Northrend to learn one stinkin’ cloak pattern then it had damn well better be the best cloak in the game forever! >=(

At least my warlock has dual-spec now.

New Rule – More cooldowns!

I’ve been moonlighting as a droodle bear tank recently and its scary stuff. So there was this big black dragon breathing fire all over me (which is hell on the fur) so I popped barkskin. Then that dragon did it again like thirty seconds later! Uh… frenzied regeneration! 3minute cooldown! O_X

It feels a lot like tanking as a paladin in BC. Specifically fights like Prince and Curator where you just prayed Holy Shield stayed up, gritted your teeth and let some giant fist beat on you for 10 minutes while your healers drank themselves into a stupor to cope with the trauma.

Therefore a Death Knight I remain. Class of the thousand cooldowns. Hell, I don’t even care if they’re all that useful. Just give me something to push when bad things happen to give me an illusion of control and I’ll be happy after dealing with the nakedness that is bear tanking.