Gitr

Here’s why I like Tomas (WoW: Sequoia) for his in-game class and his great blogging and real-life accomplishments. He’s in the reserves, has a family, and still finds time to be a GM on a PvP server.

I surprised Gitr the other day by logging in to the Kargath server and sending him a /w as he lead a guildmate through Uldaman. We chatted for a bit – he invited me apply to his guild and offered to help me stomp any boss in the game that dared get in my way. I was wandering around Teldrassil with a hastily constructed ALT and wondering if this might be a home away from home and the stresses of PvP on Twisting Nether. Unable to bear being away from leveling Wardance on TN – I ended up fleeing back and partaking of some trolls and wolves in the Hinterlands.

Gitr was amazingly friendly and helpful and in my absence from writing while playing guild leader – his blog has absolutely begun to thrive. It looks good – he updates frequently – and seems to be enjoying both his game time and blog time. I haven’t gone back to my alt on Kargath but it’s good to know that I’ve got a friendly place to land.

Looking at the silly cartoons I posted earlier seem really silly when a guy gives you a compliment like that. I’m really looking forward to spending some time on Kargath with Tomas, once I get Internet back and he visits us again.

I’d never heard of this cartoon before my co-worker sent it to me last night. I came into work today and started rolling on the floor. The strip is called User Friendly and these are the last 2 days’ cartoons:

Edit: …and March 1st

It seems nuts, I know. I’ve gone on and on since I started my mage about squishy not working for me. That was largely solved with the voidwalker use with Lockr, whom I enjoy playing a lot, too.

I’ve noticed a real void in-game for healers for parties. I like druid a lot because of the versatility, plus a good bit more armor that it offers, but what the game really needs is a good priesthood.

According to Wikipedia:

Priests are much sought-after for pre high-end raids (Stratholme, Scholomance, Blackrock Spire) but are very rarely played as of early 2006. Priests are perhaps the least commonly played class, although Warlocks are also rare. [1]

This can be attributed to the perception that sitting back and healing other party members is not as fun as other classes’ play experiences. High-level priests are quite popular however for PvP. The Priest is a very strong class for PvP and can decide the outcome of a battle if not dealt with correctly. Because of their dangerous use of area-effect fear and healing they are considered to be the primary target in any party.

The popularity of Priests may increase after the changes to the Priest class in the forthcoming 1.10 patch. Priests will gain several enhancements to both their healing and damage powers that are expected to make the Priest a more viable character.

I will be in more demand as a priest and have enough friends at this point that I should always be able to group with people to help them out by healing and to get their assistance with DPS and tanking.

If I gain some ground on some alts, we can level together. He will be bank-rolled well enough to buy good gear that adds shadow damage until it’s necessary to respec to Holy for 10- to 20-man raids.

I just moved out this weekend and into a fabulous apartment 1/3 of the distance to work. It took me exactly 15 minutes to get to the office this morning. That was wonderful.

I’ve been without Internet since Saturday morning and it won’t get connected until Wednesday evening, so there won’t be any game content posts until then 🙁 but I’m going to try to keep trying to put up some topics of discussion until then. You can tell that my last topic really got everyone’s attention and they’re all jumping in to get a work in on THAT topic. Heheh…I’ll try something else then.

Until next time.

Let’s start a debate. On Blessing of Kings, his latest post as of this writing was about his role as paladin in MC being less than glamourous or even fun.

So my brain splatter for the day is what is more important for choosing a character class: leveling to 60 or end-game roles in 20- to 40-man raids? You don’t want it to be unbearably boring to reach end-game content so you’re sure to make it to the end, yet it’s nearly certain that you’ll be playing a character longer AS a 60 than getting TO 60.

For me, the decision took place in two parts. First, I was determined to have an easy go at soloing, so I entered as a dwarf hunter so I even had the guns specialization and stoneform for battling spiders and such. Eventually soloing became boring because it didn’t really take any user input to win fights. I was literally siccing my pet on a mob, marking it, and starting with Serpent Sting and Arcane Shot and falling asleep. I’d wake up and my pet would be running back toward me. On to the next target. That’s no way to level.

After a few days of consulting with Talion and Intoxication, I settled on a human warrior strictly for end-game role. I was really interested in wearing plate armor, carrying a big stick, and going toe to toe with the biggest, baddest bosses Blizzard could make. About half-way through, we realized that my primary pleasure was taking a beating and my secondary pleasure was dishing out more damage than I took. So I became a Fury-specced warrior. I want to do rogue-like damage and go “mmmfff” if I rip aggro for a few seconds. I’ve already hit a 2,900 crit in MC and LOVED it! Nothing like getting 100 rage on a core hound at 13% and killing him with an Execute. It’s incredible. That’s what I want to do in instances, so I’m in the right place.

There are a few shortcomings at times in the guild, so I’m leveling my warlock and my brand new dwarf priest (Fear Ward) for those times that we are having trouble filling a class in a group. Let’s just see if I can bear the leveling and enjoy the end-game content.

We came a-knocking on AQ20’s door tonight. It was quite the night with high drama and great results.

First things first: make the first pull without wiping. LOL. Not so easy when your first pull brings in 2 of the guardians as adds right off. We reset and made good progress…to the doorway to the left. It was quite nice of Blizzard to put the graveyard right by the entrance, because we all got very familiar with those corpse runs. About 25 in all for me, I think. After our first complete wipe in the doorway, we made it all the way to Kurinnaxx with fine discipline and improvement. We marked a target and Fish tanked the charging wasp off to the side so he wouldn’t charge. DPS took down the marked targets sequentially and dropped Fish’s in seconds. It was about a minute or so per pull. Then it got HARD.

We got a briefing and synopsis from someone who ran it earlier in the day with a PuG. He has a nasty effect from the front, drops sand traps that silence, and gets pretty enraged. The problem with the silencing even flowed into our tanking ranks because you couldn’t taunt and our sunder armors missed.

Our first attempt began early while spreading out when we found out exactly how big his agg radius is. Let’s just say it’s big. Really big. With an unexpected body pull, we got him down to 19% on our first attempt and we were ready to go at it again. A big help in this fight is that you have plenty of time to run back from the GY and rejoin combat. Several times. After 4 attempts, Talion broke out the repair bot and people started calling out their repair bills. I heard “5g for cloth…yay Magister’s.” LOL

After one more wipe, a couple of people had to leave, and we brought in one more rogue to up the dps and I was told to go as dps as possible. I busted out the elixir of mongoose, my agility belt, went berserker stance, and equipped both Dawn’s Edge axes for a grand total of 25.8% chance to crit, get flurrry, and really start going nuts. That is how, on the 6th try, we took him down. DPS the crap out of him and keep the tanks up. A lot of the learning was getting the aggro off the first tank as his healing returns get worse. Aggro is really hard to get, but once you get it, it takes a long time to give it up. I found that out. It took almost a minute for Siv to take it off me after I stopped attacking.

He dropped a lot of money (over 2g each member) and a very nice blue plate belt. I forgot to write down the name, but it was a major upgrade for Gitr. So he decided to roll as low as he could and got a 9. Woot! The experience was great. It was very satisfying to take him down after so many tries.