BELF No More!!!!!!!

This just in: I had a donkeyodomy. Really. Blizz's race change system went live today, and Shyste went Tauren.

What can I say? I'm tired of being a belf. Honestly, if I weren't such a noob when I started playing WoW, I never woulda rolled one... =)

Resurrecting Scourge Strike: Unholy 3.3

Its almost upon us! What's that you say??? Cataclysm? Fuck no! Who cares about Cataclysm when mothereffin Scourge Strike is coming back!!!

News and numbers keep rolling in from the PTR regarding scourge strike; its fully functional--and constantly being tested by the fine folks over at the EJ forums. Word on the street is that it's goooood. Unless you've been hiding under a rock these last few patches, you undoubtedly know that the unholy strike was nerfed beyond all repair (to compensate for arena). First we had to gear ArP and use obliterate, then with 4 pc. T9 our diseases helped roll us to the top of the charts again--but no more shenanigans, my friends. Scourge Strike is making its way back into our arsenal.




Essentially, scourge strike has been redesigned so that its damage is split between two (2) parts: physical and shadow.

Physical
Scourge Strike's physical damage portion hits like any other physical strike.

Shadow

"The shadow portion of the attack does double dip into certain buffs/talents
(Blood Presence, Desolation, Two Handed Weapon Specialization, Bone Shield,
Ferocious Inspiration, Subversion, Vicious Strikes, Dark Conviction) and it does
benefit from shadow/magical damage specific modifiers (Ebon Plague, Black Ice).
It can crit separately from the physical portion (although if the physical
portion crits, the shadow portion will have its damage increased accordingly,
whether or not it crits - which means when both parts crit, your SS can do
ridiculous numbers). The shadow portion cannot be dodged or parried, nor can it
miss. It can be partially resisted. " -credited to Consider over @ EJ

What this basically means, is that scourge strike will be buffed significantly, and we'll get to see some insanely high crits like we used to... =)

3.3 Spec and Rotation

17/0/54

This proposed spec is very reminiscent of the 17/0/54 of old. However, it does drop IUP due to the unholy tree changes over the last few patches. And, the rotation's gonna play slightly different because of disease rolling:

(1a) PS- IT- BS- BS- SS- DC- HoW- DC
(2a) PS- IT- SS- SS- DC- DC

These will be the opening rotations to get deathrunes activated, and trinket procs to roll high AP diseases. Once you've got the AP where you want it:

(1b) SS- Pest- BS- SS- DC- HoW- DC
(2b) SS- DC- SS- SS- DC

Keep in mind that even though SS is fully functioning on the PTR, it is still subject to change at any time. Keep your fingers crossed, though =)

Getting Ready for Trial of the Grand Crusader-10: NBE

Are you ready for the challenge? More fire. Bigger heals. Spawn timers.

If you've entered ToCr on regular and tamed the beasts, raped the champs, and generally laughed all the way through anub, then I think it's time you tried the heroic version. We've pretty easily cleared the regular version for a few weeks now--so its time to step up the game. Heroic.




Gonna be a lot of improvising here, so be prepared. More fire. Bigger heals.

A Digression from WoW...

I'm a little irritated.

I'm not a rich man. So when I decided to purchase a gaming laptop, I made sure that it was going to be a sound investment (I thought I did at the time, anyway); made sure it had the power to run games with ease, process video and graphics, have a nice display, and enough memory so that I wouldn't need to upgrade for quite awhile.

Found the rig I have today, and there really weren't too many horror stories when I made the purchase. Certainly not like I'm finding today.

I've been all over the net, blogs, reviews and forums, and have found a very striking conclusion: QUADCORES SUCK. In laptops, anyway. Apparently theres an issue with the heat sink not making good contact, combined with an aptitude to heat up quickly, which causes the graphical/sound "stuttering" that I've been experiencing.

To solve this problem, Alienware attempted to remove heat from the system
through a BIOS update (version B14) which undervolted the CPU. Admittedly, the
stuttering was reduced after installing B14; however, it does still occur.
Additionally, by undervolting the CPU they caused massive instability
issues. (Apparently no stuttering issues in dual core processors).

I'm no rocket scientist, but this don't look good.

I called Alienware today to see what the possible solutions are for the problem, and was given crap responses such as: they'll check speakers, replace vid cards, reformat, etc. And when I brought up the issue of the faulty heat sink, the ESL (english as second language) person on the other end of the line became very defensive. No es bueno. Now, I've read plenty of horror stories from consumers returning their quad-core rigs multiple times, each time, having it return home with the same issues. I'm not that guy. I don't have the patience to deal with those guys again today (who mostly seem to lack customer service skills, other than Dennis--mad props homie), so I'll probably call again tomorrow and request either a re-configuration, or a refund. Either way, wish me luck.

Just in case you're wondering:
Alienware M17
2.0 GHZ Q9000 Quad Core CPU
4 GB DDR3 @ 1067 MHZ
1 GB ATI HD 4850 x2 (Crossfire)
250GB x2 7200RPM sata HD (Raid-0)
Vista x64

Death to Video Cards...and Sound...and HD graphics...and...shit

I had a date with Alienware last night. Lasted 3 hours. No Barry White, no candles, no romance. And I still got screwed.

Anyway, so I'm on the phone with Luis, describing my very sporadic video/sound stuttering problem. He's insisting that its GPU overheating. The night before, with the aid of Dennis (An extremely cool Alienware tech) I replaced pretty much all of the drivers, upgraded bios, directx, flash, you name it. He stressed the gpu for a few minutes, and found it to be ok. Tonight though, was a different story. After 3 hours of installing and uninstalling, running tests, analyzing fan speeds and temps--Luis came to the conclusion that I had overheating issues. And no sound--something he did deleted all sound from my computer, so it has to go back now.

I'm not gonna pretend that I'm computer tech savvy. Maybe it is an overheating issue. However, the sporadic nature of the problem, sometimes occuring even upon startup, would leave me to believe that its not. Oh well, they're replacing the cards, the OS, and whatever else they deem necessary. I hope its just a faulty card. It's gonna be a 3 week process. I hope its less.

Jumped on the trusty old macbook. Had to download the last patch, and update my addons--but my latency is far better on OSX, even if the graphics are comparable to playing Zelda on the old NES. I don't know how I did that for so long. I levelled to 80 on a 13 inch screen. Man. This is gonna suck.

/QQ


P.S. I'm in the process of making Hazl a shirt ( a real one he can't DE); cause for some reason he likes to DE the stuff that he's wearing at the time (he's on item #3, btw). For a slogan I've got:
"I DE'd my other shirt."

Anyone have any suggestions for a picture?

When Video Lag is the Most Interesting Aspect of the Game...

I'm in a slump.

Have been for the last week or so. Its not that there aren't enough challenges left in the game--I think its more to do with me not being able to get to them. I wouldnt mind spending a few days on Uld hard modes. Would love it even more to work on heroic ToCr. But we don't. There's so much content I feel the need to clear each week; VoA 10, VoA 25, Uld 10, Ony 10, ToCr 10-- and I'm out geared for all of these. Yet those triumph badges call out. 4 pieces of T9, and still, I can't stop running. These aren't even challenging any more. /no more fun

We've been collecting players, trying to get them ready for 25's. Inevitably, our list of raiders is dwindeling. Lose a Holy Pally because our Lead Healer asks him to try a new spec (to get rid of the PvP talents). Lose another because we're bringing him into raids too quickly (wtf?). Lose our Spriest because someone complimented her dps (still don't understand this one). Lose our rogue because he's dating the spriest. My 25 man hopes have now been set to the side.

So instead of moving forward, I'm back to choosing a 10 man squad from 16 players. This sucks.

I try to pug 25 Ony. /Fail.
I join a pug 25 ToCr. /Fail.

Only real exciting thing is the video lag, Stop/FastForward graphics error I've developed over the last week. Makes the Headless Horseman more entertaining. Real shitty though on the 4th phase of Mimiron. Oh well.

3 Drakes: Shyste of the Nightfall

I was almost logged and in bed tonight, when a couple of guildies asked me to join a Sarth 3D try. Now, we attempted this a few nights ago, and the closest we came was about 9%. Since then, further research reminded us that Tenebron is usually kited at enrage, allowing dps the precious time required, to finish-off the old dragon.

We're fairly well geared. Easily pulling over 5k--closer to 6 and 7, and Artagnan coming in at around 9k. No matter how hard we tried the other night, we just couldn't close. Fast forward to tonight. 2 others (dps) in the group different from last time: Another Mage, and a Shammy, geared ilvl232 or better...

DPS looked like this:

3 tries. 3 wipes.

4th try: We pull out the numbers you see above...and still die. I watched diseases tick Sarth down from 50k on...each tick dropping her HP lower, and lower, and lower, and lower, and lower, and lower, and lower...until......... BAM!

We pulled it off. All of us except for Buick, who had accidentally rez'd. That really sucks man, but we'll get it again for ya. I rolled an epic 41 for the Black Drake. /sigh

Unholy, Oh How I've Missed You...

I'm a perfectionist. I'm constantly in search of new raid strategies, DPS theories, pretty much anything that will help me (or my team) edge out the competition. Back when Tier 7 was in full swing, I was an unholy DK--out deepsing some of our servers best DK's (still have some screenies to prove it) and...it...was...AWESOME.

But, since the Great Scourge Strike nerfing (of 3.2?), the spec just hasn't been the same. I recently tried it a few weeks ago, if you recall, and reported that it sucked balls. I jumped the gun.

ElitistJerks reports that Blood out-deeps' Unholy when it comes to single target dps. The margine may be narrow, but these peeps sure know their math on the subject, so I trust their calls. What I have forgotten, lately, is that these guys sim-out BiS gear. Which I definitely do not have. I am, however, rocking 4 pieces of T9, which gives a nice chance to crit my disease ticks--and as I'm looking at the top DK's on the server (I'm #16 currently), I'm noticing that most are unholy. This got me thinking...

So I go crawling back to my old flame (Unholy), last night; head in hands, a bottle of wine and some Barry White...and she accepts me with welcomed arms.

Top the charts in VoA-25, and then again in Ony-10 (hit close to 11k during welp phase). Even against a single target, the triple disease-critting ticks are too much even for Bloods ample cooldowns. Oh how I've missed unholy...

I still don't recommend the spec if you don't have the 4 piece bonus from T9, but damn, it's so worth it if you do.

WTF Moments...

I wouldn't say that I'm an angry player. Quite the contrary, actually. But there are some things in-game that really cheese me off.

#1- PvP, Pallies, and bubbles.
#2- Struggling through content.

#1 is easily avoidable-- I only arena once or twice in a very blue moon, which leaves the only real bane of my frustration at #2.

Before we get into that, let me tell you a little more about me as a n00b 80. I say n00b, because it really wasn't until I hit 80 that I really started exploring the games finer points and nuances. When I turned 80, I was wearing mostly quest blues, I was spec'd frost dps, some of my gear had defense rating on it, and the group of guildies I ran with consistently struggled through OK and HoL. We didn't even dare step foot in HoS or Occ...and we were definitely known to challenge Archavon's enrage timer. Things were different back then; ilvl 213 was tops (226 to get technical, with KT and Maly), and stats weren't quite as inflated as they are today.

During my time as an early 80, I definitely had my share of WTF moments. My Army taunting bosses, wiping groups, my bloodworms eating AoE heals, etc. I made tons of mistakes as a new 80, but I always learned from these mistakes, and definitely never tried to fake my way around. I learned a lot hands on, and since then, I've paid my dues.


Last night I experienced another WTF moment. Not much going on with the guild, I put myself in LFG as a dps to run some heroics with people. Not long after I received a whisper. H CoS.

I entered the group and the first thing I see in party chat:
"Dude, that 78 was heals...whose gonna heal?"
"I'll tank, you heal. noob healer+noob tank = chaos"
"I can heal, won't be great, but we'll live"
"I just tanked DTK fine, we got this"

This was 2 Pallies talking. Normally I'd be concerned, but I know how to stay alive, and could probably solo dps the thing if I tried...so I let it be.

Fast Forward to the pull: Tank took off running the wrong direction, I grab first wave and kill it while the hunter is off killing skeletons by himself, the dps dk in greens and blues and no sigil is off with the tank, left me and the healer. 4.5k dps = crisis averted. Everyone reforms, and wave two comes: Pally can't hold aggro (how?) hunter is doing god knows what, and the other DK is attacking a random target. Wipe.

Now, I understand, that this place can be a tad overwhelming for someone that hasn't been there before. However, everyone assured me that they'd run CoS multiple time before today. I suggest that I (having infinite wisdom of this place) do the tanking. I try to be diplomatic about it--not QQing, and try to give a few tips along the way. I succeed; my tanking goes without incident. Get to the final gauntlet and it's somewhat nerve-racking, because, apparently all the dps thought they could just run out and start attacking shit. Somehow I manage to pull it together without wanting to poke my eyes out anymore than I previously wanted... until we get to the end of the gauntlet: we're missing Arthas. Damn. WTF.

You know what happens if you run without Arthas? Shit respawns.
Ran that gauntlet 3 times...was in CoS for like an hour. Someone even had the nerve to ask about making the timed run.
/facepalm.

And how the hell, does a DK NOT have a sigil? We're all given one! For FREE!!!

WTF

Pew Pew Kachoo!

After 2 attempts at Anub'arak the other night, the big spider (or beetle) dropped to it knees, yielding to us its purple-pixelated shinies in all their glory. The 10 man story of ToTC finally came to an end, revealing to us its Heroic couterpart.

/Happy Ending

Fastforward to the first attempt at heroic: wipe. wipe. wipe. /cursingattheworldWTF

Wipe. This shit is hard ReDONKULOUSLY hard.. Damage is increased by like 1000000000%, we have spawn timers to deal with now, more fire, more fire, more fire. We kill the magnataur, but sustain casualties. Jormungars aren't even phased by us...dead.

/sigh