My Pre-Cata Goals (Update)

Blogging is in a weird spot for me right now. I've made posts each of the last 3 (week)days. I'm still busy as hell at work and pretty stressed out about it. And taking time away from work during the day to blog (thus further pushing off the things I need to get done before a quickly approaching deadline) doesn't really help lower that stress when it comes to work.

On the other hand, taking that half hour or 45 minutes or whatever each of those 3 days to shove work aside and focus on something fun (or at least focus on venting other sources of stress) has kinda helped soothe my nerves a bit and has actually left me a little more productive once I force myself to get back to that work thing.

So yeah...here I am for consecutive (week)day #4.

I figured I'd give a quick update on my pre-Cata goals.

1) Get my Mountain o' Mounts achievement

At the time I wrote my goals post, I was at 95. Since then I got the last Argent Tourney mount on my list (the Gnomeregan Mechanostrider), the sparkle pony, and the Stormpike Battle Charger (which I swore I already had, but apparently not).

I'm still waiting for my Black Drake, which is an eventual guarantee. The way I'm /rolling in there, it's going to be once I've gotten one for everyone else in the guild first, but I know I'll eventually get it.

That leaves one random drop from all those other possibilities listed. Some weeks I try harder than others to get them. It's so disheartening to defeat a boss again or open that damn Oracle egg again and not see that one item you're really, really hoping for. So right now it's usually a week of miserable failure alternating with a week of not even trying (except for the Egg, since there's really no effort involved in that one).


2) Get my Exalted achievement

Finished this one. I changed up my pirate killing strategy in the Barrens a little bit and more than doubled the rate at which I earned rep from killing them (up to about 2200/hour). The biggest change came from forcing myself to not loot the corpses. I did the math and realized that even with over 18K rep to grind at 2.5 rep per mob, I was still probably only passing up about 80 gold when it was all said and done. So I spent a few days running laps south of Ratchet and slaughtering pirates and got my Booty Bay and Gadgetzan reps over the top for the final two.


3) Get my Master of Arms achievement

Got this one, done, too. The NHL and NBA playoffs were a god-send for this. After doing whatever serious stuff I wanted to do for the night, I'd fire up the laptop and sit on the couch watching my Avalanche or Nuggets get ripped apart in their respective series while endlessly beating away at the abominations and skeletons right on the other side of the Icecrown border from Dalaran. Ended up with Staves, Polearms, Daggers, and Fists (thus getting the Knuckle Sandwich achieve, too).


4) Kill the Lich King

We're still 10/12, as we haven't had a lot of opportunities in the last two weeks to get in there with the strongest team possible. But this week has started off well (we got 8 bosses last night in 3 hours) and we're making a hard push to finally get past Sindy and get some good attempts in on the Lich King before the week is up. Odds are we'll extend the ID if we don't get it done this lockout. So I foresee this being complete before June 8.


5) Get my Priest to 80

I spent a good chunk of time this past Sunday working on my Priest. He's going solo now. My partner just hasn't been that keen on playing his Lock (who I was leveling said Priest with). He finally gave me the go ahead to finish without him and I finally put aside my feelings of guilt for "abandoning" him. So most of my non-raiding/non-farming time in game is going to be spent getting Siaaryn up to 80. I may even splurge on some Heirlooms now, even though he's only 16 levels away. It's not like I'm doing much else with my 600+ Triumph emblems...

Monthly Moderation

As the loading screen tip tells us: "Take everything in moderation (even World of Warcraft!)"

This month's Monthly Moderation still consists of games. Not big, all-time consuming ones like WoW, but smaller ones. Game that I'll pull up when I have 10 or 15 minutes to kill and need something to do.

The best part? All these games are web-based and available online, which means I can play them just about anywhere, anytime.

Auditorium


I first heard about Auditorium from either Joystiq or Ars Technica...I can't remember which. It's a brilliant flash game wherein you bend a flowing stream of light particles through color-coded sound meters to create music. Sounds simple, right? At first, it is. But it gets mind-bendingly complex very, very quickly. Still, I spent hours and hours playing this game for a few solid months when it was released and I still go back to it occasionally, if for no other reason than the soundtrack is nothing short of amazing. And piecing it together an instrument at a time really lets you appreciate it that much more.

I believe the game is also available on the Apple Store for those of you with iPhones or iPad Touches.


Fractal


This is a new game by the same people that made Auditorium. Like Auditorium, the premise of the game is simple, but it makes for some very fun and complex gameplay. In Fractal the idea is to expand hexes on a grid by pushing on existing ones. When you make a cluster of 7 hexes (a ring of 6 with one in the middle) that set is cleared. Clear enough hexes and you move on to the next level. Believe me, it's harder than it sounds.

The game is still in demo phase as I'm writing this, though the full version is due any day now.


Super Mario Crossover


This may just be the greatest thing, ever.

I first heard about this game on Joystiq about a month ago. I immediately wasted the rest of my day putzing around with it.

At its core, it's the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Except instead of just being able to play as Mario, you can also opt to play as Link, Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Samus, or Bill (from Contra). Each character retains their playstyle from their own games and powers up in ways unique to them, so some levels are not optimal for some characters. For instance, Simon's not the best precision jumper, so he's not the best choice for a level with a lot of pitfalls. You're able to switch characters before each stage or after death.

Too much fun. Especially when Bill gets the Spread Gun.


Armor Picross 2


If you couldn't tell by now, I'm pretty big on puzzle and logic games. I love being challenged to think.

There are a ton of different Picross games out there across a ton of platforms. This just happens to be one of those that's available anywhere I have an internet connection, so it's managed to gobble a lot of my time (as has Mario Picross on the DS).

For those of you unfamiliar with Picross, each row and column has a series of numbers that represent, in order, the unbroken lines of filled squares in that row or column. The challenge is to figure out how they're placed. Good times.


There are lots of other games I could talk about. Sudoku, Kakuro, just about anything by PopCap (Peggle, PvZ, Bejewled, etc). But if I wrote about them all, this would be a very very long post.

Besides, I also want to let some of you chime in. What are some of the little quick games that you play from time to time?

More fun (in theory)

So one of the things that's been really exciting for us as a guild lately is that we've been able to get our 25-man raids going again. And by going I mean going. Typically when invites go out we have 32-35 people online. Some ready to go, some just waiting for standby slots. We've been able to enforce timeliness through the simple fact that, if you aren't ready to go when I hit the "Invite All" button on the calendar, the raid's going to fill up before you can get in.

(I've been trying to make sure I log in about 10 minutes before invites go and give everyone ample warning that they need to be on the character that got the invite, that they've "Accepted" on the calendar and that they're not in any other groups.)

We're filling up fast and within about 15 or 20 minutes, we're all there, buffed up and ready to start pulling. Seems good, right?

Well, kinda.

I've been leading raids for our guild (or, prior to that, our guild alliance) for the better part of 2 years now. And I have to say, it's never been as stressful for me as it has been these last 3 weeks.

Part of it might be carrying over from my current work situation, and so I'm trying not to blow things out of proportion. But...holy crap.

From the moment I log on, I start getting bombarded with whispers about what toon do I need people to bring, and what spec should they be in, and they're going to be afk but can I hold a spot, or can I promise a spot right then, or how late will we be going. I understand that these are legitimate issues for each individual and I don't want to trivialize them, but it's hard to juggle all those conversations while trying to also pull the raid together. On top of that I'm trying to make sure we have enough healers and tanks. If we over-invite (which has only happened once so far) I have to start trying to figure out how to convince some people to drop (I've figured out how the standby feature on EPGP works, so that's helped some). And there's also usually three or four different conversations happening in guild chat, raid chat, and officer chat that I'm trying to keep up on, because a lot of them require responses from me.

Raid leaders have a lot that's required of them, from planning to inception to execution. My strength as a raid lead is actually leading people through the encounters. Let's pull this trash pack before that one. Watch where you stand. Bone Spikes incoming. FaceMelter is MC'd. Mage is out, away team go. Beasts in 6. That's the kind of stuff I do well and have the mind for. It's logical. It has a very serial flow. Info in, info out. Typically no more than a couple things happening at a time. They may happen in very rapid succession, but still usually don't overlap much. And they have right and wrong responses.

All that other stuff that has to happen, it's more like chaos. It's variable and happens in parallel. I don't have time to deal with one issue before moving on to the next (assuming I even have a "right" answer for it, which I often don't) and my brain hates me for making it try to do so.

So all that's going on and I'm getting insanely stressed out.

Then we get going. And we have very distinct camps of people in our raid groups.

1) The serious raiders. These are people that enjoy raiding for the challenge. A lot of them are ex-hardcores who still enjoy challenging content but don't want to have to put with with a screaming raid leader or strict attendance requirements or constant pressure to perform. But they're still there and ready to go for almost every raid and they still push themselves to do the best they can. They're very capable and motivated.

2) The uber-casuals. They want to see the raids because, let's face it, they're epic and fun. But, for whatever reason, they're just not quite able to carry their weight. They may or may not have DBM or Vent or Omen (although this last is rarely an issue for them). Motivation is a little lacking and so is execution. But we don't want to deny them a chance to raid. Sometimes they just need a little experience to push them over that hump.

Now, in the Lower Spire, this isn't much of an issue. Worst case we end up waiting a while for Saurfang to drop his stacks of Battle Fury because we were over on the other ship too long the last time, or we end up needing to run down an extra 10% health from Jr. because too many people died to the Mark. But we've still pretty much never failed to one-shot the first four bosses.

Then we get up to the Upper Spire and it just falls apart.

For instance, this past Friday we cleared through all the Plagueworks trash and lined up outside Festergut's room for a first attempt with 90 minutes left in our raid night. (I should mention at this point that we've downed Festergut each of the previous two weeks and that our raid DPS this particular night should have been more than enough to handle it again.)

In that 90 minutes we got in 5 attempts, I think. Most of them wipes before the first exhale. It routinely took 10 or 15 minutes between pulls to get everyone back and rebuffed. There was one group of ranged people that, through sheer dumb luck and a little inattentiveness, almost never got a spore. I died almost every attempt before our other tank needed to taunt off of me. We have one Druid, who's one of our best, that would drop dead before the first inhale on every single attempt. And no one could explain why.

Our one "complete" attempt ended when Festergut enraged with his health bar still at 20%.

(There was one genuine moment of levity when one of our hunters pulled because her dog decided it was a good time to jump out of her lap and onto her keyboard.)

The single biggest frustration for me out of all this was the spore deal. It's really damn hard to see the spores spawn, assess whether or not the 3 key groups have a spore, which groups have more than one (if that's the case), figure out which character needs to run somewhere to cover the inequity, and instruct them to move, all before time runs out for them do actually do so. I need some attentiveness and initiative by individual players at that point and it wasn't happening.

I got chastised for beating a dead horse when I kept mentioning this shortcoming after every attempt and it was everything I could do to not snap at the individual that if it would just get corrected, I wouldn't need to keep saying it.

Then the raid ended the way many of them have lately...I hearth, give some words of encouragement (which I'm sure are sounding very deflated and half-assed) and then immediately log out of the night and finally start to breathe normally again for the first time in four hours.

I think the hardest part of all of it for me may just be in my head. The larger portion of our raid group is comprised of the very capable raiders. In my mind, I'm imagining them becoming frustrated and impatient with doing less than they know they can do because we're trying to carry extra people. Maybe I'm just projecting some of my own frustrations onto all of them as a collective and it's not as bad as I think it is, but I know at least a few of them have to feel similarly.

So now I'm waiting for a blowup much like the one that happened in the early days of Wrath where we had a large guild exodus when execution problems on Sarth +drakes finally wore down the thinning patience of some of our more motivated members. Will it come, or are the folks we have now more understanding and patient than I'm giving them credit for? I don't know.

I know a couple weeks ago I expressed my desire to continue doing 25-man raids in Cata because they were more fun than their 10-man counterparts. Now I'm starting to rethink that...

If I was me

Sometimes--even when you're busy--something grabs your attention, gets your mind going, and won't let go until you've brain-dumped.

Bear Pelt over at WoWTrotter just asked what we would do if we "woke up as [our] character." Actually, she asked yesterday. But I'm just now seeing it during my perusal of my Morning Internet™. And since it's Friday and I'm completely burned out for the week, I decided that now is a good time to distract myself for a little bit and brain-dump.

So my immediate thought was, does that include the ability to run back to my corpse and pick up where I left off? Otherwise raiding is out.

But then I read the post (novel concept, eh?) and found out she meant what if we woke up in our reality as our character. OK, not quite as fun, but still workable.

I have several WoW characters, but for purposes of this post, I think we're supposed to be picking our main, so that would be Saniel. San's a max-level NE Druid. Male. So at least one aspect of my being wouldn't change.

I could sit here all day and think of fun things I could do being a Night Elf that could shift into any of 5 different forms. Not to mention do crazy(er?) things like call down lasers of moonlight on the heads of anyone I desired. (My neighbor's Pomeranian, Mufasa, comes to mind. I wish I was making that up. I'm not.)

But let's be real here. I'd be 7-odd feet tall, with long pointy ears, blue-ish purple skin, and glowing eyes. If I so much as opened the blinds, I'd probably be swarmed by the military in no time. Yeah, I could just turn into the most epic bird any of them had ever seen and fly away. But they would have still seen me. And I'd probably be spending the rest of my day fleeing. That wouldn't be fun.

I could head up into the mountains (I live in Colorado) and hope no one noticed the bear with glowing blue eyes, feathered jewelery, and markings like a badger. (Or, as one of our guildies prefers, a skunk.) And being a bear isn't particularly spectacular if you're not tanking something. Azeroth may have a few world bosses running around. The US, sadly, does not.

I'm not sure there's anywhere I could go (in a day's time) where a giant black cat of doom wouldn't look out of place. Although I'd have to find somewhere that I could play around like that just for a while. I have to imagine the feeling of such raw power would be a head rush. Not something I'd want to pass up.

Travel form...meh. I already have a better (if slower) kitty. Now if we were to get the stag for our travel form. Just make sure there's no hunters anywhere before trying that one out.

And I'm not even going to touch the mutant seal form. Although, since I could cleanse poisons, I could probably go hang out in the reservoir by Rocky Flats just long enough to get spotted. Maybe get my picture taken before flying away again. That could be fun. (Radiation would be considered a poison, right? Right?)

And maybe, just maybe, if I had the opportunity or my forms got boring or whatnot...I'd try to sit down for a couple hours and craft some leather gear. You know, just so I'd have something more permanent to serve as a reminder of the craziest day of my life.

And no other reason.

At all.

Don't judge me.

Would you still love me?

Just a quickie here. The Fluid Druid has put up some information on the feral talent changes coming in Cata. At least as they exist in the current Alpha stage.

I'm not going to say anything specific about them in case you're not into spoilers. And if you are one of those people, I would suggest not following that link. But based on the information in that post, I do have one thing to say...

I may end up changing the name of my blog from "Primal Precision" to "Nom Nom Nom."

End of line.


Work is still really, really busy and basically kicking my tail all over the place. I feel like there's a Flame Wreath around my desk. If I move, I'm going to blow up my dev team. (If you've raided Kara, you know what I'm talking about.)

I'm trying to get some substantial posts written in what little time I have to myself, but it just hasn't been happening so far. I haven't forgotten about you all, though. Please don't forget about me. ;-P

A quick synopsis of Sindragosa

Phase 1:


Phase 2:


Thank you for your time.

Busy busy busy

The next three weeks are going to be crazy busy for me at work (where I usually try to carve out some time to do my blog updates). My posting during this stretch is going to be irregular at best, but I'll try and at least get little things up when I can. Hopefully I can finish the Blood Prince Council and Valithria Dreamwalker guides that I've been working on intermittently for the last few weeks. I also realized when making that new section in my sidebar that I never wrote up a Bear Raiding Spec post. Not sure how I overlooked that one.

In the mean time, just going to give a quick update on more raiding progress. Our 25-man team make some more progress this weekend. We got guild-first kills on both Rotface and Festergut. I forgot to upload my screenshots to my photobucket account, so you'll have to take my word for it. Or check my Armory feed. :-)

We gave Princes a few tries, but didn't have a ton of success. Keleseth keeps one-shotting his tank before they can gather enough shadow orbs. It's actually a problem we deal with on 10-man, too...just seem to have to wait for the RNG to work in our favor in terms of empowerment.

If you've been following the Cataclysm flood (it's gone way beyond "leaks" at this point), you've probably noticed that the female worgen models have been datamined, though sans textures.

Still, this is the most rogueish looking Rogue I think I've ever seen. It screams assassin. I'd probably crap myself if I ever saw that coming towards me. Of course, I never would. That wouldn't be very rogueish, now would it?

Mafs Time!

Do you love maf? I love maf. Let's do some maf together!

    Kitty Druid
+ Deathbringer Saurfang
+ Alt Tanks
+ Tiger's Fury
+ Berserk
+ Hysteria
+ Heroism
=================
    Splatted Cat

Wasn't that fun?

Where WoW has failed me

As I've stated a few times in the blog so far, I've been playing WoW since Vanilla. Not since the beginning-beginning...but not much less. As I keep meaning to make a post explaining, I almost quit not long after, somewhere in late-40-levels. What brought me back to the game with a vengeance was finding the Know Your Lore series at WoW.com and getting completely sucked into the story this game was built around. I'm a story-teller at heart, and the complexity of the plot of this game absolutely tickles me.

One thing that really annoys me, though, is how bad the game itself is at relaying this story. Only it wasn't until the past few months that I realized how much that was true.

Some of it is due to my general inattentiveness and short-term memory issues, especially around things that I don't have immediate context. Let me give you an example.

I leveled through Northred with San and Dal at approximately the same time. Dal went through the Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills on his way to Zul'Drak while San started over in the Borean Tundra first and then moved into Dragonblight. After that, he went through Zul'Drak as well and the leveling paths from that point on ended up being the same.

But during that time I was so wrapped up in everything that was new and the exploration and (to be honest) the drive to 80 I missed some important story bits that didn't get tied together until way later when I started to level Maarken through Northrend.

Like that Thassarian guy? The one who is your main point of contact (for Alliance) as you quest through Icecrown? Yeah...that's the same guy you were trying to track down for the distraught woman at Valiance Keep. His sister...the one who gave up everything to get to Northrend because she believed that, somehow, her (dead) brother was there...

And the big, bad Troll Drakuru that led you on a wild goose chase across the Grizzly Hills? The one that betrays you in Drak'tharon Keep? He's the one you deceive, betray (back), and kill in Zul'Drak.

I completely missed these things my first time through. The first time I saw Tassarian in Borean Tundra, I didn't really have a context for him. So by the time I got to Icecrown, he was long forgotten. Same with Drakuru, especially because I had been 80 for a while before I completed that chain at the end of DTK.

But those are minor things. More recently, I've come to see some of the bigger things.

Like Arthas.

I read Christie Golden's Arthas back in late-February/early-March. While a lot of the story was familiar to me by then, one particular point really drove home a point that the game hopelessly failed to make...just how irredeemable Arthas had become.

Yeah, there was the Icecrown quest chain where you find his heart below ICC and Tirion ends up proclaiming he now sees the truth after a stand-off. And, of course, there's Jaina in Halls of Reflection. But, by and large, we're taking their word for it.

Not in the book. Oh no. It's made very clear. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't...well...you should. But, trust me, there's absolutely nothing left of the old Arthas to save.

Then today (courtesy of WoW.com's Know Your Lore) I found this story (and, consequently this lore section of the main site that I never knew existed).

Productivity completely halted for me while I read the whole thing. It didn't take long. But...wow. Here's a character, Nobundo, that is a big freakin' deal. He brought Shamanism to the Draenei and, ultimately, to the Alliance. I knew that much from the days of Daluaan's early leveling.

But the story linked above just makes it so much more...real. More meaningful. And it's important (to me) to have that. It's that kind of connection to the lore that keeps me playing this game after almost 5 years. Because, if I'm being completely honest here, the game itself is starting to get a little stale. I need a little motivation to keep playing.

Now, to be fair to Blizzard, not everyone cares about the story the way I do. So slowing down the gameplay in order to put more story front-and-center may not be the right solution.

The Wrathgate cinematic was definitely a step in the right direction. And Blizz has stated that the overwhelmingly positive response to that cinematic is prompting them to put more things like that in Cataclysm. But they have to be careful not to overdo it, or things like that will lose their impact.

For me, though, there couldn't be enough. For now I'm going to read the rest of what's available in that Lore section of Blizz's main WoW site. And I'm going to continue to follow the Know Your Lore posts at WoW.com religiously. And I'm probably going to start snatching up the rest of the Warcraft novels and going through those.

But if I had my one wish for WoW, it would be to feature (emphasis there) more of the story in the game.

To Beta or not to Beta

So it was officially announced yesterday that the Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha testing phase is underway. For those of you who may be new to WoW since Wrath was released, this is the initial stage of testing for their expansion packs. Invites are sent to very specific people--all friends and/or family members of Blizzard employees. All testers accepted to this phase of testing are required to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which means they're not allowed to publicly share any information about what they're playing. No vids, no screen shots, no blog posts, no conversations...nothing. The word is mum.

Of course this means that the Beta phase is not far off. Note that "not far" could still mean months, but still...not far.

I've been playing this crazy WoW game since Vanilla. I didn't attempt to get into the BC beta because...well...honestly, I wasn't that into the game yet. Then when the Wrath Beta rolled around two years later, I also opted to not worry about it. I was very into the game by that point and I readily devoured any information that was released on various blogs and websites. But there were a couple factors that held me back.

1) My playtime was still pretty limited, all things considered. I didn't want to start trying to figure out how to divide it between the current game (where I was still trying to get a lot done) and the new one.

2) Part of the thrill for me is the discovery. I wanted to be excited for the day I got the actual retail copy of Wrath and got to start exploring all this stuff I'd heard about with all my friends.

With San I eagerly quested out all of Northrend just because I wanted to see everything. Dal made it to 80 before I really lost the drive to keep doing quests I'd already done. Maarken...yeah. I've turned to leveling him through PvP just for something different. (Which, btw, has been an interesting experiment and one I might post about soon.)

I don't want that stuff to feel "old hat" when it's still technically brand new.

On the other hand, curiosity has sunk its teeth into me. I finally spent some time on the PTR when 3.3.3(.3.3.3) was in testing so that I could play with the Mangle changes and get better numbers on what it was actually going to do for us Cats. And then I spent a little extra time just romping around and checking things out. Of course there wasn't any crazy, new, OMG content that I was spoiling by doing so. But it was a small step. And I started to realize that seeing things before they went live wasn't somehow...I dunno...evil.

Plus I have this blog now. A Beta spot would give me a lot of content to write about. I wouldn't have to scrounge for a topic for months. Think of the traffic! The hits! The powah! Mwuhahahaha!


*cough*

¬.¬

No, seriously, though. I think it would be really fun to be able to be one of those bloggers that gets to share first-hand (paw?) experiences of upcoming content. And it would allow me to place solid distinctions on my time pre- and post-release. During Beta I would be approaching things very critically. Both in the sense that, hey, a Beta tester is still a tester. But also in the sense that I'd be specifically seeking out good information for my blog.

Once the game was actually released, I'd be able to just enjoy the experience.

I don't know. I'm still kind of undecided.

Right now I'm pretty confident that I'm going to at least do what I can to procure a Beta spot once the opportunity comes around. If I don't get one...no biggie. I won't be crushed.

And if I did manage to get one...well then maybe my Titanium Seal of Dalaran would have to help me decide whether or not I should use it.

10/12!

I'm hoping to get a real post up sometime later today. I've been swamped at work and at home the last few and haven't been able to put in the blogging time that I usually do.

That said, just a quickie for now. Our progression team bagged another kill last night. Poor Lana'thel got her wings clipped.



After she died we had about an hour left in our raid window, so we went to give Sindragosa some quick learning attempts. We got in 3 or 4, and were able to get her down to 44% on the last. Her (re)death is definitely on the horizon.

Also, that gauntlet before Sinnie? Sooo crazy. Fun, though.

Weekend Progress

It's been a pretty good weekend of progress for my guild. I'm excited for us, so I want to share.

Firstly, we managed to fill up a 25-man raid for the first time in months and months thanks to a large influx of recruits. Armed and ready we went into ICC and one-shotted the entire Lower Spire. All 4 kills were guild-firsts for us on 25-man.


Doesn't 25 toons standing there look good? Yeah, I think so, too.


That was Friday. On Saturday we got a progression team together and continued a run that we started mid-week. We finally managed to down the Professor!


Class dismissed!


Our 25-man team will be starting fresh next Friday, and we'll be trying to get in two nights of raiding to see how far we can go. The progression team is going to continue Monday to try and learn and beat Lana'thel before the lockout ends.

I love when things go well. :-)