Hey you! Yes, you! Are you looking for a guild to call home? Caffeine, located on Khaz Modan (US, Alliance side) is recruiting healers and ranged DPS of all flavors. If you’re interested, you should go check out our site (linked conveniently above), and if you like what you see, pop onto Khaz Modan and talk to any of our guild master’s toons.
Here’s a few details about Caffeine.
Caffeine is a 10s raiding guild, with an eye towards moving to multiple 10s teams, then 25s raids once our numbers are up and we can get people consistently signing up, showing up, et cetera. Current progression in ICC is 6/12 – Lower Spire, Festergut, and Rotface are on farm, with current good progression attempts at the Blood Princes and Putricide.
Caffeine uses Ventrilo – a lot. We’re often on Vent while running dailies, pugging heroics, and of course while raiding. Get a good mic and use it. Being on Vent is a fun way to socialize, plus it can prevent a lot of the nonsense and misunderstanding that simple emotionless text in guild or raid chat might cause.
Caffeine uses EPGP for loot – if you’re not familiar with it, you may want to familiarize yourself. (Full disclosure; if a healer or ranged DPS that I recruit stays for the full 30 days and moves from Recruit to Raider status (or Safety Hazard), I get a big ol’ EP bonus. You win, I win, everyone wins.)
We’d like to see people who are there to help the group succeed consistently, not just there to farm up some purple pixels. Don’t be a dick.
The raiding hours on our website don’t seem to be quite accurate; on all the nights I’ve been there, we’ve raided from 10:30 PM-1:30 AM EST (9:30 PM-12:30 AM server time, 7:30 PM – 10:30 PM PST), on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Wednesdays are designated as a day off (it’s Hump Day – go use it for what it was made for), weekends may have something pop up but don’t count on it.
Big Red Heimdall sez, "UPDATE YOUR DAMN BLOG!" And so, a screenshot post. I’ve got a couple months worth, this could be fun. As always, click to embiggen, or hover to read snarky alt text..
First up, one of my favorite sights in WoW: a dead Rotface. As of last night, Caffeine has officially put him on farm status.
Before leaving Kael’thas, I did finally (finally) get my last book for Higher Learning. I’ve since ran into at least four people doing some, uh, adult RPing in the Archmage’s room.
I also went and sat on the throne in Blackrock Depths. Think that’s enough to declare myself king?
This is how I get psyched to fight Deathbringer Saurfang.
Noticed while leveling my baby warrior: is it just me, or does that tower in the distance kinda look like…? Naaaah, couldn’t be.
Truthfully I don’t know why I took this one. I think it’s because it was raining in Stratholme? Either way. It might make a good blog header, if I cropped it a bit…
Or perhaps I should edit it to showcase King Ymiron’s taste in art.
Just do your best to pretend that’s actually a picture of Rotface being downed by my guild on our last attempt of the night and not a picture of Rotface rotated 90 degrees, would you kindly? We forgot to take a screenshot, and besides, my toon was piss-drunk off of an entire Brewfest Pony Keg, because I was thoroughly sick and tired of staring at Rotface and his chin-dick and his angry poo-poos and "Good news everyone! The slime is flowing again!"
And now we get to do it all over again this week. It’s cool, though, we’ve totally got him on farm now. Totally. /cough
A couple tips to my death knight brethren (and a few for anyone) who might, in the course of tanking, end up kiting slimes on Rotface. Especially new tanks, like yours truly. These are all from personal experience, so I’m sure others will have other things to add.
This is one of the places in Icecrown where Unholy truly shines. Bone Shield will give you a 20% damage reduction while it’s up, meaning you can usually run through the slime pipes (though not the slime from the oozes!) with relative impunity, Magic Suppression (if you’re talented into it) will lessen the damage you take from most things in the fight (though not the Big Ooze’s melee abilities… that thing hurts like a bitch), and Anti-Magic Zone (if you’re talented into that) has a couple uses that maybe aren’t so obvious:
Making it really obvious where you are. This is a no-brainer, especially if you have someone who gets caught up in the moment and runs totally the wrong way. "Head for the big pink bubble!" works a lot better than "Come to me!" when there’s slime flying everywhere.
Protecting raiders during the merge. If you manage to get a merge where you can actually stand still – doable if someone merges their slime into the exploding slime, meaning you’ve only got 1 or 2 immediately afterwards – sometimes it can take people a second or two to get started. If the bubble’s popped on top of them while you’re trying to get the Big Ooze’s attention, you might save them a tick or two of radiation.
Death and Decay is really, really effective for getting threat on Big Oozes – they’re not the fastest creatures in the world, and will soak up several ticks on the run. It’s even more useful later in the fight, when there will almost inevitably be two Big Oozes up at once (especially late in the fight, when he starts pooping oozes out like mad). If you have the tanking 2T10 bonus, this is probably the one place it’s actually useful. (I kid. It’s never useful. It’s downright awful. It’s Glyph of Death and Decay.)
If for some reason you haven’t already, turn on nameplates. And get really, really good at targeting correctly and taunting on the run – if you need to get an ooze out of the center, the last thing you need is to miss and accidentally have Rotface running at you. (This is really a good tip for all tanks, I guess.)
Chains of Ice works on the little slimes. Useful to pin them in place before dragging your Big Ooze over them.
And probably the biggest Rotface tip I can give, to anyone of any class on any difficulty:
Stay calm. I can’t stress this enough. The more that your nerves or anyone else’s get jangled, the more likely someone is to make a boneheaded mistake and cause a wipe. Rotface is, above all else, about flawless execution (or as close to it as you can get). If there are multiple wipes and you can tell things are getting tense, give people a short de-stressing break. If your raid needs to constantly be doing something, and if you haven’t done it yet, we found killing Sister Svalna to be a useful way to get away from Rotface for a little while.
A digression: This is not about anything new. This is just me being mildly nostalgic.
Though my current account says December ‘07, I actually started playing WoW in the fall of ‘05. Specifically, sometime around Patch 1.8.0 or its successors – I know it was just prior to the opening of the gates. I had graduated from college, and got in touch with a friend of mine who’d moved out west to pursue a graduate degree at the Colorado School of Mines. We were chatting about various things we’d done together in college (memorable D&D games, etc.) and she told me that she’d recently started playing World of Warcraft at the urging of her new boyfriend and really loved it, and that I should totally check it out. I don’t remember my excuse for putting it off, but I had one, and I managed to stick to it until one day in Best Buy, when I walked by and saw that World of Warcraft really wasn’t all that expensive. Huh, I thought. Maybe this’ll give me something to do. (I was in kind of a console game – and MMO – slump at the time, having burnt out on Final Fantasy XI.) So I picked it up, took it home, installed it on my creaky little Mac Mini G4, and dived headfirst into World of Warcraft.
I don’t remember my first character’s name or the ones immediately following him, and I kind of regret that, but from day 1, I played Horde. My very first character was an undead rogue on Feathermoon, and I didn’t let my friend know about him – just yet. After all, I wasn’t sure I was gonna stick to this game or not. I remember falling in love with the areas around Deathknell and Brill, and how cool it was that I could jump (veterans of FFXI and Guild Wars may understand my amazement as well). I gleefully remember stealthing up to that little camp of Scarlets and stabbity-stabbing them to death, and I probably got my rogue to level 5 or 6 before deciding to try a second class.
My friend, Cassie, was a tauren druid. So I figured, why not? I rolled a tauren druid. Mulgore totally has a different flavor, and by now the variety had gotten me hooked. Cassie hooked me up with some leather gear and other generic piles of mats so I could level my own leatherworking, as well as some low-level greens, and I plowed through early quests in Mulgore and found my way into the Barrens. I remember using my newfound jumping skills (shut up) to get around to the guys above Wailing Caverns, before I had ever realized what an instance was (or that Wailing Caverns was an instance). I also remember that I had the pattern for a Deviate Scale Belt (I believe Cassie or her now-husband had blendered that instance for me so I could do some quests), and that I really, really wanted to make myself a Deviate Scale Belt – all by my lonesome. Self-sufficiency was the name of the game.
Have you spotted the problem yet? This was a long time before Patch 2.4, which would turn all the elites outside instance into non-elites… and no one had ever explained to me what that little gold circle meant. (I just thought it meant they had better loot.) So here I am, a little bitty druid around 15 or so, with what I’m sure was an absolutely moronic selection of gear (I didn’t know yet how utterly useless Spirit was), trying to solo elites – sometimes 2 and 3 at a time. However, I never gave up, at least until I did. I concluded that I sucked at this game, and wasn’t any good at it, and that’s the story of how a Deviate Scale Belt made me quit WoW.
At least until December 2007. I’d built a new rig earlier in the year – a fairly powerful one, to replace my stolen MacBook and underwhelming desktop – and had Gamestop gift cards, and that 19.99 Classic + TBC battlechest called my name…
How did you get started playing WoW? What kind of boneheaded mistakes did you make as a newbie? We were all there once, after all.
So that’s been making the rounds, so there you go. I love it, especially Illidan’s little cameo, and – oh God – is Archimonde humping the World Tree? What has been seen cannot be unseen.
After finishing up my Fool for Love requirements, I finally took the jump yesterday and made my second spec a tank spec. My primary spec for raiding, at least for the last two weeks, has been a variant of Gravity’s single-target raid blood spec – somewhat adjusted for AOE, by moving 3 out of Spell Deflection and into Morbidity, like so. I may just end up copying Gravity entirely, though; I just informed my raid that my AOE would suck, and they adjusted accordingly. Second tank was a bear, and the two of us took it up to the plague wing, so I’d call it at least a moderate success. Also through Sister Svalna and, for a change, took a poke at Valithria Dreamwalker. I can also DPS in this spec if I absolutely have to, like last night when we 7-manned (or 8-manned, my memory’s fuzzy) XT for the weekly (just under the wire).
My other spec is now a pretty stock 2H Frost with IIT build. This one is explicitly for five mans; it ends up with about 1000 less health than the blood build, and in my opinion feels moderately squishier, but in heroics that hardly matters – it’s just being able to build snap AOE threat, and that’s one thing this build excels at (barring, of course, stupid DPS – like the fury warrior I ran DTK with yesterday who insisted on, if I paused for a second to get HB or DnD, pulling himself with Heroic Throw > Charge > Whirlwind. I should’ve let him tank, by which I mean tank the floor, more often than I already did).
I guess that’s that, then. No real progress to speak of, a few new shinies on my equipment list but I still can’t get rid of those damned blue boots. It’s starting to get a little ridiculous. At this point I’d put just about anything in that spot. Wish me boot mojo!
Okay, look, I get that a lot of you might need some help death knighting. It can be a confusing experience to be thrown headlong 55 levels into a class that only starts with a whopping 3 more abilities than your average level 1 new toon. I get it. It’s cool. You and I, we understand each other. That’s why lots of those searches lead here.
What I don’t get are people asking me – and judging from the searches that somehow refer readers to this blog, a lot of you would like to ask me – where Stratholme is.
How can you not find Stratholme on a damned map? Here’s a quiz: look at a map of the Eastern Plaguelands. Where is Stratholme?
It’s right here.
It’s right here.
IT IS RIGHT THE HELL HERE.
LEARN TO READ A MAP.
P.S. Technically, it is also right here:
… but if you can’t even find the front door, you’ve got no business going in the back.
Got unexpectedly pulled in to tank in ICC-10 when a spot opened up and I was on standby. I probably should’ve passed to the other person who could’ve tanked and was also on standby, because holy shit I am not ready for that place yet. Especially Deathbringer Saurfang. After several valiant attempts, including two glorious screwups by me (one of which involved Heimdall tanking Saurfang solo for about 3 minutes straight while I chewed on the pile of bones that was accumulating at our feet), we wandered over to ToC-10 instead so that I could work on gear and Malak – the aforementioned other tank – could work on tanking experience (along with me apologizing copiously for not being ready yet).
Apparently ToC-10 is more my speed! Definitely felt less like I was flailing like a roper at my keyboard. Gormok is a decent way to learn at least the tank portion of the fight – obviously it doesn’t compare on the DPS end, but the coordination of switching off at X time is pretty similar, but less of an emergency. Malak and I seem to be able to out-threat each other when we have to when switching, as well, which is nice. Made it to Faction Champions before a variety of non-fight-related issues (sleepiness, weird lag issues, etc.) knocked us out for the night.
So yeah. It was a learning experience! This weekend, since SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010 is supposedly on its way, I’ll be taking the opportunity to do things I want to do that don’t include raiding, including grinding mass numbers of badges, trying to pug a VoA or something of that nature, possibly transferring and leveling my shaman or warrior, or … other things. I dunno.
Oh! Before I forget: does anyone know how to get Skada to show threat? I switched from Recount to Skada since Recount seems to be all over the boards sometimes, and while I was able to get it to show DPS, Skada has never once shown me anything except a blank window when I’m looking at threat. I suspect I may have a setting switched on that is causing it to get ignored or somesuch, so if anyone has a good intro to using Skada, I’d appreciate it.
After chatting with Miss Hydra for three or four hours about my financial woes (my own economic stimulus bootstrapping plan is now underway), it was time to go home and – yes – raid. Wait, what? Well, yes, a few of you may have noticed my DK’s unexpected name change from Rajaat to Ambassador (that’s Ambassador Ambassador to you) and server move to Khaz Modan, where he is in a 30-day trial run to join the team at Caffeine. Last night was my first step into Icecrown, where I began immediately sucking up the plate loot like a $30 hooker, good-naturedly picking on the raid leader for dying to a cleave (and trying to get me cleaved in the process), and — oh yeah — I also I died to Icecrown Frogger, because with two new two-handedweapons, a pair of plate boots, and an Ashen Verdict ring to tide me over until the Strength one, I couldn’t run out of the way of those pesky steam vents. Whoops! One well-steamed loot whore, coming right up.
In other words, it was a great experience. I did feel a little bad soaking up that much loot on day 1, but there was only one piece that anyone else even rolled on – Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling – and as a ret pally, he was kind enough to defer it to me so that I could gear up my … wait for it … tank set.
That’s right, yours truly is working on tanking. I’ve had a long history of DPSing. I originally intended to roll my death knight to tank all along, but once he hit 80, my first raiding guild found that they already had enough tanks (a pally, a warrior, another DK, and maybe even a bear?) and so I was shuffled into DPS. And thus my DPS set grew leaps and bounds ahead of my tank set, while I still soaked up pieces from 10-man Naxx as well as the stuff no one else wanted. In every other guild I joined, the story was the same: I was needed for my DPS, because there were sufficient tanks. And so it continued: my DPS set continued to get constant upgrades, while my tank set suffered for it. For a while I didn’t even like tanking, or so I told myself, but the random heroics have changed all that. They reminded me of the times in Naxx, in OS, even the few off-tanking opportunities I had in Ulduar. But the intention and the skill (and the learning from Gravity) don’t mean much if you don’t have the gear to support it…
…but hey, you can always buy, craft, or farm new gear.
It’s no secret that for the finer things in WoW, cash is involved. Nothing puts a strain on your pocket like raiding repair bills, trying to gem and enchant the upgrades you do get, trying to buy things to buff up sets (why the hell are most of the good plate tanking pieces in three slots only craftable?), and trying to complete time-and-money-sink achievements that you can’t afford to put money into anymore… argh!
A while ago, in a post on my new UI, I posted this screenshot, which includes a little peek into my wallet. See 353 gold shown in that bar in Fortress? That’s basically what I have on my toon at all times.
Let that sink in, because as far as I can tell, no one really understands that. "Oh, well you can just pick up blahblahblah for cheap." No I fucking can’t, pardon my French.
I’m in a near-permanent state where single epic gems are expensive, some enchants are unbuyable, the craftables from Crusader’s Orbs are out of reach even after getting emblems to get the orbs (and even one piece of Primal Saronite is way beyond my budget). Darkmoon Cards are unpurchasable. Essentially I manage to keep enough to repair after raids or astoundingly bad heroics, stock up on consumables again, and then that’s it.
I have neither the patience nor the intelligence to play the Auction House. I’ve tried it – I’ve followed the advice of Arthas-damned Auctioneer geniuses and I lose money, every single time. I don’t know what to farm because I have no idea what I should be farming. I can’t fund myself entirely through dailies like I used to in TBC (this is not a new problem, in case it wasn’t obvious – I had to borrow 500g to even get epic flying for my DK, and that was the most gold I’d ever had, at any one point, ever.)
Essentially, readers, despite how good I am at everything else, I am an abysmal failure at making money in WoW and I don’t know how to improve that.
I was chatting with some people on Vent the other night when it came up with one guy was having a problem: both SimulationCraft and Rawr (fine tools in their own right, don’t get me wrong!) seemed to be low-balling his death knight’s DPS – by at least 1000 dps in some cases! So when I mentioned Kahorie’s DK Simulator, I was a little surprised when I was met with first dead air, then "huh? What’s that?"
Well, I smell a post. Let’s get started with a quick tour of Kahorie’s fine, fine tool!
Caveat: I use Windows. I am not a Mac person anymore, though not by choice. Anyway – these instructions should work fine on a Mac if you use BootCamp or some sort of tool that lets you use Windows apps on OS X – Parallels and VMware Fusion both being popular choices. It’s not a terribly complex app, and if you can run .NET apps, you can run this sim.
First things first, you need to download the simulator. On the downloads tab, you’ll see a big list of downloads – but the only one you need to worry about is the very first one, Kahorie’s DK Simulator.zip, because it always points to the newest version. Unzip it, and place the folder inside somewhere convenient – your desktop, a downloads folder. There’s no installer to run – open up this folder, and look for this icon, then double-click it. Kahorie’s DK Simulator runs right out of the box. (Yours probably won’t have a little green checkmark on it – mine does, because I keep my simulator stored in my Dropbox, which is a whole ‘nother story altogether.)
A digression: This is not about anything new. This is just me being mildly nostalgic.
It’s no secret that for the finer things in WoW, cash is involved. Nothing puts a strain on your pocket like raiding repair bills, trying to gem and enchant the upgrades you do get, trying to buy things to buff up sets (why the hell are most of the good plate tanking pieces in three slots only craftable?), and trying to complete time-and-money-sink achievements that you can’t afford to put money into anymore… argh!
