Phunny Friday

I’ve been doing a lot of leveling of my Paladin lately; she’s made it to level 40 and gotten her fast ground mount recently.

Since I’ve been spending a lot of time on her seeing and doing new content to me at least, I wanted a way to capture her milestones, so I got this great addon Multishot. Unfortunately, it doesn’t remove the UI from the screenshots and I’ve not taken the time to figure out some way of quickly closing everything, so I’ve gotten a lot of great Achievement shots some of which have unintended extraneous windows open!

As part of my leveling I’ve gotten a couple of guildies that happened to be able to run me through Scarlet Monastery (SM), so I’ve decided to collect the whole Scarlet set; still waiting to pick up the Scarlet Belt, Scarlet Boots and Scarlet Chestpiece. Do you think they’ll laugh my Holy pally self out of the bg’s if I show up in the whole set, even if at level 40 I’m topping the Healing Charts?

Also, my guild has some of the weirdest conversations in gChat, somehow the conversation went from the fact that the Alliance can get a certain fishing achievement easier than the Horde by doing a certain NR quest, to the fact that Thrall is awesome and can do no wrong (being a Shaman and all), to the lowbie Alliance Kobold quest (“you no take candle!”), and finally to how un-random the early Outlands dungeon finder options can be (Ramparts anyone?). All of this in the space of 15 minutes or so while I was wandering around the Ghostlands doing the quests for Loremaster on my druid… I couldn’t believe the train of thought that went into that conversation so much that I screenshot it for our guild portal. Anyone else find themselves doing this?

The Paper, Rock, Scissors of WoW

Do you remember back when 60 was the 80? Did you do the “High Warlord” grind? I never experienced it since I didn’t start playing until Wrath of the Lich King hit the scene, but I hear the stories from my guildies. Recently, while browsing the realm forum I came across this signature:

“Paper is fine, but nerf rock!” — Scissors

It reminded me of my guildies’ stories about the PvP scene during “vanilla” wow. So I bring you this video, which should bring back some memories if you’ve been playing this game that long:

The New UI

Patch 3.3 brought us several new UI features, the least of which is the Looking For Dungeon tool that I talked about last week. However, several of the other features that haven’t gotten as much web coverage include the Quest Tool, Unit Nameplates, Buffs and Debuffs, and Macro/Code Changes.

The Quest Tool is useful for an uninitiated beginning player that is not aware of the availability of Addons, but has some bugs when interacting with other Addons. My first reaction to this new Quest Tool was that I would finally be able to get away from using a fairly simple but wonderful plugin for Cartographer. Cartographer_QuestInfo. However, when I went to do some starter zone quests for a horde reputation I found that the new ingame Quest Tool did not provide the same level of questing support as my old plugins. Furthermore, the map overlapped the frame and quest description resulting in an un-usable map. I solved this by turning off the “Look and Feel” module for Cartographer, so that the ingame frames are used, but all of the other useful components from Cartographer are available.

Unit Nameplates can now be seen at an increased range of 40 yards, which could be interesting from a healing standpoint, as most of your standard heals have a 30-40 yard range. Furthermore, they are now subject to line-of-sight limitations, but for those healers who spend time in PvP they can still be seen around Arena pillars. Unfortunately, unit nameplates for critters are never displayed now, so good luck doing quests like Gluttonous Lurkers in Zul’Drak, it was so much easier to find and click-on the nameplates rather than the critter itself. Another new option available in the Display settings is the ability to toggle whether or not unit nameplates overlap.

A new section for Buffs and Debuffs has been added to Interface Options in your control panel. This new section has two new options: Castable Debuffs and Consolidate Buffs. Enabling the castable debuffs, will cause only the debuffs you have cast on an enemy target to appear in your target debuffs. The Consolidate Buffs option addes a consolidation box which filters short and long term buffs to show only short term buffs, buffs about to expire, limited range buffs, and important procs. These changes shouldn’t have impacted your Buff Watch Addons, but could result in some interesting changes to them in the future so keep a watch out for updates by the Addon authors.

There is now a change for all macro users, the symbol “@” was added to replace “target=” and reduce the number of characters taken up by that conditional. Furthermore, there are some new commands available including: “vehicleui” and “unithasvehicleui”.

Finally, another addon code addition is the “QuerQuestsCompleted” event for all those Loremaster folks to finally determine which quests have been completed. As I’ve recently decided to attempt the Loremaster achievement before [the] Cataclysm hits, I went on a search for an Addon to assist with this project and was fairly pleased with the Addon EveryQuest. It just provides a list of quests that are completed, in progress, or not completed in a simple window with a drop-down option for each zone. I still had to use Thottbot to find out how to acquire and complete the outstanding quests in the list, but at least I had a starting point.

Healing Basics Flowchart

I present to you as the first of my flowchart and funnies Friday submissions:

The New Content

Happy New Year folks! Yes, it’s taken a long time for me to return to my blog, but I traveled much of the holiday season. In fact, I think my time played during the holidays was something like 2 hours total. However, during my away time I’ve had a chance to compose some posts to provide slightly more regular content (my new year’s resolution). My biggest problem with providing regular content (besides time constraints) is writing to a topic and not just stream of consciousness, so I’ve created an internal organization that should become obvious as my posts start going up. So now my thoughts on the new Patch 3.3 content…

In the Sky With Diamonds

I was going to post on my experiences with Patch 3.3, but recent discussions in guild chat have centered around gemming for healers (especially with the new patch), so it received a little higher priority. My next post should contain thoughts on the Winter Veil events and Patch 3.3.

Blogging the Big One

Since it’s a day of downtime, I, like many other players, spend my time waiting for the realms by reading forums and blogs. Of course, this is a particularly important maintenance day because if you haven’t heard PATCH 3.3 IS TODAY.

So while waiting for my chance to check out the new content, I’ll browse the blogs for all of the little morsels I can get my hands on. Unfortunately, my feed reader has grown by leaps and bounds since I started my own blog to the point that I login to google reader to over 586 new posts (most of which are meta content blogs though). I bet you can’t guess which ones I go to first? Yes, they are Jong at Forbearance, Gnomer and Squidly at Armaggedon’s coming, Big Bear Butt, and Miss Medicina. Now looking at this list I asked myself what do they have in common that draws me to them in particular? It’s that they all provide content in an amusing or antecdotal manner. These folks and several others bring a smile or a “huh” to every post that will draw the readers to them.

Just as Medicina has re-evaluated the purpose of her blog, what kind of content do I want my blog to provide? And are my spotty posts though they may be providing a smile or a “huh” to any readers that may stumble across my blog? I recognize that my posts arrive once a week if that, but I seem to write posts at certain times on certain days and don’t get a chance to otherwise. Aside from my horrible timing, what can I “do better” with my blog? Well, I need to find what my blog is – aside from the obvious healing centered content. So, if I look at my content up to this point and factor in what “I like to read” in a blog post; I need to bring more of my humor and anecdotal moments into my posts. In fact, in guild I’m known for bringing up the bad puns and funny quotes from videos, which needs to show it’s face in my posts. So along with my goal of providing more posts, I have a goal to write content that brings a smile or a “huh” to the reader.

By the way:

• Jong, The Best Kind of Night Club in Azeroth I found on my lowbie alliance druid the other day: check out the dance floors in The Stockade, no, really, it does look like a dance club.
• You Silly Gnome, why my Resto Shaman just hit 80 and will be hanging out on my blog more as I get her geared up in 3.3.
• BBB, I’m sorry that real life and WoW collided like they did for you, we all go through those times and I’m sure your guildies will understand.
• Medicina, when next your Head Meets the Keyboard, don’t despair you are not the only one with imprints of keys on your forehead.

Ohh, another post by Jong or Megan just popped up in my feed reader! Now I’ll leave my readers to enjoy the wonderful posts out there in the blogsphere…

Holiday Shenanigans

From this post I hope it becomes clear that my holiday was eventful and fun filled and hence the lack of posting. I had very little internet time due to travel and family so what time I had was spent in game grinding away because I wanted my pet turkey.  Which I got along with the title!

Raid 4 the Cure

Thanks to the Sidhe Devils of Kael’thas (US) for organizing an amazing in-game event, Raid for the Cure. I also wanted to dedicate my participation to my mother who is currently undergoing treatment for Breast Cancer and is expected to finish treatment in December. Here are the highlights as captured by one of the crowd…

In case you’re wondering who I was in that mass, I participated as an alliance druid “Kahiau” in honor of Julie being alliance…

What an amazing event and best wishes to all of those undergoing treatment and the survivors of a disease that can’t be acleansed and there is no rez for…

Update

I’ve been trying to write a minimum of one post a week and eventually work up to more regular posts, we’ll see if I ever manage it with all of the RL stuff I always run into.  This week has been no less exciting for me in game than it has in terms of RL, so I wanted to share my “updates” for this week.

First, when patch 3.2 hit our raid nights increased from 1 night a week to 2 nights a week to allow us to get in time on both finishing Ulduar and try out Trial of Champions.  Yes, we may be months behind most guilds but for being a strict 10-man, 1 night a week raid guild, we make fast progress. This week our hard work finally paid off, last night I got this little gem:

The wall for us last week was the Twin Valkyries, accidentally in our 3rd try last night some strategies changed during the wipe and lo-and-behold I saw something that had a potential of working for us. I mentioned it to the guild in vent and this resulted in a slightly wacky strategy that omg did it finally click for us. After the high wore off we were looking at calling it for the night and thought we would try out Anub once to see the fight, and what do you know, we One-Shot that bug! The healing for the Twin Valkyries certainly is made for druids, and of course this run had two druids so soaking up those orbs was made easier. Also, not sure how most guilds heal Anub, but third phase would be interesting without Wild Growth. Now, we just need to finish off that horrible robot Mimiron in Ulduar…

Secondly, I decided to schedule an “Old Skool” raid night last weekend in which we hit up Zul’aman and Gruul’s Lair. We took a guildie’s lowbie alt into each of them and picked up some leveling upgrades for them (and some xp). Everyone had a good time and I think it’s something that we will continue doing about once a month to give some of us new players a chance to see all of the old instances before Cataclysm changes everything.

Finally, once my Shaman hit Northrend I’ve slowed down on PvP leveling her since I have several guildies with alts in the same level range we can often throw together a mostly at level group to do a reg instance which far surpasses any xp I might get from PvP. However, my available leveling time on her has decreased as well so I’m still at level 75. Interestingly, since I hit NR and I’m dual spec’d elemental/restoration I find myself mostly leveling in elemental and only switching over to restoration if I’m grouped with guildies or planning on doing a series of bgs. In those cases I’ll run around questing even as restoration rather than switching back and forth between the two constantly.