Extended Raid Lockout in 3.2

Apparently on the 3.2 PTR you will be able to extend the lockout period for raids. Find more over at wow.com.

My first thought is...

Our 10 man progression group runs once a week for three hours. That is it. Even then we take weeks off. Currently we are in our fourth week of "break" from progression.

In Ulduar we have killed Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT-002, Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya, and Thorim. Before our current break we got a good look at Freya.

Killing those eight bosses takes up most of our one night of progression. Eight bosses in three hours is quite good I feel. But it would be great to get a full night with Freya and Hodir.

This change is something for raid leaders to look into and use.

Thank you Ratter for pointing this out to me.

*cast cast* Turtle MINE

Fishing, as you know, is one of my favorite past times. I fish to calm myself when I get annoyed. I fish when I am bored. I fish when I am busy. I fish listening to podcasts. I fish while chatting with friends. I fish when I just need something to clear my head.

I do a lot of fishing.

But so do my guildies!!! Congrats to one of my Pallies on winning the fishing contest in a little over 17 minutes.He mentioned Mr. Pinchy. I still needed that mini pet. All the fishing in BC I never got the chance. I did a few months ago get one. But no pet the the three chances. This time I headed over there and my first wish gave me the Magical Crawdad Box!

I enjoy doing the fishing dailies. I am still doing the Crocolisk in the City. I only have one of the three croco pets available.

All the random items that you get in your Bag of Fishing Treasures from the Dalaran fishing daily is great. Quite a bit of gold too, here are some of my favorites.

Deviate Fish is cooked to Savory Deviate Delight or made into Elixir of Giant Growth.
Pygmy Oil is made into Guru's Elixir.
Elixir of Water Walking is posted in AH just before Sunday’s Fishing Extravaganza.

The must read is dropped in the fishing bag too, A Steamy Romance Novel: Northern Exposure. MUST READ!!! *giggle fits*

My newest favorite is the Tiny Titanium Lockbox. Here is what I got in my first one.
Beyond all else I fish for mats for the Fish Feast for raiding. I help provide the mats to Husband for them so he doesn’t have to do it all. Lookie what I got!! (Oh and please note the T8 shoulders. I tend to not do lookie gear posts.)When you stand still on the Sea Turtle and jump the turtle mount tucks in his feet and head. It is a great addition to this great looking mount. *rides around in glee*

Locks Do Blush

Selenium of guild Almost Evil was hanging out in IF. Doing some banking when she was randomly /poke-d.

Twink Experience /vanish

From the Initial 3.2 Patch notes:

Battleground experience has arrived!
* Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
* Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar - both located near the Battlemasters in either city - and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
* Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
* Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
* Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would’ve been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.

This is fantastic! This patch will bring us a lot of change to our games.

First, for 10G you can now grind instances for drops for no experience. You can also explore while waiting for queues with no experience.

I still question if no experience will also go for quests. Doing the STV quests to finish the quest Big Game Hunter for the bow/gun for 29 Hunters is a challenge. If you don't get any experience for quests this will make it EXTREMELY easy for 29s to complete. (Then there is Holiday quests, BG daily quests, and Reputation quests! Lots of options would come for bored twinks.)

Then, separating those who are twinks from those who just want to level, we will have to see. My first reaction is "YES! GET THE FODDER OUT OF MY WSG." I look for the twink vs. twink battles and this will ensure that it happens. It will be much easier to have premade groups match up.

I actually see this as bad for the person leveling. Your queues will now depend on 9 of your faction and 10 of the opposite to queue for your bracket. Currently on a bad day the queue can be 20-30 minutes in the Emberstorm battlegroup. We can only hope that the lure of experience in the BGs will make more people queue.

I initially thought you are now separating those who know the game objective and don't. I can hope that there are enough people leveling alts that this will not be true. Sadly you will also not get a chance to be exposed to twinks in both good and bad scenarios. Not realizing there is a difference.

Overall, I do think separating the twinks vs those that are leveling is a good thing.

Last, those that do like to battleground can level. I actually have a friend who hates leveling with hot poker in the eyes. Now he can go dawdle in WSG, AB, EOTS, AV, and the new battleground. Just maybe he will make it to 80 by the time a new expansion comes out.

I will recommend that anyone who does have twinks wait to run battlegrounds after the patch. I will take a low level alt out into the BG with experience turned off. Testing this on the LIVE realms once launched is a must. The idea that one of my twinks gets leveled because something was wrong with the new system would be so very depressing. So be warned.

DPS Killer

Getting turned into a turtle.
…
There is nothing that kills my dps more. Silly mages should just let me pew pew them to death.

Coming Through

Husband and I went to Las Vegas for our 10th wedding anniversary. It was fun. I have wanted to see Penn & Teller for a while now and we finally did. Teller is as fantastic as I knew he would be.

In-game I used 15,500 gold plus mats for Husband’s gift.

DoTimer Self-Tip

Removing raid wide buffs in DoTimer addon. For lock and druid I only have a few items on my do not show list or blocked list.Open up the Addon menu under Interface. Under DoTimer Filters add to the Blocked Types field anything you want to never show. Press enter once you are done typing in the name accurately. For me the spelling and typing challenged, it may take a moment to get correct.

For me I want to keep the list short. The current items are:

• replenishment
• detect invisibility
• unending breath
• mark of the wild
• gift of the wild

There might be a better way to do this task. I don’t want to remove all buffs. Just the few listed and this has works just fine.

Mt. Dew Battle Bot

Oath, a good friend of mine over at Dressed to Cuddle talked about his experience with obtaining a Mt. Dew battle bot and game fuel. He also embeds the video for the target advertisement spot. Read it now. I said now!!1111!!!!111

Mountain Dew: Go Eff Your Face

The campaign ends August 20, 2009. Nib has a post on how to get the robot. No RL gold needed.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/mountain-dew.html

http://www.mountaindewgamefuel.com

Guildie Congrats and Message

Big congratulations for a friend. He broke 2000 in Arenas. I know he has been working hard and it is a blast to see him finally get the achievement.A guild friend is stationed in Afghanistan. He should be done with this tour in August. While he is away he is still missed. He is the king of “MT”s in guild chat. (To Rushy: FYI. Elle had a name change.)

Ulduar Glitched

My guild has been 17-25 manning Loot Leviathan AKA Flame Leviathan in Heroic Ulduar.

While setting up for one of these runs we suddenly had … mobs. Two Runeforge Sentry walked through the protective bubble. They then proceeded to start twacking people around their feet.

Mounted, I ran for the stairs. You know… to watch the show.

*shrug*
We don’t know what happened but they eventually reset.

How I Hit Cap

I received a comment a while back and have been mulling it over.

Elarya said...

So... Realistically speaking, what do you suggest? I'm in a guild where having two sets of gear just isn't really possible (I'd be so damn low on DKP...). Carrying around gems to plop into sockets? Better question would be, what do YOU do?

First thing I am going to say is this…

Being Hit Cap is NOT important.

*ducks quickly* Look we got through vanilla WoW and BC with a 1% miss rate. During those years bosses died.

What you need to decide is what your acceptable risk to miss, 1%, 2%, 5% or never?

I accept risk. A lot of that is because my preferred spec is Affliction. I question my own Hit gear choices when I am Destruction. (No, I will not go into those conversations with myself. I always win.)

Here are my thoughts on things for Hit.

Gemming for Hit?
NEVER! MORE SPELL POWER! It is what we are here for. All of my gear is socketed for spell power. I ignore the socket “bonus” on gear, unless it is spell power. Even if the bonus is spell power, I would do the math to see if I get more spell power with my normal gems.

The ONLY time I don’t socket for spell power is to activate my meta gem in my helm. That is the time I would socket hit or even spirit.

Food buff for Hit?
Not even on my list of options. The increased spell power spread over all the spells that do hit would be a better investment. (I put this in so I can giggle at it.)

Gear swap for Hit?
Yes. Don’t think of your hit gear as a “set”. You are NOT looking for swapping out ALL your gear. That would not be optimal. Spending all your DKP on a second set of gear for only one stat is also far beyond optimal.

At most, I have swapped out four pieces for hit, gloves, waist, trinket, and off-hand. Spend DKP on key hit gear. Trinkets like the Dying Curse or Living Flame are a good investment.

I still am using my Ward of the Violet Citadel bought for 25 Emblem of Heroism. I am waiting to replace it with Leviathan Fueling Manual. It is the one piece I still swap for the extra hit.

Talent for Hit?
Suppression. Love it, hold it, tuck it in at night. If you are low in hit, for three talent points you can increase your hit chance by 3%. That is a deal! 50% off. Get it now!

If as a lock you are looking a little priestly in the gear department. This talent will save you some face. I am still low on gear hit then I like, so I still use three talent points in suppression.

Raid make up for Hit?
This is where it gets tricky. YOU have to be paying attention. Are you Horde or Alliance? Is there magical buffs from other classes? Each and every raid is different. Plan for YOUR most likely scenario.

Here is what I am doing.
Hydra is not Hit Capped. This is by CHOICE. I choose to live the wild un-hit capped life.

Goal is 17% hit. I have 3 talent points into Suppression. To be capped I would need 14% hit.

As alliance I have the potential of the Draenei racial of Heroic Presence. Do I think Draenei are going to be in my raids? *scans past raid make ups* Yes. That allows me to take into account 1% more hit from a party buff. To be capped I would need 13% hit.

No shadow priest and no moonkins in most of my raids. Taking those into account would not be reliable.

I prefer to be running between 11-12% hit. Right now I am raiding with 10.48% hit. I feel that is low. But I kill things nicely with even that low of hit. I even miss once in a while.

I have played at a training dummy for hours putting on and taking off hit gear. Then I tested hit in raids. I understand when I miss I am under hit capped and why. It is the WHY and preplanning that you need to do so you feel comfortable with your stats.

If someone asked me “Are you hit capped?” I would still say yes. For my situation I am, just low. *grin*

More Randomness by Screenshots

Now that I know the process is: 1) put in talent points, 2) go to the trainer, 3) Train, 4) PWN. When I started poking around in a replenishment Destruction talent build I made sure I had all the talents actually learned.
When discussing who was doing Detect Invisibility on a Naxx run.
Please note that it was not a lock that compared a Mage to a Prostitute. I was not going to argue.
The Champion's Purse you get form the Champion Dailies in Icecrown give you a possibility of a Champion's Seal. I had no idea when this happened. I know it was not something that was originally implemented. It must have been in one of the subsequent patches. Most days I don’t get any, but 3 out of 4 was a lucky day.
Sometimes while doing instances so fast I forget how beautiful the surroundings are. The priest put slow fall on Cookie and I got to watch bats and spiders skitter as I dropped. I really like action shots like this one.
*giggles* The pally tank dropped right on a ledge and died. *sigh* good times.

Randomness by Screenshots

Argent Tournament TIP for those that have not received the title. DON’T turn in the last quest to get your title until you have earned all the tokens you want. That way you are still doing two dailies while killing the same mobs. *grumbles about the lost gold*

The smelly humans were the last on my list to become a Crusader.

This year I got the Veteran Nanny achievement. Apparently I did the Outland quest last year but not the one that started in Stormwind.

Last month in getting prepped for trying to buy Blizzcon 2009 tickets I switched to a battle.net Blizzard account. Remember final is final.

Last month my druid, Iuncusia (with an "i" AKA Lung Cookie AKA Cookie) turned level 80. With some gear and practice I am getting OK. And that is just fine by me. Here is her actual Ding! Shot in Culling of Stratholme.

After turning level 80 I went to go train in Moonglade. I think I didn’t train for a few levels.

Mom is doing instances. Heroics even! What a huge step. No more Spell Power for this hunter. She also has a new fancy crossbow. There was also a run of Heroic: Culling of Stratholme where she was able to get the bronze drake from the time event.

Of course there is more!

Kara Farming

Three of us have been going into Karazhan. We are there to kill Attumen the Huntsman and Midnight. There is a possibility of Attumen to drop the mount Fiery Warhorse's Reins.

With a tank to hold his attention, this was very easy. I don’t even remember taking any damage. Ok… I did… I forgot about the charge and stun. Once I reposition behind in melee, where I was suppose to be standing, it was easy.

No pony dropped.

Since we were there, I asked my Rogue if he was missing any of the enchants that drop in Kara. The only one was Formula: Enchant Boots – Surefooted. It only drops off Phantom Stagehands which are just before the Opera event.

At level 80 the three of us were able to walk pass and between most all the mobs to get to the Stagehands. I did pull some random mobs. I am not sure if it was my imp running through them or if I got to close. Either way it was easy to kill them and move on. I did make sure my imp was phase shifted in case that was the issue.

We got up to the Stagehands and kill one.

ONE.
Just ONE.
And the enchant dropped.

I didn’t see the mount drop or the enchant in ALL of Burning Crusade. It was nice to know the increased drop rate for the enchants in old world really did happen.

HydRAWR on Twitter

I caved. I signed up. I blame Fim.

You can find me on http://twitter.com/HydRAWR.

What to expect:

1. It will never be updated
2. For me to lose the log-in
3. There to be spelling errors
4. For me to not understand the charm
5. Another thing for me to ignore
6. Stuff will happen, you will not be Twitterererered too
7. Blog will always come first