Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘raid’

Ulduar really is a pretty place, the most beautiful raid instance I’ve ever been in (those titans sure knew how to build things) and now I have actually seen it all!

Last night we met up with Algalon the Observer in his Celestial Planetarium nested within Ulduar. It was actually our second date with the guy, our first being Saturday last and we seemed to have gotten it off at the wrong foot, so we decided to work on our relationship a bit more.

Algalon is an Observer, sent by the Titans after Loken, the Titans’ designated Watcher of Azeroth and jailor of Yogg-Saron, was driven to betray his comrades by Yoggi whispering to him, and subsequently killed by many a bold adventurer in the Halls of Lightning.

Algalon is here to analyse Azeroth for systemic corrption, and if he deems the planet beyond saving, the Titans will cleanse the place by killing all living organisms and start all over again.

Not to put any pressure or anything on us, only the entire future of Azeroth rests upon our shoulders. To further add to the burden, we will only have one hour to convince Algy that there’s hope still for Azeroth and it’s denizens, before he says screw this place, I’m going back to the heavens.

That actually happened last time and it was really disappointing, especially as it seemed we were getting along so well (and by this I mean we managed to stay alive longer and longer every try).

This time, last night, we nine-manned the Golf Cart and the Aerobics Instructor since our guild master and raid leader chose to be fashionally late, but as the very last Chamber Overseer right outside the Planetarium keeled over he logged into the game. He claimed he’d had some medical emergency resulting in a stitched hand, but we suspect he had planted a spy in our Vent channel and was drinking beer and watching football or something til it was time to kick ass and chew bubblegum :P

We had an interesting group setup, 2 resto shammies and a paladin for healz, a DK and paladin for tankz, and two shammies, a rogue, a warlock and a mage for the pewpew, so we fenced the gauzy see-through dude in with our totems, extended our collective hand and said “May I?”.

Algalon, possibly trying to follow some date guide line or other by not appearing to be too keen or too interested or too easy, made us work rather hard at convincing him we were worthy.

I know we were very overdressed for the occasion in our ICC 25-man gear compared to Algalons Ulduar-10, kind of like coming to a Sunday afternoon tea dance wearing ballgowns and tuxedos and the real diamond tiaras and cuff-links, but still the dance had some tricky moves and there was a bit of toe-stepping, black-hole-missing and general dying going on.

But we rose to the occasion, got our collective feet sorted out, and with 20 minutes left of the date we convinced him we weren’t that bad actually by doing our utmost to kill him.

There was a moment of dread and terror as there were quite a few seconds (which felt like minutes) between Algy disappearing as a target (woah, where’d he go? to the heavens? no, that can’t be! we still have 20 minutes left!) and the actual achievement popping up. But then there it was, spamming our chat windows:

Now, I just have to convince everyone that we must go meet him in his 25-man variety as well!

Larúe, ze resto shammy, is the girl I raid with nowadays and yesterday I was on melee healing duty in the Blood Wing, trying to take down the Blood Queen Lana’thel. I was standing smack in the middle of the melee, spreading the love and tender care around with my greenish-white lazor beams and buckets of waters and of course the imba, over-powered one and only Healing Stream totem.

The Queen is not yet a farm boss for us and so we were wiping a bit but making steady progress, fine-tuning the nibblings and positionings and group hugs in the middle, and then we suffered a tank disconnect. A serious one, it seemed, because even after we had all died and run back and gathered up in the Queen’s room he had still not gotten back on either WoW or Vent.

What to do? Well, the raid leaders decided that one of the retribution pallies should eqiup his pvp gear and act as a soaker for the Blood Mirror. And so he did.

Now, the Blood Mirror does not follow any threat table, or damage done, and it is not random, it is simply a spell that falls upon the player who is closest to the player tanking the queen. Anyone silly enough to get between the tank and the soaker would become the soaker himself.

Or herself.

I know what you are thinking, but no, I did not get between the tank and the soaker.

However, the soaker, our retribution paladin in pvp gear, died for some reason or other, and then I was not between the tank and the soaker, because as it turned out I had suddenly become the player closest to the tank and thus I became the soaker.

I did not expect to last long, even though I wear mail and carry a shield and have oh I dunno, 16 k armor or so, but my fellow healers went into overdrive and practically smothered me in heals, so many green numbers popping out all over my screen I could hardly see anything else. Or so it felt like, anyways.

They managed to keep me up for almost a full minute, all the time raining green heals on me, and I got some weird sort of omfg is this how it is-experience. I’ve been healing for a long time and have been dishing out a lot of huge green numbers myself, but to see them coming in in such a steady stream, almost fighting each other for space to drop on my head, and from so many healers, was rather amazing, perhaps because it was so unexpected.

I’ve been tanking a lot with my own furball tank, ze druid Joaquime, mostly 10mans but a few 25mans back in TBC, but I can’t remember ever feeling so giddy and high just by being healed.

Perhaps I was more blasé and used to it then, doing it regularly, or perhaps I had not the scrolling combat text enabled then. I don’t know, but I expect I will be talking about this a long way down the road, perhaps even when I sit in that home for the eldery, and tell my fellow elders about this one time, at the Blood Queen…

Should we feel sorry for Ensidia? Larísa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn asks this question in a recent post of hers.

My answer is “yes, I really feel sorry for Ensidia”, but not because they lost their achievement and not because they will be out of the game for three days. I feel sorry for them for being so utterly stupid.

As I see it, Ensidia’s action and their subsequent ban and revoked world first Lich King kill is a direct result of one of two things: Either they knew they were doing it wrong, or they did not.

Doing it wrong

Now, I don’t play this game at Ensidia’s level, I am not in a sponsored guild getting payed to play, so I can only guess at what obligations comes with that sponsorship, and what pressure they are under to provide results.

I am not a top player but that does not mean I can not personally feel the competitiveness and the will to get better, to desire to top those charts, be it as dps in a 5 man dungeon run or a guild member in a server wide guild ranking. I guess Ensidia would feel the same way, regardless of whether they are sponsored or not, and lately the competition at the top must have become a lot more intense than in previous raids. Never before has so many guilds been at the top, competing for those world first kills. As I write this, four guilds have defeated the Lich King in the 25man version according to GuildOx, with many more to come soon as many guilds have already defeated the first two bosses in the Frost Wing, opened their way to the Lich King.

I guess every one of those four guilds, five with Ensidia, were desperate for that little extra edge, that little extra boost that would push them to the top so they could claim their victory.

So when they noticed that their use of Saronite Bombs actually had a very very positive effect on the encounter, it actually seemed to trivialize it or a part of it as far as I can understand, did they stop to consider that this must be a bug, that this was not the encounter working as intended? If they had been using these bombs in their usual dps rotation, would they not be surprised that they did not only do damage in this encounter but actually helped rebuild the throne?

Or did they make a simple cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the risk of using the bombs was worth taking in order to get that first kill? Was the competition so fierce that the possible delay of asking a GM what was going on might result in another guild claiming the kill? Did they gamble on their legendary guild status to protect them should they be caught?

I don’t know, I can only speculate. But no matter why, the question is how they could be so incredibly stupid and believe they would not get caught? Every other world first and first kills have been scrutinized and achievements have been revoked during the entire WotLK raiding season, so how could they be so stupid and think their kill would survive if there was even the slightest whiff of something funny about it?

Granted, they have apparently been treated leniently by Blizzard before, but on the biggest bad guy of them all in this entire expansion? Come on.

Or did they not know?

But what about the other scenario? What if they didn’t know they were doing it wrong then?

You know, I have a co-worker whose mantra is “it is not criminal to be stupid”. He is right of course, it is not criminal to be stupid, to sit on a chair all day and do nothing except being stupid.

But while it is not criminal to be stupid it might well be criminal to act stupidly and most people do stupid things once in a while, some more often than not, and with very different consequences.

If you construct bridges, you are expected to dimension them properly or you might end up with a collapsed bridge.

If you are a construction worker, you are expected to know that using a power tool to cut reinforcement bars comes with certain restrictions or you might end up with a burning building due to a stray spark.

If you suddenly find 300 million Euros on your bank account when last you checked there was nothing but an overdraft, you are expected to contact your bank and not run off to South America for a life long vacation.

If you had spent years playing a computer game, analysing it into the smallest detail, poring over logs and videos to perfect your performance, knowing every spell in the book and having done all bosses many times on 10mans and 25mans and in both normal and heroic versions, if you were that player, facing the last boss in the game, the biggest badass of them all, and if you find that the platform you are standing on, the one that is slowly falling apart, suddenly stop falling apart and instead start to rebuild itself and thus making the entire encounter so much easier, negating the need to deal with the adds, would you not be expected to suspect Blizzard might consider that an exploit? Especially given their track record with exploit bans in this expansion?

The first three are examples of criminal stupidity, the last is an example of plain simple utter moronic stupidity.

So should we feel sorry?

I have made my thoughts on using so called exploits clear before, I think it is Blizzard’s job to make the game fool proof and if anyone finds a way to use the game or fight mechanics to work for them in a way Blizzard has not foreseen, then all the cred to them. If Blizzard does not like it they can always fix it, but why punish the players?

If I had my way, Ensidia would keep their achievement and would not be banned. They found a way around Blizzard’s encounter and beat it fair and square with the tools available to them.

But Blizzard obviously think otherwise, and we all accept their right to run their game their way every time we log into the game, so even if I don’t like their way of handling these things I have to accept it and be aware of if I want to keep playing. And anyone who plays this game at the top end can’t be unaware that Blizzard comes down hard on players they think are guilty of exploiting the game.

I don’t know the whole picture, I was not there, and I haven’t tried to look into it anymore than the posts on wow.com and Ensidia’s own site, but I can’t see it happen any other way. If they did know what they were doing, or if they did not, it does not matter, either way it was so senselessly stupid to not alert Blizzard to the fact that there seemed to be something smelly going on. It seems like such a waste.

Or is this entire thing a publicity stunt?

It was “only” a normal kill, after all. Maybe they are so sure of their own superiority that they believe this three-day ban will not interfere at all with their getting the world first heroic Lich King kill that they don’t mind giving the competition a three day head start.

And that would indeed be an achievement.

Imagine a world where you’d be deprived of three of your five sensory inputs, a world where you could not smell, you could not feel and you could not taste anything. Imagine how you would be confined to experience the world you live in by sight and by hearing alone, and how you would interpret that world.

Now, welcome to the World of Warcraft.

In WoW, you don’t ever touch anything, you don’t get any tactile input whatsoever. The rain or sunshine on your face as you ride through the great big wilderness, the magic bolts incinerating your innards or the melee swings ripping open your body, the pain in your knuckles as you scrape them against a boar when levelling fist fighting and or the warm smoothness of your lover’s skin under your fingertips when you engage in a bit of roleplaying in a secluded spot, these are things you only feel in your mind.

In WoW, you never smell anything, you don’t ever get any olfactory stimulation. The blood and sweat of your fellow raiders, the musty odour of your horse or perhaps the not-so-faint oily aroma of your mechanostrider, the sweet smells of the herbs as you gather them, the dry dustiness of the old inns and houses around the world, you can only imagine these smells.

In WoW, you never taste anything. Perhaps you are better off actually not knowing what Pungent Seal Whey or Bitter Plasma or Spider Kabob taste like, but wouldn’t you like to taste that Black Coffee or Delicious Chocolate Cake?

In WoW, you experience the world around you through vision/audio. You interpret the world through your eyes and ears and you react accordingly. But in a hectic environment, with a lot of information flooding through your eyes and ears, you will find it difficult to experience and interpret everything, and to react upon it. The more information, the more difficult the interpretation and the slower the reaction.

In real life, in the afk world, you would not need a flashing warning across your eyes and a loud sound to alert you to the fact that you were standing in a fire. Your burning feet would scream in enough pain for you to not even have to think and make a conscious decision about stepping out of it, your brain would have bypassed that and reflexively thrown you out of it. If you happened to be dressed in sturdy leathers or possibly chain mail, impregnated with enough dirt and blood and other body substances to form a rather functional fireproofing, perhaps your feet would not be the first to react but your nose, sniffing at that horrid smell of something burning.

In the afk world you don’t need to get a skull over your head to show that you are infected with some nastiness that takes out a sizeable chunk of your health every second and will spawn a gooey ooze that will follow you around and pulse more nastiness around itself until it meets another ooze and falls in love with it and the two little oozes becomes one. Ok, bad example for a RL comparison but I guess you get my point?

But in WoW, when you are staring intensly at your screen on that ugly mofo Gormok the Impaler and you also need to keep a close watch on the health of the other 24 raiders in there with you, chances are it will take you a second or three before the information that it is YOU that’s in the fire has filtered down through the layers in your brain, and then you may need an extra second or two to react and by then it is too late and you will be dead.

In WoW, when you are gathered up in a chummy group with most of your fellow raiders, humping hugging the leg of the rotted slimy abomination in Icecream Citadel, seeing the small yellowy flakes around you that indicates infection is nigh impossible in all the fireworks and slime spewing going on, and chances are you will spawn the baby ooze in the middle of your raid bringing the wrath of your healers down upon your head.

Enter the BossMods.

A BossMod is an addon that highlights certain things in a fight to help you see it and act upon it. They can also provide you with timers for those bosses that have various timed phases, such as Kel’Thuzad laving his phase shifted state and physically entering his room after three minutes and 48 seconds.

There are a few varieties of BossMods, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters to name a few, and most come pre-packed with a lot of nifty features enabled, most of which you don’t really need. The BossMod is there to make it easier for you to fish up those vital snippets of information out of the massive information flood coming your way in a raid, remember? They are not there to make you drown in even more information.

So what you want to do is set your chosen BossMod up to show you things where you find them easy to see. For some reason, BossMods often come configured to be as obnoxiously in the way as possibe, showing their pretty bars of various formats spot on in the middle of your screen. I don’t know about you but I generally want to see what is going on and not have it obscured with a bar showing me that a new ooze will spawn in 6 -5-4-etc seconds, so I have moved all such things to the sides or the top/bottom of my screen.

The next thing you want to do is check all fights and chose the information you think is relevant for you. I am lucky in that my guild goes for an exploratory “blind raiding” run first, spending an evening in the new raid wing without having read up on the tactics, with all BossMods disabled, just exploring and gathering information and trying things out, so when the next raid rolls around and it’s time to kick it up a notch, I generally know what I want to keep extra track of or where I need extra help to not screw up.

For example, in my BigWigs I show the Unstable Ooze Explosion because that is something I am not likely to see myself as my focus is generally on the people bunched up around Rotface’s legs. I don’t show warnings for Mutated Infections since I see them anyway on my Healbot and even though we are not blind raiding anymore on this one we still have someone call out who’s infected just to help people react. I use the Flash’n Shake though to alert myself to the infection if I have it, shaving that extra second of reaction time off. I don’t show warnings for Slime Spray because as I generally have the boss targetted I see his cast bar and, being so close to him, I see his animation too and can react to it without problems. I don’t show warnings for Ooze Merges because I don’t care about that. I show the Boss Death simply because I like the triumphant sound it plays when the boss keels over.

Another example, on Festergut I don’t show warnings for the spores because so far I have had no problem getting one, and I don’t show the Inhale Blight warnings because I see it clearly enough myself and there is not really anything I can do to prepare for the extra damage. I do show the Pungent Blight warning because I want to be prepared to heal my designated targets up to full asap when that happens, which takes some pre-planning and clever distributing of Riptides. I don’t show the Vile Gas because it should not be a problem if people spread out as we are supposed to. I use the Proximity Display just so I can avoid being too close to someone and vomit on them should I be in a ranged group healing. I have the Berserk timer enabled so I can see how close we are cutting it and I have the Boss Death chime of triumph enabled for the same reason as above – I like the sound.

These are the settings that work for me, resto shaman generally on raid healing. If you are anything else, tank, tank healer, melee, ranged dps, you probably think something else is vastly more important and should set your BossMods up accordingly.

There are a few problems associated with BossMods though

One is what Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn describes in a post recently, discussing another post over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog, that are we really playing the game if we allow BossMods and other addons to show us what to do? How can we complain that the game is too easy if we always use the training wheels of BossMods? Well, I decided a long time ago that addons let me have more fun and help me play my game better, but I definitely want them customized to my liking and to help me with what I want and what I need and nothing else.

Another problem is that even if you tailor your BossMod to show those and only those timers and warnings and messages that you yourself find indispensable, a BossMod happy raid leader or raid assistant may still flood your screen and your eyes and ears with raid warnings and countdowns in chat, putting a huge dent in your pretty customized layout.

Thirdly, you learn the encounters as if the BossMod paraphernalia were an integrated part of them. You train yourself to react upon the BossMod instead of the fight, which risk leaving you flailing helplessly if the BossMod plays trick on you.

Example: I was dragged into a late night Naxx Undying run with my priest Jools a few weeks ago. We started with killing Sapphiron and Kel-Thuzad, steamrolled through the Abomination Wing, Patchwerk went down in notime, and then we faced Grobbulus. And there we failed.

For some reason – perhaps because none of us had run Naxx in a long time – no one had an updated BossMod and the players targetted with Mutating Injection did not get a skull on their heads. They did not notice that they were infected and thus they dropped huge poison clouds in the middle of the room. Perhaps it was something else as well, because some players’ screens lit up with a lot of error messages so they could not see where they were going. The other healer was trapped out of range and I got confused trying to circumvent the spreading clouds so I failed to pop a pair of wings on the player going dooown.

We were all trained to trigger a run to the side when we had a skull on our head and not when we had an infection. So we relied on the safety net of our BossMods and it failed. Not a big deal, it was late at night and we were tired and/or inebriated, and we had had a good laugh together during the previous boss kills, but our reliance on addons did cost us that Undying title that time.

BossMods, like any other addons, can be turned on and off at your pleasure. If you feel you no longer need a certain warning, or you can do better without it, turn it off. Maybe you can still play as good as before, maybe you want to turn it back on.

So, use the BossMod as training wheels for as long as you need, but don’t be afraid to take them off sometimes and see if you can balance on your own. If not, no big deal, just make sure you keep the BossMod updated :-)

I’ve been talking about the joys of exploring before, and by exploring I do not necessarily mean just world exploring, I mean going into new instances without a clue of what will happen there.

Well, I know there will be mobs and bosses and Bad Stuff happening and hopefully some shiny things dropping now and again, but that’s about it. I don’t know if there will be fire or frost or poisons or void zones, if we need to spread out or stay together, if we need to run away from stuff or to stuff or maybe behind stuff.

The thing is, we will find out, and we will find out together, and although I know we will make mistakes and mess up I also know we will also have so much fun learning and progressing together.

Raiding is great but there will be plenty of time to research fights and follow in other peoples’ footsteps later, the thrill and joy of looking at bosses and their lairs with fresh eyes for the first time is one of my truly favourite things in game.

So you can imagine how I felt when the leaders in my raid guild announced that we were going to enter Icecrown Citadel without any prior knowledge gathering concerning its denizens and layouts! No reading up on tactics, no looking at videos, all bossmods disabled, we were just gonna walk in there and see what would happen.

And so we did.

We entered Icecrown wearing nothing but our raid gear and with our eyes and ears wide open. We looked at the scenery and the inhabitants of the place, we noted their abilities and their tricks and their way of doing things, and we talked to each other, both during the raid nights and subsequently on our forum, discussing and working out tactics of our own.

We did not one-shot all of the four bosses in ICC but within the first week we had killed them all as number 9 on our server (according to GuildOx), 6 days after the gates were opened.

The boss we had the most trouble with was Saurfang, but it was great fun to spend an entire night and a half wiping on him, working out different raid setups as our raid leaders ran around the platform deploying us chess pieces raiders to our designated spots carefully spaced so we would not splatter hurt on each other, and having the ranged practice Blood Beast targeting on melee so they would pick up the right beast immediately when they spawned and eliminate the risk of a beast running loose and hitting raiders in its way, and working out healing rotas so we would cover everyone and not lose any marked people.

We nailed our difficulties one after the other by trial and error and teamwork and after a lot of biting of dust and kicking of buckets it all slotted into place and we performed a flawless Saurfang kill even earning us the server first I’ve Gone and Made a Mess achievement!

Anyways, this post was not intended to brag about our raiding, but rather point out that it is quite possible to raid successfully without reading up on other peoples tactis or watching other peoples videos.

And, most importantly, to have a blast doing it!

I mean, these raid instances will be around for a long time, you will always have a chance of reading up on stuff but you will have only one shot at getting that fresh powerful feeling of wonder and awe and amazement that comes from experiencing something for the first time so why not make the most of it? Stuff those tactic guides and work things out with your guild, your friends! The kills will taste so much sweeter then, I promise!

Now another gate has opened in the Icecrown Citadel and we are putting on our Explorer’s hats again, bringing out our map-making kits, ready to go beat our sticks and heads and just about everything else we have available against anything that will come our way.

There be dragons there for sure, bring them on! :-)

Yesterday after a fast ICC and TOC we went to Sartharions Lair deep under the Wyrmrest Temple to get yet another Twilight Drake for a guildie.

It was not the first Sarth 3D kill I’ve been in on – I got the Twilight Vanquisher title on one of my very first raids with Adrenaline 3 months ago – but it was still a special one because this was the first time I would be allowed to roll on the mount. Because it is such a rare mount and a result of a group effort you need to have been present at at least 2/3 raids during the last three months to be eligible to roll for it, and my three month anniversary with Adrenaline had rolled by just a few days ago.

This time the RL’s decided we were going to zerg it, so four of us healers swapped to our pewpew specs and outfits, leaving only two healers to deal with keeping people alive.

After a few tests we went for it and poor Sartharion went down like a snowman in hell. He did manage to splatter the tank and a few of us around him at the end, but he was so low on hp that the remaining raiders finished him off without even breaking a sweat.

And when it was time to roll for the mount I rolled highest of all eligible members and won it!

Larúe got herself a beautiful twilight dragon!

The twilight dragons are not part of any of the usual Dragonflights - Malygos’ blue ones, Alexstrasza’s red ones, Ysera’s green ones, Nozdormu’s bronze ones or Deathwing’s black ones – but seems to be the result of a breeding program by Deathwing’s consort Sinestra in Grim Batol.

With the discovery of the twilight egg nests withing the Obsidian Sanctum, guarded by Deathwing’s henchman Sartharion, it is now suspected that Sinestra did not act alone but that Deathwing himself was involved in this breeding of twilight dragons, and that he has far-reaching plans of plunging Azeroth into a new Cataclysmic twilight…

You know one surefire way to make me start to tremble and feel icy clammy slithers of dread down my spine?

It is when someone I know comes up to me and says “we need to talk”. Guess I am one of those that see the glass as half empty because that “we need to talk” opener, however worded, always fills me with apprehension of the bad kind.

So when one of the officers in my new guild whispers me just before raid start and ask if I have a minute to spare because she wants to talk to me you can imagine what happened. Did someone suddenly turn down the temperature in the room?

I know I haven’t been slacking too much in this last month I have raided with my shammy. I have made some a few a lot of mistakes, but I like to think I have learned from them and did not do them twice, and also think that I managed to do a few many some things right from the start.

So this talk a month after I got invited to the guild when I happen to know after having read somewhere that a new members’ trial period is a month should not be something to be afraid of, right? If I sucked badly they would have told me something before, right? Right? Right?

Still, I shiver a little as she asks me how I like it in the guild.

I reply truthfully – I like it a lot! The people are fun and friendly and nice and helpful, the raid leaders are calm and cool and I have a lot of fun raiding there.

And then she replies to me, saying not the words I dreaded but those I hoped to hear – they are happy with me and would like to offer me a full membership!

Yes! Yes, please! Thank you!

I still tremble but as I get promoted from Trialist to Raider in Adrenaline those clammy shivers are now replaced by a broad smile and tears welling up in my eyes and I jump up and down in excitement.

I R Raider!

My computer, my beloved laptop, although getting on in years (it’s soon three years old!) and although it has been to the shop twice, has never had any problems dealing with the graphic settings of WoW.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

I was debating whether I should title this post the more catchy “How To Get Four Achievements On A Single Raid Boss”, but I settled for a slightly down-toned variety.

The well known quote of “Standing on the shoulders of giants” refers to how you can make intellectual progress by using the understanding gained by notable thinkers who have gone before you, to how much farther you can actually see from a slightly elevated position.

In WoW, most of us are standing on the shoulders of someone, perhaps not giants but gnomes, dwarves or maybe orcs. Very very few of us set out into the world intent on discovering it all ourselves (at least not after the first toon levelled to 80 :P).

We seek out information about where Mankrik’s wife can be found (yes, even I have done that quest on a lowbie Horde alt) instead of scouring the Barrens on our own and we happily use knowledge gathered by others to further our own understanding of the world and our abilities.

There is not that many of us that run into a new dungeon totally oblivious to what may come. Instead, we prefer to study videos made by those who really did go in not knowing what to expect and we read up on encounters and what information has leaked from various sources before we even enter the big ugly mofo’s lair.

When we see the big dragon lying asleep, curled up on the floor of her cave, we know that she has a nasty breath and a tail that will swipe if we come too close, we know she will fly up after a while and breathe lethal fire down upon us and we know her eggs had better be left untouched or we may regret it.

We have an inkling of what to expect and we work out a way to get what we want, sometimes by slavishly following someone else’s tactics, sometimes by tweaking those tacticts to suit our own group and abilities.

We are standing on the shoulders of gnomes, elves and orcs. We use the knowledge and information and tactics and understandings gained by the people who have gone before us.

Nothing wrong with this of course.

I don’t need to prove the Pythagorean Theorem myself before I use it – I can see the proof and understand it and gladly use it.

If I am going kayaking a weekend I want to know beforehand how to get up again in case the kayak does a flip and I get submerged, I don’t want to work it out on my own hanging upside down in the water.

If I am going to be part of an attempt to do the Assembly of Iron the hard mode way, ie killing Steelbreaker last, I want to know what I should look out for and how I should try to react to the various bad things coming my way.

(Now, those of you who know me know that I’ve usually been very keen on wanting to experience new dungeon and raid content fresh, of not knowing what to expect when I entered, of finding out myself why doing certain things are good and some are bad.

I have been very stubborn about this, but lately I have somwhat reluctantly acknowledged the fact that information does not always diminish the joy of the play.

Because while there are thrills and joys to be found in exploring and discovering things, there are also thrills and joys to be found in the execution of things, of having a theoretical if not yet practical knowledge of the steps of the dance and how to follow in your partner’s lead.

And, of course, the fact that most people I run with would already have a good knowledge of the fights and me refusing to listen did only leave me the noob might have had something to do with my changing my views on this as well :P)

This possibility to stand on other people’s shoulders is also why a generally bewildered and somewhat bedraggled raider like me can snag four achievements in a single boss kill. I was standing on the shoulders of both the people I’ve raided with before and the people I was raiding with that night as I went from doing 10mans the normal way to 25mans hard modes without going through any intermittent stages.

It makes me feel grateful and indebted and humble – regardless if you’re doing the social variety or the more hardcore one raiding really is a team effort and I hope that I can pay it back and that someday someone else will be standing on my shoulders.

One sure way to rub your nose in how many addons you rely on in your daily WoW is to transfer to another server.

Because, you know, all your addons and user interface and macros and even Blizzards’s own in-game options will reset their settings when you transfer and you will end up with a blank slate of helpful addons and options not being helpful at all.

And somehow they are all inter-related. I could not customise my HealBot until I had fixed my macros I use therein, I could not dress my shaman in her various ItemRacked gear outfits until I had  set all stats displayed in RatingBuster. And I had totally forgot how to tweak the displays of the plethora of BigWigs warnings so I ended up with them all in the middle of my screen obscuring important things going on.

Thanks to a pro reminder of a fellow transferee (you know who you are – thanks!) I had been clever and screenshotted all my macros and settings for some of my addons, so it was not such an ardous task to fix it all as it might have been. But still, it took a good many hours to pimp ‘em all to my satisfaction.

Got some aha-experiences as well when I worked my way through the addons. HealBot, for example, comes not blank but with a pre-set suggestion of shaman heals and spells. Did you know shamans have a spell called Cure Toxins? I didn’t. Can’t remember ever using that spell, especially since Cleanse Spirit does the same thing for the same cost and with the added benefit of removing a curse as well.

And even though you test and tweak and check them you still need to do a live SAT to weed out all the little bugs and things that ar not quite right.

For example, I thank the gods of Providence that my very first run with the raid guild I’ve applied to (and been accepted into!) was 25 man Vault of Archavon and not 25 man Iron Council on hardmode. I know the VoA fight a little – enough to be really really determined NOT to die in a fire (thus proving that I am a noob instead of just suspecting it) and with my instant self-heal spells handily macroed in to save my be-tailed behind in case of an emergency.

I did manage to not die in a fire, I managed to not die at all actually, and after having calmed down a bit from the initial panic (what? now? no, I am not reeeeeeeady!) I slowly woke up to the fact that my Chain Heals did not, in fact, splatter their pretty whitish-green lazor beams all over my fellow raiders.

And I rapidly found out that this was because I had, in fact, not bound the Chain Heal to its usual left mouse button hot-key. Residing there was now the eminent Healing Wave, a spell that is not bad at all but perhaps not the best choice for raid healing :P

Anyways, I got it worked out eventually and got a whole bunch of new ideas for how to Improve Stuff as well! I see many hours of macro playing looming ahead! :-)