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So much for that then July 24, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gear, Instances, Paladin, World of Warcraft , add a comment

After my last post you can imagine my surprise when logging into WoW 5mins before raid time hoping to maybe run Kara that I saw the guild message of the day saying we were doing Magtheridon.  I quickly flicked up the guild roster to see that we had 20 people online, which I’ve not seen for a while.  So yeah, so much for never seeing 25 mans again.

I’m happy to say that we got him down on the third attempt, after some bad luck on the first attempt with the cave in coinciding with a blast nova and then one of our cube clickers lagging right before a blast nova on the second try.  No loots for me there but he doesn’t actually drop anything I want now anyway, my chest is better than the T4 one now.

In recruitment news, we seem to have paladins growing out of our ears now.  There were a total of 6 paladins in that raid, four of them holy.  I wouldn’t mind this so much if they weren’t all so much better geared than me.  As it seems we’re picking up stragglers from all through Tier 4, 5 and 6 we’ve got some people with very nice gear, some for more than one spec and it is making me feel a little inadequate. I am slightly doubting whether I’m up to this hardcore raiding malarkey - I got called out twice before the raid about the lack of enchants on my gear, which is of course a very fair criticism. My main issue with the enchanting of gear is the difficulty of finding an enchanter. I seriously can’t wait till WotLK where enchants will be trade able on the auction house, once that happens you can pretty much guarantee that my gear will be enchanted up as I have no problem spending money at the auction house so simply.

After downing Maggy we got two Karazhan groups together and headed in.  As not everyone had that much time we only did the first 3 bosses. However, I’m very pleased to say that the lil Paladin wannabe - The Maiden of Virtue - finally dropped the Shard of the Virtuous and so that is one slot finally epiced out.  As I intend to get this enchanted I decided not to continue saving for the badge healing mace and instead spent it on the belt instead and also bought an epic gem to help pay for said enchants.

Overall, a pretty satisfying WoW evening. It looks like I may get to see SSC and TK once more, perhaps even Hyjal and BT one day…

Zul’Aman = Cleared July 20, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gaming, Instances, Paladin, World of Warcraft , add a comment

Tonight I took part in my personal first downing of Zul’Jin.  This means that I’ve personally cleared Zul’Aman.  Surprisingly, the fight is kinda easier than I expected. As our raid leader was saying whilst we tried to down the previous boss, Zul’Jin is probably a bit easier.  It’s only his very last phase that gave us any trouble and we downed him at some point around attempt number 5.

Nothing interesting dropped of course but the 3 badges are always nice.

This puts my personal raid progression at

When I first dreamt of how awesome raiding must be, I never even imagined that I would get into the 25 mans, never mind all the way in to Tier 5. As things happen, it may be that I don’t get to see another 25 man until wrath.  Unfortunate drama within the guild (which I wasn’t present for and don’t really know what happened) caused a chunk of the raiders to leave and summer brought about inactivity in more.  We do have a core set of raiders big enough to do 10 mans successfully but I know most of us would love to be killing the big targets in the 25 mans. Our active raiders are trickling away but they are also being replaced. Tonights raid had two trial members in it, the same classes as the two core raiders we recently lost, and both of them seemed to perform very well in their roles so there is still hope to get back on our feet.

A nice Deadmines surprise July 3, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Instances, World of Warcraft , add a comment

I’m a registered Altoholic and primarly play Alliance so naturally I’ve done Deadmines a lot across many characters, and I do mean a lot. I ran my friend through it so many times to try and get twink drops for his warrior it was insane. From this long history (well, y’know, as long as it can be for just over a year of playing) I’ve come to expect the worst from your typical Deadmines PuG. So when I get a whisper from a level 15 warrior I don’t have great optimism for the potential of completing the dungeon.

It didn’t look any better once I was in the group, we had me playing my level 19 warlock alt (who I’m really enjoying at the moment), another warlock- level 18, a mage - level 19 and a level 19 ret paladin serving as a healer. Given that, I was worried this was gonna be a complete waste of time.

We actually managed to get through the whole thing, without a single wipe, or at least without a full graveyard run since we had soulstones and used some sneaky tactics. Using a combination of off tanking using my Voidwalker we managed to get through most of the situations. I was having to use every warlock tool available to keep things in check and it made for a very fun experience. The fact that it took 2 and a half hours doesn’t even bother me because it was such a satisfying experience. I was also pleasently surprised that I managed to pick up the Emberstone Staff, even despite the caster competition for it.

Who knew it was even possible to complete Deadmines with a level 15 tank (who did ding 16 during the run)?

On this note, I’m having a lot of fun on this warlock. I’ve gotten a warlock to 19 before (blood elf female, not really keen on the character and also horde side so not much use for farming) and it was alright but this time round I’m really enjoying the play style, I may actually try and keep it up, it’s good soloin’ fun

25 man fun June 5, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gear, Instances, Paladin, World of Warcraft , add a comment

And no, it was not a gay orgy.

So tonight I got to see 25 man bosses going down, for the first time ever.  We started out doing Magtheridon, which we managed to one shot and I managed to survive and keep those being healed by me alive despite absolutely crippling lag.  It got pretty tense approaching the cave in but we got through it.  One of the 3 tokens was the Paladin one, my last blue is my chest so I could really use it.  Unfortunately, due to it being my first 25 man raid kill I didn’t really understand the bidding system, nor did I actually know how much DKP I had anyway, so it went to a shaman.

My lag seemed to be improving at this point and we headed to Gruul’s lair.  Mualgar went down on the second try, I’m not entirely sure what happened the first go, I was happily healing my hunter duo when I was 2 shot by Mualgar himself.  Next try was much more textbook, except of course that I disconnected the very second the pull was made.  The mage tank stayed alive through my DC (I’m not sure how exactly, as it was my target and no one elses - I guess the others just picked him up) and we got him down.  He again dropped the paladin tokens, this time I bid but I was against 2 shaman this time and they seemed keener to lose their DKP, it wasn’t a huge upgrade for me so I let it go.

Gruul took a little more convincing to get down.  Since it was my first time fighting him (same with mualgar but that seemed much simpler for the healer) I was worried that I would mess up on the fight.  After quite a few wipes the raid leader took all the trial members out of the raid, people were dying on shatter and since they had 21 manned Gruul for a few weeks now it seemed worth taking people out in order to get him down. After this we wiped a couple more times and then did get him down.  Again, the paladin token dropped and this time I bid and won.  It wasn’t really a massive upgrade but I really wanted to get some Tier gear as I’ve not had any before.

There was also some fun drama loot, the Dragonspine Trophy dropped (for those who don’t know, its a very good trinket, it may be best or 2nd best in slot for a few classes, I know its the reason why guilds that outgear the encounter by far still come back and do it) and it seemed most of the physical dps wanted to get their hands on it.  These problems were fueled by the DKP manager saying that DKP was allowed to go as far into minus numbers as they liked, essentially the bidding war could feasibly continue forever.  It was eventually sorted by the guild leader cutting in and giving it to the person with the highest DKP. Really, there was nothing else that could be done and any other way would have just resulted in one person with a massive DKP debt and a whole load of disgruntled dps.

Once I got out I shelled out a good 320g to get a Golden Spellthread to put on my new legs. 30 DKP and 320g for about +25 heal upgrade and a little bit of mana and hp. I guess those kinds of gains means I really am into endgame.

Ok computer, it’s on June 2, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gaming, Instances, Rants, Technology, World of Warcraft , add a comment

After buying a new graphics card and then finding out that I don’t have the right slot for it. Simply put I made a bad assumption that my computer was built at all in a way that would allow it to be upgraded when in fact it seems more like they cut as many corners as they could. I was hoping to get a quick and cheap upgrade to my computer to keep it going till at least this time next year but it wasn’t to be. As I essentially spent £50 on something useless I decided that now would be a good time to do what I’ve been saying for a while that I would - build my own computer.

Doing some eBay based price research revealed that the cost of buying the parts to assemble myself came up to about the same amount as buying a computer of the spec I want but without the graphics card (or actually just with a not very good graphics card as all the ones I’ve seen have ones included), perhaps a little bit more. I figure that paying a bit more to get exactly what I want as well as the experience of putting it all together is worth it.

Todays raiding experience has highlighted the need for this new computer.

As I had not been experiencing the persistent crashes - the computer just restarts for no good reason, error report contains the most useless crap reason it pulled out of its “We dunno what happened so here is something random we noticed” bag - recently I kinda thought maybe they had fixed themselves, as these things sometimes do. Alas today I was shown this clearly wasn’t the case. Before the raid started I got the first restart, then again after releasing spirit after the first wipe and then a further time after just having got back into Serpentshrine Cavern (my first time in there, kinda cool, didn’t down any bosses but that’s the way it is sometimes) again after a wipe. This combined with the other graphics card bugs puts a level of urgency on a new computer.

Not to mention, <20fps looks fucking awful.

Cleaning up May 29, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gear, Instances, Paladin, World of Warcraft , add a comment

Just finished an evening of Karazhan with the guild.  We had the people to do two simultaneous teams which is quite promising, we could maybe have pushed 22 or so people.  As such I got the rare event of being the only paladin in my raid which although isn’t normally a particularly uncommon thing I would imagine we have quite a few active paladins so I’m very rarely alone.

The run itself was a breeze, one shotted every boss and I picked up a couple of bits and pieces as well as badges of course. I didn’t pick up any straight upgrades and am still in desperate need of a new weapon, trinket and chest but its all good otherwise.  One thing I really do need is to enchant more of my gear, I really dislike enchanting generally because of the necessary requirement of having contact with the enchanter themselves. It’s just irritating finding a person who can do the enchant, giving them the materials etc.  I wish Blizzard would just hurry the hell up and implement auction house sellable enchants (which they showed they could do in the Arena tournament realms).

In other WoW news, I experience my first 25 man this week, Magtheridon’s Lair.  It would seem that during my time away from WoW my guild has progressed as far as downing the Tier 4 25 mans which is pretty cool really, I’m very pleased with the speed of our progress.  The only downside of this is that I’m starting to feel under geared again, as I was when I joined.  Before I went on my break I was actually one of the better geared healers in the guild, despite starting behind the others.  Now I’m a little bit behind although I’ve healed through the first 4 bosses of Zul’Aman and by the opinion of Be.Imba I shouldn’t even be able to perform at all.  I guess I must be alright at this healing malarkey after all.

Back to what I was actually going to talk about - my first experience of 25 man raiding was pretty chaotic, there was damage appearing everywhere and of course I’m just freaking out because I start to forget that there are 6 other healers helping me deal with it all.  I think I am, at heart, still a 5 man healer but it is being flushed out of me, albeit rather slowly.  We didn’t manage to down big ol Maggy but we were already trying to 22 man it so I’m not really disheartened.  We also didn’t get that many attempts on him because people were needing to go, I think a few more gos and we would have had him as all the problems that we had got dealt with very quickly generally.

I’m really enjoying the raiding with my guild and although I don’t really make any effort to make myself a part of the social side I do enjoy being in the company of the people in the guild.  A lot of them to remind me of the more ambitious people I knew in Runescape, I think there is some kind of hardcore inclined gamer stereotype which just pops up everywhere and it’s kinda interesting to see that here in quite a different environment.