Random collection of awesomeness.

Now that I got my raid report out of the way for today .. time for something completely different.

The naming blog meme
Found on Sideshow&Syrana who found it on Killing 'em Slowly: a meme in which you tag three other bloggers and they have to tell how they chose their names.

I haven't been tagged yet so I'll take the liberty of tagging myself for the sake of this post. My druid's name, Azretha, is from the spell Archimonde uses to destroy Dalaran. Using my own idea of transcribing the Eredun used in this spell .. when he raises his hand in the air to drop the sand and create a replica of Dalaran, he says (or how I would transcribe it anyway) 'Belar sumares az'retha rakass ib'na' And that's where Azretha came from, though I changed the 'e' to sound like 'ay' so you pronounce it as-ray-tah.

Aeltyrs name is a lot easier. It's just an anagram of Tyrael, the archangel from Diablo II. You know him from the minipet, too.

Then as a final one, my warriors name, Kaguzuchi, comes from an anime influence. More specificly, it comes from an attack by Shishio from Rurouni Kenshin called Tsui no hiken: Kaguzuchi (Third Secret Sword: Kaguzuchi), and the kaguzuchi is reference to a fire god if I remember correctly.

I would hereby like to tag the following three bloggers for this meme !
Zaltu from One Rogue's Journey
Dinaer from Forever a Noob
Eskel from Gone Rogue
Tell us where you got your names !

RP event: The Silithid War
I would just like to shed some light on this as well. I attended the start of this RP event, a march to Silithus, and I had a lot of fun. You can find some screenies by me and my guildies here.


Epic flying mount
As a closing paragraph a small note on my monetary status here. Despite buying a Mongoose enchant for my Greed and respeccing, I have managed to sell enough junk and I hit 4000 gold. If I could now force myself to do enough dailies I should finally be able to fly my bronze drake by the end of the week.

The noob went raiding

First of all, hooray I got Greed ! Got some guildies to run CoT with and it dropped on the first run. I then spent the weekend leveling Unarmed skill (because a huge fist tool to smash faces with is obviously not a weapon) and respecced Combat so I was ready to raid as combat.

Sartharion and two drakes
My first time doing this encounter on 25-man and with any drakes up. It took a few attempts (I guess the healers had to get used to nub rogues taking damage all the time, ahem) but we got our focus back and downed him.

I did roughly 2100 DPS on the final attempt, which is not bad if you consider I was running Anesthetic Poison instead of Wound to help ease the elemental adds. However, I am not really satisfied with my overall performance here because I died several times on the other attempts due to not noticing the void zones. It's a bloody purple circle on a red-ish background! Though like one of my tanks pointed out, I might also have been misjudging the range of them. Evil voidzones.

Malygos
Now here's a (to me) more familiar fight.
First phase went fine. Did a Killing Spree during the vortex to get some extra damage in on Malygos and avoid damage from the vortex.
Second phase I still ran from bubble to bubble for quite a long time. Still no hoverdisk achievement.
Third phase ... well. I, uhm. Messed up. Started up the rotation well. Got targeted. Pressed FREAKING SPEED BUFF instead of Flame Shield. Watched the entire phase from a corpse PoV.

Arachnid Quarter
Quite useful that I can compare these with my last run.
Anub'rekhan: last fight 2312, this time 2277.
Faerlina: last fight 2773, this time 2594.
Maexxna: last fight 2417, this time 2589.

Well, at least one fight improved (I wasn't wrapped this time)... Perhaps this is also because of my party composition - I was in the melee group with two other rogues, a warrior and a DK. I don't know what group I had last time, but yeah.

Sapphiron
Carrying on with our dragon killing spree, we fought the guy that should be on the Frosties Cereal Box ... I died at the iceblocks here, but not because I didn't manage to jump behind an iceblock. No, I ran to the other side of Sapphiron to avoid his Blizzard, and I suppose I was out of range from the healers there, so I took quite a bit of damage from the frost aura (we went for the achievement so 75 frost resist max). When I came back to the other side I wanted to hit my healthstone because I was about to die, but I was frozen as an iceblock.

Can you guess what happened next ? Frost bomb, iceblock canceled, frost aura tick. Dead rogue. No time for healing, potting, etc. Oh well.

Kel'thuzad
And then the last guy on the list. We first did two attempts at the achievement, but people died for some reason, and we were five minutes from raid end, so we decided we'd rather see a kill without the achievement than no kill at all. Focused and got the kill in. I didn't do all that bad on interrupting either, though the more experienced rogue was faster a lot of the time.

Anonymous WWS to be found here. I am Gojushiho.

Screenshot of my UI here, should you want to see it. (Might take a while before it is 'made public' so check back later if it doesn't work the first time.)

Back to combat

While I still haven't had the chance to test the new patch (I have no DVDs to burn that anime on so I'm a bit stuck at the moment), the constantly updating patch notes have assured me of one thing: I will respec combat.

First of all, I don't like the Hunger for Blood changes. As it stands now, it's a self buff, costs 15 energy, and lasts one minute, but requires a bleed on the target. This means a 15% damage nerf on trash. (Unless someone else applies a bleed or we open with garotte.) Combat was already stronger on trash, now it's just clearly better.

Second, they've added some talented melee haste into Lightning Reflexes. 3 ranks means 10% melee haste. This works even better with the recent buff to Slice and Dice.

And third, Mutilate isn't that much better as one would like. While it is potentially better in a tank and spank fight where you just stand around and DPS, there's a lot of fights out there (and in Ulduar as well I guess) where a lot of crap is happening and that's just not possible. Worse, there's a lot of abilities out there that can make your HfB and SnD drop (like Maexxnas Web Wrap), severely nerfing your damage until you can get them up again (especially with SnD having been buffed to 40% and HfB having been buffed to 15%, it's even more of a blow when they fall off).

And last but not least, bigger weapons just look cooler than small daggers, k?

So I'm gonna have to nag at my guildies to run Heroic CoT with me, so I can pick up Greed for my Main Hand. With my Mongoosed Librarian's Paper Cutter in the off-hand, that should make for a fairly decent combo to start the combat life with.

As a final note I'm getting closer to my epic flying mount again. I had reached 3500g, but made some investments in the AH, and currently only some of them are selling. Perhaps I can sell them during the weekend.

Then I can start spending money on enchants and the likes :p

Sartharion

This'll be a small post since I'm posting from university, but nonetheless. The raid night I spoke about in my previous post didn't go through, because our raid leader decided he needed to revise his priorities and quit WoW. So, kudos to him, but it was of course slightly annoying from a logistic POV.

Yesterday though, a 10 man bonanza was organised and three groups hit the instances. Our group was fairly imbalanced, with way too much melee and an unfortunate early leave by one of the two ranged DPS. We tried Construct Quarter, and got our asses kicked a few times by Grobbulus. We almost had the Patchwerk achievement, with a fight of 3 minutes and 14 seconds.

We decided not to let Grobbulus ruin our evening and went for Sartharion instead (since not all of us, including yours truly, had seen the fight yet). We attempted with one drake first, but we didn't have the tanking or the DPS for it, so we went back to kill the last drake and just downed Sartharion.

The anonymous WWS can be found at this link. You'll notice there's a lot more people in there, this is because I forgot to turn off the WWS when we hit Wintergrasp afterwards /blush.

I am Heian again, and as you can see I did 2700 DPS on Patchwerk. The DPS on Sartharion isn't really representative since I switched Instant Poison for Anesthetic Poison, as the raid leader had asked me to dispel enraged adds with a FoK every now and then (which worked, sort of).

I got enough badges now to buy Lillehoff's Winged Blades, which I'll probably do this evening.

Also, if you have any ideas on a topic I could write on for BigHitBox, please drop a note! I've got the famous writer's block, where you can't write when you have to...

The noob goes raiding again

I see I have been put in the raid line-up for tonight, and on the menu are Malygos, Military Quarter, Frostwyrm Lair, and Sartharion 2/3D.

I'm sure I'l do better on Malygos than last time now that I've gotten a feel of the fight, and while I haven't really done Frostwyrm Lair on my rogue yet I have retroraided Naxxramas before it floated towards Northrend, so the mechanics aren't really new to me.

The big obstacle for me is Sartharion, which sounds quite complicated (what with lava tsunamis, twilight realms and all that crap). Not only that, but we will be doing him with two drakes up, three if we have enough time, so it's also the hardest fight I would face so far.

Now I'm still not that fantasticly geared, but there have been some improvements since last time. I'm now sitting at the poison hit cap. I'm working on expertise (got a Trollwoven Girdle crafted and smacked a belt buckle with an expertise gem on it).

We'll see how it goes. Loot-wise, I don't have a lot of KP, but there is only one rogue that can outroll me on rogue stuff (in this line-up ...) and he has basicly everything you'd ever want (4T7.25, Webbed Death/Murder, etc) so on that regard I'm safe.

Of course, there's still all other classes that want those Tier tokens, and melee competition for trinkets/jewelery, and so on.

Anyway, doesn't matter that much. I'm just gonna try my best for the raid (already got my flasks and food!) and see how things turn out.

A week of PvP

Aeltyr casts Blind.
Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there!

I recently said to myself: self, we don't want to grind money. We don't have the time to look for instance groups. Let's do something fun. Let's respec and do some PvP.

And since you can't argue with yourself (try it - you're always right) that's exactly what I did. I respecced Mut-Prep, got me some nice PvP oriented glyphs for a relatively cheap price, put on my super awesome Eviscerator's gear and hit the BGs.

And I'm doing well. I bought the Titan-forged Boots with Wintergrasp Marks (though no enchants or gems yet .. on any of my PvP gear) and after a few evenings of battleground switching I also bought the Hateful Gladiator's Belt.

I got some more achievements. Arathi Basin Perfection (not bad for PuGing), Storm Glory (again, not bad for a PuG), Damage Control (it didn't bug out for once), Stormy Assassin (rough and long game so I got to switch around a lot) and Take a Chill Pill (didn't even notice he was berserked)

But most of all, I had fun. I spent money and I'm thus further away from my epic flying mount again, but it was worth it. I'm gonna keep PvPing, perhaps until I can buy another Hateful piece, or until I get bored of that.

On another note, I will be guest-posting on Big Hit Box relatively soon. Like, when I can think of a subject to write on.
Big Hit Box is a melee blog, a source of information for those of us who like to be in the face of mobs (or .. in the backside actually. Don't DPS from the front.). So ret pallies, rogues, warriors, druids, shamans, melee hunters .. err perhaps not melee hunters.

So suggestions on topics other than melee hunters are always welcome - what would you like to hear about ?

Aeltyr casts Preparation.
Aeltyr casts Blind.