Random observations, brought to you by some of the “excellent” artists on my iPod

Faster Pussycat Kill Kill

Despite a slow start to the raid last night, we’re moving through Ulduar-25 substantially faster each week.  We took down Flame Leviathan, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya and Razorscale, with a quick trip over to Emalon before calling it a night.  I feel a Yogg kill is in the works this week.

KC & the Sunshine Band

Each time we return to Ulduar, we notice more and more nerfs.  There was less trash on the way to Freya, and she didn’t seem to spawn the green-seeds-of-Doom during her final phase.  I see from MMO-Champion that the mobs leading to Ignis will no longer cast Unquenchable Flames and that the Ice Turrets en route to Mimiron will do less damage.  And the void zones spawned when one of Auriaya’s cats dies no longer insta-gib you.  Not remotely.  I discovered this last night as I was feared through one, briefly had some weird camera-spin-mouse issue, ran back through the void zone — and barely took any damage.

Dead Milkmen

Despite the nerfs, there are people who die consistently.  I’m going to start keep score, because going back through my WWS reports, I swear there’s at least one person who’s never lived through Hodir.  Not once.  

Arrested Development

When I was nearing the level-80 mark on my druid, I knew it was important to have her raid-ready (or at the very least heroics-ready) as soon as possible.  I set my sights on gathering the necessary gear from the AH and from crafters so that “Ding 80!” could mean “Level 80 Resto Druid LF Raid.”

Now that my DK is almost 80, I’m approaching the level cap quite differently.  Khiiya won’t raid.  (Not that Khrii has really, either.  The release of Ulduar has made alt runs through Naxx non-existent.  Not that I’m in any rush to go back there.)  Unlike the gold I was willing to spend on getting the druid geared, I don’t want to invest one copper on the DK.  Instead, she will make due with gear from quests, from factions, and from the odd heroics.  She will just be my farm toon, assigned to do dailies and gather herbs.

When K- encouraged me to roll a DK, we purposefully chose the spec that is (/faceroll) least gear dependent.  Upon 80, I won’t bother to spec out of On a Pale Horse.  I won’t enchant my gear, unless it’s via enchants that help K-‘s priest level the profession.  *Gasp* I won’t min-max.  I won’t care; I won’t have to.  As an Unholy DK, I’ll still be able to (/faceroll) do just fine.

Right Said Fred

Mid-raid, my little brother whispered me.  “So…” he said.  “I need to run through Dire Maul, Scholomance, and Stratholme for my paladin mount.  Can you and K- help me?” he asked.  He’s been pestering me about a run through Scholomance and Stratholme for a few days.  And I want to be helpful and supportive, really I do.  But ewww.  Ewww.  I’d rather send him the gold to just buy the damn thing, to be honest, but he loves lore and loves questing and even though I keep saying “Go to the Outlands,” he’s determined to finish up his questing in the old world.  So in evil-big-sister mode, rather than responding, I enabled my auto-response with DBM, and figured if he asked again he’d get the “Khaeli is fighting Freya.  Leave her the hell alone” message — and he’d just pester K- instead.

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Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo

THE GOOD

I won my first piece of Ulduar loot last night:  Rapture, a drop from the Iron Council.  

As I’ve written before, I have always opted for a 1H weapon plus an off-hand, but the new spellpower enchant for staffs has made staffs much more appealing.  With some quick calculations — and having just read Xeonio’s post earlier in the day — I decided to go ahead and bid on this.  It was a sizeable upgrade in spellpower, Intellect, and crit; I didn’t lose any haste (a stat I still really need to improve) by losing my current weapon/offhand (neither had haste); and it gave me a nice chunk of Spirit as well — great for dual-spec occasions.

And yes, “Funny, she doesn’t look druish” jokes are perfectly apt.

THE BAD

Patch 3.1.2?  Fuck.  You.  Divine Hymn — nerfed.  Soul Warding — nerfed.  But the most painful… Glyph of Penance — nerfed.  No longer will it reduce the cooldown.  Instead, it’ll add 5% crit to the spell.  As Chris writes (thank you, Chris, for doing teh math!),

At full usage – using Penance every time the cooldown is up – the previous version of the glyph (reduced cooldown by 2s) effectively provided a 33% increase in Penance’s throughput. The new glyph provides a 2.5% increase in Penance’s throughput (since healing crits heal for 150% of the normal amount). The new glyph, therefore, sacrifices 30.5% throughput for an additional 1/20 chance per tick to proc Divine Aegis.

I was really pleased with this glyph as it made using Penance a lot easier to fit into a rotation.  With my most powerful heal on a 8 second cooldown, there was often the tendency to save it for an “oh shit” moment, but those 2 seconds provided by the glyph seemed to make a big difference (and perhaps it was just in my imagination) in fully utilizing this spell.  Post 3.1, the usage of my spells has changed substantially, but now I guess it’s back to Flash Heal spam.

And while the nerfs to my spec are annoying, the rationale behind them is infuriating.  As I focus almost solely on PVE, changes to my class that are made in the name of  “balancing” PVP irk me.  As Ghostcrawler explained yesterday,  “These were mostly arena changes.”  

THE UGLY

This is the Avatar of Freya.

She’s not the only bitch I ran across yesterday. But she’s the one that I’m opting to post about.

Oh, and we killed Freya (not the avatar) in Ulduar 25man last night — an incredibly fun fight.

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More Dead Bosses, or When An Achievement Doesn’t Really Feel Like One

We managed to down Thorim last night, a boss that gave us quite a bit of grief last week.  As we were learning the fight, we seemed to always face problems in the arena (“tank down!”) or problems in the gauntlet (“tank down!”), and if we successfully made it past that phase, died to massive chain lightnings when fighting Thorim himself.  We also struggled with an undocumented ability:  Thorim’s tendency to DC one or two people on the pull. 

The thrill of downing a new boss was dimished by several things — that Kaleyen wasn’t invited to raid being the most important to me personally.  But the nerfs, omg, the nerfs.  The changes to the first few bosses in Ulduar have been discussed by several bloggers, and no surprise to any readers here I’m sure, the elitist jerk in me thinks it’s ludicrous that these have come so soon.   Honestly, I’d like to see the Disconnect, Lag, Latency, and Loading Screen bosses tweaked first.  But as we circled back around to Razorscale and Ignis last night — one shotting both while standing in the fire — I felt pretty sad that Blizzard wasn’t willing to give us time or incentive to improve.

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