Another short post- gear I gots

I just picked up the Fiend Slayer Boots from the chest event. Nice.

*Dur! Of course I meant Chess Event

I'm glad I didn't enchant my other boots!

On the road to T4 gear

Limited Warranty downed The Curator tonight, and lookie what I got: Demon Stalker Gauntlets.

Here is the anonymous report for the fight. I'll have to comment on it later but I will say that I'm not happy coming in #4. :(

Chess event is next. We're hoping to get to it tomorrow before the instance resets on Tuesday.

Kara 4March05

We ran Karazhan last night and I was pretty happy overall. Well, honestly, I wasn't happy with the run, but I did get that last badge off of Attumen the Huntsman and I now have the full Netherscale set (more about that on another post).

The raid started out poorly. People were late, didn't show up, wanted to get in one more BG before coming out to Kara. You know, the stereotypical problems that raids have when people don't seem to take it all that seriously. *Sigh*.

We worked towards Attumen but got the repops just as we pulled Midnight. *sigh* Wipe. I feigned death but one of those stupid Chargers feared me out of it and I died.

After much explaining of what happened and why we can't sit around and rez people who don't know how to control their aggro, we went through the whole process again and downed The Huntsman. Dropped gear (from memory):

• Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation


• Bracers of the White Stag

I didn't roll on the gloves because: 1) I thought the feral druid was able to get them (he died and someone looted before he could get back inside) and 2) I have Crystalhide Handwraps.

So, I know you're all wondering how I did? I am, of course, Phobos.

And here's the detail:


I'm very happy with my performance last night. I was even able to chain trap the stablehands (for the most part) (and yes, I'm paranoid about my trapping abiliites), and of course I'm happy about being on the top of the charts. We're raiding again tonight and I should do even better since I upgraded three pieces of gear with major upgrades.

Impressions/wishlist for raiding:

1. Our feral off-tank did very well for his first time in Kara. So well that we didn't miss the Pally tank all that much. Just kidding, Pyro! But we were all able to adjust our strats around the change in tanking styles. BUT, feral tank, I love you, but please please please get Omen!!!


2. BE PREPARED! Be there on time, ready to go and stocked up on everything you need. Don't expect us to wait while you run to Org for vials for your potion making. Read the fricken guild website to know that we're running Kara! Read the damn guild announcement that fricken pops up when you log in! The information is there, utilize it! *cough*


3. Listen to the raid leader on where you're supposed to stand. When he says, "bunch up or the chargers with charge you", fricken bunch up!


4. If you die during the boss fight and can't get back in, type "How's the fight going?" Don't keep asking while we're trying to kill through voice chat. Please.


5. Don't loot while in combat. Don't loot until everyone is rezed and/or has run back. The feral tank got screwed out of those nice gloves because someone got antsy.


6. Hunters do a LOT of damage.

That is all. Have a good day and wish us luck on Moroes and the Maiden (and Opera? Do I dare dream that we'll get there tonight, that the wolf will be there and that he'll drop the sniper rifle?)

BBB and raiding- USMC style

First off, I'm not in the military nor was I ever in the military. I was almost enlisted in the USMC, but, by my way of thinking, that's like saying a woman was almost pregnant. No, you either are or you're not, and I am not (pregnant or a Marine). For those people who served, I have nothing but respect for your service to this country.

I posted a while ago about how you need a military mindset when you're raiding. Well, BBB posted about this topic, and (naturally) in a much better and more coherent manner. He plans out a raid on Gruul's Lair as if it was an operation, and I swooned a little. In a very hetero way, of course.

Read it, learn in, live it.

1st night of Karazahn

Soooo very sleepy, but I wanted to post Limited Warranty's progress into Kara. We downed the first two bosses and got the Maiden down to 25% before one of our healers gained wife aggro and had to go.

Not too shabby :)

I like WoW Web Stats, too

Well, I finally followed BRK's guide on how to use WoW Web Stats. This is our last Shadow Labs run. Claz is the only hunter. The best thing about this is that when they were running damage meters during the run I was always #3. Yes, set your damage meters to include hunter pets or don't bother posting them.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with my performance. Though I'm thinking that my performance had more to do with my gear than with any special skill I may have. The best thing is that you'll see that I'm not missing too much on the mobs in Slabs and will start concentrating more on +crit gear/enchants/gems.

I know Slabs isn't that big of a deal, but I want my Sonic Spear!

Zul'Gurub

Limited Warranty did a fun run raid on Zul'Gurub last night. We wanted to run it to get some raid experience as a group and to get any gear for some of our lower-level 60s. It was pretty rough, to tell you the truth, but not too bad considering most of the raid had never been there. We downed:

• Bat Boss


• Snake Boss


• Spider Boss


• Bloodlord


• Tiger Boss

The Panther Boss kicked our ass because by this time we were down to maybe twelve people and didn't have enough tanks to take the panther adds.

Gear? I have no idea who got what or even what dropped at all. I was raid leader and had enough on my plate trying to remember strategies and getting people to stay where they're supposed to stay before the boss pull. Ok- not enough time to get in too much depth, so another quick list of impressions:

1. When people say they're going to raid and they tart talking about how they'd rather be PvPing, just replace them; even if they're the main tank.


2. Bring a crap-ton of arrows/ammo.


3. If your guild's main tank isn't on, be prepared to AOE attack everything and rely on your level 70s' uber gear to kill and defeat pulls that would have mopped the ground with you at level 60


4. If a pally is in the raid and says "WTF" when you ask him to off-tank something... be afraid, be very afraid.


5. Buy a headset. People can't won't read instructions unless they're in th Raid Warning

But, all-in-all I think it was a good experience for people to see the frustrations of a raid, but the bosses went down so easily for us that we didn't get that awesome sense of accomplishment you get.


PS- I finally got the Crystalhide Handwraps. They went from 500gold to 390gold on the AH. I put in some +8 agil gems and viola! I'm one more step closer to being Kara-ready.

Leveling as an obsession

I power-leveled Claz to 60 in about seven days played. No, I don't have a life, girlfriend or any other responsibilities other than paying rent and bills. Shut up.

Now, seven days played to 60 is not a record but I'm pretty damn proud of it, especially when it probably took me 40 days played to get Amantara to 60. How did I do it? I'll explain after a bit of a disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER

Don't powerlevel if you're new to the game. I recommend this for a couple reasons. First, you will totally miss out on a lot of what makes this game fun (well, for me. More power to all you "twinks", PvP Gods and gankmasters, but that just isn't my cuppa). You'll miss out on a lot of the storylines that were put into the game. You'll find yourself running Scarlet Monastery and not know how these religious fanatics fit into the world, you'll find yourself wondering why Thrall is sending you on a quest to root out some evil warlocks (as opposed to the "good" warlocks?). I really feel that this turns the game into a more expensive-in-the-long-run Neverwinter Nights (and I like that game). You'll just be going through the motions and it will be easy to fall into becoming one of those outraged number-crunching bastards that no one likes but will run with because they can one-shot Ony.

Second, you won't learn your class correctly. This is an issue that I'm having with Claz and crowd controlling. I leveled this hunter so fast and mostly solo that I don't really have the nuances of traps down and it was an issue. You're going to learn how to work with a group only by working with a group. I think that PVPers don't have this problem to the extent that Raiders have it. In PVP, you need to know your class and be familiar enough wih the other classes so you know how to team up and how to take down. With raiding you need to know the player as much as you know the class.

Third, powerleveling is painful, at least for me. I wanted Claz to be level 60 so bad that I spent a lot of time working on him, doing quests that are annoying, ignoring the tradeskills and not chatting with the many cool people that play this game. It was a lonely, frustrating and exhausting experience. And god help me, I'm going to do it with a priest...
END DISCLAIMER

So, you've decided to powerlevel, how are you going to do it? If you dare to utter the words "pay", "Chinese levelers", or "I don't need to do it, I'll just buy a toon", kindly go away and please delete my blog from your links. Ok, don't. But just don't mention those words within my range of hearing. Here's what I recommend.

1. Find a leveling guide. I used Jame's guide. It is free, very coherent and he breaks things up in bite-size pieces that are completely solo-able and efficient. Live and breath this guide while you're working your character and follow to a "T" his suggestions on add-ons, gearing up, when to group and what quests are worth doing and which aren't. There are other leveling guides out there, but this one really clicked with me and it was free. I don't know about the pay guides and I really wasn't interested in finding pirated guides (and neither should you!). That is the mechanical side of things.

2. Because you're going to be spending a lot of time on things that aren't going to take your full concentration (I mean, how much attention do you need to pay when you're grinding those earth elementals in the badlands, amIright?) I recommend that you have the game's sound turned off. You're not going to need to listen to anything in the game at this point, so don't get burned out on the repetitious sound of that blunderbuss or your wolf howling every 10 minutes. You will have plenty of time to get burned out on those when you're raiding and having to split your attention between many things. Instead, have your favorite media player playing your favorite music (or podcasts. If you're over 18 Kevin Smith's SModcast is a source of much entertainment while you're grinding. Or, play a lot of DvDs. Notice I didn't say watch a lot of DvDs. You're going to be so braindead from running all over Azeroth that you need to feed your mind. I recommend getting DvDs of TV shows you like (House, Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica for me).

3. Get a comfortable chair! You will be wearing a butt-print into the bottom of your chair with all the sitting and shifting. I have a bad back and if I had an uncomfortable chair I would still be bed-ridden.

4. Tell the people in your life that you will be doing this. I am blessed with many people that love me and worry about me if they don't hear from me for a few days. Learn from my mistake- you don't want your friends and loved ones wondering why you fell off the face of the Earth or them showing up at your door with that worried/pissed off look on their face. You're friends know you play Warcraft, don't they?

5. Take a day off for every three days you're power leveling. No, not a day off from work, you need to make a paycheck to pay for internet and the monthly fees, don't you? Level for three days, then on the fourth go to a movie, take a walk with a friend, read a freaking book. Do something other than Warcraft. You don't want to have a spanking-brand-new level 60 that you can't stand to log into because this painful experience is still seared into your neurons.

6. If you have a boy/girlfriend, pay attention to them if they interrupt you. Always maintain your relationships outside of warcraft. Those 3,419 murlocs you need to kill to get the drop will be there in 20 minutes, your girlfriend may not after considering the priority you're placing her into. And give her a good night smooch when she leaves you for your night of powerleveling agony. Sure, this is a bit funny, but you've heard the stories of people getting divorced over one of the spouse's Warcraft habits, haven't you?

7. Remember this is a game! Yes, you're not having fun from 1 - 60, but you're setting yourself a goal and the fun will start when you get off from the leveling train and you stop to smell the felweed. If you're getting frustrated and annoyed, take a longer vacation from the game. Like I said, those 14,761,991 murlocs are still going to be there when you get back.

There, that is Claz's guide to powerleveling and managing the agony of playing a game in a way that isn't fun for the moment. But when you get to that first raid, you're going to see how it paid off.

The Underbog (1st of many times, I think)

Last night the guild ran The Underbog to get us noobs rep, exp and to gear us up. First off, Limited Warranty is one of the very few guilds that I've been part of that actually help you out. Sure, there are a lot of guilds that do help you, guilds that will craft stuff for you and loan you gold and are a fun group of people to chat with to help you through the tedium of farming mats to level your leather working and if you think about how you'll need to kill about 6,482,132 more Helboars just to get one more Fel Hide you'll go crazy and delete your character, donate your money and then switch sides on a new server... erm, never mind.

So, the guild ran us through Underbog and I like that we're doing these instances together. The tank and the healer are both level 70 and I'm sure they had more important things to do, but they're taking their time out to level and gear the rest of us so that we can start running the heroics and maybe take a stab at Kara. The most important thing that we're doing isn't getting the gear, exp and rep. We're learning how to work together.

Have you been in a guild where everyone is a solo artist and when you try to run stuff together you have no idea what the other people are going to do and you get the attitude of "F this, I'm going to make sure I live through this!" attitude? No, me either. *cough*

But I found myself starting to gel with the group. I started to learn how the tank/puller (until I get Misdirection, after which I'm going to convince them to let me do the pulling. See BRK's two posts on Misdirection for more info [pt.1] [pt.2])... Where was I? Oh yeah, I learned how the tank likes to pull and how the GM (an amazing Boomkin who can heal like nothing) will heal the pet (which made me more aware of keeping Mend Pet up, I don't want to be the cause of him going OOM).

Second of all, I really enjoyed myself. I really started to gain an instinctual feeling for the hunter class instead of having to process every decision and losing that 1 second to a decision rather than casting Intimidation so that Snookims can pull the mob off the druid long enough for the tank to peel him back.

Thirdly, and this is something that everyone learning their class needs to do, I asked for feedback from the GM. I did it in private chat, not because I was afraid people would rip me a new one, but because I wasn't interested in compliments or accolades, but in honest feedback. Bum told me that I need to work on my trapping and crowd control. A very fair assessment, one that I agree with 100%. So, I'll be reading more BRK (man, am I a fanboy yet?) and watching his videos and then practicing my crowd control.

Ok, who am I to scold people, what do I know since I'm still learning the hunter, and most of all, this is a game! But. When you're raiding everyone needs to know your role and shut your mouth. Nothing will kill a raid faster than someone not knowing how to change their play style for the raid's benefit, unless it's someone questioning the raid leader's decisions. Raids are not democracies. The minute you're in the instance, you need to be in a military-mindset and you follow the orders of the raid leader first, your class leader second, and no one else third. What does that have to do with the above? You cannot follow the orders of the RL or CL if you don't know your own class. The order to pull the Red "X" comes and you start fumbling for that macro or the order to trap the blue square comes and you set the trap too close to where they're going to AOE the other mobs, and what do you get? A lot of angry people, possible raid drama and you're going to be looked at in a different light.

And hunters, we're a dime a dozen- no, a dime a gross. If you mess up enough, your raid spot is going to go to someone who may not be as well geared as you but they know their class and it's role and can follow orders. And what's the point of wanting to raid if you find yourself on the back-up raid list or not on the list at all?

But Claz, what mad loot did you get?

• The Tracker's Belt (drop)


• Dark Cloak of the Marsh (quest reward)