Focused Insights

As you might have noticed, this wordpress blog hasn’t been update for a while. From now on, you can find my adventures on www.focused-insights.com

/afk real life issues and boredom

I made an /afk post before and back when I wrote it, I had the same feelings as I have now: I’ve seen it. Atleast, that’s the feeling I have. I’ve seen all of Blizzard latest content and their isn’t anything that can keep me locked to the screen. Although Oldtimers hasn’t killed Blood Prince, the Vampire lady and Sindragosa, I feel like I have no business anymore in ICC. Even in the 25 man version…it has become farm work to me.

So I turned towards the PvP side of the game, arena to be more specific. I teamed up with Xeyna and we’re playing 2s as resto shaman/hunter at 1400 – 1500 rating. For a couple of weeks I had a great time exploring a part of the game I haven’t seen before. Anyway, I allready made an introduction post about it so I’m not going to explain again that I’m I was a total noob at it. It comes down to this: we’re stuck at 1500. As soon as we get close to it, Blizzard send us to Dalaran sewers, throws in some rogue/priests teams and pew pew pew, we’re back at 1350. They swipe the floor with our faces. It got me frustrated and I think Xeyna isn’t happy about it aswell.

So what’s the solution? Xeyna levels priest, I level rogue. Reach level 80, farm badges/honor like your life depends on it and own 2v2. Simple isn’t it? Yeah ofcourse, only problem is that I’m kinda sick of leveling. So that’s what I’ve been upto lately. Another secret project, trying to see what I can achieve with a new class. Not sure if it will works out. I always promised to never ever play a rogue…I fail. But I’ll promise I won’t do PvE with it…really, I will not raid with a rogue. Unless ofcourse I need some weapons for pvp. But beside that, no pve. Or maybe for emblems, but that’s really it!

Besides WoW I’m planning to move to my fresh build house together with my favorite boss. A lot of work has been done allready but we still need to finish a lot of stuff. So WoW time is limited and I’m not sure what the effect will be in the future.

That’s it for me so far, I don’t have the time to write some more. Don’t blame me…

Introducing FugarUI

Ah yes, finally I started to write this post. I had this one in mind since the start of my blog but now I finally feel I’m ready for it. One of the things I enjoy myself the most with is creating a user friendly UI that makes my life a bit easier. I can spend a whole day reading on curse.com or wowinterface.com to check what other people are using, what addons could be useful, how are addons configured and is it possible to add your own taste to it. Well yes it is!

We all know that addons will never play the game for you. I agree, but they can make it a whole lot easier sometimes. To me, there are 2 distinct categories if you look at all addons available: Addons everyone should have and addons that change the appearance of UI or the amount of info you get to see.  I will browse through my addons folder and let you know what I use and why I use them.

And now I’m standing at the gate

I have to admit, there aren’t many reasons why I shouldn’t keep this blog updated but after last night I didn’t had any excuses anymore. Oldtimers killed Putricide! Ow yes, and I’m proud of it. For months he has been toying with us and we always seem to be able to kill his 2 midgets, taking down the professor himself wasn’t on our achievement list yet.

I don’t think I can count the numerous wipes on this fight. But I’m pretty sure that the times we reached the final phase are below 5. There is a 10% raidwide buff to all damage and healing and it sure helps a lot. On fights we master, we might decrease the fight time with 30 secs – 1 min. Outsiders might not be very impressed by our kill several months behind other guilds but 80% of all puggers on Sylvanas don’t have this achievement. And that is what makes me feel proud about our work. Sure you can farm the first 4-6 bosses in both 10 and 25 these days but it get’s old news in my newspaper.

It pleases me that a guild like Oldtimers offers their members a chance to go beyond the line of pugging. I’ll be honest, the last month, there wasn’t much that seperate us from any random pug. The ventrilo chat have always been an asset to our runs but pure progress wise…we were slacking, big time.

1 for the money, 2v2 for the show

Fugaru goes Arena, another epic adventure in my World of Warcraft book. It’s like going on a holiday, away from all the boss slaying. “Oh boy, what is he trying to do now”, I hear you think… Well boys, I have no idea! Last season, I started to collect some pvp gear wich was mostly aimed for an elemental pvp specc. I saw some pvp movies from an elemental shaman running arround in Eye of the Storm and he was constantly using thunderstorm to shoot people of the cliff when they got close to the flag. I was like “Muhahah, I want to do that aswell”. So I started to run a lot of battlegrounds and I actually enjoyed the fact to kite people arround as an elemental shaman and actually being able to kill something.

I remember the days where my mage needed to run Altarac Valley for days in order to get my lvl 70 epic pvp set. Back than, those where the only epics I had access to. No raiding, no heroics, I was still a noob and didn’t even know there was a whole new world besides AV. Every time we killed Drek, it felt like a personal achievement. All I ever did was running with the large mass and shooting some frostbolts now and than hoping to not get cut off from the rest of the troops. Because if I had to run back by myself, there was no way I ever crossed the center of the map alone.

But a lot has happened since than and I can now say that I’m a better player with my shaman than I was with my mage. Zydraliam, a resto druid that use to be an Oldtimer brought up the idea to team up for a 2v2. We always kept discussing it how nice it would be to actually win some matches but we never really got started. Untill the day where he invited me to his arena team “Good old boys”. Sigh…I was hoping for a more “evil” name but he spend the money to buy the team so I didn’t made any comment. But don’t ask me about our banner/tabard, I feel shamed…

Under Construction part 2

I’ve been busy. So busy that I don’t have the time to check on new boss strategies. The new hosting is active and I’ve started to play with it from day one. It’s funny how I can get carried away, even my warlock is still standing in Borean Tundra.

But a lot of work has allready been done and so far I’m happy with the result. I ported everything to the new domain and decide to make a Joomla portal to host our guild website. It was easier to just copy paste our old website and add a menu structure than getting the website files from the old ftp site. It has been a PITA to get our forum database back. Match2Web.dk (our old hosting) seems not able to put it back in place. I wouldn’t suggest the hosting. The support is fairly fast in their response and follow up but they don’t seem to realize I can’t speak Danish.

So the latest forum build of phpbb3 sits and waits patiently for our old data to be restored. Untill than, I won’t be able to show my work to the outside world but you can allready catch a glimp from the template at the top of this post.

I was starting to work on a new EQdkp site aswell and put it all in the same database but I’m getting some errors when adding new raids. I’ll leave that for now, our old one is still doing his job. I rather see the forum online as soon as possible.

In the meanwhile, what happened in game? Well we had our first week in Icecrown Citadel with only 1 ID. I must say that I’m fairly pleased with the outcome so far. We were able to bring up Dreamwalker on Sunday and that was thanks to 2 raidnights of practice. To bad we didn’t had an extra tank or healer available so we left Rotface to rot and headed for Sindragosa. Another fun fight that requires coordination from all 10 players. Yesterday we got her untill 35% but we not every member got the idea of the fight. It’s also hard to learn it with 1 tank.

The Blood Prince Council could be another option to do with 1 tank only but no member has had time enough to practice tanking the shadow boss. We used a warlock before, this week a hunter and an elemental shaman. They weren’t really holding aggro so my healing was drawing more attention than their dps. We’ll probably do the same thing next week after the reset. Trying to clear at least 6-7 bosses and than we need some more practice on Putricide, Blood Prince and Sindragosa.

Under Construction

Well, just to give you an update on what I have been doing lately related to WoW. I’m doing a lot of photoshop work at the moment, both for refreshing my UI and…creating a new forum style.

We have had some hosting issues lately and so the matter came up that we probably should look for another hosting company. It’s an excellent occasion to also update the forum version and create a fresh look and feel aswell. I hope we can get it up next week, if we can ofcourse recover our forum database…

I was planning to do a post about my UI changes but it’s still work in progress. I’m not totally sure that the current version will be the one I will use for a couple of months. This is on my to do list:

• Change Prat to Chatter, just to test it out and see if I can minimize this more into my UI
• Reconfigure Aloft. I seem to have deleted my profile somehow and I got way to much clutter on my nametags
• Upgrate to Pitbull 4. I will probably stick to the same layout, maybe some small tweaks
• Change ZmobDB Advance from Full view to Portrait. I want to integrate this more with Pitbull.
• Make some kgpanels for my player and target frame.
• Only use 1 Actionbar at the bottum of my screen. This will be a big challenge, I don’t like to see a lot of actionbars, but I still need the click some icons during the fights.
• Omen when in combat, Recount when out of combat. I have these two on top of eachother but I want to put them in the same corner
• Minimize my target icons
• Restyle/place my poweraura’s for trinkets, etc…

My warlock is getting closer to 80 (72.5 atm) and I’m starting to work on his UI aswell. As a dps, you have all kind of nice procs that require you to use a special ability. I want to combine power aura’s and make custom sounds for it. I allready made my first wave file for the Molten Core proc…funky robot sound.

In Icecrown, we’re working on Dreamwalker, a challenging fight and a nice change of scenery after grinding the smae bosses for weeks. Should be doable, especially with the extra raidwide buff Blizzard gave us.

That’s it for now, sorry I can’t post more at the moment.

Row, row, row your boat

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

The above nursery rhyme sometimes serves as a metaphor for life’s difficult choices and I want to use it to refer to the choices you need to take as a guild officer. Lately, It has been rough in game. Not like we progressed our way on to the Lich King all of a sudden, no, in fact we’re still stuck on that Rotface dude (Altough we killed him several times before after hours of wiping). What I ment by rough is that managing the guild has become hard to achieve. I ran arround for a couple of days deciding if my time as an officer had come and if I should say goodbye. The main reason for that is that I feel like I’m not bringing the same solutions any more wich pleases most of our members. At the moment, we need to choose a path wich can have a large effect on our social ingame environment.

I was getting sick of logging into the game and awnsering people’s questions about what’s on the planner, who will raid, who will not raid, when will they raid, when will they continue, etc. On my left side I see a guild that is getting bored of the first 4 bosses in Icecrown and they want to see more. The left side doesn’t care anymore about the badges and the loot, they just want to achieve something and push themselves further to get a new boss down. On my right side I see a guild that still wants to farm those 4 bosses because it brings in their weekly badges, if they are lucky they can loot some new items. The right side isn’t ready for stepping up and evaluating their personal performance. They want to be carried.

I feel like I’m right in between those 2 sides. I’ve saw those bosses aswell, I still enjoy doing them but the element of suprise is gone. It’s farming to me but not to others, they still need this expierience. I see people who aren’t ready to progress but still insist they diserve to be a part of that progress group. It’s like Fugaru is walking with the progress side and as a person I’m sticking close to the people that still need the help. I feel it’s my task as an officer to be there for them. And I know I shouldn’t bother but if I leave them behind, I feel like I’m ignoring our guilds values.

“Not taking decisions is a bad decision” – from the great warrior Sigge

Right,…how do we handle this? I believe most of our guildmembers understand that something needs to be done and most of them understand the dilemma. I’m not going to talk about the details on how we’re handling stuff in the future but I did made up my mind: We’ll take a decision, we’ll communicate it and we’ll listen to people’s comments. Our decision will be permanent and we realize that it’s not the best decision for every single individual. We’re aiming for the best decision that helps the guild.

I came across a very well written article of Ciderhelm, one of the founders of tankspot.com. The article is more an open letter to Blizzard and how he feels that WoW is in need of reinventing itself. He points towards some differences between the hardcore guilds and the more casual player. One comment he made is especially true for our situation:

For me, my biggest frustration and source of burnout in the 99% has been when I have been doing a complex job in an encounter without mistake for hours and days and having to deal with the few who seem to always find new and interesting ways to die.

The issue present for serious gamers in the 99% is that they rarely are given challenges or means of discovering new and interesting ways to play their class or play the game. They only need to be as good as the worst players in their raid, and have little motivation to be better except for personal pride

When I look at our memberbase I see a lot of people that are decent players. With a helping hand, they can do the job. But most of the time they get used to it and forget to stand on their own feet. If you let people figure things out themselves or assign them to a really critical role in the encounter, they might suprise you. And I strongly believe we should do this more often. It will not work for everyone, but it will for the majority of our players.

Our new strategy will be like this: we want to progress and every member can be a part of it as long as they are willing to increase their performance. We’re not pushing people anymore, we’re going to pull people. Right now, we’re pushing people into new content but there is no one in front to open the next door to progress. If the push group can go stand in front of the guild and starts pulling people across the doorstep, I believe we’ll advance as a guild and as an individual.

Let’s see how it turns out, not sure how big the impact will be but I’m sure there will be one. It would be sad if it didn’t had an effect at all, than I really need to reconcider my position as an officer and as a guild member.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

The dwarf is still standing

The screenshot has absolutly nothing to do with this post but it was a leftover from my achievement hunt and I found it quiet funny to run arround like that. Perhaps a Goblin could be my first real horde character…

So, we had 2 days in Icecrown before the weekend and on thursday we had some very close attempts on Putricide. We really worked ourself into the fight and after a while we even switched to resto shaman/druid healing combo to have an extra dps and it was still managable to keep everyone up. We hitted the enrage at 30% and decided that we did our best for that night.

A lot of people were still unsaved and waiting for a fresh run in Icecrown, hoping to get some more badges and loot. Enough people are willing to help but most of the time we lack healers and/or tanks to get the train going. I silently offered to go as tank with Masiv, my old dwarf friend. He was always the first to lead in Naxxramas and Ulduar but Icecrown was unexplored teritory for him. Apart from that, it has been several months since I switched to Fugaru for full time healing. An occasional run in ToGC was the last we saw from Masiv.

I was a bit shocked of his gearlevel. The notorious addon called “GearScore” gave my pala tank a 4.9k. Ouch, that’s so painfull. There is not a chance I would ever get into a pug if I needed to whisper that to the raidleader. I had lot’s of triumph emblems for him but I used almost 50 frost emblems to buy Primordial Saronite to upgrade Fugaru’s boots. And there weren’t a lot of options to upgrade from Triumph. I was glad I had the T9 2 set bonus and bought the hands aswell, it should gave me an extra socket.

My cloak was still something I picked up in Naxxramas 25 and it seems like the only upgrade is in Trial of the Crusader or saving for Frost emblems. Ah well, let’s just see how it goes. After all, I got 3 good healers to rely on. My co-tank was Estme, a protection warrior. She had more expierience in there and was also far better geared since she plays that one as her main. I decided to let her do the hard work and I would go “OT” for most of the pulls.

Achievement hunting

Hey there, how are my fans doing? Actually, I’d better write “fan”…

Achievements! Those tiny boxes you see flashing at the bottom of your screen every time you completed something special. Well, special…you don’t really need to do a lot of stuff to earn your first achievements. Level untill 10, explore your starting zone, get a vanity pet, etc. It’s all fairly simple.

I never really focused on those achievements. I do believe it’s a nice addition to the game because a lot of people are now exploring a part of WoW that otherwise would have been forgotten and left to rot. But Blizzard does a nice job to keep all of their content alive wich they created during the years. Every day, at least 1 raid is formed to visit some old raid instance like Mount Hiyal or Molten Core. I wasn’t really a dedicated player during the release of those places and now you get a chance to see them. I was in a “Battle for Mount Hiyal” run this week. It was pretty nice to see how the encounters were develloped during those days. I can imagine how 40 players had struggled weeks to get to the final boss.

Some people spend a lot of time to farm those achievements. It’s like they are addicted to that popup box. I sometimes ask myself how bored those persons must be if you see a achievement announcement every hour. It actually requires a lot of planning and research, especially if you start to go for achievements that require some more work or multiple players to help you.

I was browsing my screenshot map last night and realized that I had earned quiet some achievements myself the past weeks. I’m still leveling my warlock and I do that by joining random dungeons. It gives me some decent gear that helps me level, you get to see dungeons you’ve never been before and every run is 25% of your expierience bar. After every dungeon, I got an achievement. But than came Black Rock Depths. Damn, the time I have spend in there, exploring every corner, opened every door, downed every mob,…just to have some idea of where we were in that huge instance. The only time I did get an achievement in there was when Pieonhere boosted me and Holymojo’s druid. A dangerous place to walk thrue.

There is a lot more to come after the break…