I feel like dancing! Yeah!
On Tuesday (maintenance!) and Friday nights I attend a dance aerobics class called BodyJam. If you’ve never heard about it before, it’s the brainchild of this guy from New Zealand. Every few months they release a new dance routine. Instructors around the world learn it, and turn around and teach it in their classes. We all learn and dance the same routine to the same music.
So Tuesday nights and Friday nights I tend not to think much about gaming. Well, that was until the latest routine was released and I found myself surrounded by 40 odd people awkwardly performing the male Human World of Warcraft dance.
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YouTube - /dance BodyJam style
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7pm. Everyone's here. So what are we waiting for?
I don’t actually know what Raid Leading is. If I had to I think I would define it as:
Raid Leading: The silence that preceeds a ready check. When nothing is said on vent or in guild or raid chat.
Well, nothing is said that is related to the actual raid or game. I usually like to fill this silence with daydreams and commentary on my dinner, or even more likely, my plans for desert. But I’m pretty sure that in that silence your Raid Leader is frantically organizing players to change into their off spec, assigning tanks and checking that the healing team are prepared.
Others have defined Raid Leading as: more than just doing a quick boss strategy explanation. This definition seems to me to be extremely misleading. Yes, explaining the strategy is an important part of leading a PuG raid, or a very casual guild that has as many new raiders as regulars, but in a guild raid there really isn’t any need to go over the strategy or fight tactics at all. Read More »
What's the opposite of being in the right time at the right place? This.
There’s a chance, a small chance, that I might be able to sneak my way into a 10 man Ulduar group bent on earning both their Rusted Protodrakes and the title, Herald of the Titans. I’m so excited!
Herald of the Titans is awarded when a group successfully kills Algalon, but only if they’re wearing 10 man gear. Fortunately Blizzard isn’t too picky about what constitutes 10 man gear and just put a restriction on the item level. Getting to Algalon in the first place requires you to complete all the hard modes: Flame Leviathan+4, Heartbreaker, Steelbreaker, Thorim+Sif, Hodir speed kill, Firefighter, Freya+3, General V without vapor and Yogg-1. All those 10 man hard modes award item level 226 gear. The same item level on normal mode 25 man Tier 8 gear.
I was asked: “What Ulduar gear do you still have?” Read More »
Cassandri roars with bestial vigor!
I’ve been slaughtered by Horde in the most deserted parts of Azeroth. I got killed many times while working on Loremaster. I think I rage quit when I ran around one of those giant red hills in the Badlands looking for a certain type of creature only to find… a level 80 Undead Warlock. The Badlands must be the most deserted territory in the game. Deserted, except for me, and some Warlock determined to kill me.
Unfortunately I don’t see one-on-one PVP as some kind of honorable challenge. I see it as a waste of time. Upon being attacked – I’m almost never the aggressor – I can’t help but think “why did you hurt me?!”. My neighbors are strangers to me, but if one of them walked up to me and slapped me on the sidewalk outside my gate I think I’d feel about the same.
My state of mind while I’m playing World of Warcraft is just not suited to PVP. Call me a care-bear, a pacifist or a big fluffy marshmallow.
The strange thing is, if I’m particularly pissed off (I’m thinking back to an incident when I had been desperate to tag mobs for a Sons of Hodir quest early in the expansion) and a member of the Horde gives me a second look (or, in this case, drops a couple totems nearby) … I tend to play aggressively.
And I also tend to win. Read More »
posted by
Lathere on the 24th June 2010
And you thought Children's Week had an end date.
Well it’s been awhile, over a month in fact since I last posted. It’s strange the longer it goes without writing, the harder it has been to start again. I haven’t quit playing or anything though RL has been incredibly demanding taking up all my time of late and I’m sorry in advance that this post is going to cover some of that stuff too.
So firstly, I started a new job which was incredibly exciting because my old job was stressful, miserable and no matter what you did you never felt that it was enough. I’m still at the same company but in a position now that lets me be a little bit more creative and actually fix issues. My first task was to set up an internal WordPress blog so, yes definitely much more fun!
A week after I started in my brand new position I found out I was pregnant, which while exciting happened much faster than expected and made me feel a tad guilty considering I had only just stepped into a new role. At least it explained why I was nearly falling asleep at my desk every afternoon. Read More »
I had to dig this picture out of my archives - damn extended maintenance!
Like many raiders I stopped throwing myself into the Dungeon Finder to complete my Random Northrend Heroic several months ago. If it wasn’t the day that I realised that I didn’t need Emblems of Frost anymore it was the day after. Probably that same day.
I have a new reason to re-queue the daily heroic using the Dungeon Finder now (but that’s the topic for another post). And two of my friends have just returned to the game and are now playing brand new level 80 characters: a Mage and a Hunter. Queuing up together seems like a good idea.
But this doesn’t even feel like the same Dungeon Finder that I remember. Is it settling down? Is this what it’s going to be like forever after?
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It's funny how a Dwarf with a legendary makes everyone feel better
It’s been an interesting couple of raid weeks for me.
On Wednesday night, “farm” night, we suffered through one of the worse raids I’ve ever been in since joining the guild over a year ago. We wiped on Marrowgar’s trash three time. We nearly wiped on Marrowgar too. I was healing (extra stressful) and I just couldn’t keep people alive. I couldn’t keep myself alive either – I was dead on a bone spike with 30% still left on the boss. I think everyone was relieved that we didnt technically wipe: a tank and healer survived at the very end. But that set the scene for the night.
I expected Deathwhisper to be a struggle. The last two weeks we’ve regressed and had to drop her back down to Normal mode. I blame the ghosts in Sunken Temple and Naxxramas’s Military Wing for establishing a dangerous precedent for dealing with ghosts. It seems, even with someone (usually me) screaming “ghosts!” every few seconds people still believe that the ghosts might just disappear if they ignore them. On Wednesday we got Deathwhisper Heroic after a few warm-up attempts. Things were looking up.
Saurfang gave us a few more difficulties but eventually we executed our Blood Beast DPS and healing assignments perfectly, with some help from a Rogue, and killed Saurfang.
We went on to spend the rest of the night wiping on Heroic Blood Prince Council.
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Suzushiiro (Holy Priest) in the opening credits of Big Crits
Are you watching Big Crits too? (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)
Big Crits is a newly formed 25 man World of Warcraft raiding guild. And everything that happens in the guild raids is recorded and edited back for us to watch as online episodes: an inside look into the running of a raiding guild.
I thought the show would be like watching a cross between an instructional how-to video with the occasional argument recorded over vent thrown in. Deep down I didn’t really think that a guild under that kind of pressure and exposure would be able to function as a hardcore raiding guild and be successful. Is the priority the show or the raiding?
Excellent raiding, in my experience, is rarely accompanied by guild drama. And wouldn’t the guild drama be the part that makes the show interesting?
To make a long story short, watching the very first episode answered a lot of those doubts. And it’s fascinating to watch. Read More »
If only it was just the Darkmoon Faire component...
Like most players working on the Insane in the Membrane Feat of Strength I’m referring back to Saate and Fannin‘s excellent guides time and time again. But I’m not following their guides strictly.
Some of the advice just doesn’t really work for me as a Priest, and some of it definitely doesn’t work for me living on Barthilas. I can’t solo instances as easily like feral kitties or plate wearers. I have Enchanting as a profession to fall back on (which seems to be unusual). I have awful luck.
I do have gold. But even I wasn’t prepared for exactly how much gold I would have to throw at the Auction House to progress.
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Stealthed in Lower Blackrock Spire
I never realised that WordPress’s Save Draft button secretly means revert to yesterday’s version. So let’s forget the writing. I’m not writing this post a second time. Sorry. Here’s the picture. And the conclusion: I got Exalted with Ravenholdt.
Here are some facts:
The Glyph of Pick Pocket is your friend
Camouflage is your other friend. Spec it.
Heavy Junkboxes gathered: 1340
Blackrock Depth runs: 24
Lower Blackrock Spire runs: 36
Average length of each run: 11-14 minutes
Junkboxes gathered per run: 17-24 Read More »
