Sunday Night Update

(reposted from Path of a Hero)

I've been working, I've been raiding when I can, and tweeting like a maniac. You guys are all looking great out there and I promise more regular updates as soon as I get this major project launched. Good stuff on the horizon.

As for Stoney: T7.5 shoulders and the Stalk Skin Belt meant I had to completely regem. I also spent DKP on the Arachnoid Gold Band. I was going to save up my DKP for the T7.5 helm off KT but two things convinced me otherwise: 1) I believe in taking upgrades as soon as you can get them because you never know when you'll get the opportunity again, and 2) our MT did not have his T7.5 helm and I knew he wanted it, and with his DKP being much higher than mine there was no reason to hold back because I would never be able to out-bid him. So I took the upgrades as they came.

I love the look of the T7.5 shoulders. It's a damn shame they're so pretty because I'll probably replace them when I finally get my hands on the helm.

I also picked up a Hand of Nerub to do some Theorycraft testing at the dummy one night.

My expertise thesis =P is nearly complete. That's also taken a back burner. I have the results of my raiding across multiple resets. What's left is the hard part: I need to figure out what the increase to DPS would be and if it's worth the trade-off in other stats. More spreadsheets!

Tomorrow we'll be in Sarth3D again, wish us luck! The 2D is like a walk in the park on a fine Sunday afternoon after wiping on 3D for 2 hours. But I don't mind the wiping because we were progressing each time.

And be sure to follow me on Twitter if you subscribe to that sort of nonesense.

May all your hits be crits!

Swiftsteel Bludgeon!! w00t?

I am full of fail. For some reason I don't seem to have my head screwed on straight for common sense things this week. Case in point: Swiftsteel Bludgeon. It dropped on trash yesterday as we were clearing our way to High Warlord Naj'entus. I spent DKP on it.

You'll notice the 1.50 speed. You'll also notice how that weapon speed entirely sucks for enhancement shaman. You'll notice again that I spent DKP for it. You will notice the fail.

What happened was that I just recently recreated my loot spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet I have listed every drop that would be of interest to an Enhancement Shaman from Karazhan through to Black Temple, including BoE crafted items. Item values are entered in manually by me and then compared to the Enhancement Points system. It is sorted by slot and then by total EP value so I can tell at a quick glance whether or not an item is worth the upgrade--and worth the DKP.

When the Swiftsteel Bludgeon dropped I checked my file only to find it wasn't listed. I whispered in officer chat to our GM to hang on as I needed to plug in the values to see if it was worthwhile. Another officer replied back "stoney look at the speed" and I thought to myself, yeah 27 haste is pretty sweet! I said I'd take it and spend DKP as a main spec item. After I looted someone asked in raid chat why I wanted a 1.50 speed weapon. My reply was the only appropriate one: "fuck me"

Thankfully we have a very good guild leader who let me put in a ticket with a GM to have it go to the next interested party, and didn't charge me DKP for it. Interestingly, we saw that weapon drop 2 more times last night so a rogue got 1 and a warrior got 2 (for an Execute set).

Azgalor Down

3 wipes. 4th attempt = kill



The 4th attempt was spot-on. We SS'd the healers that got Doomed. The shaman's used Ankh for self-rez, and the druids brought up those healers that went down and we couldn't get an SS on before they expired.

We did something different than the bosskillers.com playbook. We tanked the boss at Thrall and the Lesser Doomguards at the Tauren Warriors. We had 3 OT's for the dooms, 3 dps, and 2 healers. The Doomguard dps was all melee in an effort to reduce chance of Rain of Fire on the main tank. The ranged and healers we split into two groups and given general areas where to stand then instructed to spread out from those points. Resto druids were reminded to keep the tank HoT'ed at all times, especially as the silence CD is up. A quick reminder that the MT is the main healing priority of ALL the healers and off we went.

The trash was rough, as always. But we made it through, as always. The first Distract was successful, buying us a few more seconds to get HS, top off mana, and get into position. But the 2nd distract was resisted and so we engaged.

The fight was very well executed by the whole raid. Everyone was doing their job: Healing, DPSing, tanking, running out of Rain of Fire, running to the doomguard section when Doomed.

By the end of the fight the Tauren Warriors and the 3 OT's were completely overwhelmed. At that point Azgalor was at 3% so I called for the rogues to sprint over to Az and help finish him off. He went from 3% down to 1% very fast, and like all 1%'s on bosses that lingered for a while, maybe just a few moments longer than it should.

And then he fell.

We got 2 Gloves of the Forgotten Protector and 1 Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher. I was the one taking tells for the Warr/Hunter/Shaman gloves and when that went out my screen lit up with 8 tells from people wanting to spend DKP to be one of the first to get T6 in Unorthodox. As for me, my Gauntlets of Rapidity rate 175.15 EP versus versus a meager 156.92 for the Skyshatter Grips. It's simply not worth it for me to spend the DKP.

We then went and practiced wiping on Archimonde. Fun! Congrats to Dwarfknight, Shawck, and Siobhann for guild-first T6.