Well, it's Friday again. About time, too!

Are we there yet?
Well, mmo-champion is predicting the shattering to take place either next week or the week after. And all I can think is about damn time. WotLK was a rather annoying expansion for me. Love my guild to death and have enjoyed poking around at this and that, but the raid and heroic instance design was just killing me :/

I'm sure there's someone out there who thinks WotLK was the best expansion ever and I regret to inform them that we can't be friends.

The elemental invasion has really been a let down. I wasn't a great fan of the zombie invasion for 3.0 because it was a great excuse for players to harass other players (especially low-levels and potential newbies - how fun it must be to have your first WoW experience, being corpse camped by your own faction!) and claim it wasn't their fault that 'Arthas' was ruining the game.

It seems like we're at the other end of the spectrum. I'm annoyed by the very idea that it happens at distinct times (roughly the top of the hour, every 2-3 hours). I like that people are given the chance to evacuate and not participate. I'm annoyed that I only have enough time to hit up one, perhaps two of the instances after the event (maybe I did it wrong). I'm annoyed that the guy I'm supposed to turn the kill quests in to is apparently in a different phase of Ironforge and in mine he's evacuated, so I can see his exclamation mark on the map but can't see him!

I'M ALSO REALLY ANNOYED THAT THE MAILBOXES DISAPPEAR. WHAT. WHY ARE THE ELEMENTALS STEALING MY MAILBOX.

So here's hoping that things are more interesting once Deathwing begins his reign of destruction! (An aside, threads on mmo-champ are claiming he's actively destroying random zones in the Beta as well as the PTR, which suggests he may be randomly destroying things until he's brought down in his raid :O)

This is a very cruel thing to do to someone
Blizzard has apparently changed the security protocols that monitor logins to Battle.net. How do I know? I got an email that my account had been locked yesterday :P Of course, the email being rather vague, once I'd verified it is authentic I went OH JESUS NO, MY PURPLES!, thinking I'd been hacked. But after checking the armory to see all my characters, even the enchanter, were still wearing their clothes, things turned confusing.

I called the support line, and got a girl with a simply adorable voice that unlocked it for me an helped piece together what was going on.

The new system appears to determine what is a normal pattern of behavior for you. If you suddenly log in from an IP address it hasn't learned to be associated with your account, it considers it suspicious and locks the account. What's annoying is there's no real way to 'teach' it aside from this trial and error game.

Making me spaz out and think I'd got hacked is very mean >:|

Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast
Well, work on the Insane plugs on, slowly. I did the math last night and guesstimated that I need to go through LBRS pickpocketing at least 33 more times. After that I'll probably move on to flying around Northrend on my pally and picking herbs for Darkmoon cards. I realized that it would actually be sort of cool to pass those cards on to characters leveling in Cataclysm (I'm probably getting a second account, because no more character slots). It'd be awesome if I could sell them though.

Sreenshots pewpew

Again and Again

This has been a pretty light week!... And I was so enamored with photoshop last night that I forgot to upload my screenshots again. Ohwell, something to do tonight :D

THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY
Ok so. I guess the big news is Insane in the Membrane is being 'fixed' so that it's completable in Cataclysm, and it just won't require Shen'dralar anymore. Which is a considerable nerf to the title.

This kind of surprised everyone. I certainly wasn't expecting it. It does feel a bit cheap to essentially skip 25% of the whole achievement. Those who did it the 'right' way will have at least an additional feat in the future, but I'm hoping that there will be an analogous feat in Cataclysm that can the the 'new' crazy bunch of rep to get. It's probably difficult to put in, as you essentially you have to create a faction that no one cares about, doesn't really benefit raiding, which is probably hard to justify in terms of development time. But here's hoping.

To celebrate, my grinding partner (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID) and I hit up separate instances of LBRS and pickpocketed about 75 lockboxes between us. And now the guild bank is full 9.9

Durids!
As a personal reminder to myself, the Inconspicuous Bear put out an incomplete Gearing and Professions list for bear tanking at 85. While not finished, they're extremely helpful for putting together a plan!

Killin' Time
The guild as a whole has been somewhat counting down the minutes until Cataclysm hit, so over the last week raids of various sizes and seriousness have been put together to knock out achievements. I put together a group last friday that finished up 10 man T7, as well as Onyxia achievements for several people. In the name of arbitrary points!

More officially, the 25 man finally pushed several Glory to the Raider 25 ICC achievements to completion, so a large number of us got our Frosty Drakes. I have now broken and rebroken my mount macro several times trying to stuff him in, and somehow managed to put my sea turtle into the mix >:|

We also had a bit of a fiasco with our latest Shadowmourne box, where the quest bugged out and the GMs, for whatever reason, would only reward the wielder with one of the four items he was supposed to get. He chose the mount, which I had won the roll for. Which is freaking ossim, but it still really sucks that everyone else got screwed out of their items :/

Justicurr
Ugh. Well. I think a large part of my problem is I'm doing this either alone or with the boyfriend, and really, 1-2 people will find it very hard to change the course of battle. It's not impossible, it's just sometimes more than I care to try. I mean how many times can you stand watching your entire team dick off in the middle while the horde kills you with the flag without being a little angry.

Honor weekends turn out to be both better and worse, because you can physically see the rep bar move with each cap.... but there are so many premade teams you get paired against.

I did figure out, at some point, that I need 300 WSG and Arathi victories each, and then I'll be done, but that's some pretty depressing criteria.

I suppose really I need to make my own premade. Bah!

FACK YOU FISH
A little under 9,000 fish successfully caught later, my 9 alts are now all sitting pretty at 325 cooking skill. If nothing else, between this and the Candy Buckets of DOOM, I was able to run around the world one last time before it completly changed. Azshara in particular, while being so very useless, is very pretty, so you goblins had better take good care of it ;_;

I've been having a love affair with the new water.

Anyway, two weeks of screenshots.

The Non-Raid Leader

I haven't had a lot of time to myself, so no pretty drawings, but I'll remember to add in weekly screenshots (2-3 weeks worth? lol) today or tomorrow.

THIS IS MADNESS

The Insane feat of strength, based off a comment made by staff during Blizzcon, seems to be going away with Cataclysm. Speficially, Shen'dralar and Bloodsail reps will no longer be attainable, though if you had the reps previously, they appear to stay in tact. In terms of Bloodsail, this doesn't matter too much. As said previously, two people working for four hours in Booty Bay can get the appropriate rep.

Shen'dralar is significantly more frustrating by nature of their rep gains, which is from very rare objects that typically take a person several months to gather. What's even more fun is the NPC that originally accepted these items has been confirmed on beta to be in the exact same place, just with the quest disabled.

More or less, it appears an achievement with individual steps that take months to complete, seems to have gotten a 'one month sort of but not really warning because we still don't have a clear statement two weeks after someone mentioned it in passing'.

Most of the community is theorizing that other reps will still count toward the feat (similar to how you can still get Hand of A'dal or Champion of the Naruu after 2.4, so long as you'd met certain goals before that point). Nothing is certain because Blizzard has yet to clarify exactly what's happening, so really, if you need one last rep, now is the time to do it.

I'm a little miffed that this happened like, a week after I decided to try for it, but overall I've not wasted that much time if I quit cold turkey, turn around, and sell my rep items for 5000g a piece. :/

Hallow's End
Was another non-event. I was surprised to find that my primary alt, the paladin, already had it completed. Two others, the priest and dk, simply needed a hallowed helm (...which they actually had in their banks but FOR WHATEVER REASON I GUESS DOESN'T COUNT). The other six needed more or less everything.

Actually, the constant trick-or-treating every hour did not bother me. What did was going to all the candy buckets. The travel time involved sincerely felt like I was spending more time watching my character, rather than controlling it. Cataclysm will help with flying mounts in the old world, so similar achievements won't be as bad. But good freaking lord I never want to fly from Ratchet to Cenarian Hold again.

Overall it took a total of five days to get everything complete.

I am not a raid leader
Last year, at....almost exactly this time, actually, there was a series of events in our ten man groups that can really be best described as 'Some of you are assholes'.

My guild's policy only really cares about our official 25 mans, held three days a week in the most 'recent' content. So 10s and alts and anything else is free for all, and while the officers often take part, they don't enforce any rules. You can probably see why this is good, and why it's not, really it just is what it is.

So, I came to the conclusion that my solution to the Ulduar issue was to take my ball and go home - aka make the raid myself and tell the assholes to suck it.

When ICC came out, the primary target of my scorn built a raid group with a severe focus on progression that would meet early in the raid week. I made a group that would meet weekends and 'do whatever', with the solitary rule that he couldn't come (because I have the emotional maturity of a 4 year old).

In terms of actual raid leading, I'm actually pretty bad. Very bad. I'll send out 13 invites thinking only 9 people logged on. I'd say 'it made sense at the time' but I've done it more than once.

I have to delegate a lot. My boyfriend, who came as an alt, was handed assist and masterloot so he could handle marking and THE ACTUALLY NOT THAT CONFUSING loot window. I also had to main tank, meaning I had to focus more on what I did than the group.

The group of people I got were actually very good at taking care of themselves. Like, I cannot praise them enough. When it came time to try Professor Putricide, I gave them an order of who to try to drop disease on, told them to be vocal on vent about where they're moving, and then ignored them every attempt while I danced with Putricide. And they did it perfectly.

On the subject of loot, the group was generous to a fault with each other. I had no rules about main spec or off spec, and the few times I was asked said simply 'Roll however you think will best help the 25 man group's progression'. There were several conversations that went 'you take it' 'no you take it'. There was not one loot dispute, despite the fact that we ran /roll the entire way.

I know I lucked out with my group, and I think a lot of it is because the guild as a whole maintains a very outgoing atmosphere - Most of us refer to each other by first name rather than character name (though I'm still 'Amy' because I frankly prefer it). One officer in particular makes very sure that no form of hate speech is tolerated.

Now, this wasn't all rainbows and unicorns. My offtank was constantly abusive to random raid members. I can't even remember why, it was just arguments about petty shit. After five weeks of trying, through several channels, to get him to calm down, I was very frazzeled. Then, when his girlfriend slept through invite time and thus, did not get an invite, he threw a tantrum. And I had it. I put him on ignore and never invited him back. I replaced him within ten minutes, the end.

Several of my raid members were initially pleased with my choice. As time wore on and the offtank started leaving me messages in the one place that not only could I not ignore him beyond not responding, but everyone else could see it - the guild forums - many of those same people would approach me and say they 'felt bad' for how he was being treated.

I don't really understand why, mind you. This wasn't a case of 'oh he said something once and now I hate him', this was a pattern of abusive behavior that would. not. stop. I even talked an officer into asking him to calm down two weeks before I permanently threw him out, and that didn't stop him. He tried to stop the raid when he realized he wouldn't get his way.

Some other time I'll debate with myself over why people will willingly put up with this shit, and why I become the bad guy for not wanting to.

Aside from the offtank, the only other reprimands I passed out were for two separate people who were asked not to use 'gay' as a pejorative. I'm not sure either apologized, but neither did it again, and that's good enough for me.


Now this whole thing was going somewhere.

I'm not a very good raid leader. I have to ask my members to police themselves, and was blessed with a group of people who did. Very well. But they weren't always happy with me. I had several people who complained I was being too mean with the offtank. I had people who thought I wasn't being strict enough with gear/alt/flask/foods. I had people who complained that the group comp was bad. I was constantly questioned about doing X instead of Y.

But they kept logging on every week.

And now that we can't run a 10 man icc without locking ourselves out of 25, they're asking me to organize things. I still run a TK raid every week with a freeroll on Ashes of A'lar - our newest guild recruit asked if he could come 'just to see the fight', and was shocked when I said he was free to roll as well. Several people have asked to do a ten man to finish off T7 achievements, and when I made a post asking who could come when, I got several more requests to do T9 and Onyxia as well. Two weeks ago the gentleman running our Herald of the Titans group was running late, and I logged on to find a note saying I was now in charge.

WTF.

I don't think I have great leadership. At all. I think what I have that these people are following is that I'm ok with being held accountable for decisions. I don't mean that they were unable to admit mistakes, I mean accountable for everything, even shit out of my control.

When 9 people log on for a 10 man, it's not my fault the group comp sucks. Half the group would want an achievement, half would want the hard mode, and I got to be the tiebreaker. The offtank was the one abusing people, but once he was out of sight, I was the one who got the flak for removing him. I had to call several raids because people were burning out after an hour of attempts. All stuff that does not make me popular.

This is what makes raid leading not fun. This is why most people really don't want to do it. It baffles the hell out of me. I can't really come to a conclusion about it beyond that.

Picture Unrelated

My first coherent thought about 4.0.1 was that it had better be at least as fun as Spore, Command and Conquer 3, and all my old psd files combined, because it had to occupy the space formerly taken by them (my first incoherent thought read something closer to 'amigadamigadamigad').

This is sort of like asking a trip to Coldstone Creamery to be at least as fun as a root canal, but I wasn't in a great mood after about 9 hours of trying to convince my laptop to download the patch.

Particular appreciation must be had for Command and Conquer, which fought for its right to live right to the bloody end - crashing Control Panel every time I told it to uninstall, and then, when I decided to do things 'the old fashioned way', screaming that the Recycle Bin was several sizes too small for its hips.

I finally got in around 10PST, in time to watch the server toss everyone out again. God bless patch day!


Feral Droods

So far I've spent most of my time focused on pulling my main back into working order. All the alts are mostly getting ignored until next week, when the Hallow's End event starts, but until people simply stop showing up, my guild is keeping its regular raid schedule.

Our first raid night of the week was last night, which is a night the usual OT can't make. So I spent the majority of the night as a bear. 4.0.1 Bear feels a whole lot like 3.3.5 prot warrior. It's not necessarily hard, but it is more interesting than spamming two buttons for trash. Overall I liked the rotation, and was very pleased with 'Vengeance', the attack power buff given to tanks that scales with raid size. It solved a lot of the annoying threat capping problems.

I'm not really a theorycrafter, I just pull together information from all over. Some good resources to be had for kittybears:

Mew - Kitty simulator - Mew is a direct desendent of Toskk, maintained by the most wonderful Yawning. It's a bit more picky than Toskk was, but this is supposed to lead to more accurate data. I'm hoping it will eventually have the gear suggestion functionality that Toskk did.

BadKitty2.0 - Kitty timer - Finally appeared this morning! BadKitty is an absolute must for kitty druids. It takes all your significant data - combo points, energy, debuffs, buffs, cooldowns, procs, and places it in one spot, instead of all over the screen. The author is starting fresh, so this is essentially a new mod with the old goal. It is in alpha, which has cut down on some functionality and features - but I promise you having it will be better than not.

Kitty DPS FAQ - Again by Yawning. Updated daily as minipatches work out balance issues.

ThinkTank - ThinkTank is a great pooling of information for both your tank things and your dps things. In particular you may be interested in:
Bear FAQ, Glyph discussion, and Spec suggestions.

Feral DPS concerns - Official forum thread headed by Yawning, based on the wonderful number crunching he does. Very civil discussion about concerns with feral numbers looking forward.


THIS IS INSANE

It turns out to take roughly 20 minutes to completely destroy your rep with goblins. After that it takes about 4 hours to get honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers. Luckily, the statue that rests out in the middle of the bay allows you a brief respite to pretend you're Charlton Heston. Drop to your knees, inspect your reputation panel, and scream DAMN YOU. YOU BLEW IT UP. YOU BLEW IT ALL TO HELL.

If you're of the generation conceived, born, and raised in a Hot Topic, you may prefer to sing the entirety of 'Poor Jack'.

If you, too, want to make sure you can never fly out of Gadgetzan again, I highly suggest this very detailed guide by Fannin.

The next step after Bloodsail was wandering over to Dire Maul, as it would cover both Shen'dralar and goblins at the same time. What this lead me to discover is 'insane' doesn't really quite describe how I feel. 'Insanely Annoyed' is somewhat more accurate. Doing this with a partner (which I prefer, as the two of us seem to keep each other entertained instead of depressed), means roughly 400 runs of the instance for goblin rep, and 164 librams (of which there are three types that drop.... and are unique... and don't stack in a guild bank >:|). We worked at it for a few hours before we grew tired of the nonsense. It left me with about one bar through hated with goblins taken care of, and 12 librams that required a lot of running :|

Somehow, knowing that this portion of the Feat is the worst and it all gets better after this does not make me feel better about it. AT ALL.

Loremaster

It required a lot of flying in circles. Well. No. That's not true. It ended up in a lot of flying in circles because I can't follow simple directions or devise strategies. I'm one of those people who wastes time by doing one quest, turning it in, then going back and doing the other quest that was right next to it. I get better when it comes to quests I've done before, but as Loremaster implies I'm doing it because I didn't do them before... I was really all over the place.

I don't really have any 'techniques' to share because I'm inept, but the process also becomes very intuitive once Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are out of the way. The game clearly tells you what you need to complete, and once you enable low level quest tracking, it shows you where. If you're a few quests short, WowHead's comments section on each achievement always has someone who suggests 'Look and make sure you did X'.

But, in any case, I finished out Outland. What remains is a handful of quests in Northrend, which I think could be done in an evening. We'll see.


Long, Strange Trip

I've been working harder on this than Insane. Fishing is actually not that bad a hobby, as it's not very demanding. Streaming the latest episode of Caprica in the background helps it, a lot.

For the 10 man ICC hardmode group I ran (until this week when such things would have hindered the 25 man raid a bit >>), I brought fish feasts, figuring it was the best way to ensure that people would stuff buff food in their faces (had I been rich, in retrospect, I'd probably have brought flasks for everyone too :P). I would fish in Wintergrasp while 25 man raids were being built, as it was a decent place to pick up all the fish I needed.

This teaches you, very quickly, to rotate your camera view to watch behind you, rather in front of you. No one is going to land in the water on your fishing bobber, swim to you, and attack you. Many people are very happy to land behind you in hopes of giving you a firm ass kicking.

This is a habit I brought with me as I fished out in the old world. It wasn't really a requirement, and last night was really annoying - anytime the earth quaked I got a strobe effect as the camera bounced above and below the water line.

What this resulted in was, as my death knight was fishing out in Arathi, a wee 36 blood elf snuck behind me across very difficult terrain to get to the Keep. I didn't do anything about it. I was very perplexed as I watched him clamber over rocks, at first thinking he was trying to sneak up on me, but he made no hostile moves. Then I faced my camera forward and realized he was trying to avoid my line of sight on the more obvious route of the road. Not quite as clever as he thought it was, but I gave him points for effort and let him go on his way.

More seriously, I've pushed 3 characters to 325 cooking skill since I started the project two weeks ago. The longest stretch of it really is between 225 and 300, which is to be expected. The guide I'm using has me doing this out in the middle of the Bay of Storms in Azshara, however, so I'm enjoying my last few times in the zone before it's handed over to the Horde. My fourth character is right at 225 and ready to spend her hour or so in Azshara, but she's also my AH alt so I have to time it so I don't leave her with full bags in the middle of no where :P

It takes roughly 950 successful casts to gain enough skill to support leveling to 325 cooking. If you're stupid your first time doing it like me, you'll fish in the wrong spot for half an hour and get your 1000 fish achievement.

Not Quite a Tearful Goodbye

Remember that today, Blizzard finally officially announced that Zul'Gurub's rare drop Tiger and Raptor mounts, as well as Raptor pet, are being removed. This has been suspected for some time now but is finally official.

If you're interested at all, you're probably already farming the mounts on lockout. Best of luck to you. If you're interested in the pet, WowHead says it's a 1% drop rate, and I guess I believe it. My farming partner and I smacked all the raptors up on three resets while going in for mounts, and had two hatchlings drop. Be advised that ZG is an old instance with oooooold trash mechanics. The trash will respawn even with Bloodlord defeated. You can farm the hatchling even if you've already cleared it.

You might also consider that, since ZG is changing, you may not be able to gain rep with the corresponding faction anymore. Perhaps save your bijous and try to finish that off, in case it becomes a feat of strength. If not, hey, you're a rep close to exalted!

WHALPS

Since we're here! Also keep in mind that certain pets are somewhat unaccounted for.

You're encouraged to get your Emerald, Crimson, and Azure whelps before the Cataclysm as well. The mobs that dropped them previously are missing on the beta.




Screenshots of the week

Weekly Screenshots

As promised, I remembered to upload them. Happy WoWin's!