Incompetent Warrior

Travel Update.

2009-07-23T05:15:00.002+01:00

Here I am at 5 am waiting 2 hours after checking in to take a 1 hour flight, god but I hate airports. You wait for obscene length's of time bored out of your mind for what seems to be no good reason.

Speaking of being bored out of my mind, I found that shaving your head again (I had shaved it a couple of days ago so it kind of needed it kind of didn't) in an airport bathroom just because you are bored is not a good idea. Shaving your head should be done with a well moistened scalp, shaving cream and a good quality razor. It should definatly not be done with bathroom despencer soap and a cheep ass disposable razor.

Anyway I just popped on to post this as a way to kill time and and to try and keep myself sane.

Oh, and by the way, why is it that security people seem to want to undress me every time I go through security in an airport?

Anyway I might pop on again with another update if I get bored again.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Why so quiet?

2009-07-22T03:16:00.003+01:00

I apologise for my recent silence, but I've had a bad case of writers block and raiding hasn't exactly been great lately. Also Tomorrow, I'm taking a little trip over to England where I will be meeting up with two priests, two mage's and a pally ... possibly also a Deathknight if he can make it. Preperations for this have also left me kind of busy.

I'll bring back some IRL screenshots, oh what do you call 'em ... photo's, that's it.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Arms DPS 3.1

2009-07-18T23:10:00.007+01:00

Lately I've been getting a lot of people asking me about arms DPS, and it seems that my normal explanation of "Take your face, apply it to keyboard then roll like you mean it." just isn't enough for some people. So I thought I would write a better guide here . I will try and make it less of a "Wall of text crits you for 9000000" by highlighting important sections and linking appropriate talents, anyway here we go.

First lets talk about statistic caps. There are three of these that you should know.

Hit Rating.

This is 8% or 262.32 hit rating. After this point hit rating gives no benefit to your dps and is wasted itemisation. Please also note that if your at around 250 hit rating don't bother to gem for it as nobody gives a damn about such a small miss percentage, no really, it's not a big deal.

Expertise Rating.

There are actually two of these but there is only one you need to worry about since you should always be behind the boss, and if your not please take yourself out back and give yourself a sound thrashing, trust me you deserve it. The expertise cap for dodges (which is all you have to worry about) is 6.5% which is 26 expertise or 215 expertise rating. Again any expertise rating after this point is wasted itemisation. There are other things to consider when looking at expertise rating.

The first of these is that you will be specced into Strength of Arms, which will provide 4 expertise meaning you only need 181 expertise rating or 22 expertise (please note that the 4 points from SoA will be added to the tool tip on your character sheet so that it will read 26 expertise with 181 expertise rating).

The second thing is that for each 1% you are under capped by (refer to the tooltip on your character page for this), you can put a talent point into Weapon Mastery, up to a maximum of two.
This means 165 expertise rating with 1/2 WM and 148 expertise rating with 2/2 WM.

Armor Penetration (ArP)

This is probably the most complicated of them all so I will try to keep it as simple as possible. The cap for ArP is 100% after sunder armour and other debuffs have been applied. The only realistic way to reach this cap is with the help of a trinket proc, either Grim Troll or Mjolnir Runestone. My recommendation would be to go for the Grim Troll first as it is so easy to get. I want to keep this a easy to understand as possible so I'm not going to bombard you with a big list of numbers instead I want you to mouse over your hit rating on your character sheet and look at the percentage of armour ignored by your Armor Penetration.

This should be (when capped) about 41%. This is because you get 10% ignored by battle stance and 49% from your trinket proc.

If you are using mace spec ... go get an axe. If you can't get an axe it should read about 26%, as you will get 15% from mace spec.

Gems

First off a couple of rules.

1) Never gem for crit. Just no, ok?

2) Don't make me want to beat you, so go find those attack power gems in your gear and replace them with Strength gems. These scale with talents and with blessing of kings so go get 'em.

3) Once you hit 30% passive ArP from gear and battle stance (so that's 20% from gear) it's time to start gemming for ArP as it provides a greater dps increase than strength at this point. Once you reach the soft cap for ArP go back to gemming for strength.

4) The only time you should be putting anything but red gems in all your sockets is to activate your meta gem or if the socket bonus is really fricken awesome.

Ok that about covers it on gems.

Weapon Choices.

This is a simple one. When you look at the bonus from specialisation
Axe/polearm > Mace > Sword.
Yep that's about all you need to know on this section.

Talent Build.

This is unfortunately not as simple as take this build and own the dps meter. So I will start by showing you my favourite build then talking about the variations you can take.

Link to build here.

Now it's time to talk about the various changes you can make you your build based on personal preference.

The first is the three point's I've placed in Iron Will, these can be placed into Tactical Mastery if you find yourself changing stances a lot. And this is something I will probably change next time I respec.

The next is the 5 points I have in Commanding Presence. These points can be spent on Unbridled Wrath if your having rage generation problems or placed into Improved Demoralising Shout if your tanks are not specced into something similar.

Lastly are the two points I have in Improved Execute. One of these can be spent on Anger Management if your short on rage. Also you remember where I was talking about expertise? Well this is where you get the points from to put them into Weapon Mastery.

That about covers the talent build.

Glyphs.

These are the major and minor glyphs you should be using.

Some people prefer to use Glyph of Bladestorm but it provides a dps boost on only a few fights.

The Rotation (kind of).

Arms dps doesn't use a rotation rather it uses a set of rules to determine which ability you use next. So I will now go through each ability you use on a boss fight and the rules that determine when you use them.

Rend. This is the very first ability you use at the start of the fight. Let it run it's full duration and refresh it as soon as possible afterwards preferably within 2 seconds of it falling off.

Mortal Strike (MS). Keep this baby on cooldown as much of the time as possible. The only reason to delay using MS is to refresh rend, or to avoid wasting a Taste for Blood proc, more on that later.

Execute. When using Execute through a Sudden Death (SD) proc the only time you should delay using it is if you have less than 30 rage or if by using it you will then prevent yourself from using MS i.e. using it will put you on less than 30 rage while MS is off cooldown and an auto attack will not land within the Global Cooldown (GCD), a swing timer is a valuable tool in helping you manage your SD procs.

Overpower. Because you are using this through a Taste for Blood (TfB) proc you have a 6 second window in which to use it before you get another TfB proc and effectively lose the first one. This means that you can realistically use at least 3 other abilities before you have to use Overpower. This means that while it is one of your higher damage abilities it has a lower priority than most of them because of it's ability to be used anywhere within the 6 seconds without delaying the next one.

Slam. This is you "Fill the gaps" ability, you use this only when you have no SD or TfB procs and MS is on cooldown. As arms you should be using every GCD and this is what you use to fill up you "spare" ones.

Bladestorm. You should keep this on cooldown as much as possible, but there are a couple of conditions to fill before you use it. The first is to ensure that rend won't fall off your target in the middle of your Bladestorm. The second is to make sure that you have used your TfB proc before casting Bladestorm and that the next one wont occur for at least another 3 seconds. The third is that you have MS on cooldown, you will always delay MS by using Bladestorm, just try to minimise the delay as much as possible. The fourth is to make sure you not going to be hitting anything your not supposed to i.e. pollymorphed mobs or creatures that have to be killed at a specific time.

Heroic Strike (HS). You use this ability only to ensure that you don't waste rage also referred to as a "rage dump". What I mean by this is that when you are at high rage and you get another auto attack it will often take you over 100 rage. As you can only have 100 rage this means that most of the rage you would have gotten is wasted, this is not good, it makes me a sad warrior when rage is wasted. So what we do instead is when we are at over 75 rage we cue a heroic strike thereby boosting our damage slightly instead of wasting rage, this makes me a happy warrior.

Additional notes on Arms DPS.

The Execute Phase. When the boss get to 20% you can now use Execute whenever the hell you want to. This is a bad thing because just spamming Execute will actually lower your dps. So what you do instead is continue with your normal rotation, keeping rend up, keeping MS on cooldown, using your TfB procs, the difference is you no longer use Slam and never use HS, instead whenever you would normally use slam you use execute instead. Another tactic is to switch to two good one handers, keep Rend up, use your TfB procs and Execute the rest of the time as you should generate enough rage to Execute on every GCD. I haven't tested enough to tell you which tactic works the best so take your pick and hope for he best :)

Multi target dps. When you have several targets to hit that are close together continue with your normal rotation but switch out HS for Cleave and use Sweeping Strikes (SS) on every cooldown. On a side note to using SS make sure that it is off cooldown just before you use Bladestorm. Pop SS and Bladestorm at the same time and each Whirlwind attack will hit each target twice. To make the most of this turn off you auto attack just before you do this as each auto attack will eat up a SS charge but only generate 1 additional hit. This means you will need 50 rage before you stop auto attacking and use SS and Bladestorm. Start your Auto attack again as soon as the last SS charge has been used.

Addons.

Quartz - good for swing timer and nice target cast bars.

Power Auras Classic - use this to track you TfB and SD procs. Some people find it too flashy but I like it.

Auracle or Buttontimers - these provide an easy way to track your rend duration

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

The Picture Says It All.

2009-07-08T05:15:00.003+01:00

Ok so maybe the picture needs a few words to back it up.

Last night we couldn't continue our progress on Yogg'saron in 25 man because of summer. Yeah you know that thing that happens where the sun starts shining and people stop raiding. Anyway we were short on tanks, dps and healers.

What do we do in this situation?

Go back to naxx? If we do I may have to shoot myself.

No, what we do is grab whoever we can and make as many 10 man teams as possible. In this case it happened that we could only make one team ... and I had to tank. I protested this mainly through force of habit rather than any other reason. Fortunately due to them running a 10 man on one of our off days earlier during the raiding week we only had Mimiron, General Vesax, and Yogg himself left. This meant that I only had to tank for Mimiron and the trash up to Vesax.

We one shot Mimiron, despite a healing screw up that caused Bloodthrust to die while tanking in phase one. I kept screwing up in phase three while on the scrap bots and bomb bots. kept miss clicking and failing to taunt the bomb bots (going to have to make a macro for that, although I should really just practice more instead).

We one shot the general, infact we almost entered hard mode by mistake.

Then it was time for Yogg. We were pretty confident since we'd had so much practice on 25 man, but we figured we would have to see phase three a few times before we got it right. The most we'd seen of P3 on heroic was a confusion of adds running around seemingly killing tanks at will.

We had Bloodthrust solo tank it and he did an amazing job, once I told him to stop tanking them so close to the damn clouds that the mobs were actually standing in them, but we managed to wipe in phase 1 by spawning too many additional adds.

Time for attempt number two. This time we didn't spawn too many adds, and the melee (me included) didn't try to commit suicide too much, so P1 went very smoothly. After the chaos of seeing it in heroic P2 was almost a joke, and we finished it in 3 portal phases, despite having one of the portal team miss the second one.

Then it was phase 3 and those adds that were wantonly destroying our tanks on heroic, were behaving themselves and eating mah axe like good adds should. Except for one who went and ate our lovely tree healer Ikna instead, I had to go remonstrate with him and show him the error of his ways. Bad add, Bad. STUNTY SMASH.

Then suddenly it was all over.

WTF?!? Weren't we supposed to like spend the better part of the night wiping on this guy?

We gave a brief cheer and then milled around a bit. I think Bloodthrust summed it up when he said "well what are we supposed to do now, there's like 2 hours left on the raid?". It was a very half hearted victory. We were all pleased, but I think everyone would have like him to have put up a bit more of a fight before dieing. Ok I know we out gear it being decked out in mainly 226 ilvl gear, but still it was like he just rolled over and gave up. Oh well now to do it on heroic.

The rest may have gone and done something else but I called it a night there, having no inclination to go back and do older content.

Anyway here we are taking our victory pose after the surprisingly short struggle.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

That Fuzzy Feeling Of Hysteria.

2009-07-06T00:32:00.006+01:00

Today was not a great WoW day for me as I kept having technical issues. It started when I was doing my dailies before the raid and a friend of my housemate was over with his kids. They kept running around a knocking the cable out of the router. Now you cant get angry with them because they are just doing what kids do, which is run around, and the cable stretches right across the living room perfectly positioned to catch little feet as they rush by. Fortunately the latch on the connector is loose so it pull's out before it can trip them up. I'd much rather get DC'd than have a child get hurt. So I patiently got up from the PC room and plugged the cable back in every time they knocked it out. It was no big deal, barely even worth mentioning, except that this disguised a problem that would become apparent later on.

The friend and his kids leave about 20 minute before the raid starts and everything is hunky dory ... for a while anyway. Then I start getting strange lag spikes and random DC's, being unable to log back in, being unable to establish an internet connection. All kinds of strange problems. My frustration at this was compounded by the fact that we failed twice on Mimiron, a boss that should be on farm status for us, and I caused something like a 15-30 minute delay while I tried in vain to get online/remain online for any length of time.

It's a good thing the kids had gone because I had just become a raging, frothing, malcontent gamer with the strong inclination to take a hammer to both my router and my PC. The language was not at all suitable for little ears.

I manage to get back on in phase 2 of Mimiron on our kill attempt (fortunately I had been DC'd inside the room before the pull) only to have my game crash in phase 3 while I was on Magnetic core duty (why is it that I always get core duty?) fortunately Nyziu (my gnomish melee confederate) covered for me while I restarted WoW. I managed to remain online long enough to finish the fight after that.

That done with I asked Elix, our raid leader if they could clear trash while I ran some tests to see what was wrong. Normally I would have asked to be replaced but we were running under the full 25 already as it's summer and people have suddenly found summery things to do instead of raiding (damn them and their real lives, don't they know I've got yogg to kill?) .

Anyway I started by checking the router connections, nothing wrong there. Then moved on to the router settings, nope all is well there too. I then preformed a ping test and suddenly got a conflicting IP error. Hang on a moment. Right now my PC is the only one active on this network. A bit of frantic checking later and yes my suspicions have been confirmed, for some god forsaken reason my PC had decided it would be a great idea to try and open two connection to the router with the same IP. Damn computers, they'll never catch on. Obviously I had told it to do this somehow since PC's will only do what they are told to. But damn it, they should do what I want, not what I say!

I got back after they had only cleared one trash pack on the way to General Vesax. My technical problems however had thrown me way off my game and it took all the remaining trash to get remotely back on track.

Then I had the problem that, while normally I would be one of the main interrupters on this fight I didn't want to have another round of technical difficulties cause a wipe. So I asked for volunteers to take over ... I had to ask 3 times before I got one. Eventually I got a response and we sorted the rotation and it was time to pull. The annoyance at having all the tech problems then sorting out a replacement caused me to not realise that I hadn't switched over to my fury spec until I hit an in combat charge.

But you know what? At that stage I just didn't care any more, I wanted to release my frustration and unleash the beast that is a dwarf warrior packed with rage and hyped up on coffee on this guy.

I promised myself that if they missed even one interrupt I would switch over to berserker stance and add mine to theirs, but they didn't miss a beat, and I got to unleash. I managed to keep my head enough to stack Sunder Armor for the other melee, but not enough to check if anyone else was doing the same so I could stop. It didn't help my control that I was the recipient of, not one, but two DK's Hysteria's. In fact when one landed right at the start of the heroism I announced over vent that "I love you guy's".

Yes I am that easy, one Hysteria during heroism and I'm all yours baby.

My brain got into the swing of things as well and started doing some pretty nifty rage calculations allowing me to maximise my Sudden Death procs and heroic strikes. So even with stacking sunders and the melee haste debuff which gimped my rage generation I was still able to pull out (as I found out when I had wiped enough foaming, dps frenzy, spittle of the screen that I could check my recount) the second highest damage in the fight.

Then I did a little double take when I saw who was above me and by how much.

What kind of sick, twisted, sadistic abuse had that man done to his keyboard. Surely there is some kind of society to prevent that kind of cruelty.

All I can say to the other casters is, Be Like Lau. Sure the man's a sick, twisted, keyboard hating animal. But any man, no matter how much of an animal he may be, who gives my recount that much of a headache deserves some kind of respect.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Is It Still A Mistake If You Didn't Know Until You Were Dead?

2009-07-05T02:09:00.002+01:00

Well of course it damn well is. An avoidable death is an avoidable death no matter what. I should know I've died in almost every way imaginable on a boss fight. I've died form over aggroing. Died from aggro dumps. Died from standing in the wrong spot. Died from standing in the right spot, but standing there too long. Died from standing too close to someone. Died from standing too far away from someone. Died from moving at the wrong time. Died from not moving at the wrong time. Died from mind control. Died from AoE. Died from big, glowy, spiny, damn obvious AoE. Died from moving in the wrong direction. Died from moving in the right direction, but too far. Hell, if there was a boss where you could only die by standing on your head whilst reciting nursery rhymes I'm sure I'd manage that too somehow.

What does all this rambling about me failing have to do with anything?

Well I like to think of it as a list of credentials as to why I'm specifically qualified to talk about this subject. It may not always be as obvious as those I listed but a mistake is a mistake, no matter the situation.

Let me tell you a story.

Our raid leader did me a favour, for which I promised him that I would worship the ground he walked on and not die for the next 10 bosses we downed. I was in luck as it was the beginning of the raiding week and that the first 11 bosses in Ulduar can be classes as on farm for us. I survived the Flame Leviathan with ease. I survived Razorscales adds and flame patch's. I survived being put into Ignis The Furnace Masters pocket twice in a row. I avoided being deconstructed by XT-002 Deconstructor. I survived being DC'd twice on the Assembly of Iron. I survived the AoE of Kologarn. I survived the adds and void zones of Auriaya, even the death of our main tank on that fight didn't stop us or cause my death. I survived 800-900+ lag on Hodir.

(As a side note I had asked to be replaced because of the lag and DC's that had been plaguing me but there was realistically nobody online to replace me)

I did all this by doing my utmost to minimise my damage taken and maximise my positioning and self healing. Then however it was time for Thorim and I got sloppy.

The first attempt I was in the gauntlet and did everything I could to stay alive, but the arena team died from being overrun by adds and the big sparkly ball of death came for me. Our raid leader kindly said that one didn't count. The next attempt I was put in the arena so that our raid leader could "keep an eye on me", and for extra dps on the adds. I kept a damn close eye on my health and my aggro and survived long enough for Thorim to join the fight. We finished of the adds that were left and started on the big man himself.

This is the point where I make my mistake. I know that he does chain lightning, and I know that it gets stronger as the fight progresses. So why in gods name did I stand so close to two other melee? Ok so it's hard to judge how hard the lightning is hitting unless your keeping a close eye on raid damage. And yes the other melee should have been spreading out as well. And yes we do get forced closer together by that ground level lightning stuff he does. All this however in no way excuses me from just standing there and face rolling my way to the floor. Even if the others were not, I at least should have been maximising my distance from the rest of the melee group. I did not, I paid the price and broke my promise. It was a hand up, my bad, mistake with no excuses allowed.

What's the point of all this nattering?

Well the point is that a whole lot of death's are avoidable and next time you die take a good long look at your combat log and the sequence of events that lead up to your death and see if there was any possible way to avoid it, or even to just reduce the chances of you dieing. I'm not saying you have to play perfectly, god knows I don't. All I'm saying is realise you made a mistake and try to learn from it.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

What I Did While AFK.

2009-07-04T15:35:00.003+01:00

In this post I am going to completely deviate from the norm on this blog and talk about Real Life... you know, that thing that happens when you go afk or log off.

Yesterday I had myself a little adventure. You could, if you wanted, liken it to your, say level 20 alt that hasn't gotten his mount yet, getting a quest that takes him right across Kalimdor through unexplored areas. But that's a horrible analogy so lets pretend I didn't say it.

Anyway I had some business that I absolutely had to take care of, and to take care of it I had to be in a certain town by 10 am. Ok so what's the problem with that you ask?

The problem is that this town is ~45 km away (taking the rout that guarantees I wont get lost, something that happens very easily) and I live in the middle of nowhere and don't have a car.

Ok so take a bus.

I'm sorry but public transport sucks in this country and the earliest I could get to this town by taking public transport would be 1:15 pm, way way too late. Also taking a taxi was out of the question as I had a grand total of 6.40 Euro on me (this being the reason that I absolutely had to sort this out that day).

My solution to this problem was to leave the house at 6am. This caused it's own little problem as at 3am sleep was still nowhere in sight so I ended up pulling an all nighter just to guarantee that I would leave on time. I had calculated that that if I maintained a decent speed I could cover that distance on foot in 4 hours and 30 minutes. Those of you with half a brain will realise that this would end up with me arriving half an hour late. Do not be alarmed, I had a plan, if you can call sticking my thumb out and relying on the generosity of the motoring public a plan. Usually you can stick you thumb out on any major Irish road and get a lift to the next town in fairly short order.

I think I must at this time talk a little about the rout I was taking to get to where I needed to be. I was taking two main roads to avoid getting lost, like I said before this is something that happens quite frequently. One road straight up the other straight across. Simple right? Well I thought it was, and taking two main roads was also supposed to increase my chances of hitching a lift.

Well the first road was actually a main road and one I'd walked a good few times before. The problem was that it was 6 am, traffic was scarce and those that might have been inclined to give me a lift probably hadn't had their coffee yet, poor buggers.

After an hour of walking traffic had picked up, but I was making good time, better than I had originally hoped, and it hardly seemed worth getting a lift the (relatively) short distance to the turn off. So, foolishly, I stopped trying to hitch and just walked the last half hour to the next main road.

Finally seeing this "main" road was quite a shock. I've never taken it before, but it was the one direct rout between two (for Ireland) fair sized towns. I must say I was expecting something ... bigger. This so called main road was barely large enough to accommodate two cars passing each other and had no hard shoulder for me to walk on, in fact if two cars were coming in opposite directions near me I had to find a gap between the hedge's around me and squeeze in there until they had passed. I really should have guessed, while it was marked as a main road on the map it looked like the cartographer had drawn in this particular road during an earthquake.

After walking for another twenty minutes down this cattle track of a main road I had become slightly nervous and kept expecting to hear that banjo tune from deliverance, that's when I come across my most pleasant surprise of the day. I turned a corner in the road and stumble across this almost picturesque town, one of the few I pass on my journey even big enough to have a sign with it's name on it. The lovely architecture of the old houses, the scent of the bushes and flowers in full bloom and the dappled morning sunlight working it's way between the tree canopy. All this left me momentarily entranced, and my first thought upon arriving there was "So this is where all the hippies who got old went to.". It even, bless it's rustic soul, had a footpath for me to walk on.

I continue along this footpath for a while enjoying the scenery of the old houses, the classic Irish pub and church (mind you if you've seen one of these you've seen them all) and the look of the old dry-stone walls, only partially spoiled by the layer of concrete that had been put over the top of them to prevent kids from knocking them over. These walls were probably older than some of the houses around them and certainly much much older that the concrete footpath I was walking on. I'd expected the footpath to only extend for about 300 meters but it went on for nearly a kilometre, and as I progressed along it I started to wish it had only lasted for 300 meters. The further I went along the more depressing it became as more and more of the "new" houses appeared. God but I detest modern housing. It all seems to be on the principle of four walls and a roof with the only difference being in the size of the building, the catch phrase for these places seems to be "cost effective". They seem determined to take all of the individualism out of what is after all somebody's home.

Anyway I came out the other side of the town and started walking down the cattle track into banjo country again, and then the thought struck me. That had probably been my best chance of getting a lift as there was actually places for people to pull in and pick me up. Luck however had not been on my side as not a single car had passed going in my direction over the last kilometre. Cursing my luck I trudged on. I had now been walking for over two hours and the fact that I'm missing a tendon in my right knee was starting to show, as the mussels that I had conditioned to take over the job of the missing tendon were starting to burn with fatigue.

At this point I'm going to interject a little note on hitch hiking for those of you who may not have done it on a regular basis (Oh how I love to interrupt the flow of my own story -_-) . When you catch somebody's eye as they drive past and don't pick you up there are usually two types of look you get. The first type is the apologetic look, as if to say sorry there's nowhere to stop, or sorry there's not a free seat. The second type of look is the disdainful look. This look basically say, "Like I would let you into this car, you filthy pedestrian you.", god I hate that look. I'm probably more intelligent and better educated than most of those people and they look down on me just because I'm walking somewhere. Ok, so I may not be better educated as I tend to become bored and lose interest half way through whatever course I happen to be on.

Anyway as we rejoin my journey through the no man's land that is rural Ireland, I have been walking for 3 hours and my good knee, which hasn't been quite right since I damaged it when I was four, is stating to complain since it's been compensating for my bad knee for the last hour. I ran out of cigarettes just after leaving the house and I could almost kill for a smoke. Then as if in answer to my cravings I turn one of the many corners that looked just like the ones before and low and behold, there it is, the first shop I've encountered since leaving my house. I could have jumped for joy, except that my knee would probably have collapsed under me. I went in and spent the best part of my remaining funds on a packet of rolling tobacco and drink. Some of you might find 19 degrees to be a laughable temperature but it was enough to make me sweat and I had become damn thirsty at this stage. Having my thirst and cravings sated had now made me much less likely to throw a stone through the window of the next driver to give me "that look".

I walked for another twenty minutes despairing more and more of ever arriving on time, when I stuck my thumb out for what must have been the hundredth time. The car drove on past me and my heart sank yet again. But wait, what's this? Yes they are pulling in. Finally I had gotten a lift, just 7 kilometres from my destination, but that would have taken more than an hour to walk in my current state. I shall be forever grateful to that lovely couple for stopping to give me a lift when so many others would not, they even gave me directions to where I needed to go in that town after they dropped me off.

Anyway I got to where I needed to go and sorted my business out. Now all I've got to do is get back home. There's no way in hell I'm going to be able to walk back, my leg just wont take it. I know, I'll get a bus into the city and then back out to where I live. I'm under no time constraints now so this isn't a problem. So I'm there waiting for the bus to arrive when the heavens that this is the perfect opportunity to open up on me. Damn, I don't want to leave the bus stop because only god knows how often a bus leaves this place. I call the bus company in an attempt to find out the bus schedule so I can go find some shelter until then. It takes me 15 minutes to get through to them all the while standing in the heavy rain in case I miss the bus. As soon as I do manage to get through and find out that the next bus isn't for another 1 hour and 40 minutes the rain decides to drop off to a minor shower, leaving me soaked and thoroughly annoyed.

Ok so what do I do for the next 1 hour and 40 minutes? I doubt this place has an internet cafe. I know, I'll go buy a book and read for a while. After walking around the town for a bit and not seeing one I stop a person on the street and ask them for directions. To my absolute horror I'm told that if I want a book shop I'll have to go to the next town over. Now I'm starting to feel sorry for the people who have to live here, they've got fast food shops, fashion shops, a super market, hairdressers, and even *shudders* a solicitors, yet no book shop. To me this is a truly, truly depressing situation. I go buy a news paper and get a pint in the local pub (I justify this early drink with the fact that it's not mid day for me but very very late at night) to try and distract myself from this depressing realisation, and decide that if I ever come back here it will be too soon.

So you could say that I arrived to the raid on time, killed the boss and got some phat lootz. But you wont since that also is a terrible analogy and we will pretend I didn't say anything.

So until next time this is Morgan Walsh the Incompetent Pedestrian signing off.

It's On It's way.

2009-07-03T17:12:00.003+01:00

Sorry people no real post today eiter I had a bit of a Real Life adventure today that has left me completely worn out ... but flying in the face of the Incompetent Warrior tradition I will actually be posting about this.

Annoying My Guildies Part 2

2009-07-01T06:13:00.005+01:00

Occasionally I shall be doing a completely fictitious expose on, guide by, or interview with, one of my guildies. I have of course asked them if I "can use your ingame name so that I can take the piss out of you on my blog". I asked, they said yes, they only have themselves to blame.

SoL In-depth.

Hello and welcome to SoL In-Depth, I'm your host Dirty McMuckraker and today we have a special treat for you as we'll be discussing Bloodthrust one of SoL's regular raiders.

We also have our main source with us today, but he has asked for anonymity so we have disguised his writing and we will be referring to him by the code name ST1.

Let kick things off shall we?

ST1 how would you describe Bloodthrust?

Well that's a bit of a hard question to answer as he's such a ... composite ... personality. I'll have to break it down into a couple of descriptions. First off Imagine a monkey.

Ok.

Now place that monkey in a very small cage.

Right.

Now add about 15 gallons coffee and 100 packets of jelly tots to the monkeys system.

Riiiight.

Finally add a large supply of ... monkey product ... for him to fling at unsuspecting people near by, and you have the general impression of Bloodthrust.

You paint a startling picture of one of your core raiders ST1.

Not as startled as our new recruits when he starts flinging his monkey product, I can tell you.

I can imagine ... I'd rather not, but I can.

Now for a more defined view of Bloodthrust. You've probably been to one of those casual get together's that people have right? You know the ones, they start about 4pm, bring the kids kind of affairs. Usually out door eating if the weather is good.

I know the ones.

Well you know that one kid right?

That one kid? I'm not sure I follow you.

You know the one, there's always one, about 4 or 5 years old, cheeky little bugger. By the end of the night he's probably running around in nothing but his T-shirt despite his parents best attempts to stop him. This kid will usually do something horribly disgusting during the party, along the lines of finding some dog doings, placing it on a paper plate, then presenting it to a table full of adults in the middle of eating, with a big ass "look at what I found" grin on his face.

Okaaaaay, I know the one's ... maybe not to that extent, but I know the one's.

Yeah, well that kids Bloodthrust.

Wow ... just wow, I knew I'd be living up to my name tonight but this is just amazing. I think we have a general impression of Bloodthrust now, so lets move on to the next question. How did you meet Bloodthrust?

Well he just kinda turned up in our ventrilo server one day. All quiet like. Just sitting there saying hi to people as we logged on to do instances or whatever. At the time nobody suspected he was a raging monkey hyped up on caffeine and sugar with a pile of product at his disposal. Apparently he was a guildie from way back when SoL was Sentinels of Light, who stopped playing before I joined the guild.

So he just kind of turned up, rolled a deathknight, and got into the raiding team?

Well it was with the release of Wrath of the Lich King, so we were all at the same level when we hit 80 ... but basically, yeah that's right.

Well, what can I say? With all this information it brings us nicely to our next question. For the love of god Why do you keep him around?

A couple of reasons, he tanks so I don't have to, he does good dps when not tanking. But mainly it can be summed up in two words ... Entertainment ... Value. There is nothing quite like watching a new recruit try to raid for the first time with a new guild while dodging monkey product.

My final question is one that as a good muck raker I would normally never ask ... but do you have any proof about his personality?

I have some light documentary evidence. At the time of this screen shot we were discussing his new best in slot tanking boots, and he turns it down hill as only Bloodthrust can.

Then as if to prove his superiority he comes out with this little gem less than a minute later.

There has been a lot more but unfortunately I cannot screenshot vent where most of it happens.

Compelling evidence I must say. There you have it folks one of SoL's regular raider laid bare for you all to see.

That's all from me and our source ST1.

So until next time this is Dirty the Muck Raking Reporter signing off.

I may have gone a little over board with this one, but it's Bloodthrust, he can take it ... at least I hope he can or I'm going to be doing a lot more dodging from now on.

Ghostcrawler v.s. Warriors.

2009-06-30T16:08:00.005+01:00

Before I start I just want to say that I know this is completely unfair towards Ghostcrawler on my behalf. But you know what? It's my blog and I'm going to do whatever the hell I feel like.

Mid Wrath of the Lich King 3.0.

Warriors: I want to play arms in PvE and PvP ... But I do love this titans grip thing mow that they removed the hit penalty.

Ghostcrawler: What's the state of warriors at the moment?

Forum Browsing Lacky: Well they want to play arms but they are reasonably content at the moment.

GC: And the other classes? Are they complaining about warriors?

FBL: No not to any great level.

GC: Ok then my job here is done.

Late Wrath of the Lich king 3.0.

Warriors: GOD I LOVE TITANS GRIP. But I wouldn't mind playing arms in PvP and PvE.

Other Classes: Warriors do too much damage. QQ

Forum Browsing Lacky: Ghostcrawler sir, the other classes are complaining that warriors are doing too much damage.

Ghostcrawler: Are they doing too much damage?

FBL: It does seam that way sir. They are topping the damage meter's on most fights.

GC: I will not stand for this injustice!!! Bring me my nerf bat!

FBL: The normal one sir?

GC: No I think this calls for the special "Paladin edition" nerf bat.

FBL: But Sir, the Paladin edition was designed to nerf through bubble. Isn't that going a bit over board?

GC: No it's not! Topping the damage meter's, we'll see about that. Muhahahahahaaaaa!

Early 3.1 Warrior Changes Are Announced.

Warriors: NOES NOT MY TITANS GRIP!!!!! QQ

Other Classes: Serves you right, stupid warriors. Hehehehe.

Forum Browsing Lacky: Sir the warriors are QQing at a massive level.

Ghostcrawler: Are the other classes happy?

FBL: They do seem to be ... but those warriors are really going at it. I haven't seen this much QQ since my last visit to the mage forums.

GC: That does seem bad. I'd better throw them a bone. Hmmm, now what were they wanting a while ago?

Wrath of the Lich King 3.1 Live.

Warriors: My titans grip is still nerfed. But I can play arms now ... and Oooooh look at that Juggernaut talent man thats nice for PvE and god does it rock in PvP. I can PvP again YAY.

Other Classes: Warriors can charge in combat. QQ. After they charge they get an auto crit. QQ.

Ghostcrawler: What's the state of warriors at the moment?

Forum Browsing Lacky: Well the fact they can PvP properly again has distracted them from the TG nerf. And the fact that they can do some decent damage as arms in PvE seems to have placated them in that regard also. There are still some die hard TG QQer's though.

GC: And the other classes?

FBL: They hate Juggernaut in PvP.

GC: Time for a "Ghostcrawler Special" I think. *goes and releases a statement that they are not going to nerf juggernaut into the ground because it will cause warriors to collapse in PvP again.*

GC: That should do the trick.

FBL: Sir the other classes are still QQing ... and pretty hard.

GC: Time to put the "Special" into the "Ghostcrawler Special". *introduces a 75% reduction on the Juggernaut crit bonus*

Warriors: Ok so mabe it was a little overpowered. I still don't like the change though.

Other Classes: But but but ... they can still charge us. QQ

GC: How are the warriors taking the news?

FBL: Surprisingly well sir.

GC: And the other classes?

FBL: They still don't like the constant "in combat" charges Sir.

GC: Time to make this special a double. *goes and introduces a 5 second penalty on the charge cooldown*

Warriors: *Squeal *

GC: Working as intended.

Please note that this is a product of my caffeine saturated sleep deprived mind and these view are not those of Ghostcrawler, the SoL guild, or have anything to do with reality in any way (except that the nerfs happened).

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Meta Gem Fail.

2009-06-30T14:03:00.004+01:00

Well I just realised that I've been playing with the wrong meta gem equipped for the last week or so. /facepalm. I was looking over my armoury profile re-evaluating which upgrades to go for when I spotted this.

Yep, as you can clearly see that's a 21 agility and 3% crit damage meta instead of the 21 crit rating and 3% crit damage. Oh well off to regem I guess.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Annoying My Guildies Part 1

2009-06-29T14:57:00.003+01:00

This is a brand new section to my blog. Occasionally I shall be doing a completely fictitious expose on, guide by, or interview with, one of my guildies. I have of course asked them if I "can use your ingame name so that I can take the piss out of you on my blog". I asked they said yes they only have themselves to blame.

Lau's Guide To Mage DPS.

Hi there Incompetent Readers, this is Lau and today I'm going to tell you my secrets to topping the damage meters and making the other, lesser classes look silly.

Step one, gearing. Go to sites like the Elitist Jerks Forum and either find a list of, or demand someone tell you the best gear, stats, gems, glyph's, enchants, and Spec. Go get them. Alternately you can find a mage who's destroying the dps meters Armory him and basically copy paste.

On a side note to gearing, as alliance always remain 1% under the hit cap and demand to be put in the same group as a Drenai. Don't worry follow this guide and your dps will be high enough that they will give in without a fight.

Step Two Keybindings. Take your fireball spell and bind it to your mouse wheel.

Step Three Scorch Buff. Always ensure that this is applied by another player, be it one of those wannabe mages ... oh what do you call them ... thats right, Warlocks. Or if that fails have a less experienced/more gullible mage do it for you. Never do it yourself if you can help it as this will mess up your rotation.

Step Four Rotation. This is a highly complex seven step rotation.
1) Target boss.
2) Spin mouse wheel.
3) Go make yourself a cup of coffee. Don't worry your mouse wheel will do everything for you.
4) Drink the coffee.
5) Return to your PC and collect your loot. Remember that this loot is rightfully yours by virtue of your dps.
6) Target silly melee players who have done they're hilarious prancing act around the boss.
7) Laugh at your target.

There you have it folks Lau's guide to mage dps.

So until next time this is Lau the Wheel Spinning Mage signing off.

Please note that this guide was a work of fiction devised by my caffeine saturated, sleep deprived mind and these views have nothing to do with Lau, the SoL guild, or reality in any form.

I Need To Tank More.

2009-06-29T00:00:00.003+01:00

This post will show you that the Incompetent part of the Incompetent Warrior is alive and well.

On Saturday A bunch of us got together to go do 10 man Ulduar. Nothing new about that usually there will be at least one group going on one or two of our non-official raiding nights. However this time, for the first time in a while they needed me to tank.

Now I was less than thrilled at this prospect, not because I don't like to tank, well ok you got me I'd much rather be waving my axe around and yelling "STUNTY SMASH" than waving my (whatever M says, and you can see what he says if you read the chat) ugly green glowy sword around shouting "NOT THE FACE, NOT MY BEAUTIFUL BEARDED FACE!".

Back on track now, I was less than thrilled at the prospect of tanking mainly because I hadn't tanked anything in about a month. As it turned out yes you could tell. For one I forgot to re-glyph so I was running around tanking Ulduar 10 man with glyph of execute, heroic strike and whirlwind. Not exactly what you would call optimal.

Another thing was that I was having constant panic attacks about "What did I keybind that too again?". This lead to several mistakes the largest being me getting so confused that I simply stood in a void zone until I died while tanking Freya. You see the problem is that I used to be (mostly) a clicker, but over the first month of the expansion I taught myself to use keybindings. The unfortunate side effect is that I lost my ability to click anything unless they are in a really big ass button or I take my time. This means if it aint keybound it's not getting used. :(

The last problem is my UI. Now I like my UI and it's optimised for my DPS play style, it however really sucks for my tanking play style. There are not enough keybindings for major abilities, and any abilities I might have to click are way down the bottom on really small buttons. This makes me a saaaaad tank. I was literally tanking Razorscale with my spell book open half the time swapping in and out abilities I couldn't put on convenient keybindings. This is not good. I'll have to make a tanking specific UI now. Well I don't have to, but I am going to.

All this means that I'm going to have to do a bit of tanking just to stay in practice in case I end up letting 24 other people down, instead of just making 9 other people laugh at me.

Oh by the way this is what happens when we only need one tank for a fight and I switch back to dps but don't let the healers know about it.

Yes that's me face down again, and what's more I'm the only person face down. Guess I should have told them I was going dps for that fight. Oh and sundering the target for the melee and hunters generates quite a lot of threat at the start /facepalm.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Patch 3.2 Blues or 3.2 Benefit?

2009-06-26T10:32:00.002+01:00

I'm not going to be talking about the Warrior changes in this post, because there aren't any. Well that's not really true, there is the slight buff to Armed to the Teeth where we now gain 40% more attack power from it. Also there is the buff to block rating, but that's just a poor band aid fix to a lack lustre tanking mechanic. Just by mentioning these I've said all that really needs to be said about them.

What I want to talk about is the Emblem changes. Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead.

What does this mean for me? Well my first reaction was the classic "They iz stealing mah epics!!1!", and that they had just wasted all of my hard work. They I stopped thinking with my epeen for a moment and took a better look at it. What does this actually mean for me?

Well for one thing this can only be a benefit to my guilds progression. A lot of our players do have alts that they can play at a high level, but we can't use them because they are not Ulduar ready and not likely to be in the near future. These changes will greatly benefit any returnee players, rerollers or alts. Hell it's even a boost to off spec raiding. I've been pretty luck with grabbing off spec tanking loot but there are still a couple of items I would dearly love to replace but find myself having to horde my Emblems of Conquest for main spec gear.

There is also a salve for my ego as well since the non tier Emblem loot is all substandard to the Ulduar drops. It's over stacked on stamina and a lot of it has sub optimal dps stats like haste. There is not one peice of it that fits my BiS, although I am using the gloves until I can get my hands on the Tier ones.

An added bonus is that I can now get heroic groups again without pugging (god I hate pugging, it is without a doubt the one part of the game I hate the most) and get some frozen orbs for my Jewelcrafting.

Speaking of heroics I am really really hoping that the new 5 man instance they are bringing out is of a higher difficulty level, much like Magisters Terrace was with the release of Sunwell Plateau.

Well thats about all the rambling I have for today,

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Tanking Builds For 3.1

2009-06-24T16:56:00.002+01:00

As part of my revived Blog I shall be doing posts on all aspects of being a warrior, Tanking, Arms dps, Fury dps and if I have time also some bits on PvP (which I'm even less qualified to talk about than usual) and changes happen to these with every patch. Now being very lazy I'm going to start off by copy and pasting a quick tanking build guide that I posted on my guild forum and adding a few notes at the bottom.

Here it is.

In this post I'm going to give a brief overview of various tanking builds and their applications. For those of you who have actually seen me tank, don't worry my knowledge and understanding of tanking is better than my practice of tanking.

Max Survivability Build. (recommended for progress runs)

This is the 5/10/56 Build. This build is recommended for new or high damage encounters.

This build, as you can see, concentrates on maximum survivability over threat. The 5/5 Demoralising Shout can be changed if you have a dps warrior or warrior off tank specced into it and keeping it applied.

The single target threat rotation for this build is (In order of highest threat)

Shield Slam > Revenge > Shockwave > Concussive Blow > Devastate.

This means that you only use Devastate when all of the other abilities are on cooldown. Heroic Strike should be used on every strike while you have over 30 rage.

The recommended glyphs for this build are:

Advantages:
* This combination of talents and glyphs gives you both Shield Wall and Last Stand on 2 minute cooldowns.
* It allows you to apply the strongest damage reduction debuffs available to you.
* Allows for good mobility through the use of Warbringer.
* Has decent AoE tanking ability through Improved Thunder Clap and Shockwave.

Disadvantages:
* Relatively low threat, although if you maintain a good rotation this should not be a problem.
* Slow to apply Sunder Armour.
* Low rage efficiency.

Deep Wounds Build.

This is the 15/5/51 Deep Wounds build for threat generation. This build is recomended for encounters on farm or for threat sensitive encounters.

This Build is only worth taking if you have 10% crit fully raid buffed. If you don't have 10% crit Cruelty provides better threat than Impale.

The threat rotation is the same as for the Max Survivability build.

The recommended Glyphs for this build are:

Advantages
* High threat per second.
* Good rage efficiency.
* Allows for good mobility through the use of Warbringer.
* Decent AoE threat through Deep Wounds procking off Thunder Clap and Shockwave criticals.
* Fast at stacking Sunder Armour

Disadvantages
* Long cooldowns on Shield Wall and Last Stand.
* Weaker damage reduction debuffs.

AoE Tanking Build. (recommended for add tanking)

This is the 5/13/53 AoE tanking build recommended for encounters where you will be tanking large numbers of adds and should realistically only be taken as a secondary spec in on duel spec tank, or for specific encounters.

Your Vigilance should be placed on the DPS with the highest threat assigned to dealing with your adds. You should know who this person is.

The threat rotation for this build, when dealing with adds, is:
Shockwave and Thunder Clap on every cooldown, replace your heroic strikes with Cleave and fill the gaps with Shield Slam, Revenge, Concussive Blow and Devastate.

The recommended Glyphs for this build are:

Advantages:
* High AoE threat per second.
* Allows for good mobility through the use of Warbringer.
* Has one of the improved damage reduction debuffs.

Disadvantages
* Poor rage efficiency.
* Long cooldowns on Shield Wall and Last Stand.
* Slow to apply Sunder Armour.

Unrelenting Assault Damage and Threat Build. (Not recommended at all)

This is the 37/0/34 high damage high, threat build. This build is only recommended for encounters where survivability is not a huge issue but threat and DPS are. Again this should only be taken for specific encounters of as a secondary spec on a duel spec tank.

The points in Last Stand or Vigilance can be spent in Juggernaut for added mobility, although I would heavily recommend keeping the point in Last Stand.

I'm not going to explain this one as tank spot does it much better than I could, complete with video.
Click Here!

The recommended glyphs for this build are:

Advantages
* Very high threat per second.
* Insane damage per second for a tank.
* Insane rage efficiency as Glyph of Revenge + Glyph of Heroic Strike with the 1 second gcd on revenge can send you into infinite rage scenarios.

Disadvantages
* Low AoE tanking ability.
* Lower health.
* Low mobility.
* 3 min cooldowns on both Last Stand and Shield Wall.
* No improved damage reduction debuffs.
* Missing Critical Block.
* A damn nuisance to apply sunder armour.

If you managed to read through all that then good on you.

If you have any questions or suggestions I will answer them or amend this post as necessary.

Notes for new tanks.

Spec:
Starting off your usually better off taking the Deep Wounds build but removing the 3/3 deep wounds and taking 5/5 Cruelty. This will provide better threat generation at low levels of gearing.

Rotation:
If your having threat problems due getting confused over your rotation. the simple solution is just to cut out most of your abilities. Here is the simple yet effective rotation i use when I'm feeling lazy (which is most of the time).

To start with
Shield Slam > Revenge > Devastate

Then you use Shield Slam every time it's cooldown is up or Sword and Board procs, use revenge every time it's cooldown is up and fill in any spare global cooldowns with Devastate as this will proc Sword and Board. Finally use heroic strike every time your above 30 rage, this will be almost constantly at early gear levels.

There you have it, single target tanking with good threat and you only have to use four buttons :)

One final note, never ever use Taunt as part of your rotation. It does absolutely nothing for your threat when the mob is targeting you and wastes a global cooldown. Also Taunt suffers from diminishing returns so when a mob gets taunted 3 times in short order it becomes immune to it for 15 seconds, this can lead to trouble when somebody does pull aggro.

Well that about covers it, I officially and proudly name this my laziest post ever.

So until next time this is the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

It's One Crazy Fight.

2009-06-24T12:46:00.003+01:00

Last night we had our first attempts at 25 man Yogg-Saron and we finally got to meet the screaming lady Sara who kept annoying us all through our progression through the watchers.

See those clouds in the pic? Well they are the bane of our raid leaders sanity in phase one. Every time someone stands in one and spawns a new add he loses a little in RL. Phase one for me consists of Hitting add interrupting add, stop hitting add so it can be kited to the centre and blown up near sara, hitting and interrupting new add, praying that the add finishing team don't suddenly spawn a bunch of new adds due to a sudden case of cloud blindness ... again.

Ok so the guys in the middle don't have it easy, having done a few try's on 10 man where we were all in the middle and the melee had to run out when an add was going to be killed I can tell you that those clouds are a right royal pain in the you know what. Not only do they move around randomly, new ones spawn and their range for spawning new adds is greater than their graphics indicate. *mutter mutter* stupid floating mash gas *mutter mutter*

Then comes Phase two. This is where I start losing my RL sanity. This consists for me of a mad panic of Interrupting corrupter tentacles making a mad dash to get to my portal around the brain of yogg-saron (10 of these spawn and only one person per portal can enter), madly trying to kill the adds in the brain room while not facing those floating skull thingies, dashing over to the brain after the adds are down, dpsing as hard as possible on the brain in the brief time we have, jumping out of the brain room before we all go insane and wipe the raid, interrupting corrupter tentacles, freeing people from constrictor tentacles, restacking my sanity (ingame my RL sanity is long gone at this stage the poor raid leader is probably sitting in a corner at home muttering to himself about "the damn clouds" and screaming occasionally, god knows whose playing his character for him), getting back into position to take my portal again, rinse and repeat and try to stop the nervous tic that I'm developing.

We haven't even seen phase three yet and god knows if any of us will be mentally stable enough to deal with it when we do.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent (and mentally unstable) Warrior signing off.

Why You Should Dual Spec Titans Grip.

2009-06-23T11:09:00.004+01:00

To get back into the swing of things I'm going to start with a self serving post justifying why I have two dps specs and not dps/prot.

Arms > Fury.

Lets start with the basics. If your raiding with max dps at the moment your raiding as arms, this may well change when you have most of your best in slot Ulduar gear, but until then, no questions asked, dps wise Arms > Fury ... deal with it.
(If this is not true your not doing it right, more on that in a later post)

Is Fury Still a Viable Raiding Spec?

Hell yes. Lets look at a few of the reasons why.

DPS: Yes Arms provides higher dps that fury but even as fury you can provide decent dps and the gap between the two specs closes the better your gear gets.

Buffs: A lot of the time as a dps warrior your main job is to provide good dps while filling in the buffs missed by other classes. Pretty much all our buffs can be supplied by other classes and our job is to, as it were, fill in the blanks. So lets take a look at the three main buffs you provide as a dps warrior (there are more but these will be covered in a later post). These are Blood Frenzy (Arms), Trauma (Arms) and Rampage (fury). Deciding which spec to use depending on buffs you have too look at your other raid members. A Feral Druid will provide a better version of Rampage and an inferior version of Trauma (although they will love you if you can provide it since they don't have to mangle). A combat rouge will provide the same buff as Blood Frenzy.

What does this mean for you? This means that if you have a Feral Druid but no Comabat Rouge you should go arms. If you have A Combat Rouge but no Feral Druid you should go Fury. If you have both or none do what ever the hell makes you feel happy :)

Fight Mechanics: Take a look at the nature of the encounter you are going into. Any high motion fight or a fight with haste buffs will better suit the Fury play style. Where as low motion fights or fights that require high burst damage will better suit Arms.

Interrupts: This is a pet hate of mine so be warned I'm going to be having a little emo rage while writing this section and it may come through in the post.

Firstly if your assigned interrupt duty that means the spell has to be interrupted now, if not it's normally a case of "Congratulations you just wiped the raid". This means that if the spell isn't on a timer that you can see you have to be sitting in Berserker Stance waiting to Pummel or in Battle/Defensive stance with a one hander and shield waiting to Shield Bash.

What does this mean for you as an Arms warrior? (This is where the emo rage happens) Well as an arms warrior this means you might as well just sit there auto attacking and relieving this itch on your genetailia while waiting for that all important spell to come up so you can interrupt it. This is not much of an exaggeration.

The first time I was put on full time interrupt duty I stated that I would (politely paraphrased) have to gimp my dps to do so. I was told by a hunter ... a mother loving hunter ... that we all would have to do the same. I nearly had a fit. There was no way in hell that other classes wasting one global cooldown per interrupt was the same as an Arms warrior wasting 1 glyph, 2 main rotation skill and 9 F###### talent points for the entire F###### fight (we don't waste the global cooldown since our interrupt is not linked to the GCD). If I have voice activation on vent instead of push to talk he would have heard me yelling and screaming about how he shouldn't for a god damn minute think he knows a god damn thing about my class or spec unless he god damn plays it. However he's an officer and I like my raid spot so instead of ranting at him I punched a wall then got on with interrupting auto attacking and relieving the aforementioned itch. (Emo rage ends here)

What does this mean for you as a Fury warrior? It means that you can provide decent dps and you don't even waste one global cooldown per interrupt, all you need to do is ensure that you have 10 rage at all times (easy to do with a 40 second Bloodrage and Improved Berserker Rage).

In conclusion I feel completely justified in having Fury as my dual spec under normal circumstances, if there is a chance that I will need to tank I will of course switch it for protection but the rest of the time I'm DPS/DPS.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Lets Pretend I Never Went Away.

2009-06-23T11:09:00.001+01:00

Lets just say that apathy over the puggable raiding content and constantly changing class mechanics lead me to lose interest in writing about WoW. The new raid content, and seemingly stable class mechanics have revived my interest in Blogging. So without further ado, On With the Show.

WotLK Recap : Day 6 (I think)

2008-11-19T06:17:00.000Z

Is it 6 days since WotLK came out I'm just not sure anymore.

Anyway today when I logged on I did the daily cooking quest and farmed some kooking mats just for a change of pace.

After that I got stuck into the last of the quests I needed to get the Zul'Drak achievement and dinged to 78. An epic flying mount makes so much of a difference it's not funny, I don't know how I did without one for so long.

Anyway with Zul'Drak out of the way I went into Sholazar Basin again, but this time I had a flying mount, Yeah Baby! Can't get me now you damn nasty crocolisks!

But I digress, of I went on the epic creature grind that is the Nessinwary quest line, yes that crazy dwarf hunter is back, and I don't mean Bigredkitty.

This zone was by far the easiest of the zones to quest in that I've been in so far (the epic flier has something to do with it I'm sure). I stormed through that place pwning everything in sight, as usual. Unusually this turned out to be a good thing, since just about everything I saw was part of a quest I was on making my normal progression through a zone an effective leveling strategy for once.

But whats this? He's here again!?! And he's calling me the stalker. Yes thats right I ran into the warrior Khir several times again today and he's starting to get quite paranoid about it.

Here's me stalking my pray.

After that I went and got a meal and chilled out in Dalaran for a while. Then the panic set in. It's weekly maintainance tonight and I'm only 400k away from and I have only an hour left!

I blitzed over to Storm Peaks and started popping off quests as fast as I could. Then I hit a wall I was rushing and that meant I wasn't reading the quests too well, which meant I was screaming things at the monitor like "Where the hell is that bomb dispenser so I can blow up the damn mammoth!!" and "Who thought a quest in the middle of a F###### mine field was a F####### good idea!!". That mine field quest turned out ot be great fun as you had to step on a mine to blow yourself to the quest item, this took several attempts with bandaging and eating along the way as you can imagine. You then had to step on a mine to blow yourself back out of the mine field.

Why wasn't I using my new fangled epic flier?

Because some damn wise ass decided that that would be too easy and put little turrets around the mine field that shoot you down 280% flight speed or no.

Anyway with all my getting lost and discovering places It turned out that I needed less quests to finish the level that I thought and I dinged to 79 with 9 minutes before server shut down, I even had time to go and train my new skills, and Stunty is parked and getting rested xp in Ironforge as we speak.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

WotLK Recap : Days 4 & 5

2008-11-18T16:38:00.000Z

I've added these together because I forgot to post because I became so wrapped up in the Lich King experience. The things I will share are in ne particular order as everything has run into one big blur.

One of the most memorable moments was when I get a quest at level 76 to go to Sholazar Basin, took the quest, got put on a little flying machine then got shot down in the middle of nowhere while flying over the new zone with my Hearth Stone on cooldown. I thought I'd share the G-chat that followed my question on how the hell I get out of there. Please excuse my spelling as I was tired and frustrated.

As it turns out you have to complete a quest chain in nessingway base camp that activates the flight master.

I've done various dungeons, all very late at night, but they are all fantastic, I don't know if this seems that way because they are or if because I'm just please to be doing new instances instead of running The mechanar or slave pens for the millionth time.

While questing I keep running into the warrior Khir. After about 20 encounters in one day he started refering to me as a stalker, and I started taking screenshots. Here are a few of us doing the more interesting quests in Zul'Drak.

I dinged to level 77 and got my cold weather training so I can fly again, then I borrowed 5k gold off friends and bought my epic flying mount and training. Thats right I didn't have one and now I wonder how I ever did without it. The only down side is that I now owe 5000 gold :(

Respecced into Titans grip for leveling ... just because it looks cool. There's something about wielding not one but two bis ass weapons that just appeals to me. I know at the moment I could do higher dps as deep arms both using a 2- hander and dual wielding ... but hey I'm leveling what does it matter.

I have started replacing my gear finally, so far I'm waring about 5 blue quest reward and dungeon drop Items.

Well that about wraps it up for days 4 & 5.

So until next time this is stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

WotLK Recap : Day 3

2008-11-16T07:54:00.000Z

Day 3.

Ok so I overslept again, instead of the 5 hour extended nap I had planned to take I had a nice 9 hour slumber. Not going to sleep today so that I stop going to bed in the morning, otherwise I start getting drowsy in natural light and god only knows what kaind of weird situations that could lead to.

Anyway after grabbing a coffee I got stuck into the last part of level 74, dinged grabbed more coffee, quested, more coffee, quested, changed things up with a cup of tea, quested, more coffee, rinse and repeat.

Did The most epic quest ever devised by blizzard. If your on the alliance side you absolutely have to do the "Battle for Undercity" quest it's made of pure win.

Visited Dalaran and boy did they ever go to town on that town. Get there ASAP and take in the sights people.

Learned how to make an engineering parachute lining for cloaks, which I'm going to make the moment I log in again after suffering one too many death's by cliff. Pretty soon I'm going to be able to make the turbo boosters for me boots as well, giving me a "Get me the hell out of here" button.

Did Uthguard Keep today or however the heck you spell it and I'm loving going into dungeons not knowing whats going in. It's all new and it's all interesting, and best of all it all looks fantastic.

Finished all but 2 group quests in the Dragonblight and moved on to Zul'drak. People kept asking me why I didn't head to the Grizzly Hills and the reason is that I don't decide where I'm going next I just follow the quests and I had a quest in Zul'Drak and not in Grizzly Hills.

Ran randomly around Zul'Drak doing random quests and killing interesting (but unnecessary) mobs until I hit level 75. Realized that I couldn't understand the quests I had even with the help of 3 addons and decided to take a break and do anything at all but play wow for a few hours.

That about covers it for day 3.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

WotLK Recap : Day 2

2008-11-15T04:47:00.001Z

Day 2

Having never made it back on after the server restart I got a bit of sleep, I over slept, then a friend called round, but after that I went back to the confusion that is me leveling in a new zone.

Having finished ALL the quests in Borean Tundra I moved on to The Dragonblight where if anything my leveling confusion became even greater, so I downloaded yet another quest addon making 3 of them in total and between the three I can now just about make sense of the quests.

Learned an important lesson about group quests, when it says "suggested players 2" thats only a suggestion, but when it says "suggested players 5" you'd damn well better bring some back up. Oh well at least I got to lie face down in a new spot.

I learned another important lesson about reading the quest when after 2 attempts I realized that I wasn't supposed to solo the level 74 elite and all the non elites, apparently what I was supposed to do was to get the NPC's involved then hit bladestorm.

Bladestorm Does not save you when you pull 10 level 73-74's at once ... I was a bit disappointed when I found this out :(

Got to level 73.6 before server restart then wrote this post. And that just about wraps it up for day 2.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

WotLK Recap : Day 1

2008-11-14T06:47:00.000Z

I haven't posted lately due to a severe case of the Xpac blues. We trounced bosses in BT but there was no real pleasure in it. I got my Hand of the A'dal Title but I was ashamed to ware it. But all that is over now and I shall be giving you day by day updates on my experience in the new expansion.

Day 1.

Day 1 started with me standing outside my local gaming store waiting for the doors to open at midnight (along with the two other wow players I live with and about 60 other people). We get back to the house in record time and have a race to install the game. I lose due to having to restart my PC after every patch or it has a fit at me.

Anyway I log on and Stuntyone is ready and waiting at the boat to take him to Northrend, with 3 and 1/2 empty bags and empty quest log and an almost empty bank. I take the boat over with a couple of people I know and we are screaming at each other, "Where's this trainer?", "where's the flight master?", "Where do I pick up that quest?" and "Where the hell am I?", that last one from me. We train up in our professions and start to make a mess of northrend's leveling areas.

I soon split off from the others as my normal style of leveling is to grab every quest I can find and head off in a random direction killing things along the way until one of my quest counters starts ticking, and occasionally actually reading a quest when this becomes boring.

Several hours later (I really don't know how many but it was light outside) I was within spitting distance of level 71 but I was so tired that no matter how many times I read the quests I still couldn't figure out what the hell they were about, I kept getting lost and I seemed to have an aggro radius 10 miles wide. So I decided to call it a night, or a morning, or whatever.

Several hours later (again I'm not sure how many) I'm back online and making short work of my paltry rested XP. I ding to level 71 in short order now that I know what those guys with the ! over their heads actually wanted me to do. Questing continues until half way to level 72 I get an invite to run the Nexus instance with a few buddies ... we spend 2 hours getting lost in that place but managed to one shot every boss but the last since we didn't know you had to move or jump to remove the stacking chill debuff. From the quest I had to read a book in that place (read or pick up I can't remember the haze of leveling has clouded my mind) I got a reward of some tanking shoulders that are better than T4. This leaves me wondering how much longer my T6 level gear will actually last.

That over and it's back to my unique style of questing which gets me to level 72 shortly before the server goes through it's restart. Which continued for so long it gave me the opportunity to write this post. It's 715 in the morning and the realm is still not up so thats about all I have for you at the moment.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Patch Day Blues and New Spec Loving

2008-10-16T18:40:00.000+01:00

I was going to write this post yesterday but yesterday was patch day, and as some of you may know I'm addicted to addons.

Patch day + 155 addons = headache of massive proportions.

So no post got done.

Anyway after busting my B###s getting my UI sorted, yes I know you can play perfectly well with 0 addons, but I look at it this way, you can live on bread and water, but I'd rather have a steak with all the trimmings.

Anyway after getting my steak back in working order I went looking at specs for the new talents we had just got. My first build was so so and lag of 1200 didn't really help my get a feel for the build. But after a bit of experimentation on the target dummies, damn but I love those things, they just stand there and take abuse while I sit at my PC, screaming "STUNY SMASH!!1!" at the monitor.

Whoops back on track again, after beating on the practice dummies for a while this was the build I settled on. I'm still not convinced about using Rend even in combination with Trauma but further experimentation may prove me wrong, but It's definitely not worth it in heroics as the fights are over so fast it's not funny. Also Sudden Death didn't turn out to be the massive rage dump I thought it would be as Endless Rage leaves you with more rage than god. As it turns out I love Bladestorm. It is simply sexy and I want to have it's babies ... did I just type that last bit out loud?

Today I got my butt into a few heroics and was shocked at the result. Here see for yourself.

This is the report for the entire run in heroic Hellfire Ramparts. The poor rouge missed out since he's all single target dps and I was hitting EVERYTHING and loving it.

On single target fights I was still pulling over 1000 dps, but I guess the true test of the build will come when I get to run it in a raid environment.

Oh and before I forget, monday we went into Black Temple for our last pre patch run and downed Naj'entus, Supremus and Akama. For my first Shade of akama fight we had the strange situation where both akamas died so I didn't get to see the bit where all the broken come out and chat with Akama ... and I didn't get any loot /sulk.

On the Plus side i did find a new patch of floor to inspect.

Oh and after a visit to the barber shop stunty's got a brand new look.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Stunty's Back!

2008-10-13T04:05:00.000+01:00

I have returned!

My enforced wow and Internet hiatus has ended. My apologies at my long absence but RL kicked in with a vengeance and didn't really give me much choice in the matter, don't ask. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies, or at least, Ask me no questions and I wont ignore you and send you dirty looks for asking me questions.

Anyway back to wow. It turns out that my guild can kill new bosses without me. This came as a bit of a shock considering that since the day I got my "Raider" rank in the guild I have been at every guild first kill. Hydross, Karatherass, Vashj, Rage, Anetheron, Kaz'rogal, Azgalor, Naj'entus, Supremus, I was there for them all the first time we killed them. The few times I could not raid on a progression night either due to being left out due to player rotation or just not being able to make it, things tended to go poorly for the raid, sometimes just not making the final few percent, sometimes bringing a "Bucket'o'Fail" with them (something that has been known to happen even when I'm there) or in one famous case, an unscheduled server shut down. Even though they were suffering from the lack of stunty they managed to down the Shade of Akama in BT. Now that I have returned just think of what we can accomplish.

At the moment my internet connection is just not stable enough to raid, or even do heroics properly due to having to use this piece of #### USB wireless adapter, I wont mention brand names that not how I roll. But tonight this should be by passed through the use of one long ass Ethernet cable and I will be back in tip top shape.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

apologies

2008-09-19T22:28:00.000+01:00

My ISP hates me.

Back as soon as I can

You Know That Feeling.

2008-09-06T12:36:00.000+01:00

In my last post I talked to you about how the next day we were going to go back into Mount Hjyal and finish off the fourth boss then move on to Black Temple.

Well that was the plan, but unfortunately we were reminded forcefully that "Boss Downed" does not mean "Boss on Farm". We spent a couple of hours wiping before finally downing Azgalor and getting more T6 gloves into the guild. One person summed up our feeling nicely in his congratulations to the recipients of the gloves, and I quote, "Congratulations, you lucky sons of bitches."

With not enough raid time left to have a proper go in Black Temple we went and wiped a few times on Archimond, and wow what a fight this is going to be. We are all going to have to be in top shape to get this guy down since seemingly one death starts a chain reaction wiping the raid. Also a note to melee dps in this fight, DO ... NOT ... STAND ... NEAR ... THE ... TANK. We had one wipe caused by melee getting air bursted while too close to the tank, welcome to Finger Of Death city, population us.

Anyway the next day we move on to BT to kill Mr. shrimp guy and have a go at Supremus. Again that was the plan, and again it didn't quite turn out that way. We spent the entire raid night wiping on this guy until we had respawns on the trash and called it a night.

We also had the undeniable return of the Incompetent Warrior as I was the direct cause of one of our wipes, no buts no maybes, I wiped the raid in true Incompetent Warrior fashion.

Now I had done my homework and was prepared for the fight that night, I had the macro, I had reread the strat guides and re-watched the how to vids and I had been there on our guilds first down night.

So no room for error there right? Wrong!

You see no amount of preparation can ever eliminate the chance of me screwing up. This time it was a simple case of macro placement. How can where you put your macro wipe a raid? Well thats an easy question to answer, you wipe a raid by putting the macro to burst the bubble on the key bound slot and put your frost protection potion on the unbound slot you thought you put the macro in. This means that when you go to take your potion while the raid is healing up you actually burst the bubble killing two thirds of the raid in one horrific moment of incompetence.

This brings me nicely round to the title, when you screw up so monumentally you get this unmistakable sinking feeling. You'll know the one I'm talking about if you've ever body pulled High King Mulgar before the raid is ready, fallen off the platform while tanking Al'ar (or jumped off the platform too late), accidentally targeted and healed someone other than the tank at a crucial moment, or burst the bubble to early on High Warlord Naj'entus.

Can anyone guess which one of the listed things was the one I haven't done? Here's a clue ... I can't heal. As for the rest, been there, done that, bought the " I wiped the raid" T-shirt, and every time the feeling is the same. If you haven't felt that feeling yet then your not reading the right blog. I like to list my more horrendous mistakes here so that you don't have to make the same mistake. Oh no I want you to go out there and make new and interesting mistakes.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Bringing The Pain

2008-09-02T16:30:00.000+01:00

Last night we went back into Mount Hyjal, and again I went in as dps. We had already killed Rage Winterchill the week before so we moved right on to Anetheron, the site of my previous dps record where I finally broke 1000 dps on a single target boss fight.

Yet again we had a good melee group with an Enhancement Shaman 2 rogues an arms warrior (me) and a Ret Pally (Yes a Ret Pally, we really brought a retlol to MH). During the trash I had a whale of a time beating down the Shadowy Necromancer then hitting everything in sight. In my exuberance I occasionally ended up over aggroing on some of the trash, but since I was finally in full plate again for the first time in I don't know how long (no more Mail or Leather for me) I had decent armor and over 12k buffed health (14k with a shout) so even if I over aggroed on an Abomination I could survive with a bit of healing. This also meant that I could pull mobs off the ranged and healers without dieing, something I never dared to do before.

Anyway my fun with the trash over out comes Anetheron. Now as melee my job here is very simple I find a spot where I wont catch too many swarms and Dee Pee Ess. As melee you cant dps the infernals cuz you'll die so the only thing to do is lay the smack down on the boss. And the fight was going great ... until the infernal tank dies that is, then all hell broke loose and a wipe happened.

So I get to have fun with the trash all over again and it's boss time ... again. This time everything goes great and we down him with little problem and what little problem we did have didn't involve me since my job is so damn easy. After cooling down and distributing the loot P mentioned to me that he had read on my blog that I was over joyed at breaking 1000 dps on this boss last time, I told him that this was correct.

P: "So you would be happy to learn that you did over 1300 dps this time?"

Me: "Your kidding right?"

P: "Nope you did over 1300 dps."

Me: "Wow"

Me: "I think I'm having a little moment." My voice quite choked with emotion.

El: "I think he's actually crying."

Now while I wasn't crying I was rendered speechless as I'd set myself a goal of breaking 1100 dps and this was just so far over the mark. I can finally say that when I go as dps to a raid I'm Bringing the Pain, Muhahahahahahaha!!!

This time when we talked to Lady Jaina we all knew where to run instead of standing around like idiots and then running in random directions, and one of our lucky miners managed to get 6 epic and 2 blue gems (lucky bugger).

This time in the horde encampment we wiped on the trash a couple of times both Big Wigs and DBM both wigged out on us and stopped announcing the composition of the trash waves which caught us by surprise and since we hadn't bothered to learn the composition of each wave by heart caused a wipe. 2 more wipes happened on wave 5 due to shackles breaking early and mobs getting caught in consecration which then caused the pally tank to go down under the weight of Abominations. But we persevered and adapted and got to Kaz'rogal.

Kaz'rogal was going great until both the pally tank and the ret pally exploded simultaneously destroying half the melee group and killing the main tank.

Fortunately one of the off tanks, El managed to pick him up and we got him down to below 20% where we had to yet again rely on Thrall to finish the job for us again while one of our druids hid in kitty form, I'm telling you that guy is hard as nails.

I also think that this fight is designed to make every pally in the raid into a living bomb ... maybe we should give them their own little corner to go explode in, because it will happen.

Anyway tonight we go back to MH to get more T6 gloves from Azgalor then we move on to BT to kill the big shrimp and have a go at Supremus .

Oh and when I learned that the raid leaders had forgotten to record the combat log for last nights raid I had another little moment :(

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Responsible Raiding

2008-08-24T20:24:00.000+01:00

/RANT

I've talked to you before about how tanking is all about controlling each pull, well this goes double for those leading a group or raid. I doesn't however stop at knowing exactly what should happen and what you should do. Oh no if your leading the group whatever the size it's important that you make sure the everyone knows what should be going on.

I was prompted to write this post after being in a couple of 10 man raids where those who were supposedly in charge of the raid did not do this. It is essential that everyone know their role.

Did I stress that enough? Lets try again with bold writing this time.

You have to make sure that everyone knows what the hell is going on and what they are supposed to do! If your not prepared to do this then for the love of god don't wonder around with the little raid leader crown like your doing something.

Yes I know I may be stressing the point a little too much but it's something that I feel strongly about, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't organize a raid if your not going to lead it. Organize it then pass leadership onto someone else and make sure they know they are supposed to be leading. This happens in 5 man group all the time. I lost count of the times I've been invited as the last spot in a party to tank it then had leader passed to me. This also goes the other way, I have on many occasions tanked an instance while not being the leader because I was not 100% comfortable with the instance or I thought that someone else would do a better job. I mean there's not point in me wondering around marking things and asking the party to do stuff if I don't know what the hell I'm doing or if there is someone else in the group who could do it better.

Even when leading a group I will always ask if everyone is familiar with each boss and some of the more difficult pulls. If there are multiple ways to do a pull or a boss I will ask the group which way the want to do it and then give a very brief recap so that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing. I mean OMG I just wasted 30-40 seconds going over a boss fight, however will we make up the lost time ... oh thats right we make it up by not wiping and having to run back and rebuff (damn I think my brain just had a sarcastic fit there).

It's not a lot I expect from whoever is leading the group. It's simple little things, going over the raid markings and kill order, healing assignments if necessary, special CC duties. Also if you ask someone to do something get an acknowledgment from them. Don't just say it and expect them to do it without confirming it. Did they fully understand what you want them to do?, were they afk for a short bit?, did their doorbell just ring?, did they simply miss the chat or didn't hear you? Waiting for a simple "Ok", "np" or "sure" eliminates all the factors.

So in conclusion to my rant I would like to say that if you don't do the above mentioned things don't go around pretending to lead the group, cuz your just not doing it.

/RANT OFF

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior Ranting off.

I Lead a Raid o.O

2008-08-23T04:29:00.000+01:00

First off, it's not relevent to the title but has to be mentioned ... SoL got our first kill in Black Temple, Yeah Baby! and for the first time ever I broke 1000 dps on a single target boss fight, YEAH BABY!!!

And just look at all those funky costumes, the guild is really coming along in this regards.

Anyway on to the title topic.

This Thursday a cooperative Magtheridon run was organized between SoL and my old guild, who were having problems getting enough people together for a 25 man raid. The project was proposed and organized by Lady B, who while gathering the people together dropped this bombshell on me. Her reasoning was since she had organized the raid she sure as hell wasn't going to lead it and decided to stick me with the job :(

Having gotten the raid of the ground Lady B decided her work was done and took a back seat for the rest of the night. She promptly handed over the job of organizing the groups to Kitty the new GM of my old guild who did a decent job of it, I didn't do this as I was still finishing a speed heroic Underbog run.

My speed run finished I get a summon and start organizing healing and tanking assignments. I've had the benefit of watching and learning from some very competent raid leader over the past while so I just did my best to emulate them.

The trash on the led up to maggy when smoothly, right up until the point when while dealing with the patrol we somehow managed to pull another group of adds. Being the 4th tank and generally unnecessary I was in a good position and managed to puck them up with a quick thunderclap, the dps stuck to the kill order and the tanks came and picked mobs off me. Due to everyone keeping their heads we managed to avoid a wipe.

Next came big n' ugly himself. Most of us knew that this would be no walk over since the majority of the raid had never been here before, and we only had two warlocks. I started giving a brief explanation of the fight and picking the people to be cube clickers. I picked people be their reliability rather than any other reason. I also didn't pick tanks to be clickers because I wasn't sure what our dps was like and could not guarantee that all the adds would be down before the first blast waves were cast.

The first couple of attempts went as I expected with the raid dieing to blast waves and everyone learned their role in the encounter. What surprised me was how well we did on the channelers,the warlocks did the best that could be expected of them on the infernals as there were only two and the tanks picked up the slack often tanking their channeler and up to two infernals for a short time before the warlocks could get to them.

Then everything clicked, with the clickers anyway. i guess all my shouting of "Clickers to your positions" and "CLICK, CLICK, CLICK" payed off and on our 3rd attempt we got him down to 27%. Only 27% because people had to learn about the falling debris and getting rockshotted.

Then the most entertaining event of the night happened. Our fury warrior had to go to work so we picked up a friend of lady B's a hunter to fill his spot for our last attempt. he was in the neighborhood so he got an invite and made his way down ... and wiped the raid.

Thats right he gets pugged into a 25 man raid is there for all of 3 seconds and wipes it.

How you ask?

He had been doing some PvP and had forgotten to take his pet off aggressive. So upon entering maggy's chamber his pet promptly lays into the first channeler it sees starting the encounter with the raid half buffed and nobody ready or in position. The entire raid started roaring their heads off with laughter. made all the more funny because scant minutes before we had been jokingly bad mouthing the "huntards" and explaining why all blame, no matter the situation should be appropriated to them. Truly it was a classic moment that I will remember for a long time to come.

Anyway we recover from our wipe and set into our final, final attempt. we only get maggy to about 50% this time due to one of the clickers dieing at an untimely moment. In the end almost everyone had a great time, and I want to give my heart felt thanks to those who did not need maggy for their title or gear but still came along anyway.

... oh and next time get some other poor sucker to be the RL.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I's Been Doin Some PvP

2008-08-18T06:04:00.000+01:00

First off I should talk about why I've been doing a lot of PvP lately. It's because I wanted a sword. In this case the Merciless Gladiators Greatsword to replace my axe.

For a long time I've been told that the best weapon for arms dps is a two hander sword, but I'm one of those strange people that just cant take something at face value. Oh no, I'm one of those annoying people that wants to know why something is better before I change. Also is a seeming downgrade in weapon really going to increase my dps?

So I sat down and did a little comparison of the bonus for using axes and the bonus for using swords.

Axes: 5/5 In Poleaxe Specialization gives you a bonus 5% critical strike chance. With 2/2 Impale this is the same as saying it gives you a 5% chance to do an additional 120% damage and with my meta gem this is increased to 123%. Pretty cool eh?

But lets take a look at swords.

Swords: 5/5 in Sword Specialization gives you a 5% chance to make an extra attack. This is the same as saying it has a 5% chance to do 100% extra damage.

But thats not all, these bonus attacks also has a 30% chance (my unbuffed crit) of doing an extra 123% damage. You do the math and you'll find that this already puts swords ahead of axes.

But yet again thats not all, this added bonus actually scales with raid buffs. In a raid my crit is ~5% higher meaning these bonus attacks have an increased chance of doing 223% damage instead of 100% damage. Pretty spiffy right?

But whats this? Theres more?

Darn tootin' theres more. This ability procs off any attack you make, this includes Pummel and Hamstring. These low damage attack also benefit from axes ... but seeing Pummel crit just makes me sad (Oh yay I just hit an 80 damage crit /cry), but with swords you just made at the very least another 100% weapon damage.

This is really cool because there are times you will be asked to interrupt spells and if you play a raiding arms warrior you will know that there is that spare rotation where both Mortal Strike and Whirlwind are on cooldown. Normally you would use this to refresh your Battle, Commanding or Demoralizing Shout. But what if these still have plenty of time on them? Throw in a hamstring for good measure, it costs bugger all rage and your doing nothing better with that time so why not chance an extra attack.

I don't know if it procs off intercept, but it would be really really cool if it did :)

There is just one problem with using swords that I'm having big problems getting used to.

Image.

Before I was all like "STUNTY SMASH!!1!1!eleven".

Now I'm all like "STUNTY ..... slice ??? o.O".

I'm telling you it's just not the same and I don't know if I'll ever recover.

Anyway back to PvP.

It all started a while back when a warrior on my server Khir found out about my blog and has been pestering me into being a better warrior ever since. In fact just today he found the one + attack power gem on my gear that I had somehow forgotten to replace with + strength.

Anyway a while back he found out that I suck at PvP, and very kindly took me into a few battle grounds to show me the right way to do it and later on he led a few premades for my guild (who for the most part only PvP when necessary). Ever since then every time I go into a battle ground I'm starting to enjoy it more and more (mage's still scare the pant off me though). Infact I started enjoying it so much that when I had my think about swords and decided I really wanted one I went out and ground twice as much honor as I ever have in one day.

I'm telling you my brain nearly exploded. And do people you ignore on other servers stay in your ignore list? If so mine must be damn near full ... again.

The thing is I'm starting to enjoy PvP so much I might even start taking arena seriously.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Lots of Stuff.

2008-08-13T04:55:00.000+01:00

First I want to start with an apology for my lack of posting. It just seems that every time I sit down to write a new post it all comes out as gibberish .... I mean more so than usual. The past week has contained a few firsts for me.

The first first, if that makes any sense at all, was a full clear of Zul'Aman. Before this I had only ever killed 3 bosses in ZA and wiped on the fourth. This meant that for most of the raid I was winging it. I barely know the trash up to the fourth boss and nothing about anything after that, and to make matters worse every time we got to a boss, it was always "Ok Stunty is going to tank the boss" and every time I heard that phrase I got this "what the hell is going on" feeling.

In the end we got a full clear with only two wipes, one being on the third boss, meaning we only got two of the timed chests, and once on the last boss. Here is a quick pis of the group standing victorious over the corpse of Zul'Jin.

The second first was SoL going 3/5 in Mount Hyjal. On the trash waves before Kaz'rogal I was running around like mad picking up loose mobs and chasing down Gargoyles and generally having a great time. Then came the big guy himself. For this I just switched into my dps gear and had at him. Near the end of the fight everything started going to pot, caster were blowing up while standing too close to other caster and blowing them up too, the main tank went down, and it looked like a wipe as he went around one shotting almost everyone.

But whats this? Thrall is still in the fight and at almost 100% health, a couple of our druids have gone into cat mode and are hiding at the back somewhere, and Kaz'rogal is at 8%....

Go Thrall GO!!

Thrall and his NPC buddies manage to kill the big bugger for us. At one point it looked bad but Kaz managed to kite himself over to some of the Tauren NPC's and our victory was assured.

So then it was decided to make Thrall an honorary member of SoL, and we threw a bit of a party for him.

The third first was the very next day (yesterday) when SoL went 4/5 in Mount Hyjal. I think the trash waves for this fight have rekindled my flagging love of tanking. It's pure unadulterated seat of your pant tanking. Running after infernals and gargoyles and tanking 2,3,4 mobs at a time, you just grab anything nearby and get it to hit you instead of anything else. Fun fun fun.

As for Azgalor himself, this is one of the only bosses I've found where it's actually fun to be an off tank. He casts that doom spell on people and they come running over to you and die leaving a Doom Guard in their place that you have to tank we ended the fight with each of the three off tanks tanking two doom guards each. What makes it interesting is the fact that the off tanks can get the mark of doom themselves. This meant that at one point I was tanking my Doom Guard, the two doom guards K was tanking and a fourth that spawned when K died, not that easy picking them all up :)

Fortunately K got a Battle Rez and took a couple off me. In the end everything went well and another demon bit the dust, and the first 3 T6 glove entered the guild. One was taken by the happy Boomkin you see below.

In conclusion I will try to post more often over the next week, if for no other reason that to avoid writing such a long post.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

SoL 2/5 In Mount Hyjal.

2008-08-07T19:20:00.000+01:00

So this wednesday we stepped into our rotation on T6 content. From now on It will be one week Tier 5 and one week Tier 6, and for the first time ever I stepped into Mount Hyjal as melee dps ... and I loved it.

Mount Hyjal is like a dps warrior dream some true. The trash is mainly pally tanked and the bosses rarely do anything to make you stop hitting them. On the trash I achieved over 1000 dps, a personal record for me on Rage Winterchill I only achieved 850 dps due to him constantly casting Death and Decay right under himself and getting frostbolted for a second time 12 seconds ... 12 seconds, before my trinket cooldown was up and dieing. I'm telling you this guy hates me. On Anet heron I pulled off 960 dps, another personal record for me on single target dps. Now if only I could get a damn Enhancement Shaman and a decent Sword.

Anyway it took us two attempts but the second boss in MH finally bit the dust.

As you can see the Boomkin was late to the party.

After we celebrated for a while someone went and talked to lady Jaina, and she gave some speech about having bought time and pulling back. she then started casting a mass teleport spell, and this being our first time getting this far we all thought "oh cool I wonder where she's taking us" so we all gathered up near her.

As it turns out she just teleported the npc's and left us standing there like fools. Then the trash came.

With cries of "Flee", "Run for it!!", and "F### this I'm porting to shatt" we scattered, eventually the undead cornered me high up in the hills and rather than let them have the satisfaction of killing me I jumped to my death with a cry of "You''ll never take me aliiiiiiiiveeeeeeee!!!". If anyone out there can tell me the correct way to deal with this part of the fight I would be most appreciative. Although the comedy factor of our first time doing it was something I will remember for a long time.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Our first taste of Kael.

2008-07-30T02:01:00.000+01:00

Tonight we went and had our first attemp at Kael'thas in the Eye. This is a fight I had been waiting and waiting for. When I first hit level 70 and spent a bit of time learning about the raids that could be done and the bosses that we could face, this was the guy I set my eye's on. I never dreamed of getting any further than him ... In fact I never even expected to see him before the expansion.

You can have your Illidan and your Sunwell. This is the guy I dreamed of facing and I fear that it may be my last real goal before the expansion. Thats not to say that the guild won't progress further, and thats not to say that I won't enjoy raiding anymore, but it may be the last fight I get truly and utterly excited about.

Here he is

I learned that the latest patch had nerfed the health of the advisor's and I feared that this would make the fight far too easy and spoil my epic fight. These fears was soon proved to be groundless as time and again we wiped going into phase 3. Those damn weapons of his just won't die fast enough. With each and every wipe we got better and better, but then we had respawns on the trash and we called it for the night.

I went away from the raid feeling great, not because we had an easy night, but because we had a hard night of learning a new and difficult boss. It was great and I can't wait for more.

Oh, and as for my incompetent warrior moment. When tanking Lord Sanguinar in phase 3, do not what ever you do, mix up your stance dance (for Berserker Rage) and Shield block key bindings. This can result in you taking two 6k crushing blows and ending up face down on the ground. It happened to me so I know :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Who re you People?

2008-07-29T14:39:00.001+01:00

First off,

10,000 hits ?!?!? Who are you people and why do you read this drivel.

Secondly,

Sorry for my late silence on the blog but I have spent my time finally getting my little gnome warlock to level 70 and sorting out some RL problems.

Thirdly,

A little pic from after last nights raid where 5 of us went and farmed the hat. When Em heard about it he nearly had a fit as he collects in game pets.

We Wiped On Gruul

2008-07-22T11:44:00.000+01:00

Last night we had an epic raid, with everyone bringing their A-game. It started off with us aiming to kill Karathress and Morogrim in SSC, and we did in 1 hour and 20 minutes. And I didn't die.

What should we do now?

Ok lets go kill Rage Winterchill in Mount Hyjal. Apparently he had been buffed, but it didn't really seem that way as we tore through the trash and then him. Although I must say I was a bit peeved at him. A while ago I finally got my Medallion of the Alliance to replace my Insignia of the Alliance just for this fight, and what does he do? For the first time ever he shoots me more than once with his frostbolt thingy ... Three times all in the space of my trinkets new and improves 2 min cooldown ... the bastard *shakes fist*. Fortunately I was still in my prot gear so I had a huge stack of health to soak up the damage and I didn't die.

Ok we just one shot him, now what do we do?

Lets go test out the trash in Black Temple. This was where the real fun of the night began, thats not to say that we weren't having fun before. In fact we had a new guild member along with us and he commented that he had never heard so many people laughing in any raid he's ever been on.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time running around like headless chickens with shouts of "What the hell does this mob do?", "Which way are we going again?" and "I'm dead!". I was starting to get a little worried though since we were nearly at High Warlord Whatshisface and I had yet to die that night, it would be breaking a long standing tradition if we were to have a 25 man raid and I was to survive the entire night.

Then it happened, just two pulls away from the boss ... a wipe!! And Stunty goes down!!!

But it did not end there, we killed the group that did this, and on the very next pull I was to die again ... this was embarrassing since I was a tank and I was the only one to die on that pull :(

Then we got our first real look at High warlord Whatshisface.

And this is us after engaging him.

I'm somewhere in the pile in the center of the pic. I think we did alright considering 90% of us knew nothing about the fight and when we popped the first bubble half of the raid exploded. That little episode brings me nicely on to the next part of my post.

Before we start getting overconfident I would like to take us back a day to sunday where, like the title say, we wiped on gruul. And here's the screenie to prove it :)

Ok so we had a lot of people new to the fight along with us and this was the result of Half the raid exploding on the first shatter, I was quite in awe of the damage that could be wreaked on a raid .... by itself /Epic Fail

We downed him on the second try and I was pleased to see that nobody died in the first few shatters, although i almost killed our MT when I Intercepted at Gruul to get away from a bunch of people only to realize that the MT had feral charged at him also, resulting in us slooooowly trying to run away from each other, and fortunately we made it far enough away for a wipe not to happen,

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Oh and in a show of solidarity (even though I'm not a druid) against BRKWWA .... *Clears throat* "FOSHIZZEL"

A Long Rambling Post On Arms

2008-07-19T00:39:00.000+01:00

First off I did my first ever Karazhan one shot today, and killed Netherspite for the very first time ever. Thats right I've killed Maggy, Gruul, 6/6 in SSC, 3/4 in TK, and one boss in MH... but never killed Netherspite until today. What was amazing in my mind was that we did the entire run with the exception of Netherspite with only one tank.

And while I only managed to achieve second place on the Damage Done, just take a look at the list I did top .... can you tell what it is?

Thats right I topped the death list. It's a running joke in raids that I die the most, and while this is not always true it's close enough as makes no difference. It was during this run that I stopped to ask myself why this is. Well some of it is just plain bad luck and there's nothing I can do about that, but as for the rest ...

The fist answer that came to mind was in fact another question. What does an arms warrior bring to the raid?

So I started to list things off in my mind. The most obvious is that they bring the Blood Frenzy buff increasing physical damage for the entire raid by 4%. The other obvious one was good melee dps. Yet another was the shout buffs. But none of these helped me reach a conclusive answer. So what else does an Arms Warrior bring to the raid?

The answer lies in the question. He's a warrior, and warriors have plate, which is admittedly a very minor advantage in end game, but they also have a large stack of health to go with it, and this is not a minor advantage, it's a bloody great big advantage if you know how to use it.

Yes yes, I know that a dps warrior will almost exclusively be in Berserker Stance and will consequently be taking 10% extra damage, but stop to think for a second, look at the mage, the priest, the shaman and the rogue. They, at the same gearing level as my dps gear, will be running around with ~7k health unbuffed, where as I am running around with 9.5-10k unbuffed. thats a damn slight more than a 10% increase. Don't get me wrong I can and have been one shotted by raid bosses and understand that if anything seriously sets it's eyes on me instead of a tank I'm a goner, but that doesn't mean there is no damage to be taken elsewhere.

Ok, so you have more health than the average dps, how does this explain you dieing so often?

This is because I use my health bar as a weapon and a resource.

Use your health bar as a weapon? Than make no sense Stunty.

Ok let me try and explain. If your a regular reader of my blog, you will have by now seen some screen shots of my UI. I have it all arranged by order of importance and set it out so it's easy to read. I have incoming damage scrolling up at the left of my character, incoming heals scrolling down to the left, and Out going damage floating around at the top of the screen since it's the least important. I have large unit frames for both myself and my target just above my action bars, compact but easy to read raid frames to the top left, and Buffs and Debuffs to the top right.

Why did I go to all this trouble with my UI when blizzard provides you with a workable and functional one? It's because I wanted more information readily available in an easy to process format. This allows me to look at the amount of incoming damage, incoming heals, state of the raid, and then make an informed decision as to whether or not I should allow myself to take more damage to increase my dps time. I can instantly tell if I'm going to be putting too much pressure on the healers, or if the damage I will take will kill me and how much damage I will do in return for this health pay off. And the better you know the fight and the players in your raid the harder you can push this health resource.

25 man raids are filled with AoE damage, and from judging rage, health, heals, incoming damage, position in my dps rotation, my brain is constantly running estimates on whether taking a couple of thousand more damage will provide a significant bonus in dps out put. Sometimes the answer is no, sometimes yes, I just go with my gut instincts on it and it rarely lets me down.

This is the reason why even with my sub par gear (mostly crafted and karazhan/gruuls gear) I can still provide good dps in most fights. But this comes at the price of the "always dead" reputation. Because I push so hard one small mistake is often all it takes to kill me, and I am the Incompetent Warrior after all. Also there are times, usually in the last few percent of a boss fight, where I feel that the extra damage I can do in the time it takes for me to die is actually more than the damage I would do if I were to play it safe and survive, and a quick study of the combat log and the situation after I died have proved me to be right more often than not. There are also times where I know I'm going to die whatever I do, and getting in one last damage rotation has got to be better than running away and dieing anyway.

Told you it was a long ramble about arms, and for the life of me I don't know why I wrote it ... but I'm sure as hell not going to throw it away after spending so long on it.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Gots Me T5 Glove YAY

2008-07-18T05:31:00.001+01:00

Hurray!!!

I got my first piece of Tier 5 gear ... and it was completely undeserved. I was having a completely crap night that night, I mean seriously I stank. The only saving grace was that I was running as dps and not as a tank where having such a bad night would have let everyone down even more.

I had picked up some kind of virus that kept trying to open Internet Explorer, but having banned it from making any kind of Internet connection all this resulted in was it periodically minimizing WoW repeatedly for about 20-30 seconds. I spent most of yesterday tracking it down and eradicating it from my pc, but that night I just couldn't find it. Maybe it was having this happen which threw me off my game so much, but whatever the reason I just didn't bring my A-Game.

On the Lurker Below I was completely mistiming my movements to escape being hit by his whirl which eventually lead to my death close to the end of the fight. At one point I was so low on health that I couldn't risk jumping into the water to escape his Spout and had to run around behind him as he spouted hoping a healer could throw a heal on me as I did so. Fortunately one did, which was lucks since after his spout I misjudged whirls range again and was knocked into the water.

On Leo I kept messing up my damage rotation and misclicking abilities which crushed my dps output in an already melee unfriendly fight. Although on a plus note I did manage to survive for the longest I ever have in phase three. In fact according to the WWS report it was after he died ... if only by a fraction of a second.

Anyway hopefully I can get over this funk and bring my A-Game for the next raid. And to lighten the mood here are a couple of fun events that happened.

My Epic DPS fail on the trash in heroic black morass broadcast over Guild chat.

Click to enlarge

Proof that no one can resist my dwarfish charms. Here is Lady B obviously overcome by my Fiendishly handsome dwarven features, and also my apparently charming voice on vent (or so I've been told, personally I can't stand to hear recordings of my voice and I don't know how other people can).

We had to restrain her for her own good after that.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

A Server First ... I Think.

2008-07-15T04:53:00.000+01:00

Did I suddenly shoot forward in progression to get a server first in the Sunwell Plateau?

This is the Incompetent Warrior here so of course I didn't. Oh no I went retro for the server first. As Ghostlands EU was created with the release of the burning crusades it turns out Ragnaros had never been killed (at least as far as I know). Also a Ghostlandian is trying to craft some legendary item involving the Bindings of Whatshisname and some quest item that drops off Raggy and apparently crafting this item will cause some kind of world event. I, being one of the Burning Crusade noob invasion, haven't really got a clue whats going on so I kept my mouth shut when this sort of thing was mentioned so as not to seem like too much of a noob. But hey the people involved read this blog so the cats out of the bag now :)

Anyway, I hadn't the faintest notion that raggy was going to be killed on sunday until the person organizing the event whispered me asking how many of my guild were going to it since at least two of them said they would. I got an invite and with 24 other poeple the adventure began.

All through the Instance I hadn't the faintest notion of what the hell was going on. We pul mobs I hit mobs, people ninjapull more mobs I hit them too. There was some deal with dousing runes and what not. At one point we almost wiped with 25 level 70's when about 4 packs of mobs were pulled all at once due to a seemingly infectious bout of general incompetence. Yet being over stacked on healers we pulled through.

Only Majordomo and raggy were left to kill when we went in so we killed all of Majordomos adds which counts as beating him. Then looted his chest for some retro epics ... of which I got none :(

Then it was time for Ragnaros himself, I can only imagine what it would have been like to struggle all the way through at level 60 with 40 people in the raid and finaly be greated by this sight.

Even during the fight I hadn't the faintest notion of what was going on except the a couple of times I was sent flying through the air and into lava. I would just intercept back at him and all was good it seems, and it was great fun flying backwards through the air :)

After what seemed to be far too short a time Raggy was down and we were celebrating.

In conclusion I would like to give a big Incompetent thank you to K for organizing this and for inviting me along.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Tips For New Tanks - Part 1

2008-07-12T13:51:00.001+01:00

After running as dps behind a couple of "new tanks", players who are new to the tanking role, I thought I'd do a little write up on some tips and tricks for players new to tanking.

Yes it's true I'm going to pretend to be all wise and knowledgeable again, but please remember that I'm only pretending and that you could probably get better advice from hundreds of different sources. Also note that I am not very knowledgeable about the paladin class in regards to tanking.

Tips and Tricks.

1) Let your group know your new to the role: This is a big one since you are likely to be under geared if you're just starting tanking and this will significantly affect your TPS (threat per second). Letting your group know your new will give them the heads up that they may need to adjust their damage or healing out put.

2) Use your highest threat hit on the pull, and use it on your secondary target:

Non-Tanks tend to be trigger happy during the pull, casting unnecessary heals, dotting up mobs, sheeping just before you pull and generally making your life as a tank a living nightmare. So use a big threat hit to start the pull, and if you have two tank two mobs use it on the second on the kill order. This means that when that priest throws the heal before you hit your mobs your already targeting the one that's likely to run after him. If you have to tank three use it on the third on the kill order as this one will be getting the least of your attention during the fight. Warriors are limited to their ranged weapon, but I would recommend feral druids use Moonfire whenever possible to start a pull, and of course pally's have their holly Frisbee

3) Be Aware: Keep an eye on all cc'd mobs in case they break out and need to be brought under control again. A quick taunt on that mob and then switching back to your primary target usually allows the CC'er to do their job without getting squished, or worse your healer getting squished. Also keep an eye on loose casters as they just stand there even when attacking different targets. Is that frostbolt he just cast heading for you? If not then you need to get his attention again. Has someone in your party just died? If so do you need to pick up another mob that they were cc'ing? These are just some of the things you have to keep an eye on while tanking, so the more information you can have your UI show you the better.

4) Set you camera distance to maximum, and use it properly: This is all part of Being Aware. Setting your camera angle to maximum allows you to see as much of the fight as possible. By "use it properly" I mean turn your camera angle to where you can see as many of the mobs as possible, or where you can see the mobs most likely to cause trouble (these would include freeze trapped mobs and seduced mobs). If you have to back yourself into a corner for any reason, move your camera to directly above you. This will ensure that you have the best view possible in this difficult situation.

5) Share the love: When tanking multiple mobs it's very important that you don't leave any unattended for very long. One good way to do this is to move the tanked mobs away from the CC'd mobs and liberally use any multi target damaging ability you have, this would include cleave, Thunder Clap, Swipe, Consecration, and anything else that will hit more than one mob close to you. When tanking only two mobs a focus macro is very useful. To use this select your secondary target and type "/focus". This will set that mob as your focus. Then you select your primary target and every so often use this macro.

Warning: My macros are an ugly affair, please do better if possible.

/target focus

/cast Devastate

/targetlasttarget

This will target the mob you set as your focus, cast devastate on it then return you to your main target. You can replace "devastate" with the name of any spell, Mangle for example. This just makes it easy to maintain threat on two mobs without losing track of your main target, something which is very easy to do

Thats all for this issue of "Tips for new tanks" stay tuned for the next edition where I will be covering Line of Sight Pulls, Moving Casters, Making Use of a Good Hunter (the rare beast that they are), The Time and Place For Thunderclap, and I might even throw in a couple more of my ugly macros especially the one for "on the fly" tanking.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Will Not Stand For This!!!

2008-07-12T11:13:00.000+01:00

A while ago I read a post by Big Bear Butt on how great the new PvP gear available for honor points was for PvE. My last post states my belief in using every advantage available to me, so I got all excited and started grinding some honor in late night BG's. Today I logged on and decided to check what I should aim for now that I was amassing a few honor points. So I took a trip to Stormwind to see what the biggest upgrade for me would be.

I was shocked, I was appalled, I was more than a little miffed.

Do you know what blizzard expects of me to get any of the gear that is actually an upgrade for me?

They want me to be good at PvP. This is so totally unfair because I suck at PvP. All I wanted was free upgrades and what do they do?

They demand at least a minimal level of competence at PvP. The stuff I can get without having an above starting arena rating is over stacked in stamina, and under stacked in hit rating and attack power, although it does seem to retain an almost equivelent level of critical strike rating.

But you know what makes it worse?

The stuff that is an honest to goodness "I looked at more than the item level" upgrade, needs me to be really really good at PvP. /sulk

Oh well I may as well give arena another go and hope like hell that I get match after match populated with noob opponents ... preferably blind and arthritic noobs just to give me a fighting chance.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

If You Ain't Cheetin', You Ain't Tryin' Hard Enough.

2008-07-11T06:51:00.001+01:00

This post is in response to the new trend of thinking that T5 boss downs are not worth as much as they used to.

In a way this is true, you can now get T6 equivalent gear and epic gems from the new vendors, and the removal of attunement means that you can skip into the easier early bosses in Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, and many of the older guilds seem to think that this is cheating ... and they are right ... and they are wrong.

Haven't they been cheating too though?

Haven't they taken every possible advantage they could get to down a new boss?

Didn't they get T4 equivalent gear from they old badge vendor to enter T5?

Didn't they use strategies developed by those who got the world first kills?

If you start disregard kills based on the fact that people were useing every possible advantage they could get where does it end?

Taking this line of thought to the extreme, you could say that a boss kill only counts if you go in using only only the gear you had earned through PvE, no bought buff food, potions, or weapon enhancements and no reading up on the encounter before going.

Well I say that if you don't have the best possible gear you can lay your hands on at the time and working on the rest, and you don't have every consumable you can nab, grab, beg, borrow or steal, and if you haven't read strats and alternate strats. Well then I don't think you deserved to down the boss in the first place.

If you ain't cheating, you ain't bloody trying hard enough!

Sorry about the rant, but that attitude just pissed me off. Yes it may have been easier for us than it was for them, but we would have been bloody idiots not to take every advantage we could and continue to do so. The day we stop doing so is the day we should stop downing bosses... or at least deserve to stop downing bosses.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Vashj Down!!

2008-07-09T16:32:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we took our biggest step as a raiding guild, yes the title says it all we downed Vashj. SoL is now 6/6 in SSC.

This was it, this was what I had been waiting for. When I decided that raiding was what I wanted from this game this was the feeling I was looking for.

Have you ever seen one of those world first videos where at the end when the boss goes down the voice chat explodes with screaming and cheering?

Well it's not only on world firsts that this happens. As the lady hit the deck vent exploded with screaming, cheering and laughter that lasted at least a full minute. To date I have never experienced anything quite like that feeling ingame. 25 people all cheering and screaming their heads off after trying so hard on the most difficult fight fight we have had to date. It made the previous 27 wipes on her worthwhile ... and then some.

We had 9 previous attempts on her that night and it was our last try as we had gone way over our raid time already. Wipe number 8 was a 2% wipe and I took a screenie thinking that I would be making another "We almost had her" post, this was reinforced with the abortive 9th attempt, which went so wrong when the MT paused right at the edge of her aggro zone and a couple of people ran right on by him causing 3 early death's. This made the victory all the sweeter when it happened.

It took me a good half an hour to calm down afterwards, and the warrior class leader was almost in tears with joy.

Was I blameless for all those wipe we had?

This is the Incompetent Warrior here, of course I caused some of them. They were not directly attributed to me but I played my part in our downfall.

How you ask?

Well it's simple. In this fight everyone has to play their part or the whole thing falls to pieces. I was stationed on the western steps for phase 2 and with a mage and a healer we could keep that side covered ... but if either one of the dps died the other could not handle all the elementals and get the tainted ones as well. I know that when the mage helping me died I would after a short while be forced over the top of the steps onto the outer ring just to stop them reaching Vashj. At that point I could not even see when a tainted elemental had spawned, let alone get to it in time.

One indirect wipe I caused was when my healer had let his healing instincts get the better of him and had started healing everyone in range, I got poisoned by a tainted elemental and died before priesty boy could get to me.

How is that my fault?

I'm a dwarf, my racial is Stoneform, Stoneform removes poison effects ... and I had forgotten I had it :(

Another one was a particularly ill timed Whirlwind on my part. I was at the bottom of the steps attacking an elemental when I tapped to WW button at the exact moment that a Naga spawned directly behind me. Then, where once I saw a dwarf attacking one of those pacifist elementals, all I could see was Naga ... and it was Angry. Needless to say I did not survive long there after.

Anyway thats about all I can say on the subject at the moment, I still get excited just thinking about it. Onwards to Kale'Thas and his cronies /charge

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Was Livid. Grrrrrrr!!

2008-07-08T15:05:00.000+01:00

Just to reassure you and put you at ease, this is not a drama post.

Last night we went to SSC to do The Lurker Below and Leotheras The Blind. Lurker's adds bugged on our first attemp, I was fine with that. We wiped on our first attempt on leo at a low percentage, I was fine with that.

What really ticked me off was that on our second attempt at Leo all three of the adds at the start turned around and Mind Blasted me ... Within 3 seconds!

I spent that entire fight face down on the ground :(

I died so fast I didn't even register on that attempt on Leo.

Now I don't mind dieing if I make a mistake but dieing that fast to something I have no control over just ticked me off.

It's a conspiracy I tells ya Prince has been talking to the higher up bosses and letting them know to look out for the crazy dwarf warrior. Exacting your revenge through other bosses, Prince thats just low. Shame, shame on you /DisapprovingWarriorFace

Anyway I munched a Savory Delight and in my disguise as a Pirate I lasted until 10% and we downed him. Prince must have forgotten to let the other bosses know I sometimes masquerade as a pirate, Muhahahahaha!!

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Some Warriorz Is Not For ... Warriorz?? o.O

2008-07-07T15:14:00.000+01:00

Sorry about the title I've just read a few to many lolcatz lately.

Anyway the point of this post is that even though I go on and on about warriors, I know that they are not for everyone.

I have a RL friend that played a warrior basically from beta until he rerolled a druid on my server ... and he loves it. He specced feral and never looked back. He loves the versatility that comes with the spec. The ability to switch gear and provide great dps, ability to off-heal, innervates and battle rez's, he loves all these things that a feral druid brings to the party and I don't think he will ever go back.

I know another guy that plays a warrior and rolled a rogue, and he is a much better player as a rogue than he ever was as a warrior, even though he had played as a warrior for a much longer time.

Conversely I have a holy pally friend that rolled a fury warrior alt, and is reveling in the focused sustained dps that this guy brings, and again is a better player as a fury warrior than he was as a paladin.

This has made me feel very lucky in the fact that I first rolled a class that I love, and I do love it. I love tanking, I love the complex damage rotation of raiding arms, and lately I have come to love the self contained good dps that comes with fury spec.

So my advice would be to experiment with different classes if your a warrior, and if your not a warrior give it a go, you never know you might like it :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Raid Progression As Seen By Stuntyone.

2008-07-05T19:11:00.001+01:00

I finally figured out why my Editing software was crashing. Turns out that my buggy AVI codec was somehow managing to crash even that, darn that codec, darn it to heck

Click to enlarge

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Anetheron At 2%

2008-07-03T00:56:00.000+01:00

Yes this is another one of those "we almost had the mugger fugger" posts.

We one shotted Rage Winterchill, and on our first attempt on Anetheron managed to get him down to 2% ... the best we were to do on our three attempts at him. Four attempts technically but our third attempt when to pot on about wave four of the trash and a wipe happened before we even saw him.

As an off tank I had it easy during boss fights as I would change into my dps gear and pretend I was a fury warrior. I managed to put out over 700 dps in my prot spec during the boss encounters just by changing gear.

Did I have a flawless run from my point of view?

This is the Incompetent Warrior your talking to here, what do you think?

Of my mistakes during the night the one that sticks out as a true Incompetent Warrior moment was when I ran out to grab my target on a trash wave before they had hit the paladins consecration. Instant aggro from every mobs = Dead Dwarf. It was kind of like presenting myself as starters before the main course of the raid.

Mob1: "Mmmmm... Dwarf.

Mob2: *Drool*

Me: "Oh Crud"

*Nom-nom-nom*

Mob1: "Thats the problem with Drawfs, you have one and then your hungry again 30 seconds later."

Mob2: "Tell me about it, lets get some mage to go."

Steamrolled is the term that comes to mind. I got a rez but at that stage chaos had broken loose mages down, warlocks down, mobs running amok ... Everywhere.

Anyway after we called it quits, a decision was made that made me a very happy dwarf. It turns out that the officers had been discussing this for some time now and it was decided that we were pushing our luck with entering T6 content as we are. Sure we could with a bit more practice handle Anetheron but that would be about our limit. So for the next while we will be concentrating on getting T5 content to farm status, and gearing people up.

This is a very good thing in my opinion. I don't think I should have been allowed into T6 content at my current gearing level. When I mentioned this to the warrior class leader after the raid he asked,

WCL: "Then why do you just not sign up?"

Me: "not ... sign ... up ... ???"

Me: "Sorry I don't get you."

WCL: "hehehe"

The point is that I love raiding, and if I can I will go anywhere people will take me regardless of whether I think I'm geared enough or not.

I'm basically kitted out in T4 gear with a few T5 ancillary drops such as my mace and necklace. this is the reason I have over stacked (according to conventional practice) on evasion. Practically all my gems have some evasion component to them. I did this so that I could effectively tank in high T5 content without getting smushed, or requiring excessive healing.

It's also the reason why when I got the chance I took the T4 shoulder token that Mulgar finally decided to drop. This is because there are a lot of people waiting on T5 defender tokens that have a higher prio rating than I do, and if I waited and saved up for my T5 tokens than in the mean time I would be a much less effective tank until such a time as my turn came up. Also it allowed me to switch out my T4 legs for a slightly better pair without losing my set bonus. So all in all it was a much more effective choice than it seemed at the time.

Anyway, it now seems that I will get a lot more time in T5 content where I feel much better able to preform to an adequate standard. /HappyWarriorFace

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Gots Me A Temper.

2008-07-02T05:22:00.000+01:00

Why This Post.

I haven't been on Blog Azeroth chat (an AIM chatroom for wow bloggers) much lately, mainly due to having to catch up on work and having smushed my finger, but today I decided to log in to it after my last post for a bit of a chat and to vent a little after wiping on vashj at 3%.

At first everything was nice and normal with all the friendly people that are normally there and I got a /pat and a /comfort and commiseration on what a B#### that fight is. So having vented my frustration I was keeping half an eye on that chat while I went through my daily blog reads (all the blogs on my blog roll plus a few random ones).

While I was doing that I noticed a discussion on one of the proposed or suspected changes in WotLK. a bit into it I started paying a bit more attention and noticed that one of the participants was making a bit of an arse of himself by seemingly confusing stubbornness and pigheadedness with discussion. He struck me as the type of person I've met that can't have a discussion unless it's an argument.

Anyway it got to the point where one of the participants a blogger I respect, got so annoyed that she left the chat. The now (in my opinion) confirmed @sshat (I may be being unfair to the guy but I don't think I am, or care over much), then said "I don't know why someone would write a blog if they are not open to discussion."

That set me off. It just really got my goat. That statement was wrong on just so many levels.

One, what he was contributing could not by any stretch of the imagination be called discussion.

Two, there are 101 reasons for writing a blog and at least half of them in no way involve the opinion of others.

Three, he just attacked someone that wasn't there to defend them self, which in my books is the lowest of the low.

About My Temper

I'm sure that most people in my guild would be surprised at this post, and even that fact that I have a temper. This is because it takes quite a lot to set it off (or in this case just one unreasoning @sshat), but when it does go, oh boy does it go. It happens very fast and the first thing to go is articulate speech, which is then followed by a massive rush of adrenalin, and the last thing to go is a vision not colored red. You've heard the expression seeing red? Well it's based on the fact that the last thing people like me notice before reasoning thought completely flees their head is that their vision is suddenly tinted crimson.

When I was younger (said from the grand old age of 25 :) ) this caused a lot of problems as I could never tell when to remove myself from a situation before I snapped.

Now however it's different and when I saw that line pop up in chat, I immediately noticed the tingling sensation of vast amounts adrenalin being pumped into my system, also I noticed the sudden massive tension in my optical mussels that denoted a real whopper of an anger fit coming on.

I forced a little calm on myself and typed "Thats it I leaving too" and logged out quickly before he said something else and forced me to put my fist through my monitor.

Anyway this means that I probably wont be visiting BA chat again in the near future. Which is a shame since it was such a nice friendly place to hang out, but one prat just ruined that for me as I cannot trust myself to view even his screen name without becoming enraged again.

So until next time this is Stutyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Progress.

2008-07-02T02:35:00.000+01:00

Tonight we went to continue our attempts on Lady Vashj. We had 9 attempts on her with the night culminating and a wipe at 3% ... 3 ... Friken ... %.

/Aaaargh!!

/Headdesk

/SheIsSoDeadNextTime

We managed to get past phase two twice in the nine attempts, it was almost three times but on one attempt Deadly Boss Mods wigged out and announced that we had entered phase 3 while one of the generators was still active. This meant that some of the stairs people abandoned their post early, hence wipe time.

I can't help but feel a bit proud that when I went over the WWS report on the night, I noticed that the two times we did pass phase two, two of the tainted cores came from the western steps. Those were my steps I owned them, and by the end of the night I knew them like the back of my hand, and on many an occasion had a very close inspection of them face down on the ground. Let me tell you that traversing three length of stairs with these short legs ain't easy, but I managed ... kind of. Being arms and spec'ing into Improved Intercept helped a lot, meaning it had a 20 second cooldown instead of a 30 second cooldown.

This brings me neatly on to the next part of my post. I can help feal that I was both wasted and made the best use of by being put on the steps. Wasted because it severely gimped my dps. Made the best use of ... well for several reasons. One reason was that when a Tainted Elemental appeared I was there and looting the Tainted core the moment it died. Another was that as an ms/slam warrior I was probably the best suited of the melee classes for the steps. This is because I can unleash substantial burst damage through the use Mortal Strike, Whirlwind and Victory Rush, and only using slam when all the others were on cooldown. Also as I stated earlier spec'ing into Imp Intercept allowed me to traverse the steps faster than any other melee class I can think of.

I also made a few small changes to maximize my dps throughout the entire fight.

One was that I switched out my Figurine - Khorium Boar trinket for my Skyguard Silver Cross trinket. From analyzing the previous nights encounter I noticed that I was landing the vast majority of the killing blows on the elementals. This sugested to me that I'd be better off with the extra 1.5% crit and 140 AP as opposed to 84 AP during Phase 2. As it turned out I remained under the Combat Valor buff for most of phase 2.

Another was that I used Adamantite Sharpening Stones ... for most of each fight. Let me explain. I could only realistically make use of Windfury Totems in phase 1 ... so I did. At the start of phase 2 I would apply a sharpening stone to my axe since I would be far far away from any WF loving. Also I was to discover that due to the nature of phase 3 we were moving around so much that I couldn't use WF then either (the first time we made it to P3 I removed the sharpening stone effect hoping to gain a little WF love ... It was not to be. Unrequited love ... it hurts me so).

Finally I think I shall leave you with our comic moment of the night. During one attempt we had two people calling out over vent that they had the Tainted core, El and KJ. After much confusion it was determined that El was the one who actually had it, but a wipe happened as these things do.

When we were rebuffing KJ apologized saying that "I saw a green thing arc towards me and then my screen turned green, so I though I had the core... but it was just one of the elementals spitting at me." much laughter was had by all.

The lesson here is beware the elemental spit. No matter how much you want to throw it at someone else it's not going to shut off any generators.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Getting To The Good Bit.

2008-07-01T17:35:00.000+01:00

SoL has been 5/6 in SSC and 3/4 in TK for a while now and last night we had our first real progression night on Lady Vashj. There were teething problems with the raid as a couple of people had connection issues due to the hotfix and had to be replaced.

Once we got up and running however it was everything I expected a progression raid to be. Wipe after wipe slowly getting better with each passing attempt. From the very start we blitzed through phase one with no problems what so ever, but at our best we managed to get 3 /4 generators down in phase 2.

Phase 2 is what tests the raid to destruction on this fight. Each and every raid member has to do his job and do it well. There are (if you break it down fully) 6 different areas of the fight, 4 groups on the stairs to deal with the elementals, one group to kite and nuke the Strider's and one group to tank and nuke the Coilfang Elites. If any one of these 6 areas falls down the the raid wipes. There is little or no leeway for mistakes to be made although one or two death wont wipe the raid, much more than that will.

I love it :)

This was just the type of fight I've been waiting for, one which tests each and every raid member to their utmost. I've heard that Kael'thas is even more complex and less forgiving ... I just cant wait.

In celebration at my first proper progress raid I we and ground out the mats I needed to have a Red Belt of Battle crafted for me. I might as well preform as best I can, and if that means doing some of that hated grinding, then so be it.

Well I'm off for another night of beating up the Medusa Lady, and getting beaten up in return.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Smushed Ma Finger.

2008-06-30T03:25:00.000+01:00

Real Life Stuff. (my excuse for not posting yesterday)

Yesterday (Saturday) in work my finger decided to try and mediate an argument between 30kg of enraged wood and a concrete wall. The result of this diplomatic failure was me hopping around with a swollen, bleeding finger under my arm. I wanted to go to the doctor to get it checked out but was out of funds until I got paid today (Sunday). So today I went to the doctor to have my finger tested for breakages, none were found.

Thank goodness for that.

This means I can play and type. I have a very high pain threshold, developed through 25 years of being highly accident prone, so pushing keys with a finger twice its normal size doesn't bother me. Pushing keys with a broken finger would have. To give you a quick idea of how accident prone I am I will now list off a few of my injuries, breakages as a minimum.

7 broken toes.
2 broken thumbs.
3 broken ribs.
Broken tail bone ... twice.
Extra floating rib due to it being separated from the septum.
Cracked skull ... twice.
Missing Ligament in my knee due to being hit by a car.

All these injuries happened at separate times.

Don't even get started on my more "minor" injuries. Lets just say that I have spent more that three month on crutches due to strains and sprains ... and once putting a rake through my foot. I don't have a "good" knee, I have a "less bad" knee. The frequency with which I hurt myself at first appalled then amused the people I know in real life, lets face it it's either laugh or cry with my track record.

Anyway I can now post again without fear of further damaging my finger, Hurray.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Aaaargh!

2008-06-28T02:52:00.000+01:00

Damn you blizzard!!!

I went to log on today to do a little random killing on innocent mobs, but could I log on to my server?

No I could not.

This is unacceptable! I demand to be allowed to hit NPC's with a large axe. This is the god given right of every warrior and today it was denied to me. For shame blizzard, for shame /SternWarriorFace

I had to log onto another server and Frostbolt mobs into oblivion, but it's just not the same I tells ya. And don't get me started on the cloth stuff I had to ware, that stuff just cant take the beating I'm used to ... WTB mage plate for my "servers screwed up" alt.

So untill next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent "wanna be a Warrior" Mage signing off.

I hate dailies

2008-06-27T00:35:00.001+01:00

That just about covers it

/sulk

One of Those Nights.

2008-06-26T04:02:00.000+01:00

It was one of those nights tonight. You know the ones I mean, the ones where bosses you've killed before just wont cooperate and die like they should. The plan had been to take out hydross, the lurker below, and if we had enough time take out Loetherass the Blind as well. This brings to mind one of my favorite sayings, "If you want to hear god laugh tell him your plans."

Hydross The Unstable.

It started off wit Hydross the Unstable. I was sitting this one out as another tank with the frost resist gear had done the fight in this role before and they wanted an easier run. So I sat outside and leveled my fishing, I got from 290- 300 and they still were not done. After a while longer of sitting outside chatting with random people and emoting at horde I get an invite into the group and instructions to go get my frost resist set as the other tank had to go. So I hearth stone back and grab my clown suit out of the bank.

Want to know why I call it my clown suit?

Here's your answer

Don't laugh, now you realize the full sacrifice we tanks make for our guilds.

Anyway I get summoned back and after a while of discussion amongst the officers that we would skip hydross for tonight and move on to the Lurker Below. I got dressed up like that ... for nothing?!? You guys just did that to tease me didn't you.

The Lurker Below.

Anyway we move onto The Lurker Below, now this is a boss we have completely and utterly on farm ... what could go wrong?

I just said the four fatal words didn't I.

Our first attempt was a mess, rouges and ranged dps getting nailed by the spout, trigger happy dps breaking cc on the islands, adds evading yet still clobbering people, the main tank dieing and me taking over.

That last one deserves a whole section to itself. I'd mainly been brought along in case the Mallet of the Tides dropped as I was the only raiding warrior tank who did not have it. This meant that I was a fourth tank in a three tank fight.

So what do you do in this situation?

Why you equip your most damaging single handed weapons and have at them. But since I was there and a tank might die I had to be ready to take over one of their roles, so I dusted off my shield and tanking weapon equipping macro just in case. Sure enough the main tank goes down and I have to take over. Easy I smack my macro it equips my weapon and shield, switches me into defensive stance and I'm tanktastic and ready to go.

Well that was the plan anyway.

I smack that macro button start tanking, then get that oh so familiar "oh s###" feeling as I realize I'm still dual wielding against a raid boss. Turns out that I had gone through two different shields since I last used that macro. so I open up my bags an hastily equip my shield.

End of problem right? ... wrong.

That little mistake coupled with the fact that I never though for a moment while preparing for this raid that I would be tanking Lurker, meant that I was in a bit of a panic.

Panic + Stunty = Incompetence on a massive scale.

Let me list just a few of my mistakes. I started tanking him while standing in water, so was taking extra damage. I was jumping into the water outside the ring when he spouted. I was miss positioning myself so that I got knocked back much further than I should when he Whirled. And those are just the ones I can remember.

I just wish I'd recorded it for my how not to collection *sigh* another classic moment wasted.

Anyway more tanks died and just as we were calling the wipe he despawned at 19%, probably due to the evading adds I was talking about.

The Lurker Below Take 2

This attempt went just as a farm boss should. People stayed alive, the boss went down and the Mallet of the Tides did drop making me a very happy dwarf. after this we decided to call it a night and hope that next weeks raids went better.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

The Curse of Off-Tanking.

2008-06-25T02:04:00.000+01:00

This isn't a complaint or a rant, or at least I hope it isn't, it's intended to be an observation on the most challenging part of being an off-tank. I struck on it while reviewing a few videos of boss fights I had recorded, that the biggest challenge to any off-tank is ...

Boredom.

Thats right boredom, while there are many exceptions to this, you spend most of any given boss fight debuffing the MT's target and providing relatively inconsequential dps. This is easy, this is so frikken easy you can do it in your sleep.

There in lies the problem. Again there are many exceptions to this, but usually and off-tank has a relatively vital role to play in the encounter. This means that they have to stay focused while spending most of the fight on easy mode. Yeah, you still have to do all the other things the dps and healers do, like jump into the water, run away from the raid if your going to explode, even the good old Don't Stand In The Fire. But you do all this without the added pressure of a complicated damage rotation or having to keep the raid on it's feet.

Whats that you say?

You want some of that easy street to free epics action?

Well here's the catch. Remember what I said about the relatively vital role? Well chances are that if your not on the ball when you need to be it usually causes a wipe. For the most part the are very definite transitions in the fight for you to watch out for, which let you know thats it's time for you to actually do some work. That makes this part of your job easier, but if your half asleep your not going to be bringing your a-game and thats just not kosher.

Also as an off-tank you a floating "Oh sh##" tool for the raid leader. Did the pally tank dealing with the adds just die? Well then you get your butt back there and slap up an AoE taunt and give them time to gt a battle rez and a couple of heals on him. Loose adds giving the healers hassle? Well you pick them up and drag them to where they're supposed to be. All this means that if your half asleep from spending 60% of the fight doing absolutely nothing your not going to be much of an asset to the raid.

So how do we keep ourselves awake and focused?

One trick I like to use is to play music while tanking. Now not just any music will do. Your going to need something a bit up beat preferably with a greater than average bpm (beats per minute) which will help keep your brain active. Also the music should have little or no lyrics as these will distract you from what is happening in the encounter.

Another one is to keep yourself aware of where everyone else is and what they are doing. Not only does this keep your brain active but if one of those "oh crap" moments happens and you get given an order over vent it's no good if you spend the next 30 seconds trying to figure out where this problem is happening. Your the only one that can do this job.

No, don't go looking at the Main Tank for help, he's got some serious boss issues to deal with.

Spinning around in circles looking for where your supposed to go is bad, thats a 50 Tanking Brownie Point Minus, bad tank, bad. No cookies for you.

Anyway I just thought I'd ramble on on this topic for a while and bring to light theis problem for you non-tanks and share my solutions to it with you tanks out there.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

A Funny Old Night.

2008-06-24T02:20:00.000+01:00

Tonight we did High Astromancer Solarian. All through the trash on the way to Solarian our Guild Leader Ej was making sure that everyone had the addon Solarian Alarm installed and activated. Then on the very first Wrath of the first try Ej gets the debuff and with perfect timing his computer freezes and blows the raid up.

So all Hail Ej destroyer of raid. /bow (sorry Ej I had to mention it)

We had several wipes before downing the lady. Mainly due to the raid spreading out, but with this sorted and everyone on the same page we downed her so easily it was scary.

Well onto another topic.

Finally having sorted out my pc and codec problems I can now make videos. Unfortunatly I have a cold at the moment so I can't voice narrate them. Also I made no major mistakes tonight so I could not do my first video on one of my mistakes :(

Just think of all those great moments I've missed, the time I body pulled High king Mulgar, the time I wiped the raid by not jumping off the platform fast enough on Al'ar, the time I came withing less than a second of killing the raid by clicking the cube early on Magtheridon ... I could go on and on. But needs must and I have made do with the available material.

In fairness to my guild (who will feature in all my vids) I will be doing a "How to" vid from the warriors point of view for every "how not to" that I do.

The quality sucks so if anyone could give me a better hosting solution that You tube ... or tell me what I'm doing wrong to get such crappy quality I would be most apreciative.

Anyway here you go ... my very first vid ... be gentle.

Found a better host for the video but cannot embed it ... CLICK HERE

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Stunty MT? o.O

2008-06-22T22:53:00.000+01:00

Today was Gruuls Lair and I was pretty sure I would be running it as a tank due to the list of people who had signed up, but when I looked at the line up today some silly bugger had gone and put MT next to my name. I've never been MT in a 25 man raid before.

This is a joke right?

You guys know how much I hate responsibility, and yet you go and do this to me?

Anyway, being MT on the trash was actually easier than being off tank since when those ogre guys did their charge thing it was someone else's job to pick it up. I just had to mosey on over and pick it up off them again, easy ... I like easy I do.

High King Mulgar.

Even High King Mulgar was easy as MT I just stood by the wall in the middle of the room and had a hunter misdirect him onto me. Then I just built up some threat and made sure shield block was up every time it could be. My gear did most of the work on that one ... and the healer, who did a brilliant job of keeping me off the floor. We one shot Mulgar and his gang, and in revenge he refused to drop the T4 defender token ... again.

Gruul the Dragonkiller.

Then it was time for Gruul the Dragonkiller himself, the head honcho, the big kahuna, and anything else you want to call him. Now I was a little nervous. This guy hits like a truck, and hits harder the longer the fight goes on. So while the raid leader was going over the fight for those who had not done it before, I whispered the enhance shammy in my group and asked if I could get grace of air totems for this fight instead of windfury. The answer was an of course you can, which made me a very happy tank.

This differed from the Mulgar fight in that I needed to build a lot of threat fast while reducing as much damage as possible, this meant rotating in Thunderclaps and Demoralizing Shouts along with my shield block and still keep my TPS above 1000. Not that easy let me tell you, well not for a tank of my gear level anyway.

During the shatters I decided to be a space bully. You see that spot next to Gruul? That's mine, the rest of you can bugger off. Now I didn't say that but it was sure as hell what I was thinking. It worked too, it seems that nobody else really wanted the spot right next to the big guy, or if they did they must have seen me already there and headed elsewhere.

By the end of the fight he really was hitting like a truck. I was chain chugging Ironshield Potions and was rocking out with 19000 armor, and with raid buffs and Commanding Shout up I had over 18000 HP, yet he was dishing out normal hits for 6.5 - 7k he was able to kill me with three hits ... without getting a crushing blow. So for the last few percent I smacked up Shieldwall and hoped like hell I didn't die. And I didn't the healers did their healy stuff and I stayed on my feet while the dps did there nuking thing and brought him to his knees. A good thing too because he was about to swallow me whole.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off,

Technical Problems Have Ended.

2008-06-21T15:49:00.000+01:00

This is an apology for my lack of posting lately. All my non-WoW computer time has been taken up with corrupted files, and trying to find out why Windows Movie Maker hates me (Turns out it's not me it hates but my AVI codec).

But finally I'm back on track and will try to put out a few "Catch Up" posts to make up for my recent silence.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Up And Running Again.

2008-06-17T23:42:00.000+01:00

Ok quite a bit has been happening over the past couple of days.

High Astromancer Solarian.

I downed High Astromancer Solarian with the guild for the first time (my first time not theirs). In a fight where both the rogues we brought along managed to get themselves killed, leaving me running all over the place stunning and shield bashing the healers and hoping the mages and shaman managed to cover the interrupts that I didn't. In the end we muddled through and brought the lady to her knees. Although it's hard to tell from the pic since she turned into a giant Voidwalker before the end.

Magtheridon.

After that we went and killed Magtheridon again, adding new champions to the guild. And I discovered that with a bit of practice you can dance on the beasties head.

A New Axe.

Then a couple of heroics later I finally manage to get my shiny new axe. (Yay loot for me). Although I must say that it doesn't look that impressive for it's stats, it should look bigger and meaner, basically something that shouts "Stunty Smash!!" before I do.

Mount Hyjal.

Then there was tonight. This was the big one, SoL taking their trial run in Mount Hyjal to take on Rage Winterchill. A last minute decision to take 4 tanks to make the trash waves easier to deal with landed me in the line up.

An hour before the raid I was checking over my gear and consumables, I'd been told to bring my dps gear with me as Rage himself only requires one tank. So there I was going over my two sets of gear making sure every thing was there and setting up my Outfitter addon to switch me into the right gear for the boss fight. Ok I've got the right armor, I've got the right weapons, I've got the right ... oh crap.

Try as I might I could not find my Medallion of the Alliance, all I could find was my Insignia of the Alliance, which I though I had destroyed. Then it strikes me, I did destroy a pvp trinket, only I must have destroyed the wrong one. /facepalm

I immediately contacted one of the higher-ups and informed them of my problem, they told me that it should be alright since I would have to be very unlucky to be hit by two of the frostbolts. Ok I'm still going this time, but it means I have to grind the honor for the Medallion all over again :(

I arrive early to the instance as is my habit, and a couple of others are there already too. I'm doing a bit of exploring when I find this lovely little bathing spot just before the instance. So I strip off and have a bit of a soak, after seeing me in there Lady B decides to join me.

As more people start arriving it soon fills up. Oh and Lady B got the credit for finding it as it was claimed that only she could find a bath before a raid.

Our relaxation over we get started ... well after a much longer than normal set up period since this was a completely different kind of encounter than we were used to. It's much like comparing a normal 5 man instance to the Black Morass.

Rage Winterchill Take 1.

We deal with the trash, it gets a bit hectic but we manage, the only problem was that we didn't have enough time for people to switch to their pvp trinket before the boss came. I managed to switch into my dps gear but in my panic over having a sub standard pvp trinket had forgotten to set outfitter to equip it. /facepalm ... again.

Frostbolts and Death and decay run rough shod all over the raid. and we end up face down on the ground and let Lady Proudmore do her own dirty work. It turns out shes not so tough without 25 people protecting her. (oh and I've pointed myself out taking it easy in the Death and Decay, just in case you missed me)

It was at this point we lost a great off hand fist weapon because the master looter died before he could distribute it. This I'm sure brought tears to the eyes of the enhance shammy who would have received it. /comfort

Rage Winterchill Take 2

We changed the looting and organized the cc more for this attempt, but that was to be our downfall. Getting used to group loot in the middle of a battle was hard enough, I even clicked need and won a tailoring pattern *blush* I'm just glad it wasn't BoP. Also we had so much CC going that we weren't killing the mobs fast enough and a wipe happend as these things do.

Rage Winterchill Take 3

We reduced the number of CC since the hunters were having a hard time finding a bob to drag off to the npc's, who would then get involved in the affray.

Once you get used to the organized chaos these trash waves are it's actually a fun time to be an off tank. You grab your big nasty, drag it into the AoE storm, pick up a second one if you can. Keeping two off the pally tank for any length of time is reasonably hard, especially when the single target dps are focusing fire on your main target.

Anyway you tank your mob/s, and grab any that get loose from the AoE storm thats happening on your head, and snag any that happen to somehow be beating on the squishies. By the way, those of you who did, running past me was a great idea. Nothing draws my attention more than a bouncing priest or mage rushing by with a mob in tow, a quick taunt and the problem is solved.

So this time we tear the trash to pieces in short order, and it's boss time. This time everyone has their PvP trinket on and has decided that standing in Death and Decay is a bad idea. We get Lady Proudmore involved in the fight and all of a sudden it's boss down and SoL goes 1/5 in Mount Hyjal. Cheers and dancing all round, it's piccy time.

In case you were wondering, that little black ball is the remains of Rage. Oh, and guys, more funky outfits are needed, I know some of you have made the effort, but we need more. p.s. we made the boomkin stand off to one side since he was getting a bit wiffy after all that excitement, the lesson here is that feathers are not appropriate attire for a heavy workout.

Anetheron.

We decide to give ourselves a taste of the next boss on our Hyjal list. We have no problems what so ever with the trash waves, having had lots of practice now. The boss himself wasn't so bad either, but those damn infernals he drops are a nightmare. Looks like we will be having a fire resist tank for next time. Also Lady Proudmore was getting a bit pushy and ordering us around every two minutes, so we decided to relax and let her do the work (thats my excuse anyway).

To whoever that druid is sorry for putting words in your mouth, but thats what I would have been asking looking at that chaos. :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Delays

2008-06-17T02:03:00.000+01:00

Delays in posting due to technical difficulties.

Please check back later

Finally The Curse Is Broken.

2008-06-15T23:19:00.001+01:00

Ok So I Noobed It Up.

2008-06-14T22:19:00.000+01:00

We all knew this was going to happen, come on admit it. The Incompetent Warrior deciding on the spur of the moment to go fury? Sounds like a recipe for mistakes to me if ever I heard one.

Turns out that in my quick reserch I misread about main and off hand weapons, it turns out the Main hand is supposed to be the slow one /facepalm.

Oh well we live and learn. I also got advice that if rage wasn't a problem I should use two slow weapons for extra damage on Whirlwind, which makes sense when you think about it considering the both weapons hit when you Whirlwind.

I addition I was advised that I could greatly increase my dps in arms by switching to swords instead of axe's. as soon as I get an appropriate sword I'm going to test in-raid dps and weigh up the added dps of swords vs the fact that I really really love axe's.

I mean I could yell "Stunty Smash!!" while carrying a sword, but would it really be the same?

I submit to you that it is not.

Anyway many tests in the pipe line so stay tuned for more mistakes and light theory crafting.

Until next time this is Stuntyone the incompetent Warrior signing off.

Fury, Title, Nightbane, And More.

2008-06-13T23:25:00.000+01:00

First off ... YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY

The title I have been going on about for so long is finally mine Muhahahahhahahahahahha!!!

Ok now that thats out of the way I can get on with the post.

On thursday I went on my usual karazhan run, having realized that I had never specced Fury in my more than one year of playing wow as a warrior, I decided to give it a go. I settled on a cookie cutter 17/44/0 spec with a fast main hand and a slow off hand weapon. The difference in dps style distracted me from how well the the group was doing, that and there was the usual laughter and talk of spanking and nipples that usually accompanies our raids. We tore through Attumen and Moroes with equal ease. So well in fact that I failed to notice that our off tank DC'd right after the pull on Moroes.

I was to die for the one and only time that night on the Maiden. The damn temperamental lady, was throwing lots of damage my way and I had forgotten to equip the correct healing potions to my action bar. Idiocy tends to kill me more often than anything else.

We go and beat up the Big Bad Wolf, then we're off to trounce the Curator. It was at this point I find the one downside to being fury specced, there are times when you become a threat bomb. I was critting so fast and often in that fight that most of the time I spent just auto attacking the big guy.

As usual we call it a night after downing the Curator, it's an almost natural stopping point in Karazhan since he and the next boss has so many mobs between them. Then someone pipes up with "So when are we going to kill Nightbane?" and I instantly jump on this bandwagon. I hadn't asked about Nightbane before in our raids since I didn't want to side track the raid for my own benefit. The OT asks if we want to go wipe on Nightbane to give everyone a taste of the encounter for next time. I disagree and say we should just one shot him. So off we go to visit the undead dragon.

As you can see I had disguised myself as a pirate just in case Prince has been sharing his prejudice against a certain axe wielding Dwarf we all know with the other Karazhan bosses. The disguise and the fact I was duel wielding swords must have worked because he made no more than a cursory attempt to kill me. We preformed exceedingly well, killing a (for some of us) brand new boss without a single death.

With this done all that was left for me to do was to drop the Earthen Signet and the Fiery Signet back to that naga guy in heroic Slave Pens, and collect my title. which as you can see from my opening lines I did today.

After doing heroic slave pens today (and to all of you who ran the crazy fury warrior through SP, thank you) and riding the high of my new title I went and did the daily heroic which was Shattered Halls, with almost exactly the same group. Which we completed, even doing the time trial and scoring an additional BoJ. This put me only 31 badges away from my shiny new axe.

All Hail King Stunty!Do you think my throne is too big?

Anyway that about wraps it up for tonight ... oh wait I nearly forgot.

Initial Views On 17/44/0 Fury.

After my so far limited experience with this spec I still cannot write a full review of it, but my initial thoughts are that it provides much more easily attained good personal dps than 33/28/0, but lacks the utility of the other spec. Although this is mitigated some what in 5 man groups and 10 man raids, by the low number of physical damage dealers you are likely to run with. This is leaning me towards recommending this spec prior to 25 man raiding, further testing is required but stay tuned for a full review of the spec.

So until next time this is sStuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Disregard my last post :)

2008-06-12T22:07:00.001+01:00

My kara team just had a flawless run from the front door to curator ... then to top things off we go and one shot nightbane :)

Full story tomorrow

A Bit About My Kara Team.

2008-06-12T17:22:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to talk a bit about my Karazhan group, they just don't get enough love on my blog :)

It is lead and organized by a husband and wife duo, and we are just in it as they say "for teh lulz". I think this exert from the groups thread on my guilds forum says it all really.

On a side note, we're not usually running kara with something even resembling an ideal setup. We do Moroes without priests of any kind, Aran and Illhoof without locks (even got a nub pally healer that didn't know where to stand and hardly healed anyone before he died and spent rest of the aran fight facedown). And yes, for all those just in it for the loot and the badges: we're not close to clearing kara in one night. And proud of it, as well :)

On the other hand, we usually bring dps warrior, ret pally and any other "frowned upon" spec/class are more than welcome. If it's fun to play, the mood of the raid is so much better. We're about fun and laughs, mages getting lost, aggroing skipped mobs, dying, running back and aggroing the same mobs again, tank running into the same mobs, getting other tank to heal while rest of raid runs back before finally wiping on second group of skipped adds suddenly aggroing. :)

This is why I love running with this group, it's all about having a laugh instead of farming badges and getting loot. It's also the reason I don't have my champion title. I could go off and slip in with one of the other groups to do nightbane, hell even my Friends from my last guild have said that anytime I want I can join them to kill nightbane (whom they are farming like he was corn), but doing that would mean that I would have to spen a whole week without playing in this group ... and to me no title is worth that :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

The Polls Are In.

2008-06-12T16:22:00.000+01:00

The votes have been counted and it's been decided.

39 of you wanted me to make "How not to" guides.
3 of you didn't want me to bother at all (2 of these people were me).
3 of you wanted me to make "How to" guides.

This means that I'm going to have to go out and buy proper recording and editing software, so long paycheck.

What I am going to do is wait until I'm in a position where you get a better view than 5-10 minutes of raid boss knee (that's the usual tanking view). I will narrate these in my style (if it can be called such a thing), pointing out what I think are the key features of the encounter for melee dps and tanks. Hopefully you wont hate these too much, or tease me about my messed up accent (to non Americans it sounds American and to Americans it sounds like god knows what, but defiantly not American).

So until next time this is Stuntyone the now much poorer Incompetent Warrior signing off.

He Does It Again!

2008-06-12T00:55:00.000+01:00

Thats right folks the Incompetent Warrior has done it again, wiped the raid that is. And I did it in a no nonsense completely my fault kind of way. Now that I have your attention I suppose you'll want to know the where and the how of it. Well they say a picture is worth a thousand words to for the where let me present you with this.

Thats right, Al'ar the big canary in Tempest Keep. Now you know the where lets move on to the how.

Well you see that shield in my hand?

Yep, I was tanking again.

But how exactly did I do it?

Was it the good old standing too far back on the platform? ... nope.

Was it the falling off the edge while tanking the birdie? ... nope.

Was it failing to move my short dwarven ass fast enough when Al'ar was going to Fire Quill? ... Darn tootin' it was.

It was horrible, I was just too slow in dropping off the edge of the platform, which consigned the raid to a slow death by Flame Buffet ... and I got every last one of the buggers too. No escape for you guys when Stunty messes up, oh no. Oh well, I guess if your going to mess up you might as well do it in a big way :).

Oh but the mistakes don't end there, oh no. The best is yet to come, but at least this time it didn't wipe the raid.

This remind you of my last Al'ar post? It should because it's almost and exact copy of the pic I posted there. You want to know something? This happened not once but twice in the same fight.

The first time was completely my own fault. My key bindings for my Intercept macro and my Intervene skill are right next to each other and guess which one I hit while I still had the Melt Armor debuff on me. Thats right stunty shoots across the room right into a crushing blow from Al'ar that was meant for the current tank, hello Splatsville population me.

Fortunately for me a very nice druid threw me a Battle Rez and I was up and cooking again. Al'ar must have thought I looked better on the ground because the next time I was tanking him and just before my Shield Block cooldown was up ... well let me just show you the appropriate part of the combat log.

21:08'19.956 Stuntyone is afflicted by Melt Armor
21:08'20.200 Al'ar's Swing hits Stuntyone for 15388 Physical (crushing)
21:08'21.124 Stuntyone Dies

Thats right, in less than half a second he hit me with melt Armour and slapped me with the death blow. *sigh* I think this guy has it in for me.

That about covers all my major mistakes of the night ... Oh we also did Void Reaver, Loot Reaver, Lol Reaver, whatever you want to call him. Let me tell you it is without a doubt the most boring boss you will ever face while tanking. Just trust me on that one, it must get a little bit more exciting for the ranged dps and healers, because they at least have to move around a bit, but for the tanks and melee it's just snoozeville.

Oh and why isn't this on his loot list?

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior Signing off.

How To Find Out About The People You Play With.

2008-06-11T02:51:00.000+01:00

Tonight we went back to SSC to do Fathom Lord Karathress. We had downed him before, and last time it only took two attempts, this time however was to be very different.

I was running as a tank again for this one, but K could make it this time so the threat of tanking anything serious was removed (much to my relief). We had only planned on killing Karathress and taking a peak at Lady Vashj, which was a good thing considering how the night turned out.

It took just under 2 hours (from buffing up to pull the trash) and 7 attempts to kill Karathress and his cohorts. Now surprisingly this was not a bad thing for me. It let me see how the core of our raiding team handled this sort of thing. The answer was really bloody well. I've stated before that I don't get wipe aggro (frustration from repeated death's), and it turns out that neither do most of the raiders I run with. Most weren't complaining and the rest were actively joking about the whole affair, even on wipe 6. This I found to be a very pleasant revelation and reminded me how lucky I am to be in this guild.

Here he is finally put to rest.

Then we went for a sneak peak at Lady Vashj, just to get a taste of things to come. We didn't have any real plan just wanted a taste of the encounter. We actually managed to get two of the shield beams down in phase two before wiping. Below is a comment someone came out with as we were about to start the encounter.

When it was confirmed that we would wipe Seb the hunter Feigned Death and then claimed afterwards that he "Had faced Lady Vashj and lived."

Oh I almost forgot to mention my latest bit of loot.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off

For the attention of Banshee: The red team had a great night last night one shotting Netherspite on their first try and then going 2/6 in ZA. the night before blue team downed the prince and got some nice loot. thats bout all the news I con think of from the CoT.

Damn, They Don't Half Hit Hard.

2008-06-10T00:37:00.000+01:00

I have started adding links to the appropriate pages on Bosskillers.com for each boss I mention in the post. This will allow those of you who have never done these fights to gain a better understanding of them.

Today I logged on to do a few dailies before going to SSC. Instead I got whisped by a friend of mine asking if I'd help him get his karazhan key fragment from normal Shadow Labs. I slapped on my pvp gear and tanked the hell out of that place. I had to do it in just over an hour to be ready for SSC. We made it with time to spare.

Anyway I was on my way to the meeting stone in Coilfang Reservoir (I like to arrive early) when the guild leader whisps me saying that they would be bringing two pally tanks with them to make Morogrim Tidewalker easier, and that I would be on back up for this one. I said it was no problem, which is true since I've been brought to every 25 man raid since I got the raider rank and was more than happy to sit one out if needs be. He then whisps me again saying that K the other protection warrior would not be able to make it. My brain did a bit of work and came up with the frightening thought if we were bringing 2 pally tanks to deal with the murlocks on Morogrim, that only left me to tank him *Gulp*.

Morogrim Tidewalker.

As I have stated before I hate Murlocks, and the trash pulls before Morogrim only reinforced my opinion of them. We managed to pull two groups of Murlocks ... not once, but twice. Thats what I don't like about them, they just don't play fair. /grumble

Then it was crunch time. Time to see what I was made of tankwise and go head to head (or head to lower ankle) with Morogrim himself.

Man this guy hits like a runaway train, fortunately it's all physical damage that I receive so I was chain chugging Ironshield Potions to mitigate the damage, the rest of the time I spent trying to maximize my threat while keeping shield block up. Oh any having a little panic attack every time Lady B. was set to a watery grave, I think she got targeted for it something like 3 times in that fight, This was nor reassuring considering that she was one of my healers.

Just as he hit 25% and the raid had to move into the tunnel I used Shieldwall to make the transition easier on the healers and moved big 'n ugly over to one side so that it was easier for the raid to see what was going on. Of course this meant that I could now see nothing but boss foot, my awareness of what was going on wasn't helped at all by the AoE explosion fest that was now happening right on top of Morogrim. But in the end we prevailed, I popped last stand when he got to about 5% since the last thing I wanted to see happen was me die in the last few percent of the fight and have the giant farting dwarf wipe the raid. Also a cooldown not used on a boss is a cooldown wasted.

Loetherass The Blind.

We move on to Loe with a few minor problems on the trash that I won't go into right now, and I'm thinking that the hardest part of my night is over, and all I'll have to do is act as debuff b#### for the next fight. Imagine my horror when I find out that I will be tanking Leo in his human form.

Horror because I had not mentally prepared myself for tanking this guy, and when I reviewed the strategy guides and movies the night before I had not even considered the possibility that I might be tanking him. I like to plan exactly what I will be doing in each stage of a fight befoe I even set foot in the dungeon. This doesn't mean I wont change my plans based on changing circumstances, but I like to have a plan going into any boss fight. The thought of going in blind is anathema to me. Also this fight has a lot of aggro dumps in it, and creating that instant aggro is one of my weak points as a tank.

I made my reservations clear to the raid leader pointing out that VP (one of the pally tanks) was much better at creating that instant aggro than I was, something I had noticed during trash pulls. I could only hold a mob off him if I had enough initial rage to power through that first part of the aggro fight and overtake his aggro after several seconds. It was however pointed out to me that there was the fear of him going OOM late in the fight, and so by virtue of the mechanics of my class I became de facto main tank for this fight.

Sure enough my lack of preparation for this aspect of the fight soon became apparent as I ended up tanking him in the wrong area causing the raid to take too much damage while running from the whirlwind. We have too many death's so we move down to a safe area for being reserected and let him finish us off.

Take Two.

This time things go better with me tanking him in generally the right spot. I however get an inner demon, but oh ho I was prepared for this, I flick into berserker stance and pop recklessness which allowed me to kill my demon with time to spare.

Then it came time for phase three where both of Leotherass's forms are out at the same time. Aaaaaaaaargh! The frustration of it. As long as Loe wasn't heading right for them the dps just would not stop and let me grab him. I could only get him under control after he had killed one or two of the people topping the threat meter. However yet again we prevailed and killed him, killed him good I tells ya.

I also found out something about mages during that fight. When Loe charged straight at Lau he yelled "Oh S##t!" into vent, then ice blocked. This lead the raid to believe that this was a mage term for that particular skill.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

2008-06-08T23:07:00.000+01:00

Lately I've been telling you of my sucesses in Tier 5 cintent, Today I'm going to tell you about my failure in Tier 4 content. Specifically Prince in Karazhan.

I have never killed the hyperactive demon fugger, and tonight was no different. I'd been playing a great game and was feeling confident about this run. I'd been topping the damage meter all night (I checked it after every boss, I don't keep it visible at any other time), and others were giving me a run for the top spot.

My group one shotted Illhoof, wiped 3 times on The Shade of Aran before killing him (a warlock would really have helped on that one) did the Chess Event (lets hear it for free epics) and then proceeded to wipe 4 times on prince before calling it a night.

On the first attempt we came the closest we would to killing him that night, he must have realized that it was me in the pirate costume when at 10% he decided to drop an infernal right on top of the raid, even then we managed to get him down to 3% ... 3 Frikin' %, Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

I'm starting to think I'm cursed, every time I see that guy we get the worst infernal drops you could imagine. I hear others who go at different times to me say how easy he is and that it's all about getting lucky on the infernal drops.

Well you know what?

I just ain't got no luck.

Did I offend some witch? One of the many gaming gods? Someone sure as hell seems to have insured that I will never kill Prince.

Enough of that, I just found out I'm listed as a tank in tomorrows SSC run, so I'd better go respec and get the right consumables.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Uuuuuuummmmm

2008-06-07T19:35:00.000+01:00

Damn, damn, damn. I have nothing interesting to post about. Oh well I guess I'll just ramble a bit and see what comes out. Hmm ... I think I might just break this ramble down into a list so I'm not restricted to any one topic.

1) For you authors on my bloggroll, you do get read by me ... every day. So post more, I demand it.

2) Summer rain really sucks when you walk home from work. It means you get wet and sweaty :(

3) I've been doing a lot of raid posts lately, this is mainly because it's all so new and shiny to me. So don't worry this wont become a raid only blog.

4) Only 6 people have voted on my poll ... and one of them was me :(. I voted no because I'm lazy.

5) I hate writers block with a passion, it has become the bane of my life ever since I promised that I would post daily.

6) This isn't so much a ramble as it is a list of random thoughts, oh well you'll just have to make do.

So until next time (when I hopefully will have something interesting to say) this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off

WoWcohol

2008-06-06T15:08:00.000+01:00

I don't drink very often, but yesterday I had a couple too many glasses at dinner, so on my way home I stopped off at the shop for another bottle of wine to finish the job off.

At the moment I'm gathering the matts for The Iceguard Set, and I needed another 12 primal water. I logged on to my warlock alt and started grinding those eels in the lake near Shatthrat City. The little 'lock needed some leveling and Stuntyone needed primals this achieved both goals at the same time. I've never been one for grinding (I get bored of it very quickly), but sitting there already nicely toasted and working my way through another bottle of wine I managed to grind out 6 primal water and 6 motes of water, without ever getting bored (is this how the gold farmers manage it?).

At this point someone mentions a PuG raid on Tempest Keep, so I log over to Stuntyone and join up. There were only five of us and they were going to start asking in general chat so it wasn't looking good. Then I get a whisper asking if I want to do a quick run in heroic slave pens as dps, I let them know I'm drunk (at least I think I did) but they seem to still want me so I go and respec (I haven't looked at my spec yet to see if I got it right in my inebriated state). In the group there was a holy priest, an enhancement shaman, a hunter, a feral druid tank and me.

Slave Pens.

We storm through the place (at least I think we did, it got harder and harder to tell) with the priest pausing occasionally to resurrect me more often as I became more and more drunk eventually reaching the end of my wine bottle. The omen threat meter became merely a list of coloured bars on the left of my screen. We down the final boss and collect the last of our 3 badges, we hearth stone out and I go for a quick toilet brake.

At some point it turns out we had decided to go do heroic Black Morass, so when I get back I receive a summons to the caverns of time.

Black Morass.

Now I have never managed to complete heroic BM, even while sober. This however did not deter me one bit in my drunken state. We dived right in, I was wailing on the adds (I'm not sure how I did or even how I managed to move in the right direction) while the others were downing rift lord after rift lord and nuking bosses into oblivion. I ignored the adds during the second boss and joined in the nuking. I was in drunken dps heaven.

We one shotted that place ... even though I forgot to use my beacon. Whats even more amazing though is that I managed to remember to pick up all the badges.

In conclusion I would like to say to those I ran with ... sorry I don't usually type like that, it was the alcohol not me. Also I don't think I'm going to drink and wow again anytime soon. I stayed up far too late and I'm suffering from the hangover still.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Back Behind The Shield.

2008-06-05T02:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I tanked for the first time in tier five content. It was only a quick run to The Lurker Below, but still it was nice to be back behind the shield. One of the guild tanks had gone off for some fun in real life for a couple of weeks so we were short a tank for the run. A quick respec and brushing the dust off my tanking set was all I needed to fill the spot. Oh and making sure that I had rearranged my user interface properly, I've had some bad experiences with that one.

It was some nice stress free tanking. All I had to do was tank my marked trash mob on the way to the Lurker, and on the lurker himself (whom I caught with my imba fishing skills) all I had to do was keep the warrior debuffs on Lurker and tank the inner ring add near my island.

We one shot the fishy with only two death's. One being a mage new to the fight eating a spout, and the other being Lady B, we still can't quite figure out how she died.

The Important Bit.

None of that is really important. The thing I want to talk about it the refreshing perspective it gave me on the game. I've been dps in the raids for a while now and it's seemed to become more and more about the numbers behind the game rather than the feel of the game that I've been concentrating on. During the trash pulls I felt something I had not felt in a long time, I felt I was part of a battle, part of an adventure.

Standing out in front with the other tanks, flanking the main tank to the right while the prot pally flanked him to the left as he leads the charge at the enemy, the melee class following close behind. It felt more like the start of an epic fight rather than just another trash pull.

The enemy would see us and start to counter charge, and we would clash together in a swirling melee, then separating out into it's separate duels. I could almost see it as you would see a movie. The melee fighting for their lives in the thick of it while the mages and other casters crackling with power, raining destruction upon the foe. The willy hunters unleashing their pets and firing volley after volley into the enemy ranks, using their traps and tricks to slow any loose foe that managed to make it to their position. The healers calling upon their patron gods or the forces of nature to heal the wounded and protect those around them.

At that moment I could understand why people like to play on RP servers. It was a very refreshing moment and if I can continue to see the game in this light I could very well avoid burn out indefinitely.

So my advice for today would be that the next time your in a raid, while continuing to concentrate on your role within the raid also think about your role within the game :). Also try thinking about it less as a raid and more as an army. Who knows you might just enjoy it a little more.

The Mistake.

Damn, I nearly wrote a full post without mentioning an incompetent moment. What ever you do don't start tanking a loose sheeped mob unless the raid leader tells you too. The resulting reattempts the sheep the mob could very well sent the mage into fits (at least that's what I imagined him having behind the computer screen). I only did it once, but once was more than enough.

Oh and I got a nice piece of loot too. A shiny new thrown weapon, and many many thank you's to the fury warrior who passed on it for me. I love it to bits :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Karathrass and Heroic Hyjinks.

2008-06-04T16:25:00.000+01:00

As promised here is the more detailed break down of my latest adventures in Serpentshrine Cavern.

The Preperation.

The night before I'd heard from Lady B that she was going to do some heroics early the next day with Steb the pally who'd respecced protection (sorry to the others who came along but I'd had 3 hours sleep and couldn't remember you all, If you came leave an "I was there" in the comments and I'll add you in). I begged and pleaded until I was allowed to go along with them. I needed to get whirlwinding out of my system for the raid later that night.

We did four heroics and all in the school of CC is overrated. We did Slave Pens, Underbog, Hellfire Ramparts, and Shattered Halls. Here's a little warning for you, no matter how good you think you are never underestimate heroic Slave Pens, we did and we kind of well .... wiped on Quagmirion. /HangsHeadInShame

Anyway this all meant that I got to whirlwind to my hearts content and was more than willing to hold off WW during the trash pulls in SSC. I logged off for a bit to grab a bite to eat and have a quick nap before the raid.

The Raid.

Unlike our normal raids, this one took a bit of time to get off the ground. I don't know why that day was different to normal but it was.

We finally get in and get buffed up and start pulling trash, at this point I was told that because of the trash we would face today I could Whirlwind to my hearts content, my previous complaints on this subject having been noted. Joy of Joy's I get a full day of all out dps :)

The raid burns through what little trash stands between us an Karathrass, and we settle down to run over the fight, i.e. the kill order, who's tanking what and where. Then after one false start where the hunters don't quite MD fast enough, causing the MT to go splat as Karathrass and his three adds turn him into a warrior shaped puddle on the ground, he died so fast his healers couldn't even get of a Flash of Light before he kicked the bucket. The next time everything went well and we got the bugger, lets see that boss down pic again :)

You know what the best bit about this fight is? I remembered to ware the proper goggles this time, and while I didn't rise any higher on than 10th on the WWS report, ny personal dps was significantly higher. Check it out.

Much much better :). It should also be noted that because of the nature of the fight, having to kill all the adds before Karathrass himself. This meant that by the time we got to him the MT had so much threat on him that the dps could go absolutely mental. And they did, some of the higher dps players managed to reach 1300-1400 dps in this stage of the fight.

The Not So Good Bit (It has murlocks *shudder*)

After the loot was distributed (I didn't get any not having enough dkp, soon, soon I tells ya some of that juicy loot will be mine) we had to change a few players who had to go, and send one or two off to respec.

At this point the raid seemed to lose focus, a fact the became readily apparent on the next few pulls on the way to Morogrim Tidewalker. Here's a pic of the surviving third of the raid managing to down the last couple of trash mobs from an ill fated pull.

Soon after this came the murlocks ... I hate Murlocks. It seemed that in every zone at every level while Stunty was just a little warrior, there were the Murlocks ready and waiting to spoil his day.

Anyway during the Murlock pulls I got to unleash unholy Whirlwind and Sweeping Strikes hell on the Gurgglarggelarggeling buggers. The problem is that you just cannot have that much fun and not pay the price, and I ended up face down on the floor after almost every pull. Sure I could have held back a little and survived, but there was just no way I was going to go easy on my mortal enemies.

We have a couple of tries at Morogrim (a boss the guild has downed before) but it was just not happening. So mister Morogrim ...

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

YAY!! SoL Goes 5/6 In SSC.

2008-06-04T03:54:00.000+01:00

Whoohoo Fathom Lord Karathrass goes down. Good work everyone.

Also good progress on the fancy clothing for boss down pics. I personally brought enough Savory Delights to cover the whole raid but it turned out not everyone wanted them. This motley crew of Pirate Paladins, Ninja Hunters, Dress Waring Druids, Kilt Waring Warriors, Bears Boomkin, and much much more did it. Yeah Baby!

By the way why does the shaman in the same shirt and kilt look so much better than I do?

More to come soon but right now I need some sleep.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

For the attention of Banshee: The CoT had to cancel their Gruuls run due to lack of attendance that day. The red team proceeded to one shot all the Kara bosses from Curator to Prince, excepting Nightbane and Netherspite, who they skipped this week but plan to have a popper go at next week adding a third kara night just to deal with these. Thats about all the news I've heard from the CoT.

Loe Down, Yeah Baby!

2008-06-03T00:14:00.000+01:00

Another first night on a new boss and another first down for the guild ... and I was there ... again!

You guys and galls rock! I was planning on spending a quiet afternoon wiping on new content, and what happens?

Thats right we down him and it only took 4 tries (technically 5 but more on that later). The whirlwinding, blind bugger takes a dirt nap.

But I do have one complaint about the raid, and it could have a negative impact on our progression. Not enough of you guys are bringing fancy clothing for the boss down pic. Codose to El for his improvisation with the savory delight but we can't all do that or it would look like a gang of pirates and ninjas killed a boss and robbed his loot ... on the other hand that would look really cool. I may have to stock up on them for tomorrow night, just in case.

Thats right my crazy guild has picked lil' ol' me to come along on another progress raid. Those hunters and rogues must really like that Blood Frenzy damage bonus.

I'm just too pumped to organize my thoughts for my usual style of post, but I will give you highlights and pointer about the raid.

The Trash.

Yet again those annoying groups of mobs meant I couldn't use Whirlwind. Damn it but one of these days I'm just going to lose all control and make lamb chops out of the CC. I nearly managed to kill myself on the green stuff those bog lord type things put out, but apart from that I've said it all before.

The both trash moments of the day go to El for 1) His spectacular "Start the encounter when we are still killing trash" technically starting an attempt on Leo, and 2) For his prophetic comment before going to pull a patrol back to the raid "If I don't make it back from the pull tell my family I love them." ... "El____ has Died".

Both of these cause complete, but humorous wipes, so nobody really minded too much. And El if you're reading this, we still love ya buddy :)

Inner Demons.

My first inner demon went really really well. They only have 11k hp and hit like pansy's and I knocked his pansy demon butt into next week. This success was to be me down fall in attempt 2 (technically 3 but we wont count the pull during the trash).

Due to my earlier success with this aspect of the fight I wasn't paying as much attention to it as I should have and my inner demon having learned from last time that "If ya mess wid da Stunty, ya mess wid da axe." got a bit sneaky on me. So I didn't notice that I had my inner demon due to the sneaky lil' bugger hiding himself inside the demon form Leotheras. I only noticed when I hit WW and it scored two crits. but by that tine I only had 12 seconds left to kill my inner demon before I became mind controlled. My brain did a bit of work and realized that I would need to put out nearly 1000 dps to kill it in time. So I popped a haste potion and kicked it into overdrive.

I damn near did it too, just one second, one second more and I would have been able to hit Execute and kill the bugger. DAMN YOU GLOBAL COOLDOWN!!!! *Shakes fist at the heavens*

The following vent chat went like this.

Me: "I'm mind controlled, kill me please."

Me: "It's Stunty."

Not Sure Who: "Ok." *In an altogether too cheerful tone if you ask me*

*Some of the raid turn on me and blow me into next week*

Me: "Thank you."

Lady B: "Thats the first time I've ever heard you say thank you to someone for killing you."

*Much laughter ensues*

*And later on, a lot of people having been MC'd at this point*

El: "Damn, I must have personally killed at least half the raid."

After this fiasco I carefully read the raid warnings on who had their inner demons, and moved away from Leo briefly just in case I misread the warnings and there was another sneaky bugger hiding in there.

My Dps.

I achieved a reasonable rate of sustained damage throughout the Leotheras the Blind kill fight coming in 10th overall according to the WWS report.

Just imagine what I would have been capable of if I'd been ... and this is the really embarrassing bit, and I sure as hell didn't announce it to the raid, but they'll find out since some of them actually read this crap ... If I'd been waring my Furious Gizmatic Goggles instead of my Tankatronic Goggles, man I don't think I'm going to live this one down :(

How you ask did I achieve such an amount of damage with such crappy dps? Especially in a fight thats so much about holding you dps at the right time?

Well just look at (and this is the part I'm proud of) my dps time. 88% Yeah Baby! Sure I had to stop hitting the bugger when he was about to do his spinny business, but every other moment I could I was hitting him as fast and hard as I could, (Intercept FTW) and I never pulled aggro.

Well thats about all I can think to add at the moment and I'll try to be more organised about my post tomorrow.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that after we downed Leo everyone was jumping around and shouting for joy, into this joyous hubbub I yelled "Don't Stop Healing Me!". I still had the bleed debuff on me and my life was going down fast. The last tick of the bleed hit taking me down to 4 hp just a second before every healer in the raid hit me with a heal, shooting me up to full hp in an instant. Just one of those funny moments I thought I'd share with you.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

The Regular View Of Melee Dps.

2008-06-02T15:58:00.000+01:00

Just thought I'd post my regular view when running heroics. Melee dps just get no lovin'.

P.S. Sorry for being so lazy on this post, but I'm off to SSC tonight to face Leo the blind, should be fun. Expect a longer post on that some time tonight.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Sometimes It's Just Not Meant To Be.

2008-06-01T19:15:00.000+01:00

It's days like today that make me wonder if I have any skill as a player. Let me explain.

The Setting.

Today I went to heroic Magisters Terrace, and it was a disaster from the word go. We had a mage, warlock, hunter, holy priest, and me tanking. Now while this isn't the easiest of heroics, I have practically farmed this place for everything I can get from it, so it was in no way new to me.

The Bad Bit.

In those first few pulls we died and died. Twice form me forgetting that those casters can interrupt a healers spells and marking it second on the kill order, once from the crazy mage's body pull on a group we had skipped. I managed to pull that same group onto just me and the priest as we were waiting for the others, and while technically not a wipe it still felt bad.

The Good Bit.

After that we pulled it together a bit and mowed down the First boss and relevant mobs. During this time I also received a bit of instruction on seduction as a cc from the warlock. My usual experience with seduce us that it's a one hit wonder and started tanking the marked mob as soon as cc broke. I was told in no nonsense terms to leave that mob alone in future unless the succubus is dead, especially when the target is a caster. Apparently casters are much easier to chain seduce than melee. I really must remember that one.

It's Gone Wrong Again :(

Then we got to the room of the second boss with all his little eel thingies. Now I have always sucked at pulling these groups, but on my first try I managed to pull most of the room in one go, only the priest and I survived.

It came time for Vexallus himself, this guy killed us over and over and over again. We tried slightly different tactics each time, but the result was the same. The dps were dieing just that little bit too fast and there seemed to be nothing we could do about it.

As I've said before I don't get wipe aggro, but I have learned to notice the point at which everyone else is at their limit, even for those who aren't complaining. So I was more than happy to give everyone a free out (meaning that nobody would hold it against them if they left), they decided however to give it one last shot.

This time I switch into battle stance as soon as he hits 20% and start executing. Then the dps start dieing again but his health is going down. We can do it, we can do it. Then I notice all the dps are dead and the priest has dropped after being in her spirit healer form and Vexallus is still at 10%. I have full health, but I'm on my own, and I've used all my cooldowns and pots.
9%,8%,7%,6%,5%,4%,3%,2%,1%. Come on only one Execute away from victory here ... Splat.

A 1% Wipe ...... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

/Headdesk
/Cry
/ThrowThingsAroundTheRoom

I hate 1% wipe. Thats just down right mean.

Ok guys and galls one more shot.

He's going down this time. He's got to go down. He's not allowed to tease us with a 1% wipe and then not go down.

It was not to be however, this time we got him to 18% before the dps died and the priest started doing her spirit healer impersonation. I effectively solo'd him down to 8%. But in the end even the imbaness of Execute could not do it, and it was "Game over man, game over". With that we called an end to our ill fated run.

I think for the next while I'm going to spend most of my time as protection, as it seems to require more constant practice to stay proficient at than dps.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I PuG BT!

2008-05-31T20:40:00.000+01:00

It's the truth I swear.

Last night just for the hell of it I went into Black Temple with a few other crazy people just to have fun wiping on the trash, and can you believe that we managed to find 25 people willing and eager to go wipe on BT trash at 1:30 am game time? Well we did.

Here's some of the Crazy Raiders

It all started while I was playing on my little warlock alt in another guild when one of their members suggested forming a raid of a few people and going into BT for the laugh. I switched over to Stuntyone immediately, this sounded like too much fun to pass up. What started as a few people soon snowballed into a full 25 man raid group as friends and friends of friends were called upon.

The foolish people put me in charge of organizing the raid groups, so of course I made sure that I was in a proper melee group :). With everything as sorted as you could hope to manage with a PuG 25 man raid we started to test the trash.

I think we bit off more than we could chew.

This scene was repeated often. However we were all having a great time and chatter and lol's were rampant. I just wish I'd taken a screen shot of the reaction after I suggested we "Hit stuff and see what happens", it got a much better response than it deserve due to the entire raid being giddy. My "We Were Not Prepared ... not even for the trash." comment also got a good response.

Then after sneaking around and finding a different group to pick on, the most amazing thing happened. The mobs (after killing a third of the raid, me included) stopped randomly one shotting people and settled on the surviving tanks. I targeted the mob marked with skull, and immediately started screaming into Voice Chat.
" Come on people he's at 50%. KILL KILL KILL"
"40% keep it up!"
"20%!! You can do it!"
" 15%, 12% 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1%"
"WE KILLED A MOB!!!!"
"All on X! You can do it!"
And so on cheering my fellow crazys on, until finally when the last mob goes down.
"WE DID IT! WE FINISHED A PULL!!!!"
The Voice Chat and raid chat explode like we just downed Illidan himself.

We have a bit more fun wiping, but it gets to 3:30 game time and we have to call it as people are already having to leave. I felt a little guilty afterwards because I was the only one to get a useful piece of loot from it (apart from a couple of Marks of the Illidari) I got and learned the Design for Mystical Skyfire Diamond's.

Anyway I can now say I have set foot in Black Temple, and even killed a few things.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

A Little Salvation Please.

2008-05-30T20:05:00.000+01:00

Can anyone guess what the post is about yet?

Thats right, Blessing of Salvation. I only just noticed that in all the screen shots I took during the SSC run, not once was BoS in my list of buffs. I thought I was generating an awful lot of threat.

Here's a little pic of my buffs after Hydross was downed.

See no salv :(

Now this is probably a two part problem. Part one, I was mistakenly marked for some other blessing in Pally Power, I probably ran into the old warriors R 4 tanks prejudice, leading to whoever set pally power simply over looking me as dps. Part Two, I just didn't notice it wasn't there. Normally it's only noticeable to me by being there, something quite disastrous for a tank, and is quickly knocked off. This time however it didn't register on me because it wasn't there to catch my attention ... if that makes any kind of sense to you at all congratulations, you'll be one of the few :).

If I'd checked for and asked for blessing of salvation I could have dps'd harder and faster on all of the adds :(.

So let this be a lesson to you, even if you normally run as a tank check for BoS, and if it's not there raise such a hoohaa about it that the pallys give it to you just to shut you up.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

A guild First, And I Was There!

2008-05-29T19:14:00.000+01:00

Thats right, it was my guilds first kill of Hydross the Unstable, our tanks had just gotten the resistance gear needed for the encounter, and I was there. Yeah Baby!

Everyone put on their Sunday best for the pic. Thats me in front of the bracer's in the red hat and shirt, and before you comment it's not a skirt damn it. It's a kilt, man dress whatever you want to call it, but it is NOT a skirt whatever Lady B might tell you. Mjm had somehow managed to turn himself into an ogre, and one that I couldn't attack /sulk. He spent the next while magically shooting arrows from his belly with no bow in sight. P had his farming gear on complete with enchanted gardening implement (A rake if I remember rightly), and everyone was generally having a great time.

Ok enough with the self congratulatory segment and on with the show. I promised mistakes, and I can deliver. Oh yes, once again the incompetent warrior has been killing himself so you don't have to. I should get some kind of public service medal for this.

A little background on the raid, or at least the part of it I was most attached to. We had a proper melee group, consisting of Two Rogues (C and I, btw I it was great to finally hear your voice, and having a second giggler in the raid wasn't that bad ), a Feral Druid (K unleashing some kitty pew pew), An Enhancement Shaman (Elemental L had gone Enhancement for this one), and a MS/Slam Warrior (yours truly). This group meshed really well, everyone was delighted at the buffs the others provided, and we chatted in party chat throughout the raid, even jokingly dubbing ourselves "Team Awesome". As part of this group my personal dps jumped by more than 200 compared to my Tempest Keep run, while I was alive that is :(.

As usual I will start with a little commentary on the trash. Those Bog Lord Thingies were great fun as I got to beat on them to my little warrior hearts content. The only thing you have to remember is to move those little legs as fast as you can when the ground turns green, and as an added bonus when it dies you get to beat up on some little guys he spawns. The bigger groups were tough on me, not because my job was dificult in any way, but because I was surrounded my so many mobs and not allowed to hit Whirldind :(. The urge to smack that button and watch the number fly was almost irresistible. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that would have probably meant a wipe since I could very well crit those CC'd mobs, putting a DoT on them making it impossible to re-sheep.

Hydross Take 1.

Brand new content for us, and wouldn't it be amazing if we one shotted the over sized puddle?

Well predictably we didn't. The first transition went well enough, with a couple of loose elementals but the pally tanks getting on top of things pretty quickly. It was during the second transition that I found out something very obvious but very important for melee dps. Don't stand near Hydross during transition! That mean ol' bugger turned around and two shotted me at the aggro wipe :( This is what the rest of the fight looked like for me.

Look familiar?

It should do, it's pretty much the same view I had when fighting Al'ar in Tempest Keep on monday.

"Here we go.", I thought to myself, "way to prove to everyone that your a contributing member of the dps, but only for the first 5 F###ing seconds of every fight.". But aggro happened as it tends to and we had 8 adds out at once. Hello wipe city.

Hydross Take 2.

We do our corpse run business, get back, buffed, hyped up and ready for another shot. During the corpse run there was discussion about how best to manage aggro during transitions so we were feeling pretty confident about the whole affair.

GO GO GO!! /wipe.

An over stimulated Warlock cast Curse of Shadows before the tank had picked up hydross, causing him to cross the transition line immediately and spawning 4 adds. We run for it, and some of us even made it out. Not me I got to the first lift and decided to see if I could solo him. Would you believe I couldn't? Hydross sure as hell did. Two seconds later I did too.

Hydross Take 3.

This time round everything clicked. Transitions went smoothly, adds were brought over to Hydross so that AoE damage could nuke him too, dps wasn't over aggroing (well a couple of Warlocks kicked the bucket, but thems the brakes) and all was happy in the world.

I was having to stop dps much earlier than the other melee because I couldn't have a DoT up on the big guy during transition, and every crit I did refreshed my DoT. With a 47% crit chance thanks to Team Awesome I was critting way to much to risk trying to get a last hit in.

I more than made up for this pause in dps when it came time for the adds.

See those four adds?

Lets hit 'em all at once! Muhahahahahaha!

Sweeping Strikes,Whirlwind and more big shiny numbers than you could shake a stick at. All these were mine during the add beat down parts of the fight :)

Then it came time for the final burn. This was the moment I had been waiting for. Heroism, Death Wish and Recklessness, if theres a better combination out there I don't want to know about it.

Anyway Hydross goes POP and much shouting on vent and dancing was had by all. Then I get this whisper.

"You're alive? But you always die." -_- It was Lady B who had obviousely been casting around for my body only to find me alive and dancing with everyone else.

We distribute the loot and head on to do The Lurker Below. A fight which most of the raid (not me) had done before.

Lurker Take 1 ... And Only.

This fight isn't hard for melee dps. you only have to do 3 things.
1) Don't over aggro. (obvious)
2) Move back when the Lurker does his Whirl thing. (hits everyone in melee range and knocks them back)
3) Jump in the water when the lurker does his spout thing. (you get hit by this and it's the end of the fight for you. You'll be dead and knocked so far back there will be no hope of a combat rez.

Guess what, I manage to mess one of these up in the first minute of the fight. I just didn't move back fast enough when it came time for the Lurker to whirl. He musta smacked me with a crit because the water finished me off before I could even hit my space bar to try and jump out. As if that wasn't bad enough I just floated there watching the fight until about 65% before asking K for a battle rez. It just did not occur to me to ask for one before that, even though the only other person to die apart from me was an unlucky warlock who caught a face full of spout (some nights it's just not good to be a 'lock).

After I got the battle rez those big shiny number where just not the same, they were still big and shiny alright, but just not as big and shiny as before I lost all my raid buffs.

I also seemed to be trying my damndest to die again when it was time for the adds, I just wasn't taking into account the extra dps (thus extra threat) that Team Awesome's passive buffs and totems were providing me with, and attacking the mobs before the tank had gotten enough aggro on them. If it hadn't been for the quick work of a couple of healers I would have been Naga bait. I later learned that one of those healers was Lady B so thank you Lady B, and a big thank you to the other random healers that threw health my way, I love you all <3 style="text-align: center;">Fillet of Lurker Anyone?

Thus ends my first excursion into SSC.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I am an Idiot

2008-05-29T04:04:00.000+01:00

I just lost 2 hours of post because I had disabled javascript and blogger wigged out on me. Damn it all but you'll just have to wait until tomorrow to see how SSC went.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the (very) Incompetent Warrior signing off.

A Quick Update!

2008-05-28T07:08:00.000+01:00

The Gruuls lair run went very well last night one shotting both boss's in about 45 minutes. Gruul was nice enough to drop a lovely new shield for me (which looks much nice then the SSO rep one), but High king Mulgar still refuses to give me any of those warrior T4 tokens, the big meany. Also why is it that I'm still nervous at the start of a Gruuls run?

In other news the guild is taking me to SSC for the first time tonight but as dps ... again!!! I don't know why, but hey, I'm sure as hell not going to complain. Be sure to watch out for tonights list of hideous mistakes. A good time shall be had by all. That reminds me I'd better go read up on SSC.

I got in some practice as dps last night in the heroics that Lady B hijacked me for. The group consisted of myself, Kitty (who you might remember from my exploits in arena), Banshee (a regular commenter on this blog), Lady B's little warlock alt, and Madam N. (another warlock) who wisely went to bed after the first heroic and was replaced by the funny hunter. These runs were filled with some very funny moments that I would love to share with you. That is if I wasn't under strict orders from Lady B not to :(

Last night I killed a mage!!! Any of you familiar with my pvp posts will understand why this is a big deal for me :). Although that mage must have been decked out in greens as I managed to kill in in three hits o.O . Still from now on I'm going to at least attack a mage instead of running in blind terror from it.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

33/28/0 Mortal Strike/Slam

2008-05-27T21:53:00.000+01:00

First off I want to say sorry for the late post. I didn't get the time before Gruuls to finish it, and afterwards Lady B. hijacked me for a couple of heroics, damn but I really really have to build up some kind of resistance to her.

Ok this is going to be a departure from my usual posts and I'm going to pretend I know something. Remember I'm only pretending so do double check everything I say.

This post will have two parts to it. The first part will be on the main points of 33/28 and how to use it. The second part will be on my variant of the build and why I differ from the cookie cutter build.

33/28/0 Cookie Cutter Build. (taken from the Elitest Jerks forum)

This build is a utility build. This means that focuses more on increasing raid dps than on personal dps.

The key Points of this build are as follows.

Deep Wounds : This talent is what allows you to keep Blood Frenzy up without wasting rage on Rend. It is also required before you can take Impale, a talent which no dps warrior should be without.

Blood Frenzy : This talent is what makes this build raid viable. At rank 2 this causes all physical damage to the target to be increased by 4%. This benefits Hunters, Hunter Pets, Warriors (of all speccs), Rogues, Enhance Shaman, Protection and Retribution Paladins, and Feral Druids.

Improved Slam: Regular Slam just wont cut it. Having 2/2 Improved slam Is what allows you to put out good personal dps as well as provide utility for the raid.

Mortal Strike: Taking this gives you a second special attack to fit into your rotation, and is again part of providing meaningful personal dps as well as raid utility.

Improved Thunder Clap: Remember what I said about raid utility? Well this talent allows you to act as Debuff B#### for the main tank in boss fights. It does mean that you have to switch into Battle Stance occasionally, but thems the breaks.

Improved Demoralizing Shout: Again another item in your arsenal as Debuff B####.

Commanding Presence: This talent increase the attack power or health you give to others in your party, as well as increasing your own attack power. It's a win win talent :)

Using 33/28:

This build has a very specific damage rotation which requires quite a bit of practice to get right. It consists of inserting special attacks between white attacks, and then following the white attack with a slam. Your attack rotation should look something like this.

White Attack -- Mortal Strike -- White attack -- Slam -- Whirlwind -- White Attack -- Slam -- Mortal Strike -- White Attack

Using this rotation you can make 3 attacks with a two handed weapon in just over 4 seconds, depending on lag.

The reason you use Slam right after the white attack is because Slam resets the auto attack timer. This means that if you have a 3.6 speed weapon and you hit slam 3 seconds into the timer, after slam has finished you have to wait another 3.6 seconds before you will get an auto attack. This will kill your rage generation, and thus kill your dps. This is also why having Improved Slam is so important. Improved Slam means that there is only a 0.5 second delay between casting Slam and the attack timer starting again.

Tips on 33/28:

Get an attack timer. I recommend the Quartz addon (link pending). This allows you to better time your Slams since you have a visual reference for your auto attack.

Have Rend on your action bar. Now hold on a minute before you start flaming me on that one, just hear me out. You want to have Blood Frenzy up 100% of the time and there will be times when you just don't a critical strike. They don't call it a percentage chance for nothing.

If in doubt skip Slam. Messing up your Slam timing is the biggest detriment to your dps, so if you think you missed the timing just don't cast it.

Use a slow weapon. This is because your special attacks are instant cast or have a set cast time and use the weapons damage for their base damage. This means that if two weapons have the same dps, but one has a slower attack speed, the slower of the two will provide better overall damage.

That about covers it for what I fell I'm able to comment on. Now lets talk about my variant of this build.

My 33/28/0 MS/Slam Build

I feel that you should never be afraid to mess around with a cookie cutter build to better suit your own play style. This is how I've changed mine.

The main differences are 5/5 Deflection, and 5/5 Unbridled Wrath.

The 5/5 Deflection was taken over 3/3 Improved Heroic Strike, and 2/5 Deflection. This is because:

1) I have rage issues, I just don't generate enough rage on a consistent scale to warrent throwing any Heroic Strikes into my rotation.

2) I still occasionally have to tank something when I'm dps, and having the extra 3% deflection really helps there.

The 5/5 Unbridled Wrath was chosen over 5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout. this is because:

1) Those rage issues again.

2) We usually have enough warlocks that one of them is on Curse of Weakness duty and it seams that when curse of weakness is up I can't put Demo Shout on the same mob. This is one of those things I'd go double check if I were you.

Well that about wraps it up for me pretending I know what the hell I'm talking about. Back to my usual fare for the next post.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Sorry L

2008-05-27T02:04:00.000+01:00

It came to my attention today that I had left out a participant in my getting the heroics done for my title. They say a picture is worth a thousand word, well what about a picture with words :). And for what it's worth I never meant to leave you out L.

click for a better view

I left in the bit about H joining since it would have been mean to omit it ... and I'd already been told off for leaving someone out once already today :)

While I'm posting G-chat heres a prank a guildie played that I found so funny I had to take a screenie.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Al'ar Down, Yeah Baby!

2008-05-27T00:15:00.000+01:00

Today when I joined the raid I thought to myself, theres no possible way I can top the dps meter. Well you know what? I was right. I only ended up putting out a steady 615 dps averaged over the instance.

I went down to the summoning stone early since I had nothing better to do and killed a few warp beasts for buff food (which I still have to cook). Then the raid starts filling up so we head inside and wait for the last one or two. They arrive and we buff up.

Ok it's only the trash, I've read up on these guys so there will be no problem, whirl wind = bad so I just move. Cool every things sorted.

Can you guess who the first person to die on the trash is?

You got it in one.

Thats right first pull and I screw up, well at least I'm consistent. When it came time to move away from one of the whirl winding adds I accidentally hit "r". so the last person I whispered before going into the instance got a message that went something like this:
"From Stuntyone: ewasdweeeewsddddwadd"
This loosely translated mean "Oh S### I just died."

The trash is a bit frustrating for me because there are so many sheeped mobs around, meaning I couldn't hit Whirl Wind most of the time in case I started making lamb chops :( ... but they look so tasty.

Anyway there are only a few pulls before Al'ar, and after those Windserpents have a bit of fun playing Pinball with the dwarf it's time for the main event (I just wish I'd gotten a few screen shots of the pinball fun, I promise to get them next time).

The Pally tank, two hunters, a rogue and myself were assigned to deal with the adds. There was some confusion as to whether or not stunning the adds just before they die stops them from exploding. As it turns out it does not. So after being thrown across the room a few times (which was actually quite fun to be honest), I decide that I'll get one execute in the run for my life. Those explosions were doing between 9-10k when you added in falling damage.

This went well for all of Phase One with the birdies going down fast enough for us to have a bit of down time before the next ones. Then only about a third of the way into Phase Two (if that) disaster strikes.

The Pally tank was tanking two as usual when a late but big Execute crit lands on the the first of the birds, which meant I didn't have quite enough time to get away before the explosion.

BOOM! The pally and I go flying in different directions, this in itself was alright since I had about 12.5K HP and could survive the blast and the fall. The big problem I had was that somehow I ended up with aggro from the second little birdie. With that Flapping, Fiery, F###er beating on me there was just no way the healers could get my health up in time for the next explosion. This was in no way helped by my continuing to beat the crap out of it.

The pally has no charge and my health is jumping between 10-30% mark like an overexcited child with a paddle ball. By the time I'm able to execute I've decided it's better for me and it to be dead than for just me to be dead and it running around loose.

EXECUTE BABY!! I spam that button like it was giving out free money. BOOM! I go down hard, but with a smile on my face, those big number really are pretty :).

Now there was no combat rez available for me because by the time I died there had already been two other fatalities and the rogue died at the same time as me. The decision was made to use the last available combat rez on him. I couldn't disagree since he put out better dps than I did (but only just since he'd respeced for Cloak of Shadows and that gimped his dps). So I spent the rest of the fight watching from my back on the floor. It really is a visually stunning encounter.

After I died all hell seemed to break loose with people dieing left, right and center. I kept waiting for the wipe, but it just never happened. The remaining people got control of the situation and finished Al'ar off by killing the adds (he loses 3% health every time one dies). Pretty amazing stuff when you take a look at how many were left in the end.

But in the end all was good, and Al'ar was one shotted. I even got most of the raid to line up for a screnie. Theres always a couple that just wont move :(.

No loot dropped for me, but that was expected since Al'ar doesn't actually have any loot for an MS/Slam warrior (for fury yes, for me no). Grats again to all those in the raid that got some of that shinny loot :)

Hmmm ... we'd only planned to do Al'ar and we one shot that pigeon.

What do we do now?

Gruuls? No that wouldn't be fair on those who signed up for it tomorrow.

SSC? Same thing for wednesday.

PvP? Ok lets give that a go.

We have a bit of fun in the BG's. And can you believe it? Some of the raiders that came had never experienced the frustration ... I mean the fun ... that is AV?

While I'm waiting in the cue for AV the guild has a little surprise in store for me. Stuntys got Raider Rank... Yeah Baby! All in all it's been a great night for me :)

So in the end we do a couple of typical AV's (meaning we lost), one great AB which we one by a large margin, and completely trounce two EotS's before I log off to write this post.

Here's me and Ej chilling in one of the towers. I'm in such a good mood that I'm taking it easy on the horde ... no really look ... I've got my little axe out.

EotS and Noggenfogger Elixers ... is there a better combinaion? This makes you harder to target and has the added bonus of making you look like your riding a kitten.

Oh well it's back to protection for me as I'm listed as one of the tanks for Gruuls Lair tomorrow.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Entercard And Other Stuff

2008-05-26T17:32:00.000+01:00

After reading Naissa's Rage a few days ago I went and got myself an Entercard (scroll down and you'll see it), and today the drops I got on it from other Entercard users exploded. I got nearly as many drops today as I have gotten from all the other days I've had it combined. o.O

I have spent much more time visiting each of the sites than I meant to and so I don't have time before tonights raid to write up the post on MS/Slam which I had planned. I will get it done tomorrow at some point between finishing my post about tonights raid and doing Gruuls lair tomorrow. It's on it's way I promise.

Bonus! actual gaming sites are now wanting to advertise on my Entercard, rather than the random clap trap I've been turning down up till now. Well thats not entirely true, there have been a few applicable blogs up to now, but not nearly as many as I got today.

Anyway

Until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Raiding Again, But As ... WHAT ?!? o.O

2008-05-25T18:30:00.000+01:00

Lately Lady B. has been at me to sign up to one of the Tempest Keep raids. Now I wasn't going to because I don't have the Raider rank needed to sign up for Tier 5 raids, but Lady B kept at me and she got her own way (as she usually does, damn but I've got to build up some kind of resistance to her). I went to the guilds warrior class leader first to ask if I could, he said yes. That settled I signed up for the next TK raid.

I logged on to the guild forum this morning to check out the latest posts and the TK line up was posted. I take a look at the list of tanks, damn I'm not in there, oh well I'd been half expecting that. I am quite under geared compared to the usually raiding tanks, and it was Al'ar who they'd only just downed last week. Only mildly disappointed I scroll down the list to see who else is going.

/DoubleTake

Whats this ??? (It's your name)*

Is it really in the list pf dps ??? (yes it is)*

Have I gone mad ??? (quite possible)*

Has the world gone mad ??? (even more likely when you look at the evidence)*

Bloody hell, I think I need a quick lie down. (probably a good idea)*

*these comments were made by the small part of my mind that tends to keep it's head in a crisis ... it's a very small part.

Well needless to say I was stunned. I didn't think I really had the gearing to go as dps. After a while of pacing back and forth, occasionally refreshing the page to make sure that it wasn't a mistake, I log on to check with the warrior class leader (I don't disturb the guild leader with these things we have a warrior class leader for a reason). Finally the WCL logs on and asks to see my gear as I'm listed under dps for the raid. I make my reservations known to him, slap on my dps gear and parade up and down in front of him for inspection, trying to look extra fierce in case it helps my chances. Let me tell you looking fierce as a Dwarf ain't easy since you only come up to a humans navel. I waved my axe around a lot to try and compensate. He asked me for a few numbers then suggested a few upgrades, but in the end I passed muster and got the go ahead.

Yeah Baby!! Stunty in a big boy raid as dps, have all my dreams come true? Not only that but I got the ok to run as 33/28/0 ms/slam, (my favorite dps spec) since I would be on the adds with two rouges and the 4% extra physical damage would help down them faster. One more time, Yeah Baby!

Now all I've got to do is get my ass in gear and get the last couple of enchants I'm missing.

p.s. I will later be giving a break down of why I use that version of the 33/28/0 build

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

..................

2008-05-24T18:32:00.000+01:00

Omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg ogm omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg OMG BRK BLOGROLL LINKAGE!!!!!

/Faint

/BucketOfColdIcyWater

Ok this admittedly over the top reaction needs a little explaining. I was first introduced to BRK's blog by a real life friend of mine who plays a hunter. I wasn't convinced by the blogging phenomenon so I ignored his recommendation to go read it. That was until i was bored one day and sneaked a quick peak. I became an instant BRK fan, he was even the reason I decided to write this blog. Now, joy of joys, I have been added to the WoW-Blogs BRK Reads section of his site.

The tool tip even says "The Stuntyone" <3

And ok so I didn't quite faint when I found out about the link, but my hands did leap off the keyboard and hit my forehead with an audible slap.

Damn, I just thought of something. I'm not going to be able to slack off with my blogging anymore now that I have been linked by such a prominent blogger and my promise of daily posts is there for all to read :(

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Don't Like This Band Wagon.

2008-05-24T15:15:00.000+01:00

It seems that every WoW blog I visit at the moment has just done, or recently done a review of the leaked talents for WotLK.

Am I going to jump on the band wagon?

Hell no! Ok so technically by even mentioning it I have, but I shall pretend this does not count. I'm good at ignoring such inconvenient truth's.

Why won't I join in the talent blog fest?

Well I'm not 100% sure to be honest. It's just that every time I see one of these posts my brain jumps out my ear with a quick "You're on your own for this one.". I really have tried to read them, but I come out the other end of the post with the feeling that I had just read five pages of "Bla bla bla".

I don't know, maybe it's because I feel that with Blizzard just starting alpha testing, that any talents I do learn about and get excited by may very well be edited beyond recognition, or left out altogether. It may also be that however much I dislike blizzard as a company, (I love their games but dislike them as a corporate entity) I actually disapprove of the leak contravening the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement). It could even be becacuse I like the idea of buying the expantion and being supprised by the new skills and other content.

Whatever the reason, whenever I see one of these posts I just scroll down to the next one before my brain abandons ship again.

While I'm on the subject of blogging, Lady Jess's last post has tipped her over the edge and into my regular blog reads, and added to my blogroll. Pity her, for I shall be a regular visitor to her blog. Also after being recommended to read Resto4Life to gain a better understanding of healing this has been added to my blogroll, entertaining, informative and easy to read, all win in my books :).

While I'm rambling on the subject of healers, after reading Resto4Life and Kestrels comment on my last post I'm sure glad I don't have to do any of that healy business, it looks far too complicated. No sir, I'm gonna stick to whacking mobs with my sword and trying not to get hit in the head too often.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Tanks and Healers.

2008-05-23T14:43:00.000+01:00

As part of my regular diet of caffeine, nicotine, and blogs I read Ratshags latest post. This then lead me on to the article on WoW Insider and a blog I had never read before Pretty In Plate, which I liked so much I decided to add it to my blogroll.

Also a healer finally decided to post something about healing in the comments of last nights post. Thank you Banshee, and I don't use a "heal me" macro, I personally find them obnoxious. I will however ask SG the Chatadin where my heals are, but that's just teasing him. But nobody is explaining to me how that whole healing business works :( . I take damage and healers heal me, that's the sum total of my knowledge on healing. So Priest, Druids, Paladins, and Shaman of the Internet please, please enlighten this ignorant dwarf.

All this talk of healers and tanks got me thinking, although my knowledge of healing is severely lacking, and while there are many healers that I trust to do their job well, there are a couple of healers that just feel right. My health bar moves in exactly the right way, and almost always goes back up before I get that "Oh S###!" feeling, and when I do get that feeling I know somethings up and take measures to give them a little extra time.

I have also noticed that getting healed feels good, I don't know if other tanks take getting healed for granted, but for me seeing those green numbers gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Then again that could just me being punch drunk from tanking one too many mobs.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Random Thoughts And Comic

2008-05-23T00:35:00.000+01:00

These are a few thing I thought of today.

1) on banhammer : The Banhammer is a cruel and unforgiving overlord.

2) on beards : Having a beard is like having a pet that gets fed when you do.

3) on beards : It is impossible to eat an ice cream with a beard and retain any dignity.

4) on comments : Why don't you people leave comments. seeing "0 comments" under a post makes me a sad warrior :(

5) on walking : Walking home from work is what allows me to think these messed up thoughts.

6) on blogging : Some crazy person has actually added me to his blogroll o.O

7) on healers : During an instance is not the right time to tease your healer, unless of course you like lying face down on the dungeon floor hoping the the squishy pile you landed in is not what you think it is.

8) on healers : The difference between a melee priest and a melee hunter is this:

Until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

The Banhammer And Collateral Damage.

2008-05-22T18:02:00.001+01:00

It turns out that blizzards spate of banning bot users has hit some inocent people, not the least of which being a member of AC, "The bloggiest guild on the internet", yet the goldseller/power leveling spam seems worse than ever. Apparently little or no investigation was undertaken before implimenting these bans. Read the full stroy on TJ's blog.

/outrage

Bad Blizzard, BAD. Go sit in the naughty corner and think about what you've done.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Outraged Incompetent Warrior signing off.