We’ve made a mess

We downed him last night! Why all of a sudden it seemed easy? Anyway…placeholder for the upcomming youtube video.

No more mana for you my dear

Second night in Icecrown yesterday and the plan was to reach Lady Deathwhisper without much problems so we would have the rest of the evening trying to figure out how to handle the adds. Well it turned out to be much easier as I first expected. Perhaps I need to correct that: we made it look easy.

First attempt, we got overwhelmed by adds because we refused to kill a reanimated fanatic. No big deal, the shield was allready on 30% and we weren’t really pushing it. Healing was easy, definitly easy compared to the Lord Marrowgar fight. Untill phase 2 I never saw huge spikes of damage on people. Well we lost some dps on adds, but those were personal errors. And we had a bit of luck because 2 druid rezzers were able to get everyone back up and continue the fight. Our second attempt was bingo. Was that it?

Looks like it yeah. Now, we were ofcourse prepared and we executed it properly. It’s nice to know that we soon can take in others to teach them how the encounter work. Right now, we try to progress with people who are way to decently geared for farming ToC 10. I’m allready noticing that others should be able to do the same things that we did last night.

I changed my healing a bit and got rid of the spellpower fetish I have on my resto shaman. I usually take a bite of the feast and am eager to drink a Flask of the Frostwyrm. But this time I’ve chosen to get my own food wich provided me haste and instead of the flask I took a haste and an intellect elexir. We lacked a mage so my scrolls of intellect came in handy. 30k mana and I was good to go. It allowed my to reduce my casting time on lesser healing wave with 0.2 seconds and 0.1 seconds on chain heal. Seems like details to you, but it’s a huge difference overall.

Take a look at our kill video. It might be helpfull if you are aiming to get in there and want to know a bit of the things the boss does. My appologies for the faulty frames somewhere mid fight. Seems like I will need to update my fraps again. Also, it might be worth it to put up your speakers or headset and listen to the background music. It adds some nice shiver to it…

Collect your bones

I’ve been busy. The new patch has gave me a lot of work to do. Everyone in our guild is either working on their gear by farming random heroics or trying to progress in Icecrown Citadel. Thursday was our first night in there and for me it was a good start. Well, good in a sence that the first encounter is fairly hard if you look at where we came from. ToC 10 is easy doable, you don’t need to bring in your best people every time and lately we had about 3 10 mans going in there before the patch.

But Lord Marrowgar was more like the heroic version. He hit’s like I truck and we had a very hard time keeping our tanks alive. I saw a lot of bars going up and down like a yoyo, even on our druid tank. I held my breath the whole fight. Even now, when I see our kill video, I feel the tanks could go down any second.

I felt like my shaman didn’t had the tools to keep people alive. At least, I didn’t had the same relaxed healing position I had lately in ToC. Heal when needed was the motto, but those times are over it seems. It should be like that but in a way I feel like I’m not in controll of my situation, let alone, the life of others. But it’s a nice challenge and I hope I’ll notice some improvement in the way I handle things during the next raidweek.

After 5 attempts, Lord Marrowgar went down. You can find our kill video on our guild’s youtube channel. It’s best watched in HD but I’ll embed it here aswell.

Fugaru hungers

Oh mama, yeah mama, go baby, oh my… Well, it’s obvious, patch 3.3 is getting installed as we speak on my ready to shine home computer. We didn’t even had to wait for it that long but I’m happy it’s finally here. So much new gooshy stuff we can play with. Yeah, I know, Blizzard does this on purpose. WoW is a drug for the gamefans. I was getting a bit bored on Trial of the Crusader and in fact, we started to head back for Ulduar to have some more bosses. Also, my daily walk in the Dalaran park were getting longer and longer. Even after a connection breakdown of a couple of days…

Anyway…it’s here now and I know we’re all waiting to zone in and check out that new instance, the cross realm dungeon lfg thing, the new emblems, people will do Naxx within the hour or so for extra badges,…it’s going to be busy. And I tell you now, when I log into the game tonight, Sylvanas will be crowded. Not the first time actually, we saw it before aswell. I just hope the game will be playable. Nothing more frustrated than being stuck on the loading screen or having to wait 30 seconds to make a flask. And the addons, oh boy the addons, my precious childeren. You are all updated now but I’m sure you will forget how I wanted you to look and act.

As usual, we’ll notice some bugs aswell. On US servers, the new glyph of water elemental for frost mages doesn’t seem to work. So that means I won’t be playing my mage a lot at first. I will probably start to focus myself back on Fugaru. Looks like I’m the only shaman in the guild at the moment and we could use my services during the Icecrown raids. To bad, I was hoping to launch Masiv in their as tank but those spots are overpopulated. I wonder how I will do in there as a healer. Lately I felt I was getting behind a bit on the healing. Got to pick myself back up and keep shooting those riptides and chain heals.

Well I’ll keep you all up to date on how things are going. The wipes, the screens, the video’s, the loot drama,…it’s all incomming.

My favorite quote allready: “Let them come, Frostmourne hungers!”

Customizing UI: Deadly Boss Mods

One of the most used addons for raiding is Deadly Boss Mods. DBM tracks what is happening during the encounter and shows you warnings on upcomming events. For example, on Gormuk you want to know when the next Impale is about to hit your tank. I used BigWigs in the past but our guild started to use DMB and I switched aswell. No one is allowed to raid without it within our guild runs so for me it’s a necessary evil that I need to drag into my UI. I never liked to look of it and the GUI doesn’t give you a lot of opportunities becide from recolouring the bars. So I did some xml research and found a relative easy and fast way to change the view.

That’s how it looks in it’s original version

And this is how I want it to look like

Typ “/dbm” and go to the option tab. There you can start some test bars to see how yours are looking. It will not differ a lot from what I have if you left all the default options untouched. Now you can select a new start and end colour for your bar and if you have some textures installed, you can choose one for your bar. Apart from changing the offset, that’s about as far as you can go.

Find out after the break how you can make your DBM addon look a bit more fancy.

Fugaru wallpaper

I was working on some photoshop files to include into my new UI but I got bored designing kgpanels without being able to test them. So I came across a picture file I used for my guild forum signature and decided to test my photoshop skills. Nothing to difficult but I came to like it and I’ve decided this is going to be my new wallpaper.

Click the image to have a full view

Almost done with my UI setup and I’ll post it as soon as I got all of my tools working.

The M5 meet and great

No raid for me last night, I had RL plans. Tzuké took the initiative to set up a meet and great for the M5. M5 stands for the Magnificent 5. That’s how we called ourselves when we finally got a 5 man party in TBC. “We” was Distefano, Beric (Tzuké), Nelek, Cheet and Jacopo. I think you allready know a part of the history and since only the people who were part of it read this blog, I won’t explain every gamehour in detail.

The M5 vs Ramparts heroic and the M5 vs The Botanica heroic were publications both Tzuké and me wrote in order to send it by email to the other party members. The goal was to inform ourselves better to avoid a whole night of wiping. And oh my, did we wipe a lot. I think the first boss in the Botanica (The one that does a tranquility ability and you need to run out of sight and take down the adds) has killed us more than all the Naxxramas bosses together. It took us more than a week to figure out how we needed to kill the b*tch. By accident we figured out that you could just walk past the first boss without needing to kill her, doh!

M5 started to change during the years that past. We met Gufflet while I decided to make a paladin to tank stuff in TBC heroics. Gufflet was a warlock, also know later on as Whiteacre, Zydraliam, Munado, Visch, Diffendo, Chaotix, Supergnome and probably some other names aswell.

Cheet took a break from the game and in came Masiv for tanking and Gufflet was our mean killing dps machine. Ah, those were the days. Spend numerous hours on one boss and during the next day, try to find every tiny bit of information about the boss. We laughed about the pdf files and the powerpoint presentations with boss strategies. I also made an Excel sheet were every toon had an overview of all the upgrades that were “easily” collected in the northrend dungeons. The final boss in Oculus was another bookmark in the history of M5. From there on, it went all uphill and we raided Naxx, Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader. We have became the guys that raid Black Temple and all others were still trying to level in Terrokar forrest.

Something special

It’s wednesday, server maintenance on EU servers and allthough I’m working during the day, I consider wednesday my favorite day to read up about all the upcomming stuff in World of Warcraft. It’s the best time to check MMO Champion and WoW.com since they mostly focus on US server news as they had their maintenance a day before.

I came across a new Blizzard mini-site that they created in order to celebrate the 5th anniversary of World of Warcraft. They made a great video with interviews of all the big Warcraft boys. The founders, designers, co-writers, game masters, you name it, they are all in there. Each person get’s the opportunity to tell what’s their greatest memory about playing a warcraft game and when did they realize when Warcraft became more than just a video game. Get yourself a drink and a snack and sit down because as a WoW player, you are going to enjoy this. You can find the mini-website here.

While I was watching the video, I started to ask myself the same questions aswell. Find out what my most memorable moments are after the break.

AFK

Man I have been busy. It doesn’t always look like it but I’m starting to realize that time flies (even when you are not having fun). Work has kept me from launching some much needed actions. I usually find a spot during the day to check some blogs and keep up with our forum but now it’s hard to provide a blog post every day. And just some post to attract visitors is not my kind of thing, they will get bored after a while. Maybe some of them allready are.

So what have I been upto besides work and some other real life things? Trying to master the AH. I was getting low on gold and needed to supply 3 active raiding characters with the much needed repair funds. As I am not an all day long grinder, I mostly rely on my epic gem transmution and some herbs/alchemy stuff. It usually pays the bill but gearing up Masiv demanded a lot of epic gems and they are costly. I’m sure I’ll make a post on it someday, when I have 5 minutes more spare time.

As usual, we also had some guild drama. Ah well, drama, not really. Some loot issue caused a new discussion on the forum and things started to heat up. It’s never a fun thing to deal with and especially not when the people involved are close game friends. I like to be a popular officer but that isn’t always easy. Oldtimers has a lot of intelligent people and every argument holds some truth in it. I’m usually the one who tries to combine all of these arguments into a single wall of text wich every person can rely to. But this time I had to smack the door and ask for silence. Things are running out of hands on the forum and it is my responsibility to act as a leader now, although I never asked to be in this position. I’m not always sure if I’m doing the right thing for the guild. The things that happened during the past days have made me wonder why I still play the game and why I put all of this effort in it.

All of the previous officers seem to have had that “burn-out” feeling and not a lot of them have decided to stick to the game. I’ve had it several times before, but I always managed to find some bag of motivation wich kept me going. Sigge seems to be an expert at it. He’s been arround for a long time and I’m sure it affects him aswell, but he’s still an oldtimer. Can’t really imagine what our guild would be without him. Luckely we have those kind of people at oldtimers. There have been numerous occassions where things could have caused to wipe to whole guild.

So, AH and guild drama and I’m also waiting for my new hardware to show up. I’m developing my new UI aswell so I have a good idea on how to implemment it into my new screen. And that will also be the start of some video footage. A UI guide, some PvP combats, some progression movies in ToGC 10 and perhaps IC. Lot’s of plans, not sure they will all make it to the blog.

I have a patch post in draft for a long time now but I guess I will skip it untill the patch actually hits the live servers. There are some interesting things I look forward to. And ofcourse some new raiding place. I hope we get the guild back on her feet first. But for now, I’m going to try to afk a bit longer. Perhaps my game joy will come back a bit faster.

You’re out!

They are down! K.O.!

Last night we formed our 10 man again and headed back for the big bad ugly Yeti. It took us some attempts and some still wanted to hug the white fluffy Yeti. But he is down and he will stay down. I got some video footage comming up aswell, I’m just waiting for Jacopo to finish his encoding. More will follow later. Next week we hope to advance even further and take a better look at Lord Jarraxus in hard mode. Good job Oldtimers!

Beasts of Northrend – Trial of the Grand Crusader was killed by Masiv, Estme, Madpriest, Tzuké, Keizer, Lossoran, Tigerbap, Jacopo, Lovelace and Felios.

Update: Video after the break thanks to Jacopo