A Distant Land - A World of Warcraft Blog

2011-02-11T08:49:00.003Z

Blog closing

2011-02-08T11:12:00.002Z

Dear almost all,

Well, the dozen or so emails from readers of this blog telling me to QQ more, you get your wish.

I have tried to give to the community out there for years, even through plenty of hate in the hope the nice people would win.

But it's just too much now. Work is hard and I can just do without Internet hate, it's ruining my fun.

I deeply appreciate the supporters over the years and hope that you enjoy your time.

Will I keep playing WoW?

With my friends yes - but my confidence in Blizzard has been seriously knocked. Nerfs are one thing, but those that play a feral Druid know what I mean.

Ultimately stopping this blog is due to the hatred and trolling - I am just sick and tired of it - well done, you win.

/hugs from Red for the last time.

(and thanks for the nice replies everyone - YOU are why I tried to keep it going out there in the first place - you should be proud of yourselves as people - just wish the world was filled with people just like you - and not the haters)

Also - if you wondered about this - it's because I received a fairly consistent set of rather - well, lets just say "abusive and graphic" emails from someone that got rather too far and kept coming via different alias names and I just can't deal with that anymore.

Feral Druid changes are going live

2011-02-07T19:27:00.000Z

So, after over 10 THOUSAND combined complaints on the US and EMEA forums Blizzard are going live with the feral Druid nerf to shape shift, bleeds and bear tank damage.

Fuck you Blizzard.

/out

No more videos until Blizzard revert the druid change

2011-01-20T11:01:00.000Z

Normally I don't complain about nerf or changes to any class - I know the reasons and I understand the process of balancing a game.

However - this is my very first break from that - the propose changes currently sitting on the Public Test Realms (PTR) for druids fundamentally change the class in a way that is both confusing and too much.

Druids were designed around mobility - that was the whole reason I personally rolled a druid in the first place back in TBC. In fact, it was what made druids have a positional attack - the fact we could be mobile enough to physically use it.

The "up time" on a target is what makes druids a unique class - our damage is based around this time on target - our mobility is what defines the class.

The current PTR changes will cause shape shifting to no longer have this root removal - almost EVERY high rated MMR arena player is in support of druids in this issue - in fact, a number of frost mages at high ratings have made public posts saying that on the PTR feral druids are simply cannon fodder with the changes.

As a result, I will not be making any more videos and likely no more blog posts if this change goes live.

Blizzard have normally maintained some level of understanding of the player base and although they have made class changes over the year, they have usually understood what defines a class and left it alone - this changes that completely.

If you support me - then please go to the official blizzard forums - particularly if you have the ability to post on US forums and make the case to not push these changes live.

thanks for the support.

Red

Back from Vegas!!!

2011-01-16T18:45:00.000Z

Hey all - back after 8 days away - recruitment is pretty much closed now except for a resto shaman - thanks to everyone that applied and those that made it into the ranks - sorry we can't take more but it's a 10 man and smaller than we used to be :-)

/hugs to everyone! Jet lagged atm.

Orbis Tertius Recruitment

2011-01-06T13:21:00.001Z

So, we are now forming the small 10 man guild ranks - have almost enough for raiding to start properly - the website is new - you can apply here:

http://orbistertius.guildomatic.com/

This new site obviously looses the old several thousand posts from the previous Orbis site - but we felt it was easier to maintain and would provide a nice fresh start for a group of friends.

We are looking for the classes listed on that website - if you are raid ready then apply at that link - clearly it will require you to be able to play on the Dragonblight server in EU - and also share the exact same raiding/playing goals as listed in the guild charter.

Best wishes to us all - and if being able to easily 9 man Tol Barad and getting Magmaw on the second evening of tries is anything to go by, we are full of high hopes.

Oh, and if you have a passion for healing and have a resto shaman that fits in we are particularly interested in you!

Cheers,
Red

Orbis Tertius reforms on Dragonblight

2011-01-02T16:31:00.000Z

Hope you are all well,

so, here we go - trying to make a go of a 10 man raiding guild - not so hardcore this time, but with two nights a week raiding on Wed and Thursday - first group up saw Magmaw down in style so it looks good for the future.

It's going to be slow going at the start, but I'm hopeful of good things in the future.

If you fancy a go and are a skilled player that can play on the EU server Dragonblight then let me know.

We really need a resto shaman, resto druid and/or a holy paladin. Another tank would be good, and a couple of dps (warlock and a frost DK).

cheers!

Red

Second night and a one-shot of Magmaw

2010-12-31T16:24:00.000Z

So, we've started a tiny bit raiding again - just a few hours in total - night before last and last night.

We only had 1 hour together last night and decided to give Magmaw a try, couple of well undergeared people and one or two in roles that they have not played much in raids before.

We walked in on a high and one shotted this boss. It was close, very close, but damn it felt good to be raiding on bosses that can wipe you again :-)

Lovely mechanics, fun fight and being one of the people jumping up onto his back made for extra giggles.

Loved the fight, loved the raiding again - looking forward to seeing the other bosses.

Was also much fun to go into a raid encounter with no clue and not reading a guide - hell, the first trash wiped us until we realised what we needed to do - hehe.

Sometimes reading guides and watching videos can spoil things - and the funny thing is that watching a guide video afterwards, I was of the opinion that our positioning choices worked better.

Well, happy new year to you all out there, I really do hope it is a good one for you.

/hugs
Red

Happy Christmas and new year

2010-12-23T14:27:00.000Z

I want to wish you are your families the very best of Christmas and a happy new year. If you don't celebrate Christmas, then I still wish you the very best where ever you are and I hope your life in 2011 is bright and peaceful.

love,

Red

Level 85, pvp and heroics

2010-12-20T10:26:00.000Z

Hey everyone,

So I reached 85, gathered some gear via the normal instances and then used my honor points to buy two blue items (pvp) that put me at the cap for heroics. Some of my old guildies have transfered to this server and together with a couple of people from the guild we are now all part of we moved into Heroics.

My impression is extremely positive at the moment - they are hard and well tuned. I love some of the boss mechanics and enjoy the fact that mana is an issue for healers and you typically end a fight with most people at lower than 50% health. Feral druids are certainly ok in heroics - the QQ I've seen on the WoW forums about low feral dps is just not true - ok, sure we can't keep up with the pure dps classes, but it is far from poor.

I've been running between 6.5k and 11.5k dps in heroics depending on the boss - and I think that is acceptable at this gear level.

Of course I miss my 76% crit rate - that was mental, but right now the rotation is hard enough to be fun without being annoying - oh, and thank god they removed the confusing and stupid armor penetration stat from the game.

I've of course been blessed with doing heroics with a superb tank and an amazing healer with us, but I really hope that Blizzard do NOT nerf the instances.

Next is pvp - I've noticed a LOT of QQ about ferals on the official forums - and people seem to be posting screenshots from before the last round of patches when there was a bug with mastery and rake. We have long been fixed and have received a 50% nerf in rake damage.

I am doing less dps than "pure" classes and have no major advantage in PVP really. I've been destroyed easily by elemental shamans and shadow priests - spirit walk in a cross server BG with plenty of lag makes catching and killing an elemental shaman very challenging - however, I love fighting them because it is now difficult and less predictable.

Ferals are in a very good balance now - and I guess the QQ is because they are now fairly equal and they used to be a free kill before the Cata talents arrived. Patch 4 and now Cataclysm has addressed feral balance very well indeed. I hope we get left alone for a while now.

I still find mages the single hardest class to beat followed by warlocks - a well played prot paladin is nail biting to play against as well.

I am a little worried about the possibility of raiding as I notice that when we ask people round us if they are interested in joining for heroics we don't get much positive response - this stuff is much harder now. Even with the super pro players I when with yesterday, we still wiped several times while learning a boss in Grim Batol (Drahga Shadowburner) and I needed to change spec to manage Erudax (so I had infected wounds).

Raiding is going to needs some pretty serious players I predict and that might be difficult. I've experienced low interest when raids suffer wipes early on - and it's tough to pick moral up after that!

I'm looking forward to the future of WoW right now.

I still have some disappointments:

1) Engineering - really very disappointed with the change to this profession - I can't use the enchants in an instance now for fear of causing a wipe - and in BG's the backfires will kill you most of the time (because you are mostly using them in an oh-shit moment)

2) Mining node exploits - Blizzard STILL havent fixed this - trying to mine anything on my server is almost impossible as there are bots underground speedhacking between all the nodes and mining them.

Well, that's it for now - I will be making more videos in the future when things settle down of course!

cheers,
Red

Nearly 85

2010-12-16T13:12:00.000Z

As most people blogging out there I've taken a break as I level and have fun with the new content - well, I'm about half way up level 84 - and looking forward to spending time with my friends in the new intances!

Some of my old raiding buddies are going to move to this server - and the guild I'm in would love them to join in and have some good times here - so it's all good!

I hope you are having fun out there!

Red

Quick wave to someone!

2010-12-05T21:28:00.003Z

Hey George!

/wave to you and your mates :-)

Redmist

Cataclysm is nearly here!

2010-11-30T12:28:00.002Z

Not long now, and we see cataclysm - and here are some thoughts:

Well, I'm all ready to go tanking again for Cataclysm, I've been spending all the points I've been getting for honor over the 4k cap on gems ready to cut into tank gems for current and new gear while my wife and I level up our jewel crafter.

I've spent an hour fishing up enough fish to make 30 fish feasts for leveling cooking and also for nice food buffs in the new content. We have stock piled potions and mats for enchants. We've bought cheap armor kits on bid from the AH over the last several weeks so we have a couple knocking about in the bank.

We both know all this stuff will be replaced quickly, but it is almost free and will both level us up and hold us over until we get our crafting skills leveled up naturally.
I've explored the shattered content quite a bit now - including playing through all the new starter zones on new toons just to experience them - I liked the Tauren new start feeling the most - must more streamlined than ever before - I had a level 17 Tauren Paladin before I knew it!

I've been in PVP quite a bit and love it on my feral druid - but right now I'm in a bit of a slow down with WoW waiting for Cataclysm to hit. I don't want to really do more as I'm ready and would like to experience the new content to 85 and then raid and rated BGs.
I'm planning to try out Goblins and Worgen just to see what they are like - but I will only do these in a few months when the zones are more clear.

I've also just killed all the comments to my old Shaman movies on youtube - they are a year old (or more) now and people are commenting on them as if they were filled last month or something and it is getting too much to respond to haters there. I've tried out my enhancement shaman in BGs recently, and they have improved a bit - and in PVP gear they are better then they were, but they feel a little "slow" compared to my feral druid - I seem to either waste globals with totems that I instantly get ranged on, or I end up with everything on cooldown and 2 or 3 seconds to wait before any of my skills become active.

My druid I find is global starved (ie - I have more choices than I have time available to use them)

The only class I've found with the perfect balance in game so far is a warrior - I always have something to do, but not too much that I feel global'ed. Blizzard seem to be getting better at all this - and so they should with the time and money they have had!

Well, expect more content to appear here and on my youtube channel as I get into Cataclysm - and I certainly plan to do some more plain-speaking tutorials on Cataclsym encounters as I get into them. Beta tutorials are all very well, but they are often not mechanic complete or managed by the average guild.

Good luck with Cataclysm upgrades everyone - I've got a hard copy on order. See you all out there.

Oh yeah - the other thing I've been doing is creating WoW sigs:

/hugs Red

Back!

2010-11-23T12:16:00.000Z

Hey all - sorry for the long gap in posts - I guess you could say that the excuse from the phone company is quite a good one. "Sir, it appears an animal got into the exchange, we think a rat and has chewed through quite a few of the wires"

To be fair, BT were exceptionally good about all this - they kept me informed, they explained in detail what the problem was, they were sorry, the engineer called me on my mobile directly - the customer service team were great - all round, I could not fault their service. I just wish the rat had not picked my wires!

Back to WoW:

So, what have you guys been up to then? Well - time appears to have caught up with us and the shattering is happening today in the US and tomorrow here in Europe. Big changes everywhere and all getting ready for Cataclysm!

I love my druid - and am sad at the nerfs that are coming our way - I'm not alone in the nerf class it seems, but it still makes me sad - but hey ho - I've been through the nerf bats before.

What are you all going to be doing now then? Exploring new zones? Re-rolling? I'm going to stick to my trust druid in Cataclysm, but that's not going to stop me exploring a couple of new class combinations! I've always loved Taurens and the fact that they can now be paladins and priests I find very exciting. My wife and I are considering rolling a pair of male Tauren holy paladins just for giggles - a project I will no doubt get bored with quickly but it will give me something to do :-)

Other than that, I've been doing Battlegrounds with my trusty friend and previously twinned tank (we both had nightelf warrior tanks) Angel. Now, Angel is one of those rare people in WoW, a player that is amazing regardless of class. We have been doing random BGs together with me on Mist while he is on his holy paladin.

To say that we can win a BG with just the two of us is understated. His healing ability is legendary and coupled with a ferals damage output and ability to peel and you get a two man army. 56 killing blows in AB with zero deaths? Yes please Angel! - freedom, heals, dispell spam and 20% mastery feral druid - lots and lots of dead players. Fun as hell - I know we are getting big arse nerfs, but I've enjoyed it while my internet connection let me :-)

I've been told that ferals at level 85 on the beta are in a pretty good place right now, so I've got my fingers crossed.

Well, I wish you all great success with the Shattering today and tomorrow and I hope that if you do start a new toon that you have tremendous fun and end up with an MMO that pleases you greatly. Enjoy the last weeks of the Wrath of the Lich King everyone - especially those long term friends of A Distant Land blog /hugs (you know who you are)

Red (aka Mist)

Internet problems

2010-11-18T00:06:00.001Z

I'm not missing - I'm just without a phone line atm - waiting for the provider to fix it so I can get the internet back :-(

/hugs
Red

4th Feral PVP Video for your entertainment :-)

2010-10-31T17:26:00.001Z

Nerd screams at their very best

2010-10-30T00:47:00.001+01:00

The perfect PVP opening for a feral druid

2010-10-24T14:25:00.001+01:00

Feral druid dps for Patch 4.0.1, a basic guide to opening on a target

2010-10-21T14:18:00.000+01:00

First up - here is the basic build - you can play with the points in Brutal Impact, Survival Instincts and Nurturing Instinct and move them about elsewhere if you want - the rest is pretty much required for best dps at the moment:

The above links you to wow head and you can see the Glyphs I recommend. The instant cast roots is for raids or instances where you need to cc melee players or mobs - I'm using it to practice for CC in Cataclysm - and it works really well.

PVE and PVP Opener (Take care vs blink classes in pvp due to loss of feral charge as we use it in the opener) - this is something I've seen a lot of ferals do wrong with the new patch, so I thought it would be a good idea to show you what I've found to be the optimal opener:

Feral Charge (grants you a free Ravage due to Stampede talent)
Pounce (opens with a bleed dot - even if immune from the stun you get a bleed)
Ravage (use up your free ravage, and also with the talent Predatory Strikes you get a better crit chance)
Mangle (increases the bleed damage)

IF you have 5 combo points at this point:

Tigers Fury (also improves bleed damage now)
Rip (your main bleed)
Rake

If you have less than 5 combo points

Tigers Fury (also improves bleed damage now)
Rake (another bleed)
Rip

That's the opener - you only want to apply Rip when you have 5 combo points, not before. Then you need to go into your standard dps rotation - which by now you should have figured out - if not and I get enough requests, I'll make a new video :-)

cheers,
Red

Almost three years to the day...

2010-10-21T11:45:00.001+01:00

...since I started this blog with my very first blog post in the whole of my online life - here it is:

http://combatmace.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-day-new-blog-this-time-for-combat.html

I can't believe that this Saturday it will be exactly three years to the day since I started this work. I wanted to thank all those that have stuck it out with me and commented - from the very first comments from Scott, Bill, Unelma, Hiroo, Stephen and Bronredneck and others to the current stats as of today since the start of this blog:

261,528 unique visitors
457,625 page views
159 countries
94 languages registered in the browser

And the last statistic I really like - over 60 thousand people have visited the site more than 50 times. In fact, there is an elite group of 10,711 people that have visited the site over 201 times :-))))))))

A very special thanks to those 10,711 people - if only I knew you all - that would be a lot of /hugs to hand out!

And on the 8'th of Feb 2009 I took the step into the world of youtube - it was a shaky step and one that I initially didn't enjoy due to the haters - but again the commuity visiting this blog helped me through it and I'm now sitting at 2,511,170 video views (I know! More than two and a half million!) with 4458 subscribers and 153,615 channel views.

I've learned a LOT during these three years - most of it good:

1) Be tolerant. No. more tolerant than that...even more...

I can't believe myself, looking back, just how difficult I found it to accept critic or hate, I really found it offensive. I've learned that the internet removes peoples inhibitions completely. Ok, some take it really too far, but I've had to learn to let it wash over me like a gentle wave on a sunny beach. But...there are limits...

2) Respect others, but hit back when it is called for - and stick with your morals - always.

As the above, respect alternative viewpoints, but something else I learned about the internet is that sometimes you just have to react - and do so in the most intelligent way possible. People respect you if you don't take trolling and childish comments laying down. So, don't let it effect you mentally, but do point out where someone is being just plain stupid. This goes especially for racist or sexist comments - I have a complete no tollerance standing on some core values I hold dear.

I've had quite a few people over the years submit comments that are sexist or racist - it's why I moderate comments - those people NEVER get a hearing or any chance to voice their ideas - insta-banned, and if I can report them to google or youtube, I do.

3) Innovate.

Lastly I've learned to not go along with the crowd. When EVERYONE is doing pvp videos, change to tutorials, when people stop releasing pvp videos - start doing them. When people all crowd into one spec or class in game, reroll and respec into a niche.

My wife teases me, because at home I set my bed-side alarm for 7:01 - never on the hour or half hour. Why? Because that's what everyone else does.

Things are looking good for the furture of WoW so far, and I'm looking forward to playing the next expansion - I've tried many other games out there over the last 5 years, but I've not found the community to be as active, engaging or fun. And I still really like the game.

/hugs to everyone reading this and all the youtube fans as well - I appreciate your time and respect your place in the world.

Red

PuG ICC 25 dps and the feel of feral in a raid after patch 4.0.1

2010-10-18T08:53:00.000+01:00

Well ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to tell you - if you have not raided with your kittie since the patch... OMG, it is VERY nice indeed.

I joined a PuG into ICC25 (ok, there were a LOT of fail players in it, but I wanted to try out my new spec/talents) I loved it very much.

The way I can proc savage roar off of mobs I have killed and have combo points on the dead body is brilliant. I did some utterly brilliant dps, I hope that Blizzard doesn't nerf this, and that we scale like this up to level 85. My bleeds were critting for between 8 and 10k ( I know! )

Saurafang I guess is the single target dps test - and I was sitting at over 16,000dps (5k more than the number 2 in the raid, I know fail dps PuG) - I think that is pretty reasonable. The rotation was still complex enough to be enjoyable, but forgiving enough to deal with the RNG of crits.

Just a quick Monday update that <3 Blizzard for this. (And how much I now have to be able to counter in pvp, skull bash is utterly amazing)

/hugs,
Red

Patch 4 thoughts and a guide copied here.

2010-10-17T11:31:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone!

So, patch 4 has been out for a few days now and feral druids have been buffed during a hot fix. How do I feel about them? What do I think about the future of feral? What is PVP like right now? What about pve?

Wow, lots of questions!

Well, when the patch first came out I was very disappointed as I'd lost over 3k dps (yes, that much) - but I had faith in Blizzard and two days later there was a massive buff to feral dps and I'm back to roughly the same as I was before (perhaps a little more).

I really love how feral works now in terms of play style. I'm a little annoyed at the filler talents in the feral tree for dps are still there and it feels like we are still being forced a little bit to tanking as a role. I understand this - there are simply not enough tanks in the game at the moment.

PVP as a feral now feels really really nice. The skull-bash skill was THE game changer for me - it has taken me a few days to get used to using it, and I find I use it for more than just an interupt - I'm also using it as a gap closer. Oh, and another thing, if you don't have Glyph of Entangling Roots yet you are missing out on the single most fun glyph in the feral druid game right now. Can't catch someone? BAM, rooted. Need to heal vs melee and don't have instant cylone up - BAM, rooted.

I've no doubt that people will start to QQ about feral druid bleeds. I can now take a protection warrior with 50k health down solo without them hitting me more than twice.

I've reforged ALL my gear for mastery because it's amazing - this includes my pvp gear. I've made some mistakes in my reforging that I'll need to re-do soon as I've just realised that crit is nicer than I thought now everything can crit.

I still have major issues with a couple of classes out there - mages being one of them. I've got over 1300 resilience now and mages crit me regularly for over 14k in single spells. They must be one-shotting people in pve gear. Also, fire mages that can run and spam scorch at the same time are just mindlessly running round BGs doing this. How utterly fail and boring it must be to spam a single button and run arround in circles. Frost mages have gone back to ice-lance spam as well, which is just as dull to fight against.

Give me some variety please!

Hunters are very strong right now - especially with the stupid druid only CC in the game of Scare Beast (why a CC just for druids? Never understood that one)

I've only just realised that we get insect swarm now as feral - which is fun as a bit of extra damage as an opening (I tend to stand in caster form before a pull, smack thorns on the tank, FF and then insect swarm - then cat form, pounce and ravage and then start my rotation.

The only challenge with this patch is the 20 minute BG queues and the 22 minute dps dungeon queues - people can't be arsed to play the game on my server now, which is silly because all these changes are great and need to settle in.

Well, that's it for this post - WoW is coming along just lovely right now.

Red

Below is a guide created by a great feral druid called Mihir - I've copied it here for my own reference, and also just in case people can't find it elsewhere in the future:

The Cat Guide - 4.0.1 edition by Mihir

1 About this guide
2 Preparing your character
2.1 Talents
2.2 Glyphs
2.3 Stats
2.4 Gems
2.5 Reforging
2.6 Enchants
2.7 Professions
2.8 Consumables
2.9 Set bonuses
2.10 Simulators & formulators
3 In the heat of battle
3.1 Abilities
3.2 Priorities
3.3 Opening & finishing
3.4 Multiple targets
3.5 Addons

1 About this guide
I've been asked to bring the cat guide up to date with 4.0. It's still a work in progress atm, but you'll see it growing to it's full size in the coming hours/days. Feel free to post anything you feel should be added.

About myself: I've played druid since the release of wow, and raided as feral in top50 guilds since 2.1 (BT/hyjal). In 3.1 I switched to full time feral dps, and I've maintained a "Fix my feral dps gear" thread on these forums during most of patch 3.3. I've also made various contributions to Rawr (4T10 bonus and black magic for ferals) and SimulationCraft (black magic for ferals, better priority list).

2 Preparing your character
2.1 Talents
Talents got a major overhaul in 4.0, pretty much the biggest change since the release of WoW. The patch notes sum it up nicely:

•Talent trees have been altered. All player talent specializations have been reset, allowing for free re-specialization.

•Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.

•Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.

•Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.

•Once a talent specialization has been chosen, players may only place points in the primary tree until at least 31 points have been spent there.

The ability unique to feral combat is Mangle, the passive bonuses are Aggression, Vengeance, and Feral Instinct.

The basic feral dps spec will look like this: http://wowtal.com/#k=-3l3KpL.a6d.druid.deVzp4

At level 80, you will have acquired 36 of the possible 41 talent points, allowing for a branch-out of up to 5 points to the other two talent trees. This means that the tier 2 talents of the other two trees are still out of reach; they will be available from level 81 onwards when you gain your 37th talent point.

Unfortunately the only viable tier 1 non-feral talent is Heart of the Wild, leaving you with 33 points to spend in the feral tree. There are 28 talent points you can spend in the feral tree that will directly affect your dps in some way, leaving you with 5 points to spend on utility/survivability talents. One of those will have to be in Furor to get to tier 2. Good options for the remaining 4 are Survival Instincts (giving you an extra survivability cooldown), Nurturing Instincts (reducing strain on healers), Brutal Impact (allowing you to interrupt every 10 seconds), 1 more point into Furor (keeping you at 66 energy after a combat res), or Infected Wounds (if noone else can bring the thunderclap debuff). One has to be in tier 4 or below to get to tier 5 (I've put it in Nurturing Instinct), and one has to be in tier 5 or below to get to tier 6 (I've put it in Survival Instincts). The final 2 can be spent anywhere.

If you want to prepare for leveling to level 85, you can put 3 points in Natural Shapeshifter as well so you can take Master Shapeshifter at level 81.

2.2 Glyphs

Glyphs have had a major overhaul in 4.0 as well, and are now split into 2 categories: Prime, Major and Minor. You get a slot for one of each every 25 levels, for a total of 9 glyphs from level 75 onwards.

Prime glyphs will be directly increasing your main abilities, major glyphs will add utility or remove some mechanics, and minor glyphs are mostly cosmetic.

The prime glyphs affecting cat form are:

Glyph of Rip
A 15% increase to your highest damage ability.

Glyph of Shred
Increasing the duration of rip from 16 to 22 seconds gives you much more room to weave in ferocious bites, or to keep up savage roar.

Glyph of Savage Roar
Even tho savage roar only boosts white damage now, and white damage is only ~15% of our dps, you will still want to keep up SR as much as possible.

Glyph of Tiger's Fury
There is still a lot of different opinions about this glyph; on one hand it makes tiger's fury go out of sync with rake, since 2x rake = 30 seconds which is equal to the cooldown on unglyphed TF. But on the other hand it increases the uptime of TF by 11.1%, if TF is used on cooldown.

Glyph of Berserk
Since you should be pretty much out of energy by the end of berserk, adding 5 seconds to it will only give you ~2 extra shreds.

Glyph of Mangle
Since you will be using mangle only to keep up the bleed debuff, this is not a very good glyph to use. It's awesome for soloing tho.

Recommended setup for raid dps:
Prime: Rip, Shred and SR.
Major: Anything but Ferocious Bite

2.3 Stats
Armor penetration rating

Has been removed from the game in 4.0. Any arpen gems have changed to crit gems (and changed color from red to yellow in the process), any arpen on gear has chanced to crit rating if there wasn't already crit rating on the item, or if there was, to haste rating.

Weapon DPS
Another major change in 4.0; feral attack power is gone from weapons, and weapon DPS gets directly added to our paw DPS now. Attacks like mangle, shred, ravage and swipe now scale directly with our paw dps, and not directly with attack power anymore. Don't make the mistake of looking at weapon damage; the speed (and thus minimum/maximum damage) of a weapon have no influence on our paw DPS, only the DPS of the weapon is used.

Agility
Any item with both attack power and agility have had their attack power removed, and to compensate agility will be giving 2 attack power per point of agility. With the 25% attack power bonus from Aggression, 10% attack power bonus from Heart of the Wild, 5% agility bonus from leather specialization, and the 5% stats and 10% attack power raid buffs, you will be getting over 3 attack power per point of agility, as well as some crit. Since all bleeds can crit by default now, they fully scale with agility, making all aspects of agility affect 100% of your damage. Easily our best stat, by a fairly large margin.

Strength
Strength still gives 2 attack power per point of strength, however strength isn't affected by leather specialization, and also does not give crit. So while it affects all of our damage, it will always stay behind agility.

Mastery rating
This new stat has been introduced in 4.0 as way to improve certain aspects of your talent spec. In the case of cat form, each point of mastery will improve your bleed damage by 3.1%. You will need 45.9 points of mastery rating to gain 1 point of mastery. Since bleed damage will be over 50% of your total damage, this is a very good stat to get. This stat isn't available directly on gear or gems yet at this moment, however with Reforging it is possible to turn existing stats on your items into this stat.

Critical strike rating
With bleeds being able to crit by default, this stat affects 100% of your damage done. With Primal Fury it also increases your combo point generation. A very good stat, tho it doesn't come close to mastery atm.

Haste rating
Haste improves the attack speed of your auto-attacks, as well as directly increasing the rate at which your energy regenerates, allowing for more specials to be used. This stat has nearly no influence on your bleed damage, making it an okay stat but not as good as crit rating.

Hit rating
Improves your chance to hit with attacks. Without any hit rating, you have a 8% chance of missing versus a boss-level target. For every 30.7 hit rating, you will gain 1% more chance to hit. Since a missed special attack will automatically refund 80% of it's energy cost, and white attack are only 15% of your total damage, this is not a very important stat atm. The cap is 245 hit rating for all races; do NOT try to get this as a feral, other stats like agility, mastery and crit are worth much more.

Expertise rating
Same as hit rating really, except that expertise reduces the chance your attacks get dodged or parried by the boss. Since a dodged special attack will automatically refund 80% of it's energy cost, and white attack are only 15% of your total damage, this is not a very important stat atm. The cap is 6.5%, which requires 26 expertise or 200 expertise rating to negate. Again, do not try to cap this stat; agility, mastery and crit are much more important.

Attack power
There's still a few pieces of gear that have attack power on them, as well as a number of enchants. Attack power on gear isn't affected by the 5% stats raid buff or leather specialization, so the value of 2 points of attack power will be slightly below the value of strength.

Stamina
Improves your hit points. With the removal of attack power, more item budget will be used on stamina, so you will probably be a lot higher on hp than you were before 4.0.

Relative stat values
The priority of stats changes little from naked to ICC geared, until you get crit capped (calculated with Mew):

Code:
Naked BiS, no crit cap BiS, over crit cap
Weapon DPS 2.49 5.59 5.56
Agility 1.76 4.70 4.47
Mastery 0.92 3.73 3.79
Crit rating 0.58 2.56 2.02
Hit rating 0.25 2.08 2.82
Exp rating 0.25 2.08 2.82
Haste rating 0.26 1.96 1.95
Strength 1.32 2.96 3.06
2xAttack power 1.26 2.82 2.912.4 Gems

With agility being so far ahead, and mastery gems not available yet, this is pretty easy:
1 Nightmare Tear in your best blue socket, Deadly Ametrines in yellow sockets with a +6agi bonus per yellow socket, and Delicate Cardinal Ruby in everything else. Meta gem should be a Relentless Earthsiege Diamond.

2.5 Reforging
This is your only way of getting mastery rating at this moment, and you can (and should) use it to reforge every single item to mastery rating. Hit, haste and expertise are the best stats to reduce; try to reduce the stat that's biggest to get the most mastery out of it. If you're near the crit cap, and have items of which the biggest stat is crit rating, reforging crit rating to mastery is also a viable option.

2.6 Enchants
Pretty similar to what it was before, with a slightly higher emphasis on agility:

Head: 50 AP and 20 crit rating
Shoulders: 40 AP and 14 crit rating
Cloak: 22 Agility
Chest: 10 Stats
Bracers: 50 AP
Gloves: 20 Agility
Legs: 75 AP and 22 crit rating
Boots: 16 Agility
Weapon: Mongoose

Mongoose values in at ~200 dps, with berserking close behind at 180 dps, and massacre/black magic at 130 dps.

2.7 Professions
JC: +42 agi (3xDelicate Dragon's Eye replacing 3xDelicate Cardinal Ruby)
BS: +40 agi (2xDelicate Cardinal Ruby)
ENG: +48 haste, speed boost, parachute (240haste/12sec, 60sec cd, Nitro Boosts, Flexweave Underlay)
LW/ENCH/INSCR: 80 AP (Fur Lining - Attack Power/2xEnchant Ring - Assault/Master's Inscription of the Axe)
SKIN: 80 crit rating
HERB: 480 haste rating/20sec, 120sec cd
MINING: 120 stamina

Important note: In cataclysm, LW will be getting an agi enchant on bracers, which will replace the default haste enchant. This will make LW superior to any other profession by a large margin.

2.8 Consumables
Flasks/elixirs
The only real options is Flask of Endless Rage, 180 AP = 508 DPS
The next option would be Elixir of Mighty Agility, but 45 Agility = 212 DPS.

Food
This one's also pretty easy; since all food has 40 stats, the agility food will be the best option, and there's only one kind of it: Blackened Dragonfin

Potions
Potion of Speed 500 haste rating for 15sec = 980 DPS
Potion of Wild Magic 200 crit rating for 15sec = 512 DPS
Insane Strength Potion 120 strength for 15sec = 355 DPS

2.9 Set bonuses
2T10
A 10 energy reduction on Rip saves you 10 energy per 22 seconds while the boss is > 25% health. Below 25% you will be refreshing rip with ferocious bite instead so the bonus is fairly useless then. During a 5min fight you will be doing roughly 10 rips before the boss reaches 25%, so this saves you 100 energy, which could then be spent on 2.5 extra shreds, which is almost a 0.5% dps increase.

4T10
With bleeds being able to crit by default, the 4T10 bonus has been changed to grant a flat +10% damage on rake. Since rake is responsible for over 20% of our damage done, this is still easily a 2% overall DPS increase.

2T9
Increasing rake duration by 3 seconds puts it at 18 second duration, allowing you to spend 17% less energy on rake during the fight. This will save you about 115 energy over a 5min fight, allowing for almost 3 more shreds, which is slightly more than a 0.5% dps increase.

4T9
Since rip and ferocious bite together are around 35-40% of your damage, 5% more crit on those will increase your total damage by 1.8% (assuming you're not hitting the FB crit cap).

2.10 Simulators & formulators
The only simulator/formulator that's fully up to date with 4.0 atm is Mew.

3 In the heat of battle
3.1 Abilities
Auto Attack
Formerly the biggest part of our DPS (up to 40%), this is now (with savage roar kept up 100% of the time) responsible for only 18% of our damage. Against a mob or boss that's 3 levels higher, will have a 20% chance to be a glancing blow. Glancing blows do 75% of normal damage and are unable to crit. Gets increased by 50% by savage roar, or 55% by glyphed savage roar.

Savage Roar
Finishing move that increases auto attack damage by 50%, or 55% if glyphed. With the Endless Carnage talent, has a 22 second duration at 1 combo point, and 42 second at 5. It automatically takes combo points from any nearby target, even if it's dead. So if you kill a mob and still had combo points left on it, you can switch to the next target, and start with a savage roar that will consume the combo points that were still on the corpse. Savage Roar (if kept up 100% of the time) is responsible for about 6% of your DPS.

Omen of Clarity
Now learned at level 20 by all druid specs, gives every auto attack in cat and bear form a chance to proc Clearcasting, reducing the energy cost of your next damaging feral ability by 100%. Try to use clearcasting for shred as much as possible, since shred is our most expensive attack energy-wise. The proc-chance is 3.5 PPM; with our base attack speed of 10, that is 3.5/60 = 5.83% chance to proc.

Fury Swipes
Every auto attack has a 10% chance to proc Fury Swipes, doing 310% of weapon damage. Note that this doesn't mean the weapon damage of your equipped weapon, but rather your paw "weapon". So if your paws hit for 1k, fury swipes will hit for 3.1k. Is not affected by Savage Roar, and has a 3 second cooldown. Is responsible for about 3% of our dps.

Mangle
Primarily used to get the 30% bleed debuff on your opponents, increasing all damage done by rip, rake and shred. Can be used for combo points as well if you are unable to get behind the boss/mob. If you got an arms warrior, feral tank, or subtlety rogue in the raid, you probably will never have to use this. Mangle itself is responsible for about 1%of our dps, however the mangle debuff (if kept on the target 100% of the time) is responsible for about 17% of our dps.

Rip
Your primary damage ability, responsible for over 30% of your total damage. Gets 30% more damage from the mangle debuff, 15% more damage from glyph of rip, and is directly affected by both mastery and agility. Ticks every 2 seconds, for 16 seconds (8 ticks), which can be increased by 6 seconds (3 ticks) through glyph of shred. Below 25% health, ferocious bite will refresh the duration of rip to 16 seconds.

Rake
Like rip, rake has gotten a big buff in 4.0 due to mastery, and agility giving 2 ap. Now responsible for over 20% of your damage.

Shred
Your primary combo point generating ability. Requires you to be behind the target. Base damage is slightly lower than mangle, but it gets 30% more damage from the mangle debuff, and 20% more damage if the target is bleeding. Will extend the duration of rip with glyph of shred. Responsible for about 20% of our dps, if the target has the mangle debuff and is bleeding 100% of the time.

Ferocious Bite
Your main combo point dump. Has about double the damage per energy as shred. Will take up to double it's normal energy cost to double it's damage done. Only use it when you can guarantee you will be back at 5 combo points when rip runs out. Below 25% health this ability will refresh the duration of rip to 16 seconds. Responsible for about 5% of our dps.

Feral Charge
Used to cover distance to your target quickly. You will land behind your target, facing it. With stampede, allows the use of 1 free ravage that will disregard position and stealth for 10 seconds after the charge. It's good to open with a charge, get buffs/debuffs going, then ravage just before stampede runs out.

Faerie Fire
Reduces the armor of your target by 12% for everyone for 5 minutes. Doesn't cost any energy, so just use it while you are charging to the target. On the beta this is only 40 seconds duration, it's likely the 5 minutes is a bug.

Tiger's Fury
Increases all damage done by 15% and your max energy by 20 for 6 seconds, and increases your current energy by 80. After the 6 seconds, 20 energy will be taken away again. 30 second cooldown. Can be glyphed to 27 second cooldown. If you rip or rake while this buff is active, the rip or rake will get the +15% damage for its full duration. It's fairly easy to have every second rake get this buff.

Berserk
Decreases the energy cost of all your abilities by 50% for 15 seconds, 3 minutes cooldown. Duration can be increased by 5 seconds through a glyph. The extra energy consumed by ferocious bite does not get reduced by 50%. Best used when you have a nearly full energy bar, so you can use all that energy on the cheap abilities.

Swipe
Your main (and only) aoe damage move. Has gotten a big nerf in 4.0, is now only worth using when there's about 6 or more targets that will get hit by it.

3.2 Priorities
Cats don't use a set ability rotation; instead we have a priority list of buffs/debuffs/abilities to use:

•If you got 30 or less energy and Berserk isn't up, use Tiger's Fury
•Use Mangle if the bleed debuff is about to fall off. (can skip if you have a bear, arms warrior or subtlety rogue in the group)
•Use Berserk if there's more than 15 sec cd on Tiger's Fury and your energy is 1second from being energy capped (80-90).
•Use Ferocious Bite if the boss is below 25% health, Rip is about to fall off and you have 1 or more combo points.
•Use Ferocious Bite if the boss is below 25% health, you have a Rip on the target and you have 5 combo points.
•Use Shred if you have Clearcasting.
•Use Rip if you have 5 combo points, Rip has less than 2 seconds left or is not on the target.
•Use Rake if Rake has less than 3 seconds left or is not on the target.
•Use Savage Roar if you have 1 or more combo points and SR is about to fall off or isn't on you yet.
•Use Savage Roar if you have 5 combo points, Rip has 12 or less seconds left and SR and Rip will expire 3 or less seconds from each other.
•Use Ferocious Bite if you have 5 combo points, and SR and Rip both have 8 or more seconds left.
•Use Shred if you can use it to extend Rip duration with glyph of shred.
•Use Shred if you have less than 5 combo points, rip and rake aren't about to drop and you either got more than 70 energy, or you got more than 35 energy and Tiger's Fury is coming off cooldown within 3 seconds.
•Use Shred if you have 0 combo points and there's less than 2 seconds left on Savage Roar or Rake.
•Use Shred if there's no Rip on the target
•Use Shred if you're 1 second away from getting energy capped.

Another feral druid pvp movie for your entertainment :-)

2010-10-09T18:42:00.001+01:00

How to get started in PVP

2010-10-02T19:35:00.000+01:00

I've been enjoying pvp on my feral druid more and more. As I start to get experience I'm finding that I understand the need to shapeshift more than I did and just how utterly amazing cyclone is. No, I mean AMAZING!

I was sitting here wondering what to blog about - you know everyone is having a dry spell at the moment waiting for patch 4 and also the impending change to everything - but I also thought - well, now is a time when more people are using pvp to fill the raiding gap a bit. I've also seen many people (in my guild as well) complain that pvp sucks and they get zergged so much, etc, etc. - so I thought I'd show a little guide:

How to get started in PVP:

1) Wintersgrasp

This is perhaps the best thing to do - you can be effected from level 78 if you are a healer, and at 80, stick with the group if you are just starting out and things will be ok.

Why do you want to do wintersgrasp? Well, the quests need to be done every time they are available to you - when you join the raid, ask "Please share all quests" - and you get to repeat some that maybe you thought you couldn't do again this week.

Planning your gear.

The first thing to realise is that wintersgrasp is one of the best ways to stack honor - and with that honor you should be getting some of the wintersgrasp gear in your sights. There are two vendors inside wintersgrasp - they sell different things, so check them out - the best item to get is the shoulders:

Titan-Forged Spaulders of Triumph

Those spaulders are item level 251 and there are versions for every class and spec. The above are clearly feral from my perspective - they are also pretty much as good as relentless gear. They cost 40 Wintersgrasp Marks of Honor and are totally worth grabbing first.

Next, do Vault of Archavon EVERY week - make sure you do it. If you can get into a class run, then do that. If you have to take a tanking off-spec to get into a group and you have some good-ish tanking pve gear, then hell, go and tank it.

Why?

Guess what, VoA 10 man drops (as an example for feral druids)

Relentless Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves
Relentless Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards

And VoA 25 man drops:
Wrathful Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves
Wrathful Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards

You can also get pvp necks dropping in there!

2) Battlegrounds:
Next up, make sure you do your daily random battleground until you win one - you get a load of honor, and you also get 25 arena points. Arena points are your friend - you can buy relentless gear with it.

Now, you are getting your shoulders from Wintersgrasp, going for gloves and legs from VoA (and maybe a neck) - so you should plan your other gear accordingly.

In my opinion, one of the most important items to get is the PVP trinket. It also happens to cost the most honor. Plan your pvp - write a list and keep goals in mind. Do NOT spam BGs when you are first starting out - doing various things, like wintersgrasp, a bit of "arena for points" some BGs, and hell, even sneaking into a capital city for some world pvp - mix it up.

Save that honor - and get your:

Medallion of the Horde

At 68200 honor, it is a LOT - but also totally worth it - the 153 resilience is very cool - and the on-use will be a life saver.

Now, onto the rest of the gear... check the calendar for the BG events - if you see an AV weekend, omg - that is the time to spam if you are ever going to. Get some drinks and snacks, you are going in baby!

Spam that BG, but spam it smart - defend EVERY time. Recap towers, get the mines, do everything you can to win, don't zerg, EVER. The honor you get from that bg on that weekend is insane. Grab your set gear (furious) as you can with the above in mind.

Next, arena - /shudder. Don't worry, this will be horrible the first 100 times you go in there. Pick a partner or team of people that have low expectations - agree upfront on days you will play, and agree that you will not get annoyed or frustrated as you gear up.

Set goals - your first win, your first win of 3 games in a row, etc. Take a break if you get annoyed. Don't play tired. But... get in your 10 games a week. Save those points and fill in that gear.

Lastly, my only other advice is to gather honor however you can and get the wrathful off-set items (the cloak, ring, etc)

What am I doing at the moment? Wintersgrasp every time I'm online and it is up, and to mix it up, I've started to hang around the zone after it is over, particularly if we loose. I LOVE finding pve geared people by the summoning stone...Dead gnomes...

Also, it counts as world pvp kills, so the honor is particularly high for a kill.

Well, that's my quick guide to starting in PVP - best advice is to try and find/make a friend that wants to experiment with pvp as well, playing together as you start this adventure will make it less painful. Oh, and what resilience should you be aiming for?

ONE THOUSAND BABY!

/hugs
Red

Audio swap in process

2010-09-22T14:38:00.002+01:00

youtube have made me swap the audio out on the last two videos - this should be done soon and they should be globably visible.

cheers,
Red

And now Illidan Stormrage from Black Temple.

2010-09-21T19:08:00.001+01:00

Kil'Jaeden kill from level 70 - as requested by Xitzee :-)

2010-09-20T20:25:00.001+01:00

Feral PVP 2 - for your entertainment :-)

2010-09-19T13:51:00.001+01:00

Resilience - NOW I finally understand...

2010-09-12T10:16:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone, warm greetings on this fine sunny Sunday morning from a small village in the south of the UK.

Well, I don't know about you guys and girls, but over the years since resilience was introduced to World of Warcraft I have been very sceptical as to the reason for collecting the stat.

I tried collecting resilience on my rogue, on my warrior and probably more than these two my enhancement Shaman. I don't know about you, but it just never seem to make a difference. In fact, it seemed that all it did was to reduce the ability I had to create enough damage to overwhelm the play I was fighting.

Frustratingly, this reduction in damage combined with the fact resilience didn't seem to improve my survivability at all meant that I shunned this stat on gear for a very long time. However, I have finally seen the results of a good quantity of resilience, and I wanted to share this with you.

I guess the only thing I would caution readers about is the fact that I now have a great deal of PVP experience, both in battlegrounds and in arena - mostly solo play. If you add up the honour kills I have across all of the characters I've played since I started World of Warcraft is somewhat in excess of 350,000 honour kills. The most on any one character was 77,000 honour kills (which was my rogue).

So I have to offset the resilience message with an experience message as well. But, I really have noticed a difference with wearing resilience in PVP with my Druid. I experienced the same problem until around about 1000 resilience, where the damage done just didn't seem to make it worth while wearing a resilience set of gear.

When I hit 1100 resilience however, things started to get very different. 1100 resilience opened up all sorts of possibilities for improving my play from just doing pure damage to starting to introduce healing, snares, crowd control and having a little bit of fun like finishing a player off using moon fire while jumping around him in circles!

The difference between 800 resilience and 1100 resilience is truly remarkable (at least for a feral Druid in PVP) I really can't tell you how much I've noticed an improvement, it really quite amazing!

Sure, it hellishly fun to go into battlegrounds, finding under geared players, wearing your PVE gear of course, and with an 80% crit rate self buffed blow them up in three globals! But the chances are you'll finish the fight against better players with way less than half of your health and the very next player turns up destroys you in the way you destroyed the player before them!

With 1100 resilience however, I'm coming out of almost all the fights that I'm in (when it's balanced) with between 60 and 70% health. As you can see from the score boards above, a feral Druid in battlegrounds can really be excellent, fun, and a great surprise to the other players around you.

So if you are looking to improve in PVP on your Druid then of course go get practice, but also work your way up to 1100 resilience or more. This is easily doable by spamming AV during an AV weekend collecting all of the wrathful offset items and a full set of furious gear.

Hope you have fun out there!

Red

A feral druid complete

2010-09-08T13:53:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone,

So, this weekend my druid reached the point where I'm pretty happy with him as a character in pve and also pvp considering how late I started him.

He has Kingslayer, mostly BiS non-25 man gear (quite a few 10 man heroic gear) - a good tanking set, a good resto set and a good pvp set of gear.

I love how he looks now in caster form, and I love the mount I currently have.

Sure this druid could be improved, but going into Cataclysm with this druid will be fun and interesting.

Perhaps it is time to reflect on my druid - so, this is what this post is about.

As you all know, I've been playing for ages and tried all sorts of characters, melee is my thing so that discounts many options. However, I have discovered that being able to heal a little (learned this on my enhance shammy) is also darn fun - it reduces downtime and also makes you feel like you contribute more.

Also, it has surprised me that I like buffing people - both with leader of the pack, but also with thorns and gift of the wild - it's also damn fun to innervate for that little bit extra mana for casters. I know this is being nerfed a bit in Cataclysm, but - hey - every bit helps :-)

I like being able to tank with a press of a button - that is very cool. Oh, and this weekend I joined 25 man part pug into ICC and I was second dps/damage done in most boss encounters with a better geared fury warrior only just ahead of me. That's pretty cool as a hybrid.

Druids are very nice - instant flight form is just so damn cool - all in all, I would say that as a dps class, this druid has been and is likely to remain the most intersting and entertaining class I've played in this role yet.

If you are trying to choose a class to take into Cataclysm, I urge you to give druids a try - the only class with four viable options - tank, dps melee, heal, dps ranged.

Liquid will be my cataclysm character - he won't be called Liquid, but he will be there for sure.

cheers,

Red

The wait for Cataclysm continues

2010-09-06T08:30:00.001+01:00

ope you are all well!

The grand countdown to Cataclysm continues. My plan for staying away from all prior knowledge has failed a bit with the discovery of Cynical Brit - a great podcast from a fellow Brit!

I've tried hard to ignore the talents and such like (done well on that front) because they will all be changed and modified before (and just after) release.

What have I been doing though? Well, I've managed to save enough and purchased a travelling tundra mamouth (always wanted one) - and now I'm saving up again. My wife has gone back to playing her first druid (the one with all the mounts and pets) and has rerolled it to boomkin.

As you've probably seen from the youtube channel, we have been mount farming in every instance that drops a mount every reset together. ZG is being removed as an instance in cataclysm, so if you want to farm that tiger and/or raptor mount, get going now, because they will be gone from the game! We farm Kara for the horse mount, Strat for the mount there and Sethic Halls for the druid mount.

I've also been teaching my wife how to pvp a bit - she has always liked healing in pvp, but hates the way that pvp in wrath is all about instant burst and death. Last night we entered battlegrounds with her druid as resto and a proper pvp build and her very first bits of pvp gear.

Thankfully it went rather well - so maybe I can convince her the fun to be had in pvp after all!

I've also been collecting up the T10 set for something to spend my badges on now that primordial saronite is selling for just over 150g each (so low its not worth it) - it will make a good starter tanking set for leveling in Cata. Although I was told the other day that even the starting greens in Cataclysm will replace T10...

It's all pixels after all, but as long as you derive some enjoyment from the game its worth playing.

Lastly I am thinking of changing my druid's name to hide from all the youtube fans that turn up on my server and whisper me. Normally I quite like it, but a few have started to whisper during raids and don't take no for answers! One even started trolling trade with a toon name almost identical to mine - how bad is that !!! Especially when quite a few people know me on the server.

take care now!

Red

My first feral druid pvp movie

2010-08-29T23:50:00.003+01:00

funny video

2010-08-23T16:56:00.002+01:00

One of my guildies linked this to me today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZkNszEI4cE

I had to share - funniest arena movie I've seen...

What's the best class to play as a twink?

2010-08-22T11:01:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

Well, one of my alts finally dinged level 70. I've been playing this alt as a twink and levelling almost exclusively inside battlegrounds. I've played quite a few characters over the years as twinks, including Rogues, Warriors, Shaman, Druids and Warlocks.

One of the best classes to play as a twink in my opinion after going through all of these different classes is most definitely a Hunter. Dressed in heirloom items, and some easy to get blues you will utterly and completely destroy people inside battlegrounds. Spec yourself out as a beast mastery Hunter when you get to level 60 and between level 60 and level 69, you will utterly destroy everything in your path. In fact I have stood at the top of Arathi basin on the cliff just above the goldmine, selected the three players of the opposing team that are defending the flag, sent my exotic chimera pet (easily the best twink pet from level 60 - you have to be beast master to use it) attacking them while I stay on top of the cliff, and my pet has soloed the three players!

Having dinged level 70 just recently I guess you could say that my Hunter is no longer a Twink. But I thought I would share with you her current build (beast mastery) and gear that she was wearing at level 69.

Teya - my hunter twink

So there you go, if you are looking for some fun in battlegrounds I would highly recommend rolling a Hunter as an alt, gearing them out in heirloom items, jumping into battlegrounds and owning faces!

Red

Farming ZG for mounts video

2010-08-21T17:38:00.002+01:00

Feral DPS druid caps and stats

2010-08-21T12:26:00.006+01:00

I've received quite a few e-mails from readers requesting information about feral Druid DPS stats that you should go for. I've also received a lot of e-mails asking about the caps are feral DPS Druid should be looking for.

So that is exactly what this post is about, and I hope you find it useful. However, I'm not saying that this is the best source of information all the best set of stats to go for! As long-term readers of this blog will know, I never follow the normal, and some of the stat choices I make are going to be sub optimal. I tend to choose stats that allow me to do a slightly more hybrid role than the pure role.

A good example of this is my current feral DPS Druid - you see, to do maximum DPS in current build of World of Warcraft at a certain level of gear is best to stat, penetration. However, I find myself either tanking, or rescuing a raid from wipe by picking up a boss when a tank dies, or picking up number of adds that are beating on a healer. As a result, agility stacking is more useful - and only delivers a slightly lower level of DPS. In addition, I play this game for fun and agility stacking provides a very high level of correct - and let's face it guys and gals - crits are fun!

So, with all that said let's take a look at the statistics that make sense for a feral DPS Druid:

Right, let's have a look at the statistics that makes sense for feral DPS Druid. Firstly the primary statistics that we have to consider are:

Agility
Hit Rating
Expertise Rating
Armour Penetration Rating
Critical Strike Rating
Haste Rating
Strength

So, those are the feral Druid stats that are more interesting. The problem with the current state of World of Warcraft, and feral Druids in particular, is that they are more mathematical than almost any other class in the game. Much of this will be changing the cataclysm (thankfully) however, until that point this post will serve you as a one-stop shop for all of the statistics you need to know for a feral Druid.

Summary (feral cat caps):

Crit Cap = more than 76% is a waste

Armor Penetration Cap = 1400 rating = 100% (stack when you have more than 400 from gear)

Hit Cap = 263 rating (8%)

Expertise Cap = 131.16 rating with Primal Precision talent (16 Expertise) and hitting from behind.

To understand these numbers let's take a look at some facts and figures, starting with what I consider to be the most important:

Agility: agility is a fantastic stat for feral Druids, and it affects quite a few different things (let's have a look at those):

DPS (Damage Per Second)
1 (point of) Agility (Agi) gives you 1.18932 Attack Power (AP) = more dps
1 Agi also gives you 0.0129744% Critical Strike (Crit) = more crits on your screen

Damage Avoidance
1 Agi = 0.0225641% Dodge
1 Agi = 2.1624 Armor

Just so you don't have to do the mathematics, to get a full 1% of crit strike or dodge you are looking at the following:
77.075 Agi = 1% Crit
44.318 Agi = 1% Dodge

So, as you can see agility delivers an awful lot of capabilities to your average feral Druid. If you're interested in what agility stacked Druid in a 10 man Guilds of average performance would be able to obtain, then just take a look at my own Druid. My Druid currently has approximately 2000 agility.

Now, before we get onto the other statistics that are important or interesting for feral Druids, we have to take into account our first cap - critical strike rating cap.

Feral Druid Crit Cap
The game is designed so that 4.8% of our white Crits will always be converted into white hits against bosses. We can't reduce our chance to normally hit with white attacks below 4.8% - that's how the game works.

Our Crit chance with Yellow Attacks is always reduced by 4.8% against bosses - again this is how the game is designed. But we actually CAN convert all our hits into crits.

So, what does this mean?

Looking at the Crit Strike rating you have in percentage terms when you are sitting in cat form, these are the theoretical crit strike caps:

76% = White crit cap (+ 24% Glancing Blows [which you can't change] = 100%)

So this means if you are sitting behind a boss, and you are hit and expertise capped, and you are 76% crit strike rating in cat form, then there is no way of achieving more crits on your white hits at this point.

79.8% = Ferocious Bite Crit Cap (+ 25% Crit from Talent - 4.8% Crit Suppression built into the game = 100%)
104.8% = Yellow Crit Cap (- 4.8% Crit Suppression built into the game = 100%)

It is not quite as simple as the above unfortunately because you have to subtract any avoided attacks from these caps. For example: If 4% of your attacks are avoided due to not reaching the Hit- and/or Expertise cap, then your white crit cap would be 72%. Just for fun, this also means that hit+expertise capped druids, if you had 104.8% crit, then everything that can crit for us - will :-) and if you think that this level of crit is not possible - well, raid buffed with a couple procs an agility stacked feral druid will get there.

In practice, what it means for the average raiding Druid is that anything over 70% crit is pretty much a waste - up to 70% crit is pretty cool though. Most end-game armor pen stacked ferals will be sitting at about 50% crit. I'm agility stacked and I sit at about 70% crit self buffed (which is hellishly fun).

Feral Druid armour penetration cap
Armor Penetration Rating (ArP) - makes you hit harder against mobs or bosses by the fact you remove some of the armour that mitigates the damage you do.

1 ArP = 0.07145% Armor Penetration
13.9957272 ArP = 1% Armor Penetration
ArP cap (100%) = 1400 Armor penetration rating

So, the above 1400 armour penetration rating represents the hard cap (that is the point where any more armour penetration is completely useless.) However, you will often hear players talk about a soft cap on armour penetration - what they mean is there are quite a few trinkets in the game that provide armour penetration. As a result, many feral Druids will take on the penetration to the point where combined with a trinket proc they get 100%.

For example, Needle-Encrusted Scorpion provides 678 ArP while active and Grim Toll provides 612 ArP while active. Bbecause we're trying to reach the Armor Penetration Cap (1,400), this means we'll need either 733 ArP on gear (+gems) for Needle-Encrusted Scorpion or 788 ArP on gear to reach Grim Toll's Soft Cap.

If you have the equipment to be able to achieve 100% armour penetration rating from gear alone then your trinkets can be replaced with pure DPS trinkets such as haste, crit, or attack power. In practical reality, it makes little sense to go armour penetration until you have more than 300 to 400 armour penetration rating from gear - this is because the DPS improvement of armour penetration gets greater the more you have (the DPS graft from armour penetration is not a straight line). Below 400 armour penetration rating from gear it makes considerably more sense to stack agility.

Feral Druid Hit Rating Cap
Hit Rating - lowers your chance to miss.
Feral Druid hit cap is 263 (8%) or 230 with a Draenai (due to their racial).
1 Hit Rating = 0.03% Hit
32.79 Hit Rating = 1% Hit

Again, reaching this cap is quite important, however in my experience if you are just short it really doesn't make a huge amount of difference to the DPS that you can deliver on a boss.

Feral Druid Expertise Cap
(131.16 rating - AS described below though!!!)
Expertise Rating – Best threat stat per point up till 6.5% then it’s equal with hit for bear tank.
1 Expertise Rating = 0.0305% reduction in dodge & parry chance.
32.79 Expertise Rating = 1% reduction in dodge & parry chance.

There are different levels of expertise required depending on whether you are in a normal instance, a heroic instance, or a raid.

Cap vs Level 80 mob = 5.0% (Dodge) / 5.0% (Parry) = 163.95 (20) / 163.95 (20) Expertise Rating
Cap vs Level 81 mob = 5.2% (Dodge) / 5.2% (Parry) = 170.5 (21) / 170.5 (21) Expertise Rating
Cap vs Level 82 mob (Heroics) = 5.4% (Dodge) / 5.4% (Parry) = 177 (22) / 177 (22) Expertise Rating
Cap vs Level 83 mob (Raid boss) = 6.5% (Dodge) / 14% (Parry) = 214 (26) / 460 (56) Expertise Rating

The 10 Expertise we get from Primal Precision is equivalent to 81.975 Expertise Rating so subtract that from the above figures if you have that talent - (which you better as a feral druid!)

Since you should always attack from behind, your target can't parry. Therefore you only need 26 expertise or 213.13 Expertise Rating - MINUS the 81.975 we get from Primal Precision - means we really need 131.16 Expertise Rating (16 Expertise) as a feral dps druid to cap when hitting from behind on a raid boss and talented properly.

If you were tanking (with Primal Precision as a talent) and you have 46 Expertise - then you should never get parried (in theory) - expertise is a great threat stat.

In practical reality for raiding (with the primal precision talent in your build), anything over 132 expertise rating as a feral druid is not required if you hit mobs from behind.

Haste Rating - when other stats are capped, haste is reasonably good (but not great).
1 HasteRating = 0.03965% Haste
25.223 HasteRating = 1% Haste

Crit Rating - Don’t stack it. Crit will come from agility and on some gear and weapons.
1 Crit Rating = 0.022% Crit
45.91 Crit Rating = 1% Crit

Strength - provides attack power - don't gem or gear for it, but if you get some off-spec tanking gear with strength on it - then cool.
1 Str = 2.37864 AP (2.616504 AP) (Cat)
1 Str = 2.1624 AP (2.37864 AP) (Bear)
1 Str = 2.292144 AP (2.5213584 AP) (Bear with PotP)

Best DPS Enchants:
Head = Revered with The Knights of the Ebon Blade for the Arcanum of Torment.
Shoulder = Exalted with The Sons of Hodir for Greater Inscription of the Axe unless you have Inscription.
Cloak = 22 Agility from Enchant Cloak - Major Agility or 23 Haste Rating from Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed unless you have Engineering or Tailoring.
Chest = 10 Stats from Enchant Chest - Powerful Stats
Wrists = 50 Attack Power from Enchant Bracers - Greater Assault unless you have Leatherworking. Extra socket if you have Blacksmithing.
Feet = Enchant Boots - Icewalker if you could use the +Hit or else Enchant Boots - Superior Agility - unless you have Engineering in which case grab Nitro Boosts and enjoy an extra Dash.
Legs = Icescale Leg Armor unless you have Leatherworking.
Hands = 44 Attack Power from Enchant Gloves - Crusher or 20 Agility from Enchant Gloves - Major Agility unless you have Engineering. The Engineering hand tinker Hyperspeed Accelerators is best macro'd in with Tiger's Fury and possibly Berserk. Extra socket if you have Blacksmithing.
Waist = Eternal Belt Buckle
Rings = Enchant Ring - Assault - only available to Enchanting.
Weapon = your other gear will determine the value of Enchant Weapon - Mongoose vs. Enchant Weapon - Berserking or even Enchant Weapon - Executioner at very high Armor Penetration levels.

Summary (feral cat caps):

Crit Cap = more than 76% is a waste

Armor Penetration Cap = 1400 rating = 100% (stack when you have more than 400 from gear)

Hit Cap = 263 rating (8%)

Expertise Cap = 131.16 rating with Primal Precision talent (16 Expertise) and hitting from behind.

Tanking Stats:
Defense Rating – Gives a chance for the mob to miss us – (actually starts to pass Agility as a pure avoidance stat at around 50% dodge due to Diminishing returns) Agility is still a better all around stat due to the armor and crit rating it provides up till around 60% dodge
1 DefenseRating = 0.008% dodge and 0.008% chance to be missed and 0.008% reduced chance to be crit (Crit reduction not needed for PvE if you have SotF )
122.96 Defense Rating = 1% chance to dodge and 1% chance to be missed and 1% reduced chance to be crit (Crit reduction not needed for PvE if you have SotF )

Resilience – No need for resilience in PvE but...
94.27 Resilience = -1% chance to be crit, -2.2% crit damage, -1% all damage & -2.2% mana drain reduction
1414.06 Resilience = 33% reduction from crit damage = the cap for this part of resilience's effect

Regular (white) Armor – With the changes to druid armor since BC you are in no danger of hitting the armor cap anytime soon and can stack it wherever you can find a place. It’s a phenomenal mitigation stat.

Includes non-bonus armor from all slots except rings, trinkets, neck & weapon. All armor from rings, trinkets, neck & weapon as well as armor patchs & any bonus (green) armor on items & armor from Agi receive no bonus from SotF, Thick Hide or the metagem

1 Armor = 6.251 Armor (Bear)
1 Armor = 6.87 Armor (Bear with Thick Hide)
1 Armor = 7.01 Armor (Bear with Thick Hide & Armor Metagem)

Damage Reduction from Armor % = Armor * 100 / (Armor + (467.5 * AttackerLevel - 22167.5))
DR% for Lvl83 Boss mobs = Armor * 100 / (Armor + 16635)
Armor cap (75% DR) for Lvl83 Boss mobs = 49905 Armor

Stamina – Provides health, a major tanking stat.
1 Sta = 10.81 (11.89) Health (Cat)
1 Sta = 14.86 (16.35) Health (Bear)

Dodge Rating – We get more dodge from agility, but not a bad stat to pick up on gear for bear tanking. (never gem for it)
1 DodgeRating = 0.02% Dodge
45.25 DodgeRating = 1% Dodge

cheers,
Red

StarCraft 2 - first impressions

2010-08-18T13:31:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

well, this weekend I decided to finally go and get Starcraft 2 - Wings of Liberty. I had quite a few problems with the installation on Windows 7 64-bit. Installation of the game went fine, however, when I started to play the game I couldn't see any of my units! After 15 min looking at the forums I discover that this was a bug with the ATI 10.4 graphics drivers, and that the only solution was to upgrade to the 10.7 beta drivers from ATI. Unfortunately, I had not learned my lesson from a previous graphics driver problem with my NVidia card in the past - and I just tried to install the new catalyst drivers straight over the top of the 10.4 version.

When the drivers had finished installing they asked for a machine reboot, which I then did, and subsequently the entire system blue screened! Thankfully I had created a restore point before doing any of this, so recovery only took 5 min. I spent another 30 min looking at the forums to discover this was a common and well known problem to do with leftover components from 10.4 ATI catalyst driver interfering with the new 10.7 driver. I found a piece of software online that people recommended called DriverSweeper - which automatically clears out all of the remaining components from the graphics drivers for almost any of the main graphics cards on the market - you boot Windows 7 into safe mode, run the DriverSweeper application to remove all of the leftover pieces of the software, boot the machine into safe mode and install the new graphics drivers.

Of course, after doing all of this I realised that my entire StarCraft to installation had been removed due to my restore point! So, another one hour later I finally had StarCraft installed, a new 10.7 ATI catalyst driver installed and a stable computer ready to play the game!

With this fantastic new computer that I have, overclocked, liquid cooled, and maxed out - StarCraft 2 looks simply stunning. I played eight missions of the solo campaign and I'm completely hooked on this new game! The cut sequence graphics are simply incredible in high definition on a 30 inch display with all of the graphics settings maxed. Before I knew it, it was 1:30 in the morning! If you are interested in real-time strategy games, and enjoyed command and conquer in the past, then I thoroughly recommend starcraft 2.

As it happens, the installation of a new graphics driver (which I really hadn't planned on doing!) Has made the system even faster - bonus!

cheers now,
Red

Engineering is leveled in just 5 hours!

2010-08-15T20:39:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

So, what have you guys been up to?

I've been farming materials to change my Druid's main profession from herbalism to engineering. Today was the big day! In just five hours I went from zero engineering skill to 405 engineering skill! I decided to drop herbalism because one of my other characters also has maximum herbalism - in addition, two of my wife's characters also have maximum herbalism!

I had rolled engineering on my warrior having never previously tried that profession, it's really good fun particularly in PVP. I also found that when I was tanking, the Pyro rocket enchantment that you can place on your gloves was really useful as an extra ranged ability to pull mobs. The only money I spent on levelling engineering this time, was on the patterns and recipes required. I spent zero gold on materials from the auction house! I found a really good levelling guide for engineering online and I followed this meticulously - it worked perfectly.

My wife helped out by farming mithril ore while I was farming fel iron and adamantite ore. So, my Druid now has the Pyro rockets on his gloves, rocket boots, a fragmentation grenade belt, and a parachute cloak! I still have 45 levels to grind on my engineering skill, so I can make Jeeves, the repair robot.

I have now tried almost all professions except for jewel crafting (because I can't stand daily quests), and the two most entertaining professions are alchemy and engineering. The two most useful professions are alchemy and enchanting, my wife has alchemy my Druid has maximum enchantment as his second profession so we are pretty much covered!

By farming all of the materials required to level engineering as profession, I have also made quite a few hundred gold in the spare materials that were left over. As a result of this, I still have 20,000 gold!

What else have I been doing? Well, with the 10 man Guild that I'm in, we have been working through heroic modes in ICC - just last week we managed to bring down Deathbringer Saurfang after only just a few attempts. This brings our heroic total to six bosses, leaving some of the harder ones the next few weeks! I'm starting to wonder whether we might even be able to kill heroic mode Lich King before cataclysm arrives in the shops.

Quite a few people in the Guild have been invited to the cataclysm beta test, I have refrained from applying for a beta test key! If you are in the beta I hope that you are enjoying your early preview of the game and that it doesn't ruin things for when cataclysm is finally released.

As you have been able to seem from this blog, one of the other things I'm interested in is art! I have no skills in arts using traditional materials such as paint, paper or canvas - however, my skills with a computer seem to be adequate when creating wallpapers and signatures using a graphics package. I have had some lovely feedback from the Guild and other people that have seen the artwork on deviant art and on my blog. So if you're one of those people that has left feedback, thank you so much!

I have considered making a new video for my Druid, PVE or PVP (I'm not sure) - however making a video tends to take quite a long time and I've been rather preoccupied with work or my family. The spare time that I've had, I've either been creating artwork on my computer or playing World of Warcraft a couple of nights a week, raiding heroic mode ICC 10. It amazes me that another month has gone past, and I still feel comfortable writing a blog, creating videos, raiding with friends, and playing WoW with my wife. This game really has some longevity!

Anyway, that's all for now, catch you later!
Red

(PS: this entire blog entry was spoken using my new voice dictation software and not typed!)

Another heroic fight is completed - this time with me tanking on my druid!

2010-08-10T10:19:00.001+01:00

Just a note about Deathbringer - he is the latest boss to fall on heroic mode - took a little practice - and was great to see the dps team close to each other (everyone). Grats team!

New art for my readers

2010-08-10T10:03:00.002+01:00

I am not religious, but I've been working on a wallpaper for a friend who's main toon is called Angel. When I was done I was suddenly inspired to make this - it is an Angel returning after doing battle with darkness - it took many hours - I hope someone out there likes it - it is called Ascent:

/hugs
Red

Self Buffed Stats

2010-08-07T11:45:00.000+01:00

I was asked what self buffed stats I have now:

This is me with just mark of the wild - my hit rating is lower than the cap, but I have found this makes almost no difference to my dps and with the non-hit staff I'm doing more dps than with my staff that has hit rating on!

Cheers,
Red

/salutes to a team from Asgård - a guild on Twilight's Hammer

2010-08-07T11:30:00.000+01:00

What a lovely evening I had yesterday. I ran ICC and had a great laugh killing off many bosses with a fresh team. Having a couple of people that had not been in the instance before with us always adds a freshness.

And then I joined for a random heroic afterwards. Well - as I've said on this blog before, sometimes you really luck out. I joind 4 people from the same guild over on the realm of Twilight's Hammer. Their guild was called Asgård - here was the group:

Now I joined these lovely people in Halls of Reflection Heroic - they had not done this before and were all really at a mid level of gear and everyone knows that this heroic can be a challenge if you've not done it before. This team worked together, talked tactics and were prepared to try something new I suggested after a couple of wipes.

At no point did they complain or get annoyed - THIS is the kind of team that we all dream about getting into - wipes don't matter at all when you meet such friendly people. Thankfully I've tanked this on my warrior many times and was able to help out with positioning and tactics - showing that the "tuck yourself round the corner tactic" is just poor and badly conceived. We went on to fight through the entire dungeon and emerge victorious.

This is what a heroic should feel like, when 4 of 5 from the team are litterally only just geared enough but they work together.

Thanks Feladorn, Renoom, Dusksedai and Saiphyr of Asgård for such an enjoyable instance - may we meet again in the future - and good luck with your new journey that is about to start in ICC!

cheers,
Red

Looking forward to some new software

2010-08-04T14:54:00.000+01:00

I've just purchased some non-gaming software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. It is a voice dictation package that seems to have come of age finally from what I've been told. The UK release date is the 13th of this month, and I can't wait to get it downloaded and working.

Why am I excited about voice recognition for my computer? Well, I write a LOT for work mostly and also for pleasure - I am a reasonably fast typer, but sometimes struggle to get the words down that my mind is thinking due to a speed difference with typing compared to speaking. I've seen a demontration of this new software working at about 150 words per minute - which is fast speaking. Ok, it will need some training, but with the amount I write, I'm hyped about the purchase.

I'll let you all know in a few weeks if it was worth the £79!

cheers,
Red

Another bit of art for everyone - This one is supposed to be a human mage going bad - heading towards a fire spell

2010-08-03T15:38:00.002+01:00

Heroic modes start to tumble

2010-08-03T08:53:00.000+01:00

Well, our casual 10 man guild is slowly making progress on heroic ICC. Last night we finished the Crimson Hall achievement for heroic mode - I must say, the blood princes is not a great heroic fight - seems a pretty silly mechanic for a movement fight to give you a stacking debuff to make movement almost impossible.

We loved heroic festergut and rotface and the bloodqueen was ok apart from some serious aggro issues for me - on our winning attempt I had to not dps for about 2 minutes of the fight - shame, all this pent up dps and I just couldn't get it out - haha.

I hope you are enjoying the last remaining weeks of Wrath farming, completing old world instances or working through heroics!

Red

The husband and wife druid team strikes back!

2010-08-01T11:40:00.002+01:00

My wife and I have been having some fun while we wait for cataclysm. We wondered the other week what bosses and content we could clear as just two of us - feral druid and boomkin.

Last night we decided to take on some big 40 man raid bosses to see what was possible. We started in Blackwing Lair - Razergore took a couple of attempts and was a little tricky, but once I figured out a good kite path for all the adds it became easy. Now, Vaelastrasz was not easy - the dps you need as two people is pretty insane - also for two man you can't really have a tank as you both need to average about 10k dps to beat the boss in time before you both blow up (and you both blow up)

This sounds like not much, but remember that one of you has to tank him, and he still hits pretty darn hard - and if he breaths on you, its still a lot of damage. We found that if I tanked in cat form I could JUST keep ahead of aggro from my wive as boomkin. Clearly as cat tanking I can't use shred so my dps is not as high as you might have expected.

It took us a fair few goes, but on the winning attempt we had him down just enough that when her boomkin litterally went boom from the debuff I had enough health and dps to kill him before I died. Most amusing to us both was that the boss died, I had two seconds of the debuff left before I died - I had an instant cast battle res ready and cast it on her just as the boss was falling to the ground. She got the res and I died. It saved us a run back AND as a bonus it bugged out the money we were awarded and she got double the gold - haha.

We went on to kill the next boss (and all the trash) with no wipes before moving on to other content. Perhaps our biggest victory was managing to kill Al'ar in Tempest Keep - it took us four attempts before we figured out the tactic - my wife had to go resto rather than boomking because the damage was too much on me. We made it with 30 seconds left on the enrage timer - very close!

I wonder what other content we could two man?

In the meantime - we are gathering gold and mats between us, settling on our cataclysm professions and having fun a couple of nights a week in a lovely 10 person guild - we have started on hard modes in ICC and have cleared a few already - was nice to get Festergut and Rotface heroic mode this week - now we can work on the others.

cheers!
Red

What I love about feral druids and hope stays feeling like this for Cataclysm

2010-08-01T11:19:00.001+01:00

These are the top ten things I greatly enjoy about feral druids:

1) AOE swipe as cat - it feels SO immediate, press a key - BAM, loads of damage - I love the feeling so much I made a short clip of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAbB_6S2ltU

I hope this stays the same in Cataclysm

2) Off-tanking - I am amazed that an agility stacked feral cat druid can so easily shift into bear form and save the day - It has happened many times for me, in heroics and in raids. I've shifted, caught the boss as the tank dies suddenly, popped all my cooldowns turned the boss while the tank gets ressed and the raid is happy.

I hope I can off tank like this still in Cataclysm with my dps kittie spec

3) I love how as bosses fly off (Halion mini boss) out of my melee range I can spam spells (ok they are not powerful, but it means I still feel engaged in the action.

4) I LOVE instant battle res+innervate+pinkpaw(mark of wild) on casters to get them into the action again instantly.

5) I greatly enjoy a complex single target rotation that can pump dps out

6) I uttlerly completely have fallen in love with 72% crit rate and 45% dodge as kittie - haha.

7) Herbalism+flight form is win

8) I like how other players seem to react to a cat druid - /pat /tickle /hug - etc

9) Stealthing through an old world instance to farm bosses for shards is so cool (ok, rogues get this as well)

10) Lastly, running along a gauntlet swiping as a bear when tanking is great fun.

I hope you all have a top 10 list for your favorite build of this wonderful class - I only wish I'd rolled druid 5 years ago when I started to play WoW!

have a lovely week :-)
Red

Last of the Dragon wallpapers - Grass Dragon

2010-07-10T23:23:00.000+01:00

And here is the last in my series of wallpapers for you all - thanks for sticking with the blog, and I hope you love this one as well - this is my GrassDragon:

Feral druid dps guide

2010-07-10T17:53:00.001+01:00

A new free background for my readers

2010-07-10T14:53:00.004+01:00

I'm calling this one Sea Dragon - this one is hosted so you can click through to the full 2560x1600 res - I've also updated my first image "LoveFromRed" to be max size for everyone.

Next, a tutorial for Lich King

2010-07-09T19:05:00.001+01:00

Finally, my druid becomes a king slayer!

2010-07-09T15:39:00.000+01:00

Part 1:

Part 2:

Free Desktop from Red

2010-07-03T23:25:00.003+01:00

I have been making desktops in last few days - and I was so pleased with this one - I wanted to give it to you, my blog readers. Click on the image below - and it will expand - then copy and use as you want - clearly not for commercial use please!

Halion Tutorial

2010-07-02T19:20:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone - way past time for me to create another short real-world tutorial - Halion gave me the chance to do this!

cheers!

Red

A new video on youtube - this time, my druid!

2010-06-30T09:45:00.003+01:00

I've had some requests to see my feral dps druid in a typical heroic - so, here you go!

Revamping areas in Cata...

2010-06-24T15:35:00.002+01:00

Oh!!!! Nom nom, one of my favorite areas is getting a revamp!

Epic's to become, well, epic!

2010-06-24T10:09:00.004+01:00

I don't know if any of you regularly read blue posts from Blizzard - if you don't then check this recent post from Ancilorn:

Originally Posted by Ancilorn

Well, hopefully this comes as good news. We're actually working on restoring the epic feeling to epic items in Cataclysm. Epic loot should be epic, and something to be very proud of. Our plan is to try and get the Heroic -> Blue Gear and Raid -> Purple Gear balance back. This is further proof that not everything Deathwing does is entirely a bad thing.

I'm absolutely delighted with this change if they go through with it - having played WoW back in the begining, epics really were special. Now you have to have a legendary for it to be special. I love the idea of blues for heroics, raids for purples with a promise from Blizzard to make raids require 85 level blues from heroics to compete.

I hope that this delivers a feeling of progression currently limited in game during this expansion.

There have been some great blue posts in the last several days about the future and their desires to re-capture some of the original game feel while still keeping the new game mechanics alive.

cheers!
Red

Added some much requested things!

2010-06-23T09:53:00.001+01:00

I've just added a brand new google search engine to this blog - I hope it helps!

I've also added an RSS feed subscriber - I've no idea if it works or not, but I hope it does - let me know someone please!

cheers,

Red

What are you doing with your time before Cataclysm?

2010-06-20T17:45:00.003+01:00

I've been relaxing when in game recently. The guild I'm in right now is full of some amazingly nice people, very calm and very polite - they are also strictly 10 person only. I wanted to experience the 10 person only feel to see if the cataclysm changes that will effectively push us to 10 player will be ok.

It's interesting, 25 players in an instance sure does make things feel a bit more "epic" - BUT, only when you have 25 great players. Most guilds suffer with about 15 good players, 5 ok players and 5 poor players - meaning that really all you are raiding with in end-game is 15 people (the rest are usually in the way)

Wow, now I've read that above it sounds really nasty and mean. I thought about changing the paragraph, but it was what came out of my brain, so it stays :-)

Anyway, 10 people in an instance is most definitely better for getting to know people and their styles. It makes for easier fun I've found - people seem to be happy to join in with a joke or mess around when it is needed.

I've also noticed that things move faster due to less afk and bio's and d/c time - 10 people is better in so many ways. I've been learning to appreciate the instances rather than the co-ordinating 24 other players.

I'm helping out on some 10 player hard mode fights now, which are definitely more challenging for a team that has almost exclusively 10 person gear - I've managed to pug some 25 man gear, but the rest of the team is in 251's or less.

What else do you do before Cataclysm? Well, for me I'm working on the travelling tundra mamouth as my next big goal. I've always wanted one on a character since they came out, but found myself spending gold on upgrades and gems, etc while raiding. Now I'm raiding less and with a team that wipes less the gold is starting to pile up a bit more. Still a long long way to go, but it would be fun to enter Cata with a mount like that.

Well, that's me for the last few weeks! I hope you are finding things to entertain you while we all wait for new content!

cheers,

Red

Been a while since a post!

2010-06-12T19:55:00.002+01:00

Hope you are all doing ok.

Lots happening with me here! So, I've renamed the blog to "A Distant Land" because I've realised that my characters are so many and with changing names and faction that I'd better stop naming my blog after them - haha.

In game I've quit the warrior and the guild on the alliance side I was in. The guild started to fall apart due to summer, and cataclysm blues (you always get this at the end of an expansion) - I could not stand to go through yet another guild collapse so I've left with the blessing of the GM and a "we'll miss you". Was a nice bunch of people, but just too many bad players pulling the core down.

I've moved all my toons that I'm playing over to horde side again, and it feels really good - why oh why did I leave horde in the first place! My warrior is now an Orc and my druid is back to where he started life - as a male Tauren. I've joined a very nice 10 man raiding guild full of the MOST relaxed players I've ever had the pleasure of running with. First night we cleared and got the LK down to 28%.

I'm hoping to kill the LK in the next few weeks and hope that these guys keep me on for a while.

My gear is now pretty much as good as it can get without more raid drops and overal dps I was number one last raid instance (by a very very small amount) - and with my first 10 man heroic item won on thursday, the druid is feeling and looking good!

I've started doing some more photoshop work recently and have been learning about brush glow and layer blending - I hope you like the results as shown on the blog title :-)

Heroics are fun as a feral druid - I've discovered that you carry most of your own buffs round with you, so I'm consistently sitting at 42% of the overal damage done in a heroic meaning double the rest - seems that a druid is pretty reliable as dps. Oh, and I've been managing to avoid all the cataclysm information for the most part!

My broken foot is now all better and out of the cast so work is a burden once again. I miss the old players from Orbis badly right now, but I also hope that they do great before Cataclysm!

/hugs

Red

Feral pvp screenshot

2010-05-26T13:40:00.001+01:00

Feral PVP in 1k resilience?

Pwned!

Gearing your feral druid more easily

2010-05-25T09:38:00.009+01:00

So, you either have or are thinking of gearing a feral druid - or are just wondering how I did it thus far?

I was emailed and asked where to start so I thought I'd share some of this information to save you looking around.

First the obvious, if you have access to heirlooms, then grab them - they are pretty nice at level 80 while you gear up. I used the Repurposed Lava Dredger for quite a long time for example. Now, you are going to want to run instances for the best loot - sure, there are some great quest items, but instances are where its at. Also, I didn't have a huge pile of gold sitting around, so the uber nice crafted and BoE items on the AH for silly money I didn't bother with.

Now, here is a subject that some of you will hate, some will be ok with. PVP gear...

The pvp gear for a feral druid is almost perfectly itemised for us - I believe it is the best loot you can get easy outside of instances - and it really lets you pull off some amazing dps. First thing, a feral druid at really low levels of gear can get quite a bit of help from pvp items.

I spammed pvp on honor weekends - in particular AV honor weekends. I also defended EVERY SINGLE TIME. Why? Well, if you want to have some serious fun in AV go into your home base, tuck yourself into a corner and prowl. Then turn on your enemy nameplates and wait for the enemy to arrive. Tab through all the plates looking for their tanks - put one of focus (the second highest health one and the main one just select)

Now, wait, wait for a while - when they charge in, wait a little more until all the aoe spells are going off - then cyclone the main tank. 80% of the time this will wipe them. If the second tank picks up aggro, well, cyclone him - then repeat on the main tank, and on the off tank. 90% of the time this will wipe their raid. You are likely to get killed the other 10%.

Also, SPAM Wintersgrasp:

Grab your honor - profit!
PVP Gear I got as a priority to use in PVE:

Wrist = Wrathful Gladiators Armwraps - crit, agility, attack power and stam - lovely
Ring = Wrathful Gladiators Band of Triumph - crit, attack power and stam - pretty nice
Shoulders = Furious Gladiator Dragonhide Spaulders - great itemisation
Chest = Furious Gladiator Dragonhide Robes - two set bonus and good stats
Cloak = Titan-Forged Cloak of Victory (from Wintersgrasp marks)
Trinket = Battlemaster's Fury - crit, nom nom

That was the order I did things in pvp with - and if you wonder I enchanted and gemmed for agility. Why? Well, as you gear up you are just never going to get close to the armor pen soft or hard cap and it really is crap as a stat until you get close to those limits.

Now you have a set that is going to serve you really well in pve until you gear up - ignore idiots that tell you "dude you have pvp gear" - lucky for us, the pvp gear is almost perfect for pve as a feral druid - and the stam helps you if you need to go bear form and pick up from a dead tank (which happens quite a bit in poor groups)

I'm not going to talk about non-heroic loot outside of the harder instances (ToC and the Icecrown ones), thats real easy to get, you will need enough so that the dungeon tool lets you into heroic. The good news is that the requirement has been lowered, the bad news is that it means you end up with all blue gear groups so dungeons take longer. My advice to you is be patient. I went in as dps, so the queue times were longer - quest while you wait.

When I reached level 80 and grabbed enough loot from pvp and normal instances to get into heroics - I started with the easier heroics first - I didn't want to get vote kicked for crappy dps or being very badly geared.

So, lets take a loot at the instances:

Epic belt from Utgarde Keep heroic
Staff from Violet Hold
Ring from Gundrak (your other ring is from pvp)
Trinket from NORMAL ToC (other trinket is from pvp)
Gloves from ToC normal
Legs from ToC normal (yes you spam this instance)
Helm from HEROIC ToC (gem with Agi/crit damage meta - use a tear in the other helm gem slot to activate it)
Boots from ToC heroic

Ok, from this point onwards your dps will jump massively, you will find instances go faster and you will start to really notice the massive crit rate and potential of your shiny new druid. Grab gear as it comes along to get your expertise as close to 26 (the above loot has some really nice expertise items deliberately) as you can and get your hit to over 260.

Start running the ICC instances as soon as you can on normal, and then on heroic - there are some amazing items in there - grab the Orca-Hunter's Harpoon from heroic HoR as a soon as practical, it will be the single biggest upgrade for you outside of raiding.

So, do your daily heroic 1st every time you play and save your frost badges - its your choice what you want to buy first - I personally picked up the 95 badge 264 chest first as my choice because I wanted a big upgrade on my expertise.

So, that's how I did it - pretty much in that order. Do the weekly as well (pug it) and try and get into VoA (hard without achievements) - when you have enough gear - try and pug ICC.

Oh - and as you do the instances - spend your emblems on T9 gear - its really very good - replace your lowest item level non-pvp items first (because the pvp items are level 264) - and then the pvp items.

I hope the above helps someone!

Oh, and I hope you like the new wowhead tooltips!

cheers,
Mist

Emblems and Loot - WOOT!

2010-05-24T08:59:00.005+01:00

My druid has become a man (err, Tauren)...

Been pugging like crazy over the last few days to see if I can't gear the druid up to 264 level. Joined a Pug ICC raid last night and did pretty well. Also, been saving all my badges (got to 95 of them) and bought the first item - struggled to choose and in the end decided that I'm going to gear up with off-set items as it will be easier.

Was a good choice because of what dropped that I rolled high on in the PuG lastnight:

Now I've just obtained:

Shadow Seeker's Tunic - godly amound of expertise
Cultist's Bloodsoaked Spaulders - love the looks

...and now, the big item, the one and only - Distant Land

My attack power with these items jumped by 3k !!! And crit and haste jumped a good amount as well. I'm sitting here self buffed with nearly 65% crit rate and approaching 9.5k attack power. Just amazing considering the state this druid was in just a short few weeks ago.

Even better was the PuG - they were ok, not great and Rotface was a tricky fight for them, the PuG was about half guild and half not - the person doing the kiting of the oozes couldn't really handle it. I went bear and taunted a Big Ooze that got away from him, kited it round the room and saved a wipe. Every one was delighted - not least the guild that was running the instance because they have never killed him before.

Of course I jumped into battlegrounds right after the instance to try out my lovely new staff - one of the best named items in game for me on this druid imho. I wear almost full PVP gear as a feral druid with a PVE weapon, PVE trinket and PVE chest. I run close to 900 resilience and it rocks.

Feral pvp is really quite good compared to other classes. Oh, don't get me wrong, give a warrior a paladin healer and they are utterly amazing. But a feral druid is quit self sufficient - lots of ways of getting away, self healing, tanking or otherwise messing up the enemy.

Oh, and give a geared feral a healer... nom nom!

cheers,

Mist

ps - I had a mail about the layout of the site being crappy - now, while agree it is hard to navigate, this is a google blog and I'm really no expert on blog templates - you have no idea how long it took me to just get a three column display. Also, its not like a website where I have loads of separate page locations - its all under this blog title.

If anyone has some good guides or technical tips about how to make it better please ping me on stealthycrimson@googlemail.com

Druid is ready

2010-05-17T09:40:00.004+01:00

Well, after many quests (including the druid swift flight form quest), dozens of Stratholme runs (for cash) and lots of herb selling I've finally managed to get epic flightform. I've also managed to scrap together an extra 3000g by selling the darkmoon card greatness that I've been grinding herbs for.

I've geared the druid as best as is possible outside of raiding and transformed him to horde to pvp (alliance sucks on my battlegroup) annoyingly the horde BG queues are a lot longer here at about 6 minutes compared to 1 or 2 minutes on alliance side. Ok Horde win more, but is it worth waiting longer? Gives me time to continue the loremaster achivement that I'm doing I guess.

The guild I'm in seems to not want to bother getting the Lich King down in 10 man (even though we have the raid lock out now for weeks) - I keep turning up, but we either never get a team going or it is new people yet again each time and just results in an evening of wiping trying to teach people the fight again. The 25 man runs are degenerating into either farms or "not enough log on" for the harder fights.

Am I surprised?

No. Been there done that, got the T-Shirt. This is end of expansion behavior of an average guild through and through. The badies that don't know what to do in encounters don't have fun trying new stuff or being better or getting better just give up and fall onto the old excuse of "its boring" - which is just not true, because schedule a farm run and they ALL show up.

I'm looking forward to putting this expansion behind me now and moving onto new pastures. I've tried many games inbetween and NONE have come close to this one. I still completely enjoy the game and have no plans to leave it.

I am glad I rolled the warrior and tanked, it showed me the last side of the game for roles and proved to me that I can tank, heal and dps at end-game with flare and cunning. PVP still remains my biggest weakness in that I'm not as good as I want to be. I do tend to pick classes that are not FOTM (kinda deliberately) - so I guess I can't complain too much.

I've been running round the old content to do this Loremaster thing, and you forget sometimes the depth of the game that was Vanilla - and the shear scale of the land. Pretty cool stuff - I wonder what Cataclysm will do to this place?

/hugs

Mist

Fast Leveling Alts in WoW - some basic thoughts.

2010-05-11T10:25:00.009+01:00

Amundia (a blog reader) recently left this comment on one of the posts and I thought its a great idea for a post!

Amundia said...
Hi Red... or maby you want to be called mist now? or maybe "The man of many Mist" haha ;)
Well I'm a long time reader. Love your way of explaining and writing about your thoughts and experiences in WoW. Your youtube videos are awesome. As I figured that you acctually have lvl up a bunch of toons. Do you have some good tips on how to lvl a toon as fast as possible? I find myself stuck from time to time.

If you have time and think it would be an intressting idea. At least I would love to read about your thoughts and tips on how to lwl a new toon :)

Shock on!

So, you know, that's true I have indeed leveled many characters and do have a kind of method now for leveling - here it is:

How to level without using fixed guides and getting bored silly:

So, the first thing to note is that I do not use these fixed "do this do that" guide mods. I have tried them, but it just made me feel like a robot and not enjoy the leveling experience. I also DO level professions while I play alts which again speed leveling does not advise. But, it does hold your interest. I also (especially at lower level) do every single pvp daily possible because the honor in BGs is now extremely good, especially below level 30. Above level 20 I run instances as often as they interact with quests - not outside of that.

Mods that I DO use:

Map mods - get your favorite - I use Cartographer - I want to see the whole map, especially areas I've not yet been.

Quest Helper - I read the quests, but I do like this mod for helping me with directions of travel sometimes. I don't like the new in-game quest helper at all.

Make sure that you turn on the in game talent preview option - it is easy to make a mistake with early selections.

So, basically, when I want to roll a new alt this is what I do and it's the same every time now:

1) Save 100g on my main

2) Buy 4 frostweave bags

3) grind badges on my main and buy the relevant shoulder and chest heirloom items (the extra xp stacks = 20% more on every monster kill and quest completion, and pvp win!) NOTE: if you are unsure what toons to level then get the heirlooms that everyone can wear. For example, I was not sure about doing either a druid, another rogue, warrior or hunter. I knew that all of these classes could use the leather heirloom items - so that's what I bought first - and in fact I used them to level my druid, my hunter AND my warrior. They worked just fine. I changed my mind about what I wanted to level from a druid to a warrior (for ICC) ages ago and used the leather heirlooms all the way to 80 on my warrior.

4) I pick easier starting areas for toons - human and nightelf are the best for alliance, Orc and Trolls are easier for horde - easier because of location to resources like mail, city and shear size of area and ease of quests and early mobs. Don't believe me? Run a Tauren warrior from 1 to level 20 and then do the same thing for an Orc warrior - then tell me different.

5) Ignore EVERY quest once I'm logged in (at level 1 in starting area) - run straight to the nearest mail box - collect my 4 frost weave bags, 100g and heirloom items. Equip them. Grab my chosen professions then hearth back to the start zone.

6) Quest - using quest helper if you have never done the quests before. READ the quests and plan your route - if you see that a quest is white for you - try and plan ahead - grind a little if it will ding you when you return so that you can grab the quest.

7) At the lower levels travel time is the biggest bore and the most time wasting thing you can do. Thankfully Blizzard gave us mounts at level 20 now.

8) At the lower levels quest ALONE (unless you are using Recruit a Friend) - it takes too long with others and reduces your xp gain.

9) Do ALL the quests in a zone as best as you can (except rep grinds). I found over the years that being eager to move on actually slows you down as stuff takes longer to kill and there is more downtime. I don't, for example, move into the dark portal at level 58 - I do it at level 60.

10) I tend to only go back to hand in quests in blocks, grabbing as many as I can and doing them all together - more bag space helps a lot with this. I also tend to kill everything on my way to a quest and on the way back - even when I have a mount. This really adds up with money making and xp - sure if the distance is large I'll not do this, but medium distances I will do this every time. I will go back to areas with quest givers on even levels if possible to combine training with leveling.

11) Focus on instances when you have quests inside the instance - this is important, I DO research an instance before I go - I check wowwiki and wowhead for quests that relate to an instance and I go and get them all (and do any pre-quests) so I max out the xp gain in those instances. If you have a high level friend willing to run you throuh the instance then by all means ask - but do realise this kind of ruins the experience of running the instance. I don't do this in instances that I've never done before.

12) Do instances when you have massive rested bonus - the XP with the heirloom items in an instance when you have a blue xp bar is amazing.

13) Don't skip quests - I know lots of guides try and tell you to avoid quests that don't involve killing mobs - but I play this game for entertainment. It's not a race, and I want to involve myself in the game. I don't use quest helper for characters that are going to be my MAIN's for an expansion or a patch - alts I do.

14) If you can find a friend to level with from level 20 onwards then go for it - you'll have mounts, and it makes it more entertaining, especially if you can use the in-game chat.

15) Always park in an inn or city - and take breaks to get rested bonus - I take long breaks on alts and try and plan when I'm going to do an instance with full rested bonus.

So, well, that's it really, not rocket science - but the things that make the biggest difference are the 100g seed money, the 4 large bags and the heirloom items (shoulders and chest ALWAYS before weapons or other bits) DO NOT BUY GUIDES ON THE WEB - you are wasting your hard earned money.

I guess one of the other things I'll do is for toons that have damage mitigation talents I'll tend to take those for leveling as it just means less downtime - except for classess with pets of course - then its just about dps - the bigger the better.

I hope that helped a little - oh, and if you want to know the fastest class to level?

Hunter - without question.

cheers!

Mist

Saving for epic flight form

2010-05-10T12:24:00.002+01:00

The grind continues...

Epic flight form for my druid - this will be the 4th character that I've bought epic flying for - and it's a slow old grind. Nothing on my server makes a huge amount of gold anymore apart from maybe red spell power gems - but even these are now down at the 130g mark during the week.

Playing the AH is not really possible without huge sums of starting gold on a server with 40,000 auctions up at any one time.

So, its just a grind. I do find that running Stratholme all the way through with empty bags makes me about 300 to 500 gold (depending on sales of shards/dust) and how many people are doing the runecloth grind that week. Herbing, Titanium and primals make money but unfortunately the server suffers from exploiting gold farmers. I have frequently had the situation where I am about to mine some Ore and had it (this node is in use) message and no one being near - if you have nameplates on you can see someone underground (literally) mining it - then they vanish - I wish Blizzard could do something about it.

The guild I'm in banks ALL BoE items meaning no raid roll chance to make some money. I'm running low on my tank (245g - due to wipe nights) - but I just don't want to spend the gold I'm saving for epic flying now. I guess I'm at the point where when I run out of gold I'll stop tanking until I've achieved my goals.

Running repeated daily quests is not something I can bring myself to do anymore - it drives me nuts having done them all for three characters already.

cheers!

Mist

New PC

2010-05-09T11:54:00.003+01:00

Well, with all the trouble I've had with my PC recently and the terrible over-heat issues I've had with my NVidia GTX 285 graphics card I decided that a new rig was over due. This time I decided that a named brand was not going to cut it. Too expensive and over priced.

I read a lot of reviews about sites that will take your custom components and build the rig for you or build a bare bones system and you fit the rest. It's really challenging to pick a company isn't it? There are so many mixed reviews for businesses out there that sell hardware. The problem with the review sites is that they don't show you the trend over time as a company either gets worse or better.

For example. Alienware - they were rated very highly, their machines used to rock. But - they were bought by Dell, and the quality, stability and cost profile has changed to make them not so good. But, they still trade off the old reviews from years ago.

In the end I settled on a company that has mixed reviews but seems to be attempting to improve a great deal and has invested a lot of money in behind the scenes infrastructure. I watched a youtube interview with their CEO and decided that this was where I would spend my money.

Scan.co.uk

So, the experience? Specing out all the components was fantastic - their sales technical guy was very responsive over email, we exchanged thoughts on power supply, cooling, and a couple other things. I wanted the system to be capable of being over-clocked and that's what we built it round.

The big thing for me was the case - I've had cooling problems with the Alienware cases so this time I went for a Silverstone Temjin TJ09 case - it has some great reviews - but it also is supposed to be really challenging to wire.

The guys at Scan have wired in the parts I've bought and clocked it fantastically well. The system is stable, clean and beautifully put together.

I've gone for an overclocked i7 from Intel and a 5970 ATI Black Edition GPU. 6 Gig of Corsair ram and windows 7 - 64Bit (home edition) - It is a thing of beauty. If you are looking for a new rig - I'd say give these guys a call - I spoke with a tech called Phil there - great experience. Hey, not saying you'll have the same great experience, maybe you'll have problems. But I for one would use them again. 9 out of 10 for marks.

Oh, and this new system runs fraps at 60 fps with all game settings maxed at 2560x1600 resolution and 5.1 sound recording - I hope that I can make some more videos now I've a rig that will let me manage it!

cheers,

Mist

The Druid continues to grow

2010-05-07T09:41:00.004+01:00

Druids really are quite fun :-)

Sick of wipe night tanking where I made no mistakes but watched others fail round me I asked the raid leader for a tanking break. Thankfully he read between the lines and granted the request straight away.

So on Wednesday I cleared the first couple wings of ICC as feral dps (in my crappy gear) - I thanked all those present for carrying me. As it turned out I managed about 6k dps at every boss fight, more on some. I hate to say it but I actually beat a couple full time mains on 1 fight - haha.

55% crit self buffed now is pretty fun - and its sitting at 54% in my growing pvp set. I gem PURE agility as I don't agree with armor penetration as a stat for feral druids (even thought I've read all the elitest jerks stuff) I had the same thing with my enhancement shaman - at the time people were all about haste, and I stuck with AP and pushed the dps of the class into the tables online of the top 10 enhancement dps for many fights in Ulduar.

It felt relaxing, different and fun - I even threw some heals and one tranqulity about (god that spell looks good)

Last night I went into Wintersgrasp to grab the last mark needed for a 245 pvp cloak and had some fun by moving away from the main group to attack the towers on my own. Lucky for me I met a few players solo and got to 1v1 them.

37k HP DK with a large PVE weapon - pwned (twice)
35k HP Warrior - hit me one time - I've a lovely strat for warriors - Pounce, mangle, fury, rake, rip - dash away (warrior is slowed) - Cyclone, prowl. Reopen - attack, natures grasp, moonfire - leave bleeds to tick, keep distance - win.

Last couple solo moments were with a mage (twice) - first time he died so fast I don't think he was able to react. Second time he knew I was there and got me down to about 10% health. I've learn something from my warrior against mages - get bleeds on and make them hurt when they are at distance. The advantage a druid has is that our bleeds hurt a LOT more than any other class from what I can see. And, slowing a druid is quite difficult :-)

I've just changed my off-spec to a pvp offspec while I grind some gear and it makes things a whole lot better in fights. Thankfully years as a rogue helps me get behind targets quite well on this druid for shred :-)

All in all a pretty good couple days - apart from the stupid wipe fests in ICC due to crappy player mistakes.

Oh - and a couple days and I'll have 50 frost badges - wonder what to buy first on my kitty?

Mist

Cataclysm screenshots and content

2010-05-06T16:06:00.002+01:00

So - what will you do? Watch the video spoilers and look through the hundreds of images already being posted?

Well, after a long chat with my wife about this - we have both decided to NOT look at anything - we remember fondly the very first time we saw stuff in vanilla and how we messed that up by looking at all the previews of the rest of the expansions.

Something that Toxin said to me on Vent the other day - the guild he is currently in does not review tactics or stuff, they just get something that works for them. Well, I like that idea - I want things to be fresh and capture the sense of exploration for me (which I enjoyed in the old WoW - just riding around places sometimes).

So, no spoilers from me or viewed by me :-)

cheers!
Mist

Site totals - been a while since I looked!

2010-05-05T11:44:00.002+01:00

Crumbs - this is a bit frightning for a person like me writing here - I just looked at my Google Analytics page - first time in months and months:

These are the current stats:

202,725 Total Unique Visitors
99,736 Regular Visitors
152 countries/territories

Thanks everyone!

Mist

Project Cataclysm - update

2010-05-04T17:05:00.005+01:00

Still work in progress, but has taken a few steps forward.

If we can pull this off and get a dedicated 10 man Cataclysm (why do I struggle to type that word properly ffs) guild going it could be great fun. Would be amazing to get some of the best (and nicest) people together again. I'm hoping it works out because I want to go horde again damn it!

It is looking like I've got a few top notch dps people interested and at least 1 amazing tank. Healers, not sure - one, maybe(hopefully) two.

There is a healer on my realm (resto druid) that reminds me of a resto druid from Orbis in terms of skills - I've not spoken to him about the idea but if the others are interested then I'll approach him.

Had a couple dps shaman speak to me as well (nice one) - so building the ranks of quality players might be possible.

I've a clear idea of what this guild would need to be to excite, challenge and satisfy the people I've spoken with because they all play this MMO for the same damn reasons I do.

The guild rules will have to (of course) include Toxin's Rules Of Raiding (see near the end of his 2008 interview) - if you have read this blog for a while, you'll smile and know what I mean - if not, it involves swearing and more swearing (most of it about not being keyboard turning, fire standing, Lazorbeam sucking, green shit eating muppet) ;-p

So, guild name guys and gals? - how about "Vidi, Veni, Adulteri (VVA for short)" It means in Latin: I saw, I came, I committed adultery. (the game being the mistress of course)

;-p

Red

Gearing up

2010-04-30T08:31:00.005+01:00

You know - its funny, 5 years ago when you rolled a toon in WoW gearing up was a HUGE deal. The endless Upper Blackrock runs, the Scholomance runs (when it was released and worked!)

I remember to this day the first epic I got on my priest - it took literally months and months to gear a character. Yesterday on my new druid I got:

[Shoulderpads of the Infamous Knave]

[Binding of the Tranquil Glade]

[Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders]

[Tower of the Mouldering Corpse] - my favourite drop!

[Needle-Encrusted Scorpion] - dropped 1st run - no one else wanted it!!!

[Armbands of the Wary Lookout]

[Treads of Dismal Fortune]

[Staff of Trickery]

...and several badges.That seems a little crazy to me really. I went from 29% crit in cat to 45% crit - I went from 4.5k attack power in cat to nearly 7k attack power. If you know what you are doing, getting a new character geared up is really amazingly fast these days.

It's fun too :-) I don't like the extended queues for instances as dps, but as you can see, this didn't hold me back much.

I must say being an enchanter is nice with the instance tool - I get a lot of mats from random drop DEs.

Need to start saving gold up yet again for epic flying and dual spec - I wonder what is best to get first?

cheers,

Mist

The druid is coming

2010-04-29T11:29:00.003+01:00

More play with my druid yesterday - and I'm now settled on it as my cataclysm class - this is my old warrior banner if you liked it :-)

I'm going to change this blog to reflect my druid choice as of now, even though I'll be playing a warrior tank until cata arrives - don't get too confused! (this is my way to deal with the change over process)

cheers,

Mist

Project Cataclysm

2010-04-28T09:47:00.006+01:00

What will YOU play in cataclysm?

I've rolled and levelled several toons over the last few months to make sure I have options and yesterday was my big "test" day - I took all these level 80 toons into pug raids during the day to try them all out - and I did this with all the main specs for each class.

I've been saving up gold and glyphs for the test - and a couple thousand gold later and here are my findings!

Paladin:

I've tried this in all specs - healing was the most annoying (movement fights sucked)

Retribution was ok, but really a little dull

Tanking - the best of the three specs, but having played a warrior it felt slow - way too slow

Druid:

Feral tanking - was ok, but compared to a warrior, again it felt a little uncomplicated! Having charge helped make it feel better than the paladin, but I really need better gear - I think it is similar to a warrior - very gear dependent.

Feral dps - hell complex, seriously large number of things to get right - but when you get them right!! Wow, I did several heroics as this spec and was getting some great dps considering the crap gear, I think playing a rogue, shaman and warrior has made my understanding of class mechanics superior - and you know what, this was much more fun than I anticipated

Boomkin - nice big fat numbers, but movement fights? SUCKS ARSE.

Restoration - lovely mechanics, I really like this class for healing - what put me off was not seeing my armour while casting (shallow I know) - but in cata they are making tree a cooldown - so I like that change (I know many don't).

Priest:

Shadow - nice spec, fun dps (can be very high), but ultimately felt like a "shadow" of what a priest is for ;-p

Holy - great healing, best of the classes I felt

Disc - fun spec, but clearly more pvp oriented, ok for single target, but then why use this rather than a holy paladin?

Problem with a priest is that I've end-gamed a priest before serious hard core and there is nothing new here to me, its just too easy.

Shaman:

Enhancement - well, my old raid leader Toxin had me bang to rights on this, I love the fast and furious dps nature of this class/spec - it is great fun and the most intense of melee dps specs, more fun than rogue... BUT, and it is a big problem. Enhancement shaman really really is a support class, if you don't heal while doing dps then you are not really getting the most out of the class. Also it is SERIOUSLY squishy - nothing in the Cata preview tells me that will change.

Restoration - fun healing spec, but I felt like a healing "turret" - again movement fights sucked.

Elemental - just really didn't work for me as a feeling - it was a casting "turret" similar to resto, but it is just really dull compared to melee for me.

Hunter:

All three specs are fun - and all viable, but this is a pure class like my old rogue - and I really like healing and tanking sometimes - it is AWESOME in pvp though - and I think will be my pvp bot for cata - no doubt. Raiding with a hunter is a little, well, dull...

I've missed out mage and warlock, because I just am not into mana management. All the classes I've tried have a way to either never run out of mana or regen mana instantly and easily. I'll leave mana management to the pro-caster players out there!

Rogue:

Great dps, but oh boy, I've done this to DEATH - no rogue for me in cata.

Warrior:

In my opinion, the BEST tank going - I tried a DK and hated it badly so it was levelled and DELETED, that's how much I hated it.

As dps, a warrior sucks until end-game gear, then it's amazing. I've been lucky enough to get quite a few 264 level dps items as off-spec and it does some seriously high dps. But, tanking is where it is at. I love the feel of warrior tanking...

BUT... and here is where everyone that has known me for ages will slap me upside the head and tell me - DUH. You can't heal.

I like healing sometimes - its a massive part of this game for me - rolling a warrior has made me realise I like the tanking thing more than I thought, but healing is something I really want to do.

In conclusion...

(and Toxin I am expecting a "told you so")

Cataclysm will be this for Mist - a feral dps druid:

Feral cat dps main spec, restoration off-spec with the ability to tank where needed. She is already my maxed enchanter, but I don't know what other profession I'll get (place holder at the moment, she is maxed herbalism)

What faction and server I live on will likely change :-)

(oh, and now the gear grind begins)

Cheers!

Mist

Changes for Cataclysm

2010-04-27T08:51:00.001+01:00

This is a huge change! Will I stay in a 25 man guild with this - wow, that's really hard to say, I find in most 25 mans that there are about 10 great players.... If I can get the same experience and same loot and same difficulty from 10 player version and I can't even try it on 10 player if I am running 25... Why would I want to do 25 man again?

Tox, when you read this - would LOVE your thoughts!

We're continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we'd like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards

10 and 25-player (Normal difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
10 and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you're able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.

We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.

We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don't plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.

In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.

We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you're a big guild or a small guild the choice won't be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We're eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!

An update

2010-04-25T11:14:00.003+01:00

So, been a while due to my injury!

But, what have I been doing? Well, we are still moving through ICC on 25 man - it is hard for someone like me who has played with some really amazing players like Toxin, Azybubbles, Meck, Zeks, May, Arthina - oh my, just realised how many great players I miss - I would end up listing more than half of my old raiding guild :-(

Sometimes I wish that we all got back together for Cataclysm and made an end-game guild that really stood out.

But anyway, we now down to the last two bosses on 25 man in ICC - my gear is pretty top notch now (for non-heroic) and I'm pretty confident tanking and also talking a whole fight through at the same time.

PVP is a bit depressing at the moment, as people gear up I get more facerolled 1v5 than I used to - people just don't 1v1 or 1v2 anymore - shame.

I have started to PVP on my hunter that I have twinked - she utterly destroys everything - sub level 40 hunters are completely over powered. That's how I have been letting the aggression out - haha.

I've had quite a bit of trouble with my PC recently - specifically with my NVidia GTX285 graphics card - this card was a replacement about a year ago for a GTX 8800 - and I have been suffering from over-heat problems when running on full resolution. I've tried everything - I don't have the NVidia drivers that are known to cause this issue but I'm starting to think I've a dry-joint in the card.

When I raid I have to turn the resolution down by half - which sucks. So, I've decided to build a new PC around an ATI GPU and a watercooled frame - I've ordered a bunch of components from Scan.co.uk and hope that they arrive in a week or so - then I can start building.

I've managed to level quite a few toons to 80 now - I have an 80 rogue, 80 warrior, 80 shaman, 80 paladin, 80 druid and I'm working on a priest, mage and hunter.

I'm doing this because I really don't know what to use for Cataclysm - I'm starting to think about giving ranged dps a try - I've never done that so no idea what to expect. I don't really like mana dependent classes and with the changes to the hunter class removing mana I think that may be the way for me to go.

I like the idea of a hunter because I've had the great privilege of seeing the difference between an amazing hunter and an average one - I want to become an amazing one like a certain old hunter many reading this blog will remember we played with.

I wonder what all of you are thinking about for Cataclysm?

take care now!

Mist

Wondering where I have been?

2010-04-21T10:05:00.000+01:00

Hey all,

so, have any of you wondered where I've been?

Unfortunately I had a nasty accident and hurt myself a lot :-( I'm now back home and up on crutches with the mother of all casts on my leg.

No nasty details, but I'm back :-)

cheers,

Mist

Finally, the King... also, a nice pvp video I found!

2010-03-08T23:40:00.006Z

I finally arrived here tonight:

Nice moment to pull the Lich King and main tank it.

Thanks to the raid :-)

Oh - and also, I found a great pvp video of warrior called Nikoma - pvp as Prot spec - all support to this person:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL8eO05zYkc

check them out - great player!

Mist

Progression in ICC and voice communications

2010-03-04T15:49:00.002Z

Hey everyone!

I've been progressing pretty well with this guild. In 10 man we are just 1 boss left to get to the Lich King and this has been more about raid time than skill I believe. Being a guild that has a strictly lower number of raid days and not a huge amount of interest in harder core progression raiding its been tricky to get people together to try harder bosses.

But, over this last week, we have found a good 10 man team to go in and fly through the bosses - its been great fun. It's very interesting, this 10 person team largely shared something in common! The people in the team tend to be the ones that talk on Vent. Even the normally quiet ones spoke up in this 10 man raid.

And with this communication we found things a great deal easier. I read a blog entry from a hunter today who said that she had to borrow a machine this week that had problems with the sound card and thus played in silence. She said it was very difficult to do this. I think it's interesting to draw a conclusion here that sound and communications makes for a better raid and experience. It does drive me nuts when someone spams the chat pannel in the middle of an encounter with advice or warnings and then wonders why their tank or healer didn't take the advivce!

Do people really think that as a tank in encounters like say, the Dream Walker (solo tanking this on 10 man) - that I have time to read the chat? Yeah, exactly - not going to happen is it. Vent or some other form of IP voice comms is vital for progression raiding.

Of course it doesn't always work - I do remember months ago tuning into the in-game voice chat in an AV once. Once was enough, let me tell you! Ha Ha...

If you are interested (even if you are not) - I've obtained a couple of new items recently, I dinged over into exhalted for the Ashen Verdict recently getting the final level tanking ring, and very nice it is as well. I only took part in one rep farming PuG raid, and as the main tank it was very painful, so I didn't bother again. All this rep was achieved the old fashioned way, from playing the instances ;-p

Oh yeah, the items? Well, I received the lovely Bile-Encrusted Medallion from Rotface (25 man) last night, a lovely item that was more powerful than I realised (I had not noticed the bonus armor on the item) - a great upgrade for my badge loot level 226 item the Shard of the Crystal Forest. This is the last ring for the rep: Ashen Band of Endless Courage

I've still got some low level items and the main isses with my gear are the other ring, shoulders and boots. Funny, I've always had problems in WoW getting good boots - from my rogue to shaman and now my warrior. The guild offered to sell me some crafting items to get the boots made but I don't have the time to farm gold so had to turn them down.

I love being one of the main tanks in the guild right now, I never realised the simple pleasure to be had with pulling a new boss and tanking it when it dies - Prof Putricide has been one of my favourite fights so far with a solo tank of The Dreamwalker a close second.

Cheers!

Mist

The perfect PuG

2010-02-21T11:24:00.004Z

Hey everyone,

So, the other day I experienced one of those magic moments - the perfect PuG.

I dearly love the new looking for group tool - and I wanted to encourage you all to have a go. I know that from emails there are quite a few people who find it too intimidating to end up in a team of strangers and have your performance measured so directly. This is especially true of healers and tanks.

But, I say to you - the very fact they are strangers means you have nothing to loose! Give it a go. And the best thing is that once in a while you run into a team like this:

Here we have Zublu, Sirdeath, Jaenar, Neptune and myself at the end of the three new Icecrown instances that we ran together. There was teamwork, banter, jokes, helpful play and overall it was easily the most entertaining and fun PuG that I've been in for months - perhaps since I started this warrior.

I wish these guys great things for their game time!

But, what makes a good PuG?

It is rarely about just gear - I joined a team last week where everyone was in starter blues (it was my random non-heroic) - and I thought it was going to take ages. I couldn't believe their speed and performance - better than most epic geared players I've run with.

Ok, what else is it?

I did several PuG Forge of Souls last week and two stand out in my mind. The first was with a retribution paladin who repentanced all the edge caster mobs for me with out my asking. The next was an enhancement shaman who used his instant heals on our druid healer when his health dropped.

These two things show you dps classes using buttons and skills outside of their core role - THAT does make a huge difference. Mages who counterspell casters on a pull of a large pack are instantly on my friends list for example.

Humour helps a lot to make a PuG run smoothly - but even better are those who join my teams and say "Guys, first time running this instance - I'm focused, but would appreciate 1 minute to understand boss encounters from you - just the highlights I need, thanks"

Those guys I take time for - and generally the instances go very well.

Those are some short thoughts - oh yeah, one last thing!

Narimsa - thanks for coming over to chat and /wave to you from the Blog :-)

/hugs!

Mist

All the complaints from warrior tanks...

2010-02-08T10:03:00.002Z

Hey everyone!

Been a while since my last post, but I've been busy with work and my birthday as well (trips to IMAX to see Avatar - omg go and see this in 3D at an IMAX) but I wanted to say some things about all the negative posts I've seen about warriors over the last few weeks.

So, yeah - it DOES suck when PVE is hurt a little because of PVP and the warbringer change is not welcome.

BUT...

Warriors are amazing tanks, no, really - I have started to gear up pretty seriously now, and in the better quality gear I have it is showing me that I am one of the most versatile and mobile tanks going. I've a paladin and a druid, both tank specced and although they are easier to play, now I know this warrior - they are no where near as fun and active.

Warriors do need to work at it during tanking, but my survival rates are amazing and abilities are so diverse that I have something for every situation in the game.

Heroics are fun as a warrior - ICC 10 and 25 is great with my threat easily pushing over some pretty serious DPS. On single target bosses I've even had to scale it back when tanking with a partner due to the risk of pulling aggro back after their taunt runs out.

Single target bosses in ICC 25 I have regularly pulled 11 to 12k threat per second sustained - ok, on movement fights this dips to 7k tps - but I am still learning :-)

AOE threat does suck a bit, but I've learned to tab cleave/shield slam per mob as I rotate when it comes off cool-down (not tab devastate, it is way too slow with packs in excess of 5 mobs)

Really, I can see myself scaling with gear faster than the paladin or druid tanks we have - I believe that the primary problem warriors have is that in the end-game gear they are the best, but the scaling of warriors is very poor compared to any other classes. You'll suck in low end gear compared to a paladin tank in similar gear.

Give you the best - which, lets face it, with the emblem system, you will eventually get - and you will rock and roll.

I do not believe that warriors are poor, nerfed for tanking or in any way a downgrade for the fights that count (bosses) - I would go so far as to say that for tanking progression content a warrior is one of the best choices.

Don't worry guys, if you have rolled warrior - work on the gear and have a smile on your face as you upgrade - because gear really does matter to us, and it makes it fun when you get something - not like other classes where gear hardly notices as you upgrade.

For example, I got a new 2H dps Axe from 10 man for my Arms off-spec - rocked into PVP after the raid and went from zero with my old weapon to hero with the new one.

Cheers!

Mist

AOE Tanking in Heroics and Raid Trash

2010-01-21T10:09:00.003Z

Hey everyone - hope you are having a great week!

I thought it might be useful for those budding tanks out there now that I'm gaining a lot of experience to discuss a topic I know is close to all warrior tanks hearts - AOE/Trash pack tanking.

I admit, when I was new to this tanking thing I struggled with trash tanking - mainly because I suck with a boss tanking spec only because I was pvp'ing with arms.

Well, now I carry a small pile of glyphs into dungeons to re-glyph and I re-spec frequently - but I will be changing to a pure two spec tank builds, one for bosses and one for trash in the future.

So, what is my heroic/trash build and glyphs and why?

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LVMhzfZhZVItMx0zidIzsGo:dMfzmo

This is my heroic's and trash build - it is a little unusual in that it has anger management, but combined with the glyphs of cleaving and sunder armor I find it remarkably good for trash. The deep wounds build is much discussed on tanking forums and having tried other builds I find this one the best by miles.

Note that I do NOT take improved revenge in this build - I find in the gear I am in right now I get rage starved in heroics quite easily and a stun on a mob at the start of combat on a pack is less incoming rage and annoying if you are trying to position a large group and one gets left behind.

I've maxed out shield specialisation for this build - again for trash packs blocking with your shield is wonderful.

I would also recommend picking up a mod like this:

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info15610-TidyPlatesBeta5.9.html

and then combine it with this:

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info14984-TidyPlatesThreatPlates.html

follow all the instructions and you'll end up with nameplates over the mobs that change size depending on the level of threat you have on them - in very large mob groups it is pretty helpful to see which mobs are about to escape.

As for main boss/raid tanking builds, well - I'm still experimenting at the moment and spending a small fortune in gold respeccing as I try them out - these are the two I am playing with at the moment:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LAM00fZhZmItrx0zidIzsGo:doAzmo

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LAM00bZhxZMItrx0zidIzsGo:doAzmo

I do not have a survival/cooldown build as I personally believe if as a tank I have to rely on 2 minute shieldwalls to survive then there are massively bigger problems in the raid than tanking.

The thing I am really not sure about is having deepwounds for a boss vs having bigger chance to crit. I don't have spreadsheets to crunch or a huge amount of experience yet - what do you all think?

cheers!

Mist

Warrior tanking in ICC - second impressions

2010-01-18T10:43:00.004Z

Hey everyone!

Well, last night saw me tanking in ICC 10 again and I thought it might be useful to someone out there to give some perspective on the trash and the bosses as a warrior tank that is still learning.

Trash - just right!

I love the trash in ICC - it hits hard and there is not too much of it, just enough to give you something to do and challenge that aoe trash pack management of a warrior. The best mobs by far are the giant skeletons that come awake at the start of the lower spire before Marrowgar. Last night we lost our other tank because two spawned right at the same time as we were searching for traps. I managed to grab both and tank them from 100% to 0% on both with out loosing my life. The healers were the best obviously, but it was fun.

Ok, so off-tanking Lord Marrowgar - well, this is all about managing your threat, positioning and the dps being fast to get people out of spikes. If they do that then the fight is not really all that hard. I did notice that spike damage was not too bad. The other tank and myself pre-agreed which way we would run when we got Coldflamed - I suggest you do the same, it helps.

Lady Deathwhisper is a little tricky - as a tank, you need to pick up the adds at the side, but make sure that you keep the Fanatics away from everyone as they do a nasty melee aoe. When you get a Deformed Fanatic, taunt them and kite them.

The boss is burned as we go, and when phase 2 pops I grabbed her first - when you get 3 stacks of her Touch of Insignificance you get the other tank to taunt off you - rinse and repeat. Be careful of the pillars - we tanked her a little forward to avoid line of sight problems that some healers had with melee had last time we were here.

Oh, and interrupt her frost bolt casts - and co-ordinate that, we (tanks) were both interrupting the same cast last night by mistake - hehe! (and watch for the little ghosts)

Gunship battle - is a fun fight, I was the add tank here, so had the easy job - grab the adds as they spawn, tab through them for threat and spam cleave. One thing, sometimes when you are waiting for a mob to spawn you spam an attack button. This doesn't work here. You see, the axe throwers on the other ship keep hitting you and you will auto target those when you take damage. So, be careful and select your target - the adds move fast when they spawn.

I did have to jump across last time we were there and you need to tank Saurfang (Muradin for other faction) - just make sure you tank him in range of your healers - and be careful of his buff - leave the ship if it gets too high - but tell people what you are doing.

Only thing as an add tank here - they do aoe whirlwinds - move them away from people when they do - healers often forget to move.

Deathbringer Saurfang is my favourite fight so far in ICC that I've seen as a tank. This is perhaps because both tanks are equally important - making sure you have enough hit so your taunt doesn't miss is important - but not hugely essential as you can taunt again - you just need better dps if this happens. When one of the tanks gets Rune of Blood, you need the other tank to taunt the boss off as soon as possible - and back again when he gets it.

There does appear to be a bug with this fight with taunts - we have had this happen every time we have been here. Occasionally you will taunt - you will see the taunt debuff on the boss, he will turn to you, hit you once and then immediately go back to the other tank. This happened to both of the tanks this time and also last time we were here. It seems to be a bug because the taunt does not fail - and it does not last the duration it should do.

Quick note on this fight - the dps have to be good - we do this on 10 man with just two healers - and near the end of the fight (from 25%) you WILL need your cooldowns as a tank, do NOT blow them all at once, rather carefully manage them and chain them together when you are tanking.

So, watch for that one, and I have not been in a raid that has tried the other new bosses yet!

cheers and have fun!

Mist

Back from the USA

2010-01-16T15:05:00.000Z

Thanks for all the emails and in game mails while I was away - landed this morning from the USA after a week away on business.

Hope you all had a lovely week!

cheers,

Mist - Jet-lagged-like-mad!

Looking For Group - "Special" Achievements

2010-01-07T14:22:00.011Z

Now I'm pugging a LOT as a tank for badges for a dps set for the times I'm asked to off-spec - after a couple hundred instances I've noticed some pretty funny things - I've categorised them here for you as my top five new "Achievements"

1) Down Ranker!

This one drives me nuts - I downloaded and installed a brilliant addon called Rank Watch a couple weeks ago - and I would say 2 or 3 out of 5 groups someone is using the wrong rank spells.

The award goes to an elemental shaman on my realm who insisted on using rank 1 of all spells and doing a dreadful job (obviously) in Pit of Saron. When pushed as to why he wasn't using the max rank spells his answer was this:

"This is an Alt character and I can't afford the spell upgrades, they are too expensive"

And he was serious!

2) A Righteous Fury

This one just cracks me up. So as a tank, I very very often come across a retribution paladin that has been tanking and joins an instance and forgets to remove Righteous Fury - who then keeps pulling aggro and moans until someone in the party points out that he has this buff on - they either leave with embarrassment or say sorry and we all carry on.

However, there are those really special cases - had one today - that say "I'm not removing it because I do more damage with it enabled"...

Oh My God

3) Dude, where's my spell...

This one kills me... It is incredible how often when as a tank I ask a party member to do something in the group that I know you can do, and they end up arguing with me and the 3 other players in the group, that their class can't do that - I'll give you a few examples from this last week alone:

Last boss in Forge of Souls - the Devourer of Souls - heroic mode. Druid healer dies with a bad luck Wailling Souls+Lag - we are at 5% - and kill the boss with no issues. We ask the Retribution Paladin, please can you res the druid after we are done.

"No"

"Err, why not?"

"I can't"

"Why not?"

Only holy paladins can do that.

Five minutes later the druid corpse runs...

Or the shadow priest who joins us in Halls of Reflection heroic and I ask him to please CC one of the targets at range.

"Priests can't CC you noob."

O'RLY?

"Yeah, I'm not a Mage ffs!"

Someone else in the group says - err, they are undead.

"I'm not undead I'm a Nightelf you idiot"

VOTE KICK

4) GEARED!

This achievement goes to the person that joins your party and straight away announces that "he has the highest gear score" - then spends the rest of the instance either afk, or "just a sec" or doing such a terrible job that you wonder "ebay much?"

5) Pull faster noob!

This is the last and my all time most hated thing as a tank - I have started to let people die because of this it has got so bad in some randoms.

Every 10th group or so you get someone - and it is (sorry to these classes) almost always a retribution paladin, hunter or rogue. Who decides that they are responsible for the pulls (and they never misdirect or do it in such a way that it is helpful.

Believe me, I really don't hang around in instances - I chain pull and often pull two or three groups at once depending on the healer. These "special" players are the ones that no matter what jump off and pull more mobs.

A rogue did this to me in an instance recently - Fan of Knives on every single trash pull - regardless of number of mobs, and regardless of whether I'd got aggro. When I pointed out that this was silly he claimed that "yeah, but I ALWAYS misdirect them onto you first" - for the rest of the instance he did - but he sure hadn't up to that point - guess he forgot - pfft.

Or the paladin that I left tanking a trash mob in Pit of Saron he pulled (and then taunted - ffs) - because "I can handle the elites here" - the healer left him there and the other dps. He joined us about 5 minutes later as we looted the boss calling us all arse holes with 10% health and no mana.

There you go - my top five (in no special order) things that I see again and again in PuGs.

cheers!

Mist

Raiding for real

2010-01-05T12:04:00.004Z

I miss the lovely people over at Scooby Snacks (the casual heroics guild I joined on my warrior) - but last night the guild my wife and I have joined (more of a raiding guild called "Raid And Not Paid") took me into ToC 25 - after the previous evening clearing the first wing of ICC 10.

Firstly, ICC 10, the first wing. Just LOVED it. Great fun to tank, quite hard hitting mobs, and compared to their other tank who is sitting at 50k hp with lots of tanking experience I was clearly under geared.

But, we managed it all, with some very good moments. I didn't loose the aggro and didn't screw up - so I guess raid experience helps, regardless of the role you'd done it in before. I firmly believe PVP experience helps a LOT for raiding - it sharpens you up, improves your situation awareness and makes you faster on the keys than many other players.

I walked away with some lovely new items and a big boost in HP.

Last night we went to ToC for a "tanking test" as it turned out. They asked me to take some of the choices and be one of the primary tanks for the instance. This was great for me, having seen this instance on heroic and completed Dedication to Insanity with the amazing players like Onck, Toxin and Azybubbles (among others - you know who you are) in Orbis - seeing this from the eyes of a tank was great.

Onck, as a tank - if you ever read this - /salute, there are some pretty intense moments, especially that first boss, he hits like a truck - and fighting against 7 to 9k dps players for aggro made me sweat a little. But - I managed my abilities and cooldowns and was not 1-shotted. Held the aggro no problem and we marched all the way to the last boss.

I was asked to main tank the boss at the end and had one of my best moments as a tank so far. Popping shield wall at just the right moment to save a wipe and pulling 13,000 threat per second for part of the fight near the end when blood-lust was popped.

Tanking is very intense, like healing I would say - and like healing - so far it is very rewarding. You do get abuse in heroics sometimes from pugs (always blame the tank) - but overall, if you want to roll a tank - right now, I'd say "go for it".

Oh, and for the many many tanks out there that have complained about the Glyph of Vigilance, I tried it for the first time yesterday - why would you not take this for main tanking is something I now wonder - it will be in my main glyph slot instead of revenge for 25 man raids (not 5 mans).

cheers,

Mist

Some usefull warrior notes - hit caps and more

2010-01-03T15:44:00.005Z

Some notes I kept to help me remember stuff about warriors - maybe others will find this useful as well!

Glyphs:

Trash/5-man Setup

Glyph of Blocking

Glyph of Sunder Armor

Glyph of Cleaving

Boss Setup - EDIT!!!!

Glyph of Blocking

Glyph of Revenge or Glyph of Vigilance (after testing this for 25 man - I'm impressed)

Glyph of Heroic Strike

Dodge caps

123 Expertise Rating (15 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality + 5 Skill Racial (Orc/Dwarf) = 3.75% + 1.5% + 1.25%

140 Expertise Rating (17 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality + 3 Skill Racial (Human) = 4.25% + 1.5% + 0.75%

164 Expertise Rating (20 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality = 5% + 1.5%

214 Expertise Rating (26 skill)

= 6.5%

Parry caps

435 Expertise Rating (53 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality + 5 Skill Racial (Orc/Dwarf) = 13.25% + 1.5% + 1.25%

451 Expertise Rating (55 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality + 3 Skill Racial (Human) = 13.75% + 1.5% + 0.75%

476 Expertise Rating (58 skill)

+ 3/3 Vitality = 14.5% + 1.5%

525 Expertise Rating (64 skill)

= 16%

Hit Caps

230 Hit Rating

+ 1% Racial (Draenei) = 7% + 1%

263 Hit Rating

= 8%

1) Hit rating.

You need 8% for an Arms/Protection spec, while you only need 5% in Fury (assuming 3/3 Precision).

2) Expertise

A mob cannot parry from behind, therefore you only need enough expertise to stop a mob from dodging when you are behind it; as a mob cannot parry when you're behind it. The magic number here is 26 expertise.

Summary

Arms

Hit cap – 262.32

Yellow cap – 262.32

Expertise Cap – 215

Fury

Hit cap – 786.96 with 3/3 precision. This is not plausible so aim for around 260-300 with 3/3 precision.

Yellow cap – 163.95 with 3/3 precision.

Expertise cap – 215

cheers!

Mist

Happy new year! And what a way to start for me :-)

2010-01-01T13:27:00.005Z

After literally months and months of farming for this on my shaman, I logged in on my new warrior this morning - popped over to ZG on the off-chance it would drop with the help of my wonderful wife.

Guess what...

On the 01/01/10 - I became the proud owner of a new tiger!

I hope you all had a good new year celebration.

Mist

Happy Christmas and I wish you a great new year

2009-12-29T09:48:00.006Z

I wanted to wish everyone the very best of new years and I hope you have a peaceful holiday season.

If you are in a part of the world that does not celebrate this time of the year then I wish you the very happiest of times and a wonderful end of the year and good new one.

Well, what has it been like as a warrior tank then?

Amazing really. If you are considering a re-roll, then warriors are a good choice.

But what about tanking then? Well, compared to

druids and paladin tanks I find that tanking large groups is very challenging, but I think probably more fun. We have to cycle through the targets and keep the threat up. It is a very active tanking class. However, when you are trying to pull large groups that involve more than 1 caster they really shine. Charge, shield bash silence, heroic throw silence another, intercept on a third caster - they all come to you.

Last night for example, I was tanking in a PUG to the Pit of Saron. If you have been there, after one of the bosses there is a slope that leads to a gauntlet style run through a tunnel to the final boss. On that slope are two Ymirjar Deathbringer packs. Each Deathbringer summons in two Ymirjar Flamebearers and two Ymirjar Wrathbringers. Well, these two packs are quite hard to tank, but a mage with this group was fire and had not glyphed to remove the knock-back on his spell.

Guess what he did? Yeah, knocked back the mobs into the second pack. Well, I managed to gather them all up using silences from throw, shieldbash and charge then intercept and intervine on the healer. It took some concentration and was tricky, but we managed it with only one death in the group (a DK who carried on max dps on a single target while all this happened)

It showed me right there what a warrior tank can do with mobs that are spread out and not all in thunderclap range. I'd be interested to see what a paladin or druid would do in such a situation - I've played a druid tank and it would have been a lot harder. Not sure about a paladin.

Single target tanking is truly where warrior tanks shine. Very high threat per second if you know what you are doing is pretty ok to manage. But the REAL advantage of warrior tanks that I never appreciated until I rolled one is to manage incoming damage. Healer focused on the group? No problem, disarm (much to my amazement many bosses can be disarmed) Boss casting a spell and your health is low? Spell reflect... Again, to my amazement many boss spells cast on me I can reflect.

Big spike of damage coming? Shield block, trinket. Spike threat? Shield block, shield-slam, revenge, concussive blow (massive threat in just a few globals) Oh - and the best bit? Interupts on a very very short cool-down. Solo tanking Lord Jaraxxus in ToC 10 while our other tank took all the adds showed me I was able to interrupt every single cast he does - that makes a big difference to the healers.

My tank is now fully geared with full T9 and a block set as well delivering over 26% block. My avoidance set now runs me at 35k health (unbuffed) with 84% unhittable. This puts me up there with most good tanks.

I've discovered that a lot of tanks stack HP at the expense of avoidance which seems a little strange to me. I've got to the point now in my block/avoidance set where trash mobs (not bosses) hit me maybe 1 or 2 times before they die - very often they don't hit me at all, which is pretty damn funny. The healers often find themselves doing some dps in my groups - haha.

The biggest things I've struggled with are trinkets and rings. It took me ages to get good ones - and I'm still after another ring. Pug groups are fine once you explain the tactics to new players to an instance - and the new LFG tool (as a tank) is just awesome - instant dungeons - any of them, any time of the day. I've been told it is hard as a dps to get a group sometimes.

I love the new instances except for the first waves of adds in Halls of Reflection heroic (which is insanely hard with most pugs where the dps just nuke random targets before you pick everything up and frequently find themselves 1 shotted)

All in all the tanking experience as a warrior is intense, satisfying and fun. Takes a while to gear up and people treat you like crap sometimes when you turn up to an instance in blues as you are gearing up. I learned to stack HP and flask for those early gearing runs because then people shut up (even if you know that you will take shit loads more damage because you have compromised other stats) Once geared and with some experience it makes the world of difference.

Happy new year everyone - and many many thanks to all those people that stopped by the server I am on to wish me the best - I wish you and your families a great time in 2010!

cheers,

Mist

Successful Trial of the Crusader 10 man on the first ever run!

2009-12-19T10:25:00.003Z

So, last night the "We Love Scooby Snacks" (name of this new guild I am in) ran Trial of Crusader 10 man. Half the team had never stepped into the instance. I have never tanked it before and my wife has never healed there.

We had a few wipes throughout the instance, but because I knew the tactics (as did the other tank in the team) - with some coaching, we killed the last boss at midnight!

Great run, was fresh and fun to see people in a mix of blues and epics get excited about bosses that I've breezed through in the past. You forget how hard some of this content is when you don't have a team that has known each other for 3 or 4 years with tanks like Onck or Azybubbles that are just SO damn good you wish you knew how they heck they do what they do.

I miss the Orbis guys quite a bit. Toxin, Azy and the others were kind of like family after all that time. Artfool popped over to the server to say hi yesterday so a big /hugs to him! But it did make me miss the guys even more.

But there we go, they are in a guild now that is full of class leading super uber geared players and here I am proud I've just broken the 30k health mark as a tank - hehe.

Well, at least it is fresh :-)

Cheers Team Scooby for the fun last night.

Mist

New instances, new gear and new fun

2009-12-14T10:20:00.002Z

What a great week it has been for me in WoW.

The new guild I'm in is doing mainly heroics at the moment - they are a lovely group of people and really fun to be with.

So, what has been happening? Well, I ran a whole bunch of non-heroics to gear up - completed as much rep-grind as I could and picked up as many defence items to get to the 540 raid cap with some sensible numbers on heath and armor. I used the crafted blue set for tanking and a crafted shield that I spent from level 72 to level 80 watching the AH and putting in bids on low cost items.

This worked a treat and by the time I hit 80 I was ready for some of the easier instances on heroic.

So, I ran all the simply heroic instances to save up badges and purchased a couple of parts of tanking gear while getting some higher level crafted items made.

At this point in the game I was able to run some of the harder heroics but before I did the new instances on normal mode beckoned. Now, I have to say, I LOVE these new instances - they took a little getting used to for me as there are quite a few caster groups spread out that makes it a little tricky to tank. But with practice I'm getting better and better learning to heroic throw silence pull and shield bash another caster to gather them into 1 group.

So far the gear has dropped really well for me - I guess I've been lucky. Not suffered too many wipes - but I'm now sitting on some nice new items:

Titanium Links of Lore
Binds when picked up
PlateWaist
1306 Armor
+79 Strength
+118 Stamina
Durability: 55 / 55
Requires Level 80
Item Level 219
Equip: Increases defense rating by 47
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 32
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 124

Legguards of Abandoned Fealty
Binds when picked up
PlateLegs
1961 Armor
+44 Strength
+134 Stamina
Blue Socket
Durability: 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Item Level 200
Equip: Increases defense rating by 60
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 60
Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 56

Lucky Old Sun
Binds when picked up
MaceOne-Hand
182-340 DmgSpeed 1.60
(163.1 damage per second)
+46 Strength
+69 Stamina
Durability: 105 / 105
Requires Level 80
Item Level 219
Equip: Increases defense rating by 21
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 26
Equip: Increases your parry rating by 24

Scourgelord's Frigid Chestplate
Binds when picked up
PlateChest
2322 Armor
+81 Strength
+147 Stamina
Blue Socket
Durability: 165 / 165
Requires Level 80
Item Level 219
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 74
Equip: Increases your parry rating by 66
Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 46

Royal Crest of Lordaeron
Binds when picked up
ShieldOff Hand
7530 Armor
211 Block
+38 Strength
+75 Stamina
Durability: 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Item Level 200
Equip: Increases defense rating by 49
Equip: Improves hit rating by 25

This wonderful new gear has pushed my health unbuffed (no shout) to just under 30k with 543 defense, 24k armor, 23.3% dodge, 18.4% parry and 13.72% block

I'm getting there!

Also, a quick shout out to Lipsill - thanks so much for popping over to the server yesterday for a chat and wishing me all the best - it was also a pleasure to raid with you back then, good times! Grats on 100k honor kills and I hope you enjoy the game in the future. Good luck with the reroll to mage for pvp!

cheers everyone,

Mist

New Armory Link

2009-12-10T08:50:00.002Z

Thanks again for the comments!

Here is my new armory as requested:

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Dragonblight&n=Mist

As you can see, recently dinged, but already growing up fast! The hardest bit was getting defence capped so quickly as the brand new guild I am in (really nice bunch of guys and gals) asked me to Main tank and raid lead their 2nd ever go in Naxx.

I know this is a long way from where my shaman left off at the highs of server first hard modes in ToC with the wonderful Orbis Tertius, but you know what - I've never tanked and these guys have never really raided much, so it is all new. Sometimes it is not about the end-game, but rather about the fun of trying to create a new team and get people to work together.

I think that I may have found the perfect tanking buddy in the guild right away in the form of a paladin tank called Design - was great co-ordination with him in Naxx. Funny think is we both have nearly maxed engineering and watching tanks speed off on Nitro boots to get to mobs is pretty damn funny - especially when you see kitty druid healers dashing behind you trying to get in range to heal ;-p (I can see many games to be had in the future - hehe)

I managed to get the stats needed to tank Naxx (540 defense, 24k health, 21k armor) with a new freshly dinged group but at the expense of hit rating. I used the taunt glyph and that helped a HUGE amount on the run and I'd recommend it totally to new tanks just starting out.

I have also taken a slightly unusual build because I was concerned about improving my cooldowns - I need not have worried because I really didn't need them.

Warrior tanking is much more fun than I thought - it really is quite a lot of buttons to press though!

I need to practice lots - and I am going to try a trick I read about on a pull where heavy initial burst is needed to beat the dps aggro. Apparently starting with recklessness, retaliation and then swapping to defensive real quick and charging in works wonders for initial aggro. I will have to give it a go and see what happens!

cheers all!

Mist

A new name - Redmist has become Mist

2009-12-09T17:19:00.002Z

So I have decided that I want to leave behind the theme of colours in my characters and have shortened my name to Mist.

I could not believe that the name Mist had not gone on this server I am on now, but there we go - I guess no one felt all misty :-)

There we go - recently dinged 80, Alliance Nightelf Warrior.

I tanked last night as well, Naxx 10 man, it was great, relaxing and fun - very new to me, but in blues it went rather well with only one single death in the whole three wings we cleared!

Thank you everyone for the wonderful response to my last post, I am truly humbled by the fact people have checked back here for so many months!

I hope all your plans for Christmas (if you celebrate of course) are going well, and for people in other parts of the world that don't then I wish you the best of times and a great end of the year :-)

take care now!

M I S T

A new start

2009-12-08T12:15:00.002Z

So, I refocused myself after being totally disappointed with the game for months.

I re-rolled as an alliance warrior - I've always liked the combat mechanics of up close damage classes - going from a rogue, an enhancement shaman and now to a warrior.

I wanted to try out tanking - but start from the beginning with a level 1, play the game by actually reading the quests instead of using quest helper and learn a class font to back - including pvp.

10,000 honor kills arrived before level 75 and I've started to tank having only yesterday obtaining the defence cap for raids. I'm starting out small, and with play time dictated by me rather than a guild - successfully tanking ToC normal at level 79 and gaining many of the pvp achievements already.

So, here I am, transferred to a "proper" European PVP realm rather than the crappy server I used to be on. I of course miss the good players I had the pleasure of knowing in Orbis - was a great time. I have tried other games, but you know what - WoW is just too good right now compared to others, especially when you remove all the mods and start again.

I have come back :-) with gaming time built round my family - it is working!

cheers,

Red

Good bye

2009-09-30T13:34:00.002+01:00

So, my wife and I have made a hard choice.

Life in WoW has been great for us - and this blog has really been a window on that time spent with friends, but life also has other needs - in particular family.

It is a really hard decision to make but I've made it. I'll not be raiding in WoW for the future and I'll not be playing much WoW either. To all the great readers out there - thank you for your time, I hope dearly that I added something to your internet entertainment as this was always my desire.

This won't be a surprise to many long term followers because I've spoken about my frustration with the server stability and Activisions poor take over of Blizzard leading to a softening of the content and really terrible raid instances like ToC. For those that discover this blog in the near future - there is a complete and interesting story here of an online gamer discovering an MMO and then the trials and tribulations of being in an end-game guild. Sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy a peek into an MMO'ers life.

I'll leave this blog content here for as long as google let me, but there will be no more content created here or on my youtube account.

Take care everyone, and I'll miss you all - particularly those long term posters here on this site.

cheers for one last time,

Redmist and Draiza.

1 Million but do I desire more?

2009-09-30T09:17:00.005+01:00

My combined views of youtube and warcraft movies hit 1 million last night.

Thanks everyone - pretty intense that so many find this content and information interesting - ok I've had a fair share of l2p and you are a noob comments together with some threats and such, but the majority of humans are nice, civil and friendly. I've learned a lot with the experience.

It has been difficult sometimes in the early stages as I was learning to play and make movies with this character that would entertain, because the first time you get seriously negative comments it is crushing. But after exactly 5059 comments across all my videos I have learned to ignore the crap and return the nice posts with as much care as one person can deliver as a hobby.

As a celebration of this time and this blog for the 22 thousand people that read these pages at an average of over 800 per day - here is a very private and personal video just for you:

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=YZEZ69MT

That video (you need to press the play button twice due to adverts) shows some of the characters that I have played over the last few years in WoW - all at either rank 12 pvp or end-game raiding.

My wife and I are at this time evaluating what we want from the game or whether the game holds the appeal that it used to. We both dislike the way Activision has taken this game and we both are disappointed with the current raid content in the form of ToC.

The changes to the classes we play are poorly thought out and the stability of the servers we play on has decreased significantly over the last few months to the point where the game is no longer reliable and you spend as much time fighting lag and disconnections as you do virtual monsters.

We have not made a clear choice yet about our future in the World of Warcraft, but we are evaluating things carefully right now. We will either carry on and see what happens or we are going to quit playing and its 50:50 right now.

Thanks for all the support over the years everyone - and we hope you understand our feelings about WoW right now.

cheers,

Red

Shaman class update

2009-09-27T11:12:00.002+01:00

So, there have been a lot of changes with shaman over the last couple months. I thought it was time I discussed the changes a bit and what I think of them.

PVP:

One of the big changes as far as I am concerned for pvp is the removal of the snare immunity on the earthen power talent. The totem now removes one snare per tick - this is every 3 seconds or so. 3 seconds is an eternity in pvp and means really that you can use it for 1 ham string or 1 chains of ice or 1 mage slow before you are pretty much kited out of the range of the totem.

This is very annoying in pvp and is a pretty horrible nerf to us. I would have been ok if this change was for the party but still gave us freedom. But Blizzard didn't like shaman having a similar ability to paladins so it was taken away. This makes enhancement shaman a free kill to good hunters - no point fighting it. Unless you out gear and out skill the hunter you will not get close.

Against most other classes you will be ok. Frost mages now can't be beaten without popping wolves whereas before they were pretty ok to kill. This really is a direct nerf to us vs hunters.

The next nerf was with the cleansing totem that ticked the moment you dropped it - this meant that you could effectively spam the totem and cleanse every global cooldown. Now the totem is mostly useless as you get kited away from totems by any good pvp person or team anyway. However, I don't feel as hurt by this change as the others because I've just placed cleanse toxins on my bar and key bound it to Shift+cleaning totem so I use this on myself. I have also installed grid and clique and bound shit+left click to grid as cast cleanse toxins. This has meant I have more to deal with but I can still manage ok, just with more globals spent.

Next up, the changes to elemental. I tried these out yesterday and I still don't get on well with ranged classes - I do like the change to flameshock and lava burst no longer consuming. It makes elemental more simple that is for sure. But you still have to stand still to do anything significant as an elemental shaman and I like mobile classes more.

PVE:

The change to the totem of quaking earth is welcome but really just a bug fix to bring it in line with all the other class stuff available for druids and paladins.

The other changes don't really effect pve although I have noticed that as I gear up I am scaling much worse than the other dps in the guild, although my healing output during harder fights has scaled better than I expected. It is entirely possible to maintain about 1.1k heal per second and also do about 5k dps at the same time.

Enhancement Shaman continue to be both the best and worst class I've ever played. They delight in pve but where as with a paladin, rogue, hunter or priest you can use the gear you gain in pve to great effect in pvp - this is just not the same for enhancement shaman. I am as effective in pvp with pvp gear as I am in pve gear now with the changes to resilience. I still get killed in 3 globals by destruction locks - but I think pretty much everyone does at the moment.

Shaman remain an enigma, both the most versatile class and the most frustrating at the same time.

I'm struggling with this, do I re-roll with the next expansion to paladin, hunter or warrior - or do I stick with the shaman in the futile hope that Blizzard will realise what is wrong with the class. I thought totems would be fun when I rolled Redmist, but they are a ball and chain.

If you really love pve, then shaman are totally cool. Pvp - they are extremely frustrating unless you have a healer behind you - a paladin healer in particular. Put a pro paladin healer behind you, give you 30 seconds to get your flurry up and they are like a freight train on heat.

I guess re-reading this it sounds a bit negative, but then that's the class right now - I hope for some postive changes for pvp in the future. PVE is great - pretty much perfect I would say - if you love pve, then enhancement shaman doesn't come much better.

cheers everyone!

Red

Back with a BANG!

2009-09-26T12:48:00.007+01:00

Amazing return from the US and my business trip. So, yesterday morning I landed in the UK after an over night flight and I needed something yesterday evening to keep me awake to try and beat the jet lag.

I logged in and got a wonderful Orbis welcome home - thanks guys and gals. Chatted a bit and was asked if I would like to try and do heroic Trial of the Crusader. Of course I do!

We gathered up outside the instance and spent a while fighting with the in-game chat because our vent server was down (and stayed down for the whole instance) So co-ordination was a bit harder with a lack of good quality voice chat.

The team was: (and there is a reason I'm listing them out)

Toxín - mage
Syphér - rogue
Rhila - druid (boomkin)
Wisqa - resto/elemental shaman
Artfool - mage
Azybubbles - paladin tank
Onck - warrior tank
Arcenium - paladin healer
Redmist - enhancement shaman
Lipsill - priest healer

The Northred Beasts dropped in record time, the Lord Jaraxxus was flawless and by the time we got to the Faction Champoins someone pointed out that "hey, we are still on 50 tries, cool" - but to be honest we didn't really think much about the number of tries at this point.

We utterly destroyed the faction champions with Onck's perfect opening on the NPCs and our nuke strategy.

Next up, the Twin Val'kyr's Fiola and Eydis, again with a slightly different strategy we managed, one shield very nearly didn't go down but a rapid bloodlust pulled it off at the last half second.

Now we take a break, some new enchants are done on new gear won - we need all the health we can get on Azy and Onck. Wisqa leaves to re-spec and re-glyph as elemental for more dps leaving just the amazing Lipsill and Arcenium as the only two healers. We take another break and again realise that, hey, we haven't wiped yet... close a couple times, but we are on fire here.

Anub'arak... He waits for us, I've never tried this boss on heroic before, and neither had many in this raid. Toxin goes through the tactics we are going to try, Azy explains to me the idea with the kite (thank goodness he did and helped me as I was running because I was targetted first!)

We make a start - 50 tries left...

Flawless raid communication, Onck and Azy are amazing tanks. I'm throwing out chain heals left and right in phase 2. The dps zips out fot the team slamming into this giant crab-like beast.

Prayer of mending jumps around and our holy beacon shines in the frosty air...

Last phase guys! NUKE...

Onck's health dips, oh no.. boss is at 4%... Our brave warrior falls, our rogue spins through the icy air and kisses the floor 2 seconds later I pop an earth elemental, all this gives enough time for Azy to grab the boss. 2% - NUKE, screw the adds, go go GO!!!!!!!!!

Server first baby!

Grats Orbis and what an amazing team... thanks for rather an amazing return from the US...

Red

Away on business

2009-09-18T00:13:00.001+01:00

I hope everyone has a great week - I'll be away for all of next week starting Sunday - so will not be posting until I'm back.

Have a great week everyone and take care - check back soon!

Red

The state of battlegrounds

2009-09-15T17:51:00.002+01:00

I just had to take this screenshot today - There was me and a priest - EVERYONE else was...

FOTM?