The Cranky Sysadmin

When I first started playing World of Warcraft I started a pretty typical character, a human warrior. I got him up to level 16 and abandoned him for a tauren hunter. Now that I have two 70s that need instance runs for almost any progression, I’ve decided to try the warrior class again. On a whim, I started a ridiculously small gnome warrior. Knowing the mechanics of the game better, I’m having a lot more fun with the warrior then I did the first time around. I’ve made level 20, and I’m seeing some of the essentials of the warrior class. The staple talents seem to be for damage and threat generation. There are other abilities for slowing down mobs, and interrupting spell casting. Charge is great for closing the gap. Rage management is something I didn’t understand the first time around. In dungeons, I’ve always wondered why some warriors kill the critters. Apparently, it’s to keep their rage up.

I’ll write more about my experience as I progress. Another reason for leveling a warrior is so that I can be flexible. I have a DPS (hunter) and a healer (shaman). Having a tank would be nice to round out my utility.

We had an unsuccessful Botanica run this weekend. We wiped several times on the high botanist without making progress in the fight. The high botanist heals himself when he turns into a tree, so the saplings he spawns have to be burned down quickly so that the group can then focus on the high botanist. The other problem was the little saplings that he spawns every few seconds. They don’t have many hit points, but they can overwhelm the tank and healer pretty quickly if they aren’t removed.

The good part about the fight is that the tank (mercury on a feral druid) and healer (me on Ep, the resto shaman) could keep tanking and healing for a long time as long as I chug a pot, keep up on mana stream, and do mana tide when needed.

I think one of the dps needs to take care of the little saplings, and when the botanist turns into a tree, the dps should use their assist macro to attack the same target, namely the trees that the botanist spawns.

None of us had ever walked into botanica before, so I’m not surprised that we had problems. Better luck next time.

Obviously, the test is of gear that I’m interested in:

• The Ancient Scepter of Sue-Min
• Shockwave Truncheon
• Gavel of Pure Light

We now return you to your original program.

Well, Ep and I made ourselves an Arena team a few weeks ago. Ep doesn’t PvP at all, but I take Moonraker (Lvl 70 NE Druid) into the battlegrounds quite a bit. Even though I don’t like fighting other characters as much as some people do, I enjoy BGs because I can pick and choose my fights –or just stealth around and collect towers/mines/flags. In fact, I’ve done them often enough to get three or four pieces of epic honor gear.

Speaking of honor gear, I just got an ugly hat the other day, in fact. Why does druid-specific gear have to be so darn hideous! The shoulder armor has weird globes on it and is edged with giant feathers (uck) and my new hat looks like a cross between branches and antlers hooked onto a scrap of wood and taped to my head. Thank goodness for the “Show Helm” box in the Interface Options that I can uncheck!

Anyway, we started fighting Arena battles two weeks ago and lost every single one (as we expected, since we’re new at battling … and lame at PvP). Last week, we didn’t get around to fighting our 10 battles, but this week we got a few in on Saturday and did our last few on Monday evening, so we wouldn’t miss out on this week’s points.

Our first few battles went as normal with us valiantly trying to stay alive/kill, but instead being killed/not killing — with a little running around and shapeshifting by me, just for good measure. :-)

But in our ninth battle, as a change of pace, I decided to turn into a bear and charge the other team instead of stealthing in. I got all the way over to the other entryway and started beating up on a Paladin while his warlock friend ran away. (To kill Ep, probably.) Slowly I realized that the Paladin wasn’t fighting back. Then, he suddenly disappeared. Sadly, we still didn’t win against the warlock. (DoTs make me cry.)

I figured that the Paladin just got disconnected and we’d have to fight two active people in our next battle. But, I was wrong… The next battle had a Troll warrior standing in the entryway doing nothing! I was able to kill him (big surprise, eh?), but his hunter friend subsequently killed us.

But, it was very strange to see players in two subsequent battles just standing there. Do people with very low arena ratings just go in and not fight at all? Then again, if they were giving up intentionally, I would think it that both of them wouldn’t fight. But, in both battles, one person just stood there and the other handed us our… um… losses.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my bafflement. Perhaps a battle-hardened reader can enlighten us on this strange Arena behavior?

I can’t wait to see what happens next week. Maybe both players will just stand there and we’ll actually win! Tune in to find out.

Is noobishness a word? It should be. I’ve been running around like an enhanced shaman meleeing things down with my mace with flametongue, a searing totem, and some shocks for quite some time. Today, I tried something different. My original grinding rotation was: Lightning bolt two or three times, flame shock, searing totem, and melee them down with a shock whenever it was available. My new grind: Drop a searing totem, lightning bolt all of the time. Flame shock whenever it’s up with either earth shock or frost shock as the alternate. There is very little melee in this rotation. I thought the interrupts would eat into my DPS badly, but for most mobs it doesn’t. Those that attack quickly are a problem with this rotation, and I just switch back to melee and shocks for those. My dps went from around 300 to almost 500. That’s not bad for a change that doesn’t require any gear.

I haven’t posted much this week because I haven’t done much. I haven’t had much time to do more then the Shattered Sun dailies and then go to bed. I will speak to doing the daily grind on a resto shaman compared to a hunter though. On Og, my hunter, the dailies go fairly quickly. The things I have to be careful about on Og are adds when fighting in the high spawn rate areas. Hunters can handle multiple mobs, but it can get dicey when you have three of them attacking you at the same time and you’re standing on a spawn point. On my shaman, it’s not so much of a problem. I’ve managed 4 mobs attacking at the same time without worrying about dying. Either earth shield or water shield and some Lesser Healing Waves keeps me alive. Doing the dailies is a practice in patience though. Og does 500 – 700 DPS to most mobs in the dailies. Ep does around 300 – 400 DPS. I have no problem downing mobs, it just takes a while. There is always competition for the dailies and I fare well tagging mobs before many other folks, thanks to flame shock and earth shock. The one daily that is painful though is the “Mana Cells” quest, where you go to Bashir’s Landing and collect 10 mana cells. The cells are guarded by these mana eels similar to the ones in NetherStorm. The problem occurrs when I’m killing one… slowly… and some asshat comes along and ninja’s the mana cell while I’m busy. In this instance, Og has a much easier time of it. I send in the pet to occupy the mob, go grab the mana cell, and then mow down the mana eel. Stoneclaw doesn’t seem to last long enough for Ep to grab the power cell, so I’m stuck fighting the mob and occasionally watching someone else grab the cell. I’ve adjusted by trying to do this daily either off hours, or I skirt the edges of the camp looking for the less popular mana cells.

What’s on my WoW plate this weekend? Well, I want to hit Magister’s Terrace and 2 other instances. Mercury still needs slabs because of a key fragment loot problem. I would like to see Botanica, heroic Slave Pens, or heroic Mana Tombs. The latter two seem to drop a lot of healer loot.

Ep the resto shaman has reached the arbitrary milestone of +1400 healing. To get there I have to wear a cloth skirt which looks a little um… weird on a hulking Draenei. I think I’ll now start working on my casting mp5 which is still around 100. In instances, my problem seems to be lasting through the bosses. This is probably due to the amount of overhealing that I do. For trash, this is probably ok, but I need to be more careful about it on bosses to conserve my mana. I may try down-ranking my chain heal and see what that gets me. I only use healing wave and lesser healing wave when either the situation is grim, or when there is only one person taking damage. I also tend to forget about pots and mana tide until I see the “not enough mana” messages. I’ll have to fix that as well. One of my longer term goals is to make an alchemist’s stone and then a redeemer’s alchemist stone. These trinkets make mana pots 40% more powerful, and the redeemer’s has +119 healing, which makes it one of the best healing trinkets in the game.

We had a guild run through mechanar today. The group was a prot paladin, a ret paladin, a hunter, a geared mage, and my resto shaman. Chain heal is well used in this instance. There is a lot of AOE that mashes the melee DPS and tank. There is also a lot of healer agro when mobs are summoned. We also seem to have a tough time keeping the adds away. I suspect we need to pull stuff farther back and be careful where stuff gets sheeped. The Cosmic Lifeband dropped. It’s a bit of an upgrade for me, but I let the ret paladin have it since he’s respeccing soon. I’m waiting on the hh rep ring which is far superior. All in all, it was a good run in a straightforward dungeon. Now I just need Botanica for the other half of the arcatraz key.

Our guild organized a shadow labyrinth dungeon run last night. With some difficulty, we got Murmur down. The loot wasn’t wonderful for anyone, but we all got some quests and lower city rep, and we all got the first frag of the kara key. Yes, I know we don’t need the key anymore, but it’s good practice of grouping skills. For progressed guilds slabs may not seem like much, but it requires a lot more attention to detail and gear then instances up to that point. I’m happy that our guild brought the house down. Now for the good and the bad:

The good

• We cleared the trash very quickly. Overseers didn’t start respawning until we wiped on Murmur.
• Even with adds on the trash, and an overseer add later (after they respawned), we didn’t wipe.
• Everyone was willing to try different things and persist through wipes on the bosses.

The bad

• We had more unplanned adds on trash then usual. This caused a wipe once.
• Our group tended to DPS before the tank had agro, which led to a lot of damage throughout the party.
• We wiped several times on Vorpil and Murmur. This is probably not so bad since the tank was learning the encounters.

Well, not really. I was looking for a Sethekk Halls pug last night and I found one. Before I got invited, I mentioned that I was a resto shaman. They invited me and I assumed that I would be healing. Well, after the first pull, I realized that the other shaman was resto as well. I offered to spam lightning bolt and backup heal. We sorted out the totem forest situation, and away we went. It was a good run and my DPS was surprisingly good. With the group buffs, I was doing around 600 DPS in healing gear with no spell damage consumables. There were no wipes, and everyone was happy with the totem buffs. I got my slabs key, so no depending on other folks to get in. I need about 6 slabs runs plus the quests to get lower city revered and pick up my Lower City Prayer Book.