It's One Crazy Fight.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.