Shocking news

Aeltyra lets out a hacking cough.
Suprise! Yes, dear reader, I have a small confession to make.The picture you see on the right is an accurate depiction of my character. I had a sex change. Now, Out of Character this is easy to explain: I was tired of the male character animations and wanted something more visually appealing.

But In Character? (For the people unfamiliar with RP, imagine yourself being an actor. Your in-game avatar is the character you act out. Thus, In Character is things your character would do / think etc) I don't think Azerothian technology, or magic for that matter, is advanced enough to pull this off (besides blaming magic is way too cheesy). Even if it was easy to explain HOW I did it, explaining WHY I did it is still a riddle.

There are other options of course. You could just treat it as an entirely new character, which is probably what I'll do. The womanising behaviour of my character cannot be transfered to a female version of that character, or she'd be some kind of weird, obnoxious lesbian. I think I will explain that this is the twin sister of my male character, or something. Input on this is welcome however - make those brain cells work!

Remind me to change the header image to reflect these changes.


In other news I was taken into an Ulduar progression raid yesterday evening. Our target was XT-002 Deconstructor. I am horribly undergeared for this fight, but I guess they just wanted to do me a favor since I don't raid a lot anyway.

It's a pretty straightforward fight for us rogues: nuke the living daylights out of him. You can CloS both the Light Bomb and the Gravity Bomb, but since the last is more dangerous I prefer to save it for that one and just run when I have the Light Bomb. Other than that it's a good idea to keep an eye on your back, if a lot of scrapbots are coming dangerously close it might be a good idea to get in there and throw a Fan of Knives at them.

We lacked a bit of a punch to really down him, but we definitly improved over our attempts - while we could barely hit 30% on first attempt, the last few attempts were 10%, 8%, 12% ... etc depending on how many scrapbots he consumed before he faceplanted all of us.

DPS-wise I have no idea how I did, because I had disabled Recount for some reason and there is no option to take a WWS yet if I remember correctly. This was also the first fight in which I have exchanged Tricks of the Trade with another rogue, giving some very nice numbers on the Heart phases when combined with Heroism, Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush.


As a final note I've been doing more PvP now that I don't have to worry about respeccing costs, and one noteable thing is a Warsong Gulch match in which I was given the Iron Man achievement as a little present from my guildies (thanks guys!). I'll be happy to spend some time in there helping the others that were present to get the achievement as well.
The way we did it was pretty simple really. I stayed in defense in our flag room (a bit risky but I have a lot of 'oh sh-' options). I had to stay alive the entire match, so if a Horde attack didn't look safe, I stayed in stealth. Meanwhile my guildies bulldozered through the Horde as one block, and with a protection warrior and a bit of dedicated healing, they got the flag to our flag room and handed it over to me so I could cap it.
Let's just say it's pretty stressy when you have one flag left to cap and you have to stay alive no matter what :p

PS: If you have found this page because Google found the words 'sex change' and 'lesbian' and concluded this was some kind of obscure site: HAHAHAHAHA
Aeltyra points at you.
Aeltyra cackles maniacly at the situation.

Rogue fashion, dual specs.

Rogue Fashion
First, a bit of character progress news. We did Malygos 25 yesterday (due to the two tanks that could tank Sartharion having their PCs wrecked ... we suspect voodoo is involved) and I got Frosted Adroit Handguards (for the minimum KP bid .. gotta love no competition). I think I will keep this as my non-Tier piece, instead of the usual Chestguard of the Recluse, since I have Heroes Bonescythe Chest already and it would break my two piece Tier bonus if I rolled on that chest.

After that I went into a 10-man Naxx run that was almost full melee DPS (only one hunter). Grobbulus was interesting with this setup as one might suspect, but we did get him down. I also got a nice piece of rogue fashion (Scourge fashion?) in the Cloak of Mastery. Not that I'm complaining, but I had the Ice Striker's Cloak crafted a few days ago /sigh.

I was quite satisfied with my DPS on that run, though. Using Zaltu's macro recommendations and Dinaer's weapon switching comment I setup my Sinister Strike and FoK with Closetgnome gearset switching. On the trash I was second on damage done and DPS until late in Naxx, below the hunter and above all the death knights.
For every FoK I would automaticly switch to double Broken Stalactite for some big FoK numbers. As soon as I hit Sinister Strike, I would switch to my usual Greed/LPC combo for max single target DPS.

Dual specs
With patch 3.1 nearly upon us, what will you do with dual specs? Will you buy it at all? I will probably (when I get enough money ... I got my bronze drake so I'm balancing on the verge of poverty at the moment) go for a PvE combat and a PvP Muti/Prep spec.

I'm just happy I'm not playing my druid as my main at the moment. Trying to decide between Tanking, Moonkin DPS, Cat DPS, Resto, Resto PvP, Feral PvP, Moonkin PvP ... dual specs would almost make you depressed when you think of it that way.

Sure, I could come up with a few more rogue specs, but there is a difference between choosing combat PvE or muti PvE and cat DPS or moonkin DPS.

Sartharion 3D

This post is just to confirm to a certain hunter that I will indeed report on this run (hah!) But not in the way he might have thought.

So yes. Yesterday I joined an attempt at Sartharion plus three drakes.
I had specced HaT, since it's the only raid spec I hadn't tried yet, and brib..I mean, asked the raid leader if I could be put with the hunters.

For the information I managed to gather from them in the secret hunter party channel, I refer to the 'things we know about hunters' subpage.

Other than that I must say HaT was a pretty fun experience. With four hunters providing me with combo points, I was constantly throwing out Eviscerates. The crits were around 7k-9k. Since I was running dual Anesthetic Poison to keep elementals under control (and sort of failed at it) I can't really say how poison damage was.

The guild had tried this encounter a few times before, but now we got some practice on a new tactic and a different raid leader. Sadly though, it seems this night was one of those nights. I think about eight people had problems one way or another (random disconnects, power surges, connection resets and who knows what else) so I don't think we ever got an attempt in where everyone was online the entire time *shrug*

On the positive side, we've now used up our bad luck quota!

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...