Anti-adaption

This started out as a comment on the noob's most recent post about a rogue's playstyle. I ended up typing so much I figured I'd just make it my own post.

Leveling as a Feral Druid is insanely fun. We have so many tricks at our disposal that we're able to overcome just about any obstacle the game can throw at us, even if it takes using the full range of our abilities to do so. For instance, I had a basic equation that served my questing needs all the way through Northrend:

Actual # of players needed to complete quest =
Suggested # of players needed to complete quest - 2

There were a couple exceptions. I think I ran across one three-person quest where I needed a healer. And there was a couple five-person quests that I solo'd.

But it wasn't always this way. While I'm very well acquainted with the skills and abilities of a Feral Druid now, back in the days of Vanilla and BC...not so much.

Remember, with the exception of a Warrior that didn't make it out of Westfall, Saniel was my first toon. Not only was I learning how 2 DRUID, but I was also learning how to WoW in general. It was a lot to take in.

I was kinda disappointed when I found out that I had to go 10 levels before I would be able to actually play the way a Feral is supposed to play. That is, shapeshift. But I sucked it up, spammed mah moonfare and Wrath, and got through.

Then I got Bear form. And while I was excited, I quickly found that it didn't kill things as quickly as my spells did. But I sure could take a hell of a lot more damage. So for the next 10 levels my pattern was to pull from max distance with spells (I learned very quickly the value of pulling from range, rather than rushing up to something) and then shift to bear to finish the job when the mob got close. That worked well.

And then I got Cat form. Instantly, all the neat tricks I'd learned in the last 19 levels went straight out window. My Cat could kill things fast. And Prowl around to get by things I didn't want to fight. And get the drop on unsuspecting enemies. And it was a melee class, which made it more fun (for me) than tossing out spells.

For the next 40-someodd levels, that was that. I was a Cat.

That could sneak past a pat without going splat.

But my skill curve went flat as I refused to...adapt.

*cough*

Sorry.

Anyway, the point is that I more or less played a furry Rogue from that point on. With the amount of time it took to level and the various breaks I took before I got serious about the game, I almost forgot that I could shift into other forms. It made the game a lot more difficult in places than it needed to be.

It wasn't until BC when I was having trouble in Nagrand not aggroing 4 mobs every time I stepped that I started to remember I played a versatile class. Except "remember" isn't exactly the right word. After my 4th or 5th death in one of the Forge Camps on the west end of the zone, my partner leaned over my shoulder and asked (as if it was the most obvious thing in the world), "Why don't you go Bear?"

I laughed at him. "Bears can't kill things fast enough," I said. "I'll still die." Because, of course, after 40-someodd levels and an expansion pack things would still be the same, right?

But the idea nagged at me. So the next time he left the room I tried it.

Holy cow, he was right! That was a ton easier! Bear against one mob...not so special. Bear against four? Now it shines!

I started doing all kinds of crazy things after that. I would shift between Bear and Cat in the same fight. I would pull with Moonfire again to get a DoT on my enemies before they got to me. I would even heal myself mid-combat. (Seriously...this was a revelation to me. I only used my heal buttons out of combat prior to that.)

I would even intentionally pull more than I thought I could handle just to see if I could manage it.

Wild, right?

I'm half tempted to start leveling another Feral, just to see what it's like now that I understand the game.

And my class.

My guild is amazing

It figures something like this would happen the night I make a "burnout" post...

A couple weeks ago, after one of our regularly scheduled raids ended a little early, I got a group together to go do Sarth 3D (10). It was the fourth or fifth time we've done it, and each previous time I'd rolled pretty much dead last on the mount. But this time, everyone on the run passed, essentially gifting me the drake.

#99.

Since then I redoubled my efforts at getting one of the mounts from Kara, ZG, UP, Strath, fishing, or Halaa. 100 was close enough to taste.

After once again having no luck in Kara and ZG last night, I asked if anyone in the guild wanted to join me on a UP run. I got a few volunteers. But before we could leave, I was called to the forge in Dal to "help test an issue with an addon."

When I got there, I instead found out that a small group of my guildies (isn't it awesome how I can link them all?) had pooled resources to buy me a chopper. (Hopefully I remembered everyone involved.)

#100.

Two for one!

How awesome is that?

So, of course, I had to run off to Krasus' Landing to show off the new mount.

So pretty.

Then, just like a kid opening presents on Christmas morning, I headed to UP with the group in an attempt to get more.

On the approach.

Before heading in, I had to get a shot of the mount that actually completed the set.

If you listen hard enough, you can hear ZZ Top echoing across the hills.

If there was any doubt (there isn't) as to why I continue to log into the game almost every day of the week, it's because I get to play it with some of the most amazing people evar.

I really suck at "thank yous," but really you guys...thank you.

Understanding Burnout

As I've stated before, I've been playing this crazy WoW game for the better part of 4 years. Almost 5 at this point. From the very beginning I've understood that when there is a game that people are capable of playing that long, some burnout is going to occur. I didn't get my very first look at this until the end of BC. And, at the time, I didn't personally feel any of it. I mean, there was still so much to do! But I understood it, intellectually.

As Wrath is slowly coming to a close and we get ever closer to the release of a new expansion, I'm finally feeling the burnout. I get it now. But why did it take almost 5 years? It's never taken me that long to burn out on anything before. And if you consider the number of hours I pump into this game...yeah.

But today I realized there's a very fundamental difference for me between Wrath and the previous two content cycles: I've been a part of Wrath right from the start.

I didn't start playing Vanilla until pretty close to the end of its cycle--a little bit before the first Scourge invasion and the opening of Naxx 40.

Leveling was slow and intermittent. When BC dropped, Saniel was still only in the 40s. I started Daluaan to work on at that time, just so I could justify having bought the expac when I was still 15 or so levels away from being able to see its content.

Saniel didn't ding 70 until Christmas day of that year, 10 months and change after BC had been released. Dal didn't make it until a couple months later. I spent the remaining year of the expansion learning how to actually play WoW with people. Dungeons and Heroics and Raids. All the fun stuff that I'd either avoided or didn't even know about up to that point.

By the time Wrath finally came out, I was a fairly seasoned vet. I'd gone from haphazardly leveling my way through the world to actively raiding, reading blogs, researching specs and gear and rotations, and even acting as a guild's raid leader. I had two max-level toons and a couple more that just kinda floated around when I really needed a change of pace. I put more hours into the game each month than I had the almost-two-years prior to getting addicted serious.

Then Wrath drops. Both my 70s are 80 within a month. I'm running Heroics consistently. I've been an active part of every raid tier as it's been released. I have a 3rd 80 now, and a 78 (although he started at 55, so it doesn't count as much). There's also a 47 in the mix.

I've watched my guild expand and shrink several times over. With two exceptions, I've accomplished everything I've wanted to accomplish in this expansion. One of those things (kill the Lich King) is somewhat dependent on other people. The other (obtaining 100 mounts) is now only impeded by bad luck and a gold bag I refuse to open.

When I have a goal, I'm capable of pursuing it with relentless single-minded ambition. Especially when I know that accomplishing it is just a matter of time and determination.

When I have no concrete goals...my interest in something in virtually nil. I'm not the type that does something solely for the sake of doing it.

I still log in almost nightly to try and accomplish those last two goals. I also have the mini-goals of getting my Priest and my DK their epic flying. I refuse to fund them with my main, though. Like all my toons, they need to earn their own way. Siaaryn's almost there. Another week or two and he'll have it. Just grinding out dailies and playing the Saronite-to-Titanium AH game.

My DK's a little further away. But if I put a few solid days into farming herbs, I could probably make it quick.

There's still months and months until Cataclysm is finally released. (I'm banking on January or February, despite Blizzard's financial forecasts.) I'm just as anxious to get in the beta to experience something really new as I am just because I think it would be a really neat experience to be an active participant in a product under development.

Now I get burnout. I see why people leave the game in droves during the last few months of an expansion, especially with something new and shiny actually visible on the horizon. Yeah, there's a still lot to do now...but I've done it.

Hard at work

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple days. I have a few things swirling around in my head that I want to talk about, but I've been forcing myself to spend my blogging time working on a new layout/design instead. I've been meaning to do it for the last two months or so, and it's time to stop procrastinating.

It's probably going to consume my free time until sometime early next week.

If you want a sneak peek and to follow the progress of my testing, you can check it out here: http://sanieltestblg.blogspot.com/

In retrospect, I probably should have named it PrimalPrecisionBeta...

Can we have it both ways?

You'll have to excuse me for this post. I'm kinda brain dumping a thought I had while driving into work this morning.

One of my concerns over the upcoming raid lockout changes are that it's going to put a guild like mine in a tough spot. We use 10-man raids to give our better players their progression fixes while opening up 25s to everyone. That's no longer going to be a viable option, and it's something that's been in my mind ever since the announcement.

Our guild is in a pretty stable place right now, all things considered. We have, more or less, the same progression 10-man team that we've had all the way through Wrath. It's comprised mostly of our Officers and long-established members. There's wiggle room in some of the positions, but we're a little hamstrung in that we only have two tanks. So if either one is unavailable...

We have a second 10-man progression team that basically consists of players that we absorbed from another guild. They're all co-workers of one of our guild's longest-standing members. They enjoy raiding together, but on non-raid nights there would be 2 or 3 of them at most online. So, looking for a little more of a social environment, they joined our guild with the stipulation that they could still run their own 10man content. I'm cool with that. I enjoy it, even. It feels like competition. It pushes me, personally, to try harder to get the guild first kills on my team.

This past weekend two more members of our guild decided to try and put together a 3rd 10-man team that I think they want to run regularly as well. Power to them. While it effectively eliminates the pool of alternate choices for the other two teams when they're short members, I hope they can keep it going.

Ok, got that? Keep it in mind. I'm going to shift gears now for a moment, but it's all going to come back later.

Our 25-man runs this weekend were pretty successful. On our first night we were able to down Rotface and Festergut (plus, obviously, the Lower Spire). The Ugly Bros. are a week-to-week coin toss as to whether or not we're going to get past them. So when it took a combined 3 attempts to get the 2 kills, we were feeling pretty good.

The next night we went back and started on the Princes. It wasn't the first time we'd tried them on 25-man, but it was the first time in quite a while. There were some learning attempts and some confusion at first, but everything eventually came together and we got a very smooth kill. That was a guild first for us on 25-man.

The Upper Spire is difficult. A huge jump from Lower on that curve. I was looking at the people in the 25 groups those two nights and I realized that only a couple of them had never been that far into ICC. So most of the people in there already knew the fights...it was just a matter of adjusting from 10-man difficulty to 25-man difficulty.

After Princes we went on to Lana'Thel. Once we got up there, the number of people who were familiar with the fight dropped significantly. The number of people who had completed it dropped even more.

BQL is a tough fight. It's very chaotic, even on 10-man. On 25-man, it's absolutely insane. We had a good portion of our raid just trying to learn it that night. As you can imagine, success was limited.

There's always going to be a learning curve going into 25-man content, even if you've already mastered the fight in 10-man. That's just the way it goes. And that's fine with me. Even as a raid lead, I have to adjust how I manage a raid and that takes some time to figure out, too.

Ok, so bringing those two separate stories together...

This morning I started to think that maybe we don't have to choose between being a 10-man guild or a 25-man guild. Maybe there still is a way to do both.

Maybe the idea is to get enough members to field a few different 10-man teams. They can set their own schedules and run their own progression as they see fit. And then, every third week or so, declare it a 25-man week. Schedule the big runs on our usual nights (Fri/Sat) and see what we can all do together.

Maybe if we get to the point in a tier of content where we're pretty much farming it on 10-man, we can shift the schedule to focus more on the 25s until the next tier comes out.

I don't know if something like that would work. From an organizational standpoint, it wouldn't be easy to maintain. But if we can pull it off, it might give us the right mix of everything to keep people happy and still be the kind of guild we want to be.

I haven't floated any of this past my fellow officers yet (though several of them will read this, no doubt). Like I said, this post is sort of a brain dump to get the whole thing out of my head.

I'm wondering if any of my readers run a system similar to this in their own guilds currently and if they have any insight on the idea.

The Lich King...he haunts me

Time, attendance, and a myriad of other factors have severely limited our guild's attempts at finally killing the Lich King. Last night we had our first hour of tries in well over a month, and only our second series to date.

We're able to get to phase 2 pretty reliably. After that...we need a lot of work. 60% seems to be the point where we consistently wipe, usually around the second or third Defile.

On a positive note, we saved someone from being dropped off the edge by the Val'kyr for the first time ever...

*sigh*

A Bear's guide to ICC: Valithria Dreamwalker

Valithria Dreamwalker is the first "boss" of ICC's Frostwing Halls. I use the word boss in quotes, because she's not a boss in the typical sense...that is, one you try to defeat. Encounter might be the better word here.

When you start the VD encoun--hang on. Lemme try that again.

When you start the Valithria encounter, she's in the center of the room being held down by magical energies. Her health is at 50%. The idea is to heal her back up to full. All 6 million hit points.

As you can guess from that description, you (the tank) are not exactly the star of this show. But that's okay. There's still plenty for you to do.

While your healers are desperately trying to heal Valithria, there's wave after wave of mobs trying to stop you. This is where the tanks and DPS come in.

You'll notice that on either side of the room are gates. Once you start the encounter, these gates will open and that's where the mobs will enter the fight. On 10man, you only have to worry about the two gates nearest the room entrance.

When entering the room, you can see 3 dark gray strips leading to the center. Ideally the two tanks should be split just outside the two edges of these strips, on the crushed-bone floor. The rest of the raid should be between them.

During the fight, as the adds come out of the gates, it's going to be tempting to rush up and meet them. Don't do this. During much of the fight, you're going to have a single healer doing most of the raid healing. If you spread out too far, you're going to make their job nightmarish. Make smart and liberal use of FFF and Growl to draw the mobs to you. If you absolutely must go run out to get one, immediately drag it back to your original tanking location.

There are 5 types of mobs you'll encounter during this...erm...encounter.

Risen Archmages (Liches)
There's 4 of these present before the encounter starts, surrounding Valithria. They drop fairly easy, but there's a couple things to watch out for.

First, they will Frostbolt the entire raid, doing damage and slowing movement speed. This can and should be interrupted as much as possible. Not as important with the first four, but as you see these guys coming out of the gates, keep them from casting that as much as possible. If you have a Bash available, use it. Feral Charge can also be used when the situation allows.

Next thing to watch out for is Column of Frost. It starts out as a swirling whitish spot under someone's feet and then erupts into a huge column, dealing damage and knocking anyone standing in it high enough that they'll also take fall damage. If you see this appear beneath your feet, move. If you get caught in it, use Feral Charge in the air to avoid the fall damage.

Finally, they summon Mana Voids, which look like pools of shadow magic on the ground. Bears obviously don't have to worry much about these, but make sure mana uses are avoiding them.

Blazing Skeletons (Skeletal Mages)
These are the most crucial enemies to kill in this encounter. They have a pretty unremarkable Fireball spell, but the big thing to worry about is Lay Waste. This is an uninterruptable, channeled fire AoE. It does pretty heavy damage. Your raid needs to kill these guys as quickly as possible when they appear.

Gluttonous Abominations (Aboms)
The Aboms on their own are not a significant threat in this encounter. They have a frontal cone ability called Gut Spray that sounds bad, but really isn't unless you end up tanking two or three of these at once. Just make sure to keep them pointed away from the rest of your raid.

The bigger threat from the Aboms comes after they die. About 3 seconds later, they'll spawn a pack of about 5 or 6 Rot Worms. The worms hit surprisingly hard (on non tanks) and additionally will stack a DoT debuff on whomever they're attacking. It's important that these be controlled and killed quickly. You do not want them running around your raid. When an Abom dies, stand right next to it and start Swipeing like crazy to pick them all up and control them. Have your aid AoE them down.

Blistering Zombies (Zombies)
These zombies are of the big, top-heavy, green, blistery kind, with the purple tentacles coming out of either shoulder (as opposed to the ghoul kind like DK pets).

Ideally these adds will not be tanked. Instead they will be kited. Hunters are good for this, as are Shamans (Frost Shock) and Mages (Chill effects). If none of these options are available to you and you need to hold aggro on one, do your best to kite it as well. Why? They hit pretty hard, for starters. On top of that, they have a Corrosion debuff that can be brutal.

When these guys die, they explode, so it's worth keeping your distance as much as possible.

Suppressors (Geists)
Suppressors, like the Zombies, are not tanked. These guys come out in packs of 3 or 4 from both gates at the same time. They head straight for Valithria and start casting Suppression. You should really only assign one raid member to getting these down. Cats and Rogues are somewhat ideal, but any class with strong AoE can manage.

Suppressors are the main reason it's important to keep the Archmages interrupted as much as possible. If the person killing the Suppressors is slowed, it can drag out the length of the encounter significantly.

(If you are a Cat and you get put on the Suppressors, remember that shapeshifting will clear the slow effect. You should have this macro to quickly accomplish this: /cast !Cat Form. This basically performs a shift out and back into cat form instantly.)


The kill priority for the adds should be Blazing Skeletons -> Worms (from the Aboms) -> Blistering Zombies -> Risen Archmages -> Suppressors -> Gluttonous Abominations.

There's also a whole Portal/Emerald Dream/Healing Buff mechanic happening in this fight, but as a Feral you'll probably never see it. It's mostly for the healers. I don't feel comfortable enough describing the whole thing, because I'm not personally familiar with it. There are better places to go learn about that.

Once Valithria is fully healed, she'll break her bonds, kill all the reaming mobs, and present you with a loot chest.

Sadly, there's not a lot of great Bear loot to be had from this encounter. 10-man can drop Oxheart and Skinned Whelp Shoulders, but those are more for Plate DPS and Energy users, respectively. On 25-man you can hope for either the Noose of Malachite (which is actually pretty good) and Devium's Eternally Cold Ring.

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As with all my boss strats, I'm writing from the overall perspective of a Bear tank and what they will need to do. For you Cats reading this blog, I suggest you check out Dinaer's guides on Forever a Noob. They're written for Rogues but are a pretty good guide for melee in general and his gear drop suggestions (with the exception of weapons) will be spot on for Cats. If I have additional insight, I will try to add it in my blog.