1. Where you get to relive your driving lessons

Flame Leviathan is easy. No really.

After you get over ooh-ing and aah-ing over your vehicle abilities, and go over such important steps as HOW DO WE IGNITE THE FUCKING TAR, you can move on to the WHERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWERS phase. All as you trudge through a million dwarves, complete with choppers that shoot lazorbeems and big bad things that like to smash you in the face. I didn’t really pay attention to this phase, as I was busy giggling and squeeing and going pewpewpewomgikillthings.

After you stand in green glowy pads to heal your vehicles, and one of your group inevitably forgets to, you move on to Flame Leviathan. Did I mention Flame Leviathan is easy? After your guild gets over the hahaha woman driving jokes, your bike riders remember to pick people up from where they drop, and your DPSers thoroughly enjoy being launched into the air, collect your epics and move on to:

2. Razorscale: When Skadi isn’t annoying enough

Razorscale consists of two phases, in phase 1 you get to kill annoying adds and heal through annoying breaths while one of you harpoons the annoying dragon above, in phase 2 you get to DPS the annoying dragon while you move away from annoying blue fire and tanks pray they don’t get taunt resists. This might sound oddly familiar to you, however don’t dwell on it much, distribute the purplez, because ahead waits:

3. You might think this is the worst trash ever but it isn’t, aka HAI IS THIS MOLTEN CORE

The next thing you notice will be two giants who have made this their home. The next next thing you notice will be your tank screaming his dying breath as he gets to admire the floor up close because all the healers were stunned. After that, you will probably notice your healers cursing up a storm as they constantly get their drinking interrupted by the ball of fire. Next up will be the “Hey, try iceblocking” and the “How about Cloak of Shadows” parts as your entire raid slowly realises that the ball of fire is here to stay.

When your healers and DPS finally manage to drink up to full, you can move on to the next bit, which involves Trash That Does Whirly Stuff and Trash That Does Not Do Whirly Stuff.  Move out when the Trash That Does Whirly Stuff does the Whirly Stuff, and make sure each member of your raid lives through the unique experience of being bounced between two Whirly Stuffs. After your raid is done declaring this the worst trash ever, and the more knowledgeable among you giggling that they ain’t seen nothing yet, you can face:

4. LOL WHAT DOES HE HAVE ON HIS CROTCH

The Ignis fight involves a lot of fire. But it is one of those innovative fights that actually involves your offtank standing in the fire as he tries to figure out how to kite the adds through them without making your healers lose their will to live. You will go through a lot of tries at this point, most of which end with your offtank dying a fiery death, your main tank dying a fiery death, or someone else crucial dying a fiery death. Another of the biggest obstacles in your way will be your raid getting over the required KEKE YOU ARE IN HIS CROTCH jokes. When you decide you have wiped on Ignis enough and want to KILL HIM WITH FIRE, your raid leader will decide to skip him and you can say hello to:

5. “He sounds like he’s had his balls removed”

The first thing you’ll notice about Deconstructor is that he does aerobics. The second thing you will notice about him is ROFL HE SOUNDS LIKE A LITTLE GIRL. After your raid gets over the whole voice bit, and you wipe to the enrage timer because you tried to DPS all the adds, one of your tanks will hopefully be smart enough and will suggest offtanking the Pummelers until Deconstructor is dead.

This works perfectly, but there might be a few kinks to be worked out, such as How To Teach Your Melee to Not Die To Bombs and WHAT THE FUCK THE SCRAPBOTS ARE EVADING, combined with the ever-delightful HOLY CRAP SCRAPBOTS FROM THE LEFT WATCH OUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODHKSHK WIPE FAST. When these kinks are smoothed, onwards to:

6. The worst trash ever, part 2

If you’re lucky like us, you’ll have a friend who has done the trash pop on Vent to dispense advice, if you aren’t, prepare to wipe. And wipe. And wipe once more for good measure. After these wipes you will probably figure out that 1. You cannot outrange the 10k damage/tick DoT, 2. You still should not stand in things that will result in fiery death, 3. HAHAHAH FEMALE MOB THAT SUMMONS BALLS IS SHE A FEMALE OR MALE IF HE HAS ONE BALL LOLOL AHSHIT THE MT IS DEAD. Hopefully you will soon get through this most exciting trash, and go through the exciting experience of your raid leader gloating on Vent that the raid has figured out the Rune Giants until someone explodes in the middle of the raid. Next up on the list is:

7. THE LEFT ARM, NO I MEAN THE RIGHT ARM, FFS IT’S THE SKULL ARM ALREADY

Kologarn is normally a fight which involves healing the people that need healing and tanking the things that need tanking, not to mention running out of glowy lazorbeems. It also requires your raiders to be able to tell their left from their right when the right is really left. However, Blizzard in their infinite wisdom has decided that this is too easy and they must add in THE BUG OF DOOM, aka How To Wipe On Kologarn When Things Are Going Just Peachy. This bug involves Kologarn hitting everyone in the raid with Ability of Doom even though your main tank is perfectly in melee range. After you get sufficiently tired of wiping to this, you will want to try:

8. “…guys? Fusion Punch was dispellable after all.”

The Iron Council consists of a Very Big Mob, a Smaller Mob, and the Smallest Mob. You will want to kill the Very Big Mob first as he has many abilities that will hurt your raid. Your raid can put their Iron Boot Flasks to good use here to confuse the shit out of your tanks. Proceed to wipe a few times while your offtank figures out the range on the BIG EXPLOSION and your two disc priests try to heal through Fusion Punch without realising it is dispellable.

After all these things happen, there are but a few minor details to be worked out, such as 1. Your offtank interrupting Chain Lightning, 2. Your mage or shaman dispelling the shield because your disc priests are completely hopeless, 3. Your DPS not standing in bad things, 4. Your DPS standing in good things, 5. Your main tank not inexplicably dying, 6. Err shit I forgot but it does not matter anyway because we did not get to kill Iron Council.

NEXT WEEK: THE TRASH THAT IS CALLED TRASH, AND OTHER EXCITING STUFF

Purchased Lumi’s dual spec. Specced cat. Got glyphs. Trudged off to a target dummy to try it out.

Now, her gear is nothing special, and she’s not gemmed optimally. In the exact same gear before 3.1, and a cat spec, she used to average 2k dps on a target dummy.

In the same gear right now on live, she’s doing between 3 and 3.1k sustained. Self-buffed.

Needless to say, happy druid? Is happy.

I’m not at all pleased about Savage Defense, though. I feel a lot more squishy, having lost 4k armor and 3k HP overnight, and I really don’t think Savage Defense is making up for that. Maybe less of a nerf to HotW and SotF, or a better idea to have a damage shield was in order?

A few useful code tidbits, with credit to Frohman in the Quartz comments on Curse.com and Wurzel on Xperl’s WoWAce page. These are workarounds for certain problems with Xperl and Quartz, since as of now, versions of these for patch 3.1 have not been released.

Your Quartz showing everyone’s buffs/debuffs on the target, regardless of what is yours, and driving you crazy? Try this:

Go into Interface/Addons/Quartz/Quartz_Buff. Open Buff.lua. Notepad will do.

Use the Replace function to replace all instances of “if isMine and duration > 0 then” with “if isMine == ‘player’ and duration > 0 then”.

Save the file.

Go into your Quartz folder, and if you have a folder called Buff, delete it.

Quartz should now work as it used to.

Xperl getting you down? Your druid form mana bar not showing? Here’s the solution!

Open up Interface/Addons/XPerl_Player/XPerl_Player.lua. Go to line 210. It’s a line starting with “local PlayerClass”. Delete the word “local”. Save the file, and enjoy your mana bar.

To do list and random notes for 3.1 (AKA: How to kill time before a patch):

Purchase dual spec for Ely – I’m inclined towards PvP disc and PvE Holy. Still in the process of finding good resources to explain the new glyphs definitively. Should sift through EJ posts for some info. Search function not turning up anything useful.

No idea how good new Serendipity is. I’ve seen a lot of priests spam Flash Heal to pad the meters, while I conservatively stuck to Greater Heals and CoH (still in the TBC mindset where mana is a precious commodity not to be wasted). It seems like the new Serendipity is geared towards priests who still will use FH a lot and damn the efficiency. However, it’s also useful as a new ohshi function, coupled with Test of Faith. Both of which I didn’t take, but mostly because I didn’t know where to take points out of.

Stuck between choosing 2.5 second Greater Heals or Spell Warding for PvP. On one hand, will Flash Heal + Penance be efficient enough, and will the throughput suffice? I’ve never played without 2.5 second GHs except as shadow, and the thought of being without worries me, although people say it is enough.

Ely needs to get some PvP gear, stat. Looking forward to the next season, and perhaps battlegrounding more on her.

As for Lumi – her duals will be 0/60/11 feral tank and 0/55/16 PvE kitty. I’m again undecided about my last tank glyph. I’ve had Frenzied Regen and found it lackluster, that’s a fault on my part though as I mostly forget to pop it. I could opt to change now to SI or Berserk. The thing is that I’m not sure either of those are. I pop Berserk at the start of every boss fight for a nice threat lead, so having an extra 5 seconds (time to squeeze in 3 extra mangles) is nice. And I can see it potentially being useful for trash pulls, although I would be much happier if it reduced the cooldown rather than gave an extended effect. On raid trash though I usually tank a single mob, the one currently being DPSed, and leave the heavier AoE tanking to DKs or paladins, so not sure how useful extra Berserk time is there.

The SI glyph, on the other hand… a lot of the time, I go without popping SI on a boss fight. If the healers are doing their jobs properly, I shouldn’t need to anyway. But when I do need it, extra 15% sure is nice. Again, it comes down to survivability versus threat.

Want to roll mining and JC or enchanting on Shaylah, my new DK girl. Enchanting entails farming lots of instances on Lumi until Shay gets it to 375 (I do have a lot of 300-375 mats stockpiled though so). 375-450 = Pure torture begins, although I only need 375 for my disenchanting purposes so I can level 375+ at my leisure, cheaply. As opposed to Jewelcrafting which is pure torture all the way, BUT, I can potentially make more gold from it.

It was so easy to level Jewelcrafting to 375 on Haomarush that I’m amazed how expensive it is on Grim Batol, despite there being more supply. On Haomarush I managed to turn a profit all the way except on the 250-300 stage, whereas on GB after hitting 150 I’d need mats like 30 Moss Agates at 10g each on AH (on Haomarush I’d get them for 1-2g each, sell the resulting necklaces for 3-4, everyone would be happy). Yeah, if I’m not making profit leveling it, and if I’m not sure how much I will make when I hit 80, I’m not leveling it, thanks.

It’d be easier if the mats were even remotely farmable… but no, they aren’t. I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine how many stacks of tin I would need to get 30 Moss Agates, and how many hours that would take in total. Mining runs make me want to die inside, as opposed to herbalism runs, that are easier.

I guess I’d eventually roll the leftover profession on my priest anyways, along with Tailoring that I’d always planned to roll as soon as she hits 60. But Tailoring/Enchanting seems more self-sustainable than Tailoring/Jewelcrafting. With tailoring, you can at least find the materials you need while questing.

If I log on and see that Bartender no longer has the Zoom feature, as one of the comments says it does, I am going to be a very unhappy player. I love that feature! On the same note, I hope all my addons work properly and flawlessly.

I wonder if we can get an Ulduar raid going this week.

One of the most basic requirements of getting together a group, or finding a crafter, is your trade ad. The quality of your ad will directly influence whether your experience will be good. Want to know how to avoid some of the simple mistakes that make an ad a bad one? Read on!

1. Resist the temptation to use all caps. This will make a lot of people ignore your ad, and you’ll end up looking like a terribad in the process.

2. On the same note, resist the temptation to use strange punctuation, to put your add in a box, or anything else that will flood people’s chatboxes and annoy them. Don’t make people notice your ad for the wrong reasons.

3. Don’t use /y. Again, it will annoy people, and we’re trying to do the opposite here.

4. Be clear and concise in what you want. If your ad is for a raid group, make sure you mention any required achievements or specific classes/specs that you prefer. If it’s for a crafter, specify the item that you need as well as the crafter type.

5. Use good grammar, proper capitalisation, and correct spelling. This is perhaps the most important thing to do. Making your ad look professional will go a long way towards getting you what you want.

6. Add something to your ad that makes it unique! I like to add a few humorous words, as it tends to attract a better crowd. In my experience, people who get and appreciate the joke are often more mature and capable.

7. Don’t use words that might be considered offensive. People take “LFM Naxx, please have good gear and experience” a lot better than they take “LFM Naxx, no scrubs” or “LFM Naxx, no noobs”.

8. No matter what you do, do not spam the ad! It’s not like smacking your advertisement macro will get you people faster. In all likelihood, you’ll end up in the ignore list of a few people, and be reported for spamming. Be patient, and ideally put your ad out there once every 1-2 minutes.

9. When someone replies to your ad, it’s only polite to reply with “No thanks” if you don’t need their services. It’s considered rude to not reply, assuming that they will realise they are not needed, and will make people less inclined to answer your ads in the future.

So we pugged a 25 Naxx today, cause, it’s fun.

Enter this priest. Not badly geared, and says that he’s specced for AoE heals. No Guardian Spirit, no Imp Healing, but yeah, we give him the benefit of the doubt, and sure enough, he’s topping the meters every boss.

Except he’s being really obnoxious about it. Boss dies, link healing meters, gloat gloat, point out how much more healing he has done than the others and is clearly special.

Well, bad, but bearable.

Every time I do a ready check, this guy is never ready.

He’s either afk drooling on loot (by his admission), or he is missing this minor buff or that, or he absolutely needs to make this important comment about how this boss should be done.

Oh well, we grin and bear it.

But then he starts dropping subtle hints about how he needs this piece or that, and that said piece would be much better off in his hands because he has the most healing done. Apparently there’s this bit we missed about loot not being determined by rolls, but rather, who’s topping the meters.

He gets outrolled on Forethought Talisman next boss. A disc priest wins it.

He immediately posts the healing meter, and starts going on about how the loot is “so very fair, right”. People point out that disc priests heal through damage absorbed rather than amount healed, and that said disc priest has over twice the dispels he has (for Heigan).

But no, apparently, no matter how much damage the disc priest has absorbed, it wouldn’t have been as much as his healing. Also, if the disc had not dispelled, he would have, anyways, so what’s the difference?

Thankfully, the raid response is /care, so he bitches about how he’s been carrying our raid and got nothing in return, then promptly leaves.

Then proceeds to whisper me that it’s not about epeen, it’s about how he’s been doing so much and went without anything just because he rolled low, but of course noobs like us can’t understand logic, and puts me on ignore.

Sometimes I actually enjoy pugging raids.

Then someone reminds me why I hate it.

On the other hand, Lumi landed Undeath Carrier, Gatekeeper and Cloak of the Shadowed Sun. Happy druid is happy.

Take a guild.

A good guild, if you were looking at progression. Everyone Twilight Vanquishers, rolling in epics, going for raid achievements, that kind of guild.

I have had the dubious pleasure of wiping with such a guild on Maly10 today.

It all started when some guy was looking in trade for people for a Maly8. After a five minute interview, he was convinced I’d do a good job, and chucked me an invite.

Mayling, who heard this, also wanted in, so I directed him to the group leader knowing how much resto druids were wanted for Malygos. He got in as well. Great, I thought.

Until he got kicked a minute later, apparently to be replaced by another resto druid, because the priest had threatened to leave if said druid wasn’t invited. It obviously didn’t help that this druid, who had the word “Noob” in his name (and who does that, seriously) had better gear, either.

I gave the group leader a piece of my mind, but I was in the instance already, and oh well, let’s give this a shot.

Try 1: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. Only one person had 18 stacks of the DoT, the others were at… 3. I suggest people put more effort on keeping their stacks up. The DK says DPS is bad in the first two phases. He has a point, since we have only two people breaking 3k.

Try 2: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. No matter how I turn Malygos, the DK doesn’t seem to be able to grip the spark next to the other. I don’t think we ever had two stacks at any point. I point this out, the DK retorts with “DG has a cooldown”. I don’t quite understand how this is relevant, because I mean, with the way I turn Malygos, he ought to be able to catch at least _one_ other spark on top of the one that we killed wherever it was. He also doesn’t manage to ever break 2k dps. Raid buffed. With 4 piece Valorous.

Try 3: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. How surprising. I’d say Malygos ate about half the sparks during this try. The non-guildie warrior, who’s been doing decent DPS, is kicked, because the DK will invite a “more imba” warrior.

Try 4: Same stuff, different try. The more imba warrior does 2,5k dps with best in slots.

The shadowpriest, who incidentally was our top DPSer, says he’s had enough and leaves. The hunter, who was the only other guy to break 3k dps, also leaves. The druid, who was a friend of the SP, follows.

The group is quickly filled with… more guildies, as the group leader decides to screw 8man and just go for 10. Everyone has great gear, we have a paladin for blessings, this is going to great, and we move on to…

Try 5: By some grace of God, two sparks end up in the same place. Heroism is popped. The other fury warrior pulls aggro and dies. I get yells of “OMFG CR”, which I can’t do till P2. However, the holy paladin also dies to Vortex (Vortex is srs bznss with a resto shaman and a paladin as your healers), because apparently, he doesn’t have a bubble button.

I combat res the paladin going into P2. He doesn’t accept. The whole group is screaming at me to res, and I’m trying to type that I have, and tank two Nexus Lords. Which is slightly more challenging than it should be, because attacking the skull is hard. The enhancement shaman who was attacking the not-skull also dies. Paladin finally accepts the res, and proceeds to die to the next breath with about… half of the group.

After the wipe, the enhancement shaman loudly proclaims that he is not staying for another try unless we get a priest or druid for Vortex. A resto druid is hastily found. At this point I’m giggling at the irony of them having kicked Mayling only to end up needing him various times.

Then the shaman starts yelling at me. Now I had been expecting that, being that I’m the only non-guildie in the group, the wipes will probably end up being my fault.

He claims that I haven’t been above 3k tps the entire fight (I usually fluctuate near 5k selfbuffed, breaking 6-7k depending on the raidbuffs I have), and that he can’t do as much DPS as he wants to because I’m not building enough threat. However, strangely, he also admits that he doesn’t have a threat meter installed. Because he “doesn’t need it”, because his guild “is very good”. I end up pointing out that half his guildies have died to the breath, and that you can’t get more terrible than that. Not to mention the Death Grip-challenged DK and the holy paladin who can’t find his bubble button.

Try 6: We have a Vortex at 51%, which ends up working to our advantage as Malygos goes to about 44% in between the break before Vortex and the one before P2. The Nexus lords go amazingly smoothly, thanks to one of the warriors (the not-failing one) yelling “Let the tank get some threat, and attack the skull” at the start of the phase. You know, to do the things that we learn at level 20 in DM.

P3 goes smoothly, and Malygos finally dies, with the only loss being the retarded fury warrior.

And this, guys, is how a good guild is not really very good.

(P.S.: And me? I admit that I make mistakes. I’m relatively new to druid tanking, having always been resto. I try my best to do everything the way I know how, but obviously I can’t always do it, as the mishaps show. I realise that I’m sometimes missing obvious things. But when I’m putting 100% into it and others aren’t, and I end up being blamed for everything that goes wrong at the end… does not sit well with me.)