I’m not dead…

I’m just in school until the end of July.

What?

Yeah.

I’m finishing my Associates degree that I started back in 1997. Better late than never, right?

The perils of flying, or WTF I’M STUCK IN A TREE!?

I really like heading into Dalaran in Flight Form and parachuting down. It’s one of those little joys I get from WoW, and the city really does look lovely from that angle.

However, I was not aware of all the risks involved. We all know lag spikes can be dangerous things, even deadly at times. When combined with the mechanics involved in parachuting down to an unknown landing area, there are things you need to be aware of.

Such as trees.

When one’s hooves are firmly implanted into the trunk of a tree, even Auto-Unstuck may not be of any help. This is of particular importance now that joining a battleground deposits you squarely in the same location when you leave as you were when you entered, and when one’s Hearthstone has signigicant time remaining on its cooldown.

Thanks to the kindness of my friends, who banded together and summoned me to Orgrimmar, I was able to free myself from the grasp of this wretched tree.

Please don’t let this happen to you.

This Public Service Announcement was paid for by the Northrend Transportation Safety Administration. The more you know!

How soon is now?

Yeah, I went 80s on yo’ punk ass. And what, bitch?

I saaaaid I’d have more to write Soon™, and apparently that time is upon us. Upon me? Us? Whatever.

So now, on to some updates.

Back when our management team over at Unemployed was doing the whole “preparing for new content patch” stuff, we made a point of stressing to our raiders that we’d be pushing Hard Modes (and Achievements, too, where applicable) in Ulduar. We’re not really a server first kill sort of guild, but we enjoy challenges and challenging ourselves.

We had a guild meeting to lay out our goals and direction for T8, and with help from Miss Tigerfeet we have snazzy new graphics and added Hard Modes to the progression images on our guild site. It’s nothing major, but seeing that we’re tracking progression not only based on kills but also kills under certain conditions helps drive home the point.

Ulduar! It’s beautiful.

*wipes tear from eye*

The first week in was a bit of a let-down. When I say “in” I mean “into patch 3.1″ and not “into Ulduar,” because realm stability (or lack thereof) was a huge kick in the ass. We spent a lot of time raiding the Loading Screen Boss, and we downed the World Server multiple times. Funny thing about those two bosses, they don’t count toward progression on most sites, and for some reason don’t drop Emblems. They also don’t seem to have a normal reset timer, but are most frequently encountered on Tuesdays. Hmm.

We did get Flame Leviathan down at the end of that raid week, which was pretty sweet. Then we played around with getting stomped by Razorscale, which was the opposite of pretty sweet.

The following week we broke into 10man teams, and picked up some nice Achievements in addition to getting folks familiarized with more of the fights. Between the two groups, we downed:

Flame Leviathan
Razorscale
XT-002
Kologarn
Auriaya
Freya

Earning the Achievements:

Orbital Bombardment (Server first! lol!)
Nerf Gravity Bombs
Nerf Engineering

Tuesday this week we headed in 25man style and downed Flame Leviathan with Mimiron’s Tower up, for a server third Heroic: Orbital Bombardment, and got our first kill on XT picking up Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs. We then took some time getting people acclimated to Kologarn. Lemme tell you, man, that AOE hurts on 25.

Wednesday, due to a select combination of people unavailable this week and unavailable on Wednesday specifically as well, we broke into 10man teams again, getting everyone experience downing Kologarn.

Tonight’s Thursday, last day of our raid week, and we’ll hopefully be seeing a big dead Giant and 25 people in bunny costumes accosting his fallen head for the kill shot.

Boo. No posts from me.

How dare I?!

Really though, apologies for the couple of weeks of inactivity. Seems to be one of those periods of time where if it’s not one thing, it’s something else, and my poor blog got shoved to the back burner yet again.

More coming soon, promise!

Haiku to you, too.

Thanks Tiger. Thanks A LOT. After almost three full weeks of Bashō crap in my english class, and not a single haiku to write, I get tagged for this.

I want ye olden days back, when tagging something meant CRANK and CROOK on an overpass or equally difficult-to-reach location, and even the goodiest of goodie-two-shoes had their tag in mind in case the moment ever arose when they’d get ballsy enough to shed them shoes, whip out a Sharpie, and immortalize themselves on the back of a school bus seat. At least until the bus driver came around with spray bottle of cleaner and paper towel in hand. But I digress.

I’m told I should compose a haiku about my class. No, not my english class. My beloved Druid class.

Alright, here goes. *ahem*

An Ode To Chickendom
Fluttering feathers
In the winds of my Typhoon
Laser bird of doom

Aw, c’mon, I can’t just do one!

Guild Leader
Stop asking me things
Check the forums more often
Another grey hair

Okay, okay, fine, I’ll go back to Druids now.

Branches
I’m a tree today
What happened to Wild Growth spam
Where’d my mana go

There you go, the end. I’m not tagging anyone because, well, I rarely do, and it seems all my choices have already been tagged.

The Week of Short-Staffed Raiding

As promised, here’s an update! At least I think I promised that. If I didn’t, well, here’s an update anyway.

I gave a summary of Tuesday and Wednesday here, so now on to Thursday!

18 in the raid. Arachnid Quarter, down like a skinny hooker. We had a little hiccup on Faerlina, but aside from that it was gravy. Noth? No problem. We cleaned up Heigan. Loatheb was no problem. Hey, let’s go visit Thaddius! Yeah, not so much. A couple tries on him and it was clear we needed a full 20 and a bit more overall raid damage. So we sauntered off to Military Quarter to pay our dear little Instructor Razuvious a visit. One-shotted his ass. It was getting close to raid end time (10pm), but we decided to give Gothik a quick try. Meh. Not so good. We called it, and planned a cleanup night over the weekend.

Fast-forward to Sunday.

We began at Thaddius. First attempt went as expected. Which is to say it was a slight improvement over some of the previous night’s attempts, but we called for a wipe shortly after a couple of bad polarity transitions (one of which was totally my fault). Second attempt was pretty sweet though. We kicked his ass.

Started out with 20 (obviously), but quickly lost one DPS due to their missing the jump, having no charge, eventually getting a charge, but not being quite fast enough to make it to the correctly-charged group. Then the Big Mean Lag and/or DC Monster bit a healer, coincidentally enough also the only Shaman in the raid, so we finished out the fight with neither totems nor the ever-popular Bloodlust. Yup, you read that right. We essentially 18.5-manned Thaddius, with no Bloodlust. Realm 4th Heroic: Subtraction. Go us!

Then on to Gothik. Eew. Eew and Yay at the same time. Yeah, it’s not a regular raid night for us. But damn. Five tries later, and me shedding my feathers for branches, Gothik was down. Four Horsemen next. Took us three tries to get everything down right, but we got em, and we got em good.

Sapphiron after that. The first attempt was a little shaky, and the iceblocked people weren’t exactly placed in ideal positions, but it was a pretty decent try. Second attempt though, that was seriously one of the cleanest Sapph kills we’ve ever had. Yeah, some folks died (last air phase the iceblocks were again all on one side of the room somehow), but everyone was seriously on top of their game. It was beautiful.

Then we headed to Kel. This is where it became crystal clear to me that despite all my healing experience in BC and healing a few times in our LK raids, I need a lot of practice to become an efficient and effective healer again. Yeah, Icebolts weren’t getting interrupted enough, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let my healing targets die. It was getting pretty late, so we called it after two attempts.

All in all, excellent raid week. And just pesky ol’ Kel’Thuzad left to finish off Heroic: The Dedicated Few. Pretty nice, pretty nice.

What’s in a name?

Soooooomebody (Brajana at Mend Pet, to be precise) dun gon’ and tagged my spacechicken ass.

Apparently I’m supposed to explain the origin and meaning behind my characters’ names. Educational and entertaining!

Pilsner, Tauren Druid (Main)

(IC) Pilsner here, he’s a wanderer, and, well, Taur-ahe isn’t exactly the most friendly language to speak (or understand, for that matter) by those not intimately familiar with the Shu’halo.

Throughout his travels, particularly in the Dwarven lands, nobody could get his damned name right. So folks took to calling him by the name of his favorite beverage. Not to confuse poor barkeeps into thinking they were ordering another round, they dubbed him “Pilsner,” a rarer-than-average brew not commonly stocked in taverns.

(OOC) I was drunk. Hefeweizen (my favorite type of beer, a wheat) was taken. Paleale was an option, but I didn’t want it shortened to “Pal.” So Pilsner was born.

Biscayne, Forsaken Warlock (Former main)

(IC) She’s not quite sure if that’s her first name or her last name, since she has no family to speak of, but she seems to have some recollection of hearing that name frequently. Then again, her hearing wasn’t exactly great to begin with, so who knows. Either way, it stuck.

(OOC) I love /dancing. When I first saw the Forsaken female /dance, the first thing that came to mind was a drunk stripper. Biscayne Blvd, the name for a stretch of US Highway 1 in South Florida, is home to several (in the past I would’ve said “many”) shady motels and strip clubs. You do the math.

Thompson, Blood Elf Hunter (Farming alt)

(IC) There’s not really any IC reasoning behind this name. At all.

(OOC) C’mon, seriously? A Hunter named Thompson? Please tell me you get it. His usual companions are Echeyakee, now Fear, or Humar, now Loathing. He’ll soon be taming a Gorilladin, aptly named Gonzo. Eventually he’ll look to adding Raoul to his stable. You get it now, right? /facepalm

20mans are fun!

So our guild forum is back up. Yaaaaaay! I disagree with our forum host’s assertion that the Wowhead itemlink script was the root cause, but I’m not gonna argue about it because YAAAAAY THE FORUM IS BACK UP!

But now, on to an update of this week’s raiding!

On Tuesday we split into two 10man groups. One team headed to OS to work on 3D, and the other went off to frolick in Naxx. I was in Group Naxx, so I can’t say much about the 3D folks other than it was a really good learning experience as a whole from what I heard. Naxx group started off in Arachnid Quarter, and picked up the two achievements there.  Not too much facerolling going on, which was a good thing. We went for Safety Dance and Shocking, and were able to identify a couple of specific things that can be worked on (lag and DC’s aside). Three quarters cleared and some good learning to be had.

Wednesday we went for some 20man action in OS and Naxx. Well, it was closer to 17-20man action most of the time, but that’s beside the point. We stomped Sarth with a whopping 2 healers (no drakes up, we wanted it to be a little challenging but not painful). Then we headed into the Construct Quarter.  We had some problems with the tank combo on Patchwerk never all having tanked that fight together before, but once we got that figured out it went like butter. We did have to bring in 2 more healers for that (probably could’ve done with just 3 total, but there was an extra one on and we said what the hell and went with 4, it’s like it’s raining Resto Shamans tonight). One of them stayed for the remainder of the evening, and the other had to take off, so we took down Grobbulus and Gluth with 18 no problems.

Then we paid Thaddius a visit. Oh badly timed DC’s, how we hate you. We decided to give Shocking a try there, since less people means less chances of crossed charges, but we got bitten by the lag monster twice. Third attempt was our last for the evening, and although we didn’t get him down (gogo DC’s), it was amazing to see that with 17 people in the raid (one was disconnected most of the fight) we made better progress than during our first week ever of attempts on him with 25.

All in all, two big Tauren hoof-thumbs up for short-staffed raiding. It’s both fun and challenging, and it appears to fill the coordination/performance gap between facerolling 25man Naxx and getting our asses handed to us in Heroic 3D.

Yaaaaaaay! Stuff.

I probably won’t be posting much until next week.

Our guild forum took a crap today, which is always fun. We run phpBB2, and it appears there’s a little issue where sometimes the forums and categories decide to rearrange themselves. So yeah, working on that.

We’re also taking this week to break into 10man Achievement teams (and likely a run of Heroic: The Dedicated Few as well) to work on some raiding fundamentals, fix some bad habits that facerolling through Naxx for the past couple months has engendered, and hopefully get a few more people closer to finishing off their Glory of the Raider meta-achievement.

Having a particular combination of raiders all taking a day (or the whole week) off at the same time is both a good thing and a bad thing. Bad because there’s not really an opportunity to progress on Heroic 3D, but good because we really did need to take some time to work on positioning, awareness, threat, and other issues that stem from spending 2/3 of our raid time roflstomping through Naxx and the remaining 1/3 getting roflstomped by the second most difficult encounter currently in the game.

I’m actually really excited for the 10man groups. Not because of the mount or anything else related to the meta, but because it’ll give us an opportunity to identify and work on specific issues that people are having in a smaller setting.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Apparently they don’t want us in caster form

Season 6 PVP Sets Armor Preview

I kid, I kid.

But yeah, why’s the Druid set the only one NYI? It’s a conspiracy to increase the Female Night Elf Druid mailbox dancer population I tell you! AAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!