Why hello there! Or, a rant about why I hate entry-level raids.

Hello, my name is Cly and I'm an altaholic...

All jokes aside, I do play far too many characters. My account holds two 70s, three more toons between 60 and 70 that I'm actively working on, and a myriad of alts below those. I've acted as class captain for rogue, druid, warrior, and priest, been a guild leader and a raid leader, and now I'm raiding casually and preparing my various alts for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. (Provided I stick around that long.)

But anyway, on to the topic. I absolutely hate entry-level raids. Back in The Day, it was MC. Friggin' hate MC. Healed it on my druid, tanked it on my warrior, and DPS'd it on my rogue. Saw Rag's dead ass a few thousand times...but there is nothing more boring than doing the same instance over and over and never getting past it. (My druid was the only toon to advance into Blackwing Lair, which I deeply regret.) I suppose you can count AQ20 as an entry-level raid as well, but in my humble opinion it was a much better designed and more interesting instance than MC. ZG was alright. Except I hate the Panther, because she never dropped my druid's staff once in God-only-knows-how-many runs.

< / rant >

Now, there is Karazhan. I used to enjoy Karazhan. I have run it on my druid and priest, my former roommate's mage, and will probably have to run it on my hunter. It's getting old. Yes, it's wonderfully organized so that you don't have to clear -every- boss to fight the final Big Baddie. Yes, it drops two pieces of tier 4 and many good items. Yes, you get a ton of badges per clear. Yes, you can clear it in four hours or less if you're good.

No, it is NOT fun the five-hundred and seventy-eigth time.

I realized this after DPSing and off-tanking a four and a half hour Karazhan clear on my druid, then hopping over to my priest a day or two later for her guild's Kara attempt. Three hours to get to Opera. Opera event downed at three and fifteen. I leave to go eat dinner. Come back, do some alting, and the raid's at prince. Get a request from our GM to come emergency heal - they lost someone.

"Sure, I'll come" I say. Nevermind that I'm undergeared for the latter half of the instance, I assume he's thought of that.

I log over, get the summon, run up to Prince, and find the holes in the group have been patched with members of a tier 5/tier 6 guild one of our friends is in. (Uh oh.) One attempt at prince, one wipe later, one of them immediately starts pinning the blame on me - my healing style, my spec, my gear, etc. (If you want me to 'keep the tank topped up so the other healers can deal with spike damage', yes I'm going to overheal a ton. I never went below 3/4 mana and I was spamming rank 1 Greater Heal, which did the job nicely for my gear level.) Blah blah, I'm a skill-less noob, blah blah blah.

Or maybe I don't hate entry-level raids for the fact that they're entry-level raids. Maybe I hate the people who assume that because you're still doing them, you don't know jack.

Here endeth the rant. Next up: My beloved hunter alt, the imminent dissolution of the guild I helped found, and druid PVP.

DPS/Healing meter freaks and why they suck

Ok so have you ever noticed how there's always 1 or 2 guys in the guild who are absolutely stark raving nuts about being the top 1 or 2 on their respective charts. It drives me absolutely nuts, cause they do the stupidest stuff in an attempt to achieve this.

For starters, Healers FOR SHAME. If you are always trying to be top on the healing charts why don't you flip over to your over healing meter and check it out, I am willing to bet you are on the top of that one also. Why don't you just take that number due to over healing, and calculate how much mana that is using your (and I'm giving you the serious benefit of the doubt here) MOST efficient heal, and lets see how much you've managed to waste and see how much longer you could have stayed up and healing. Not to mention lets check how many times you have died compared to the other healers due to pulling aggro to early in the fight or some such nonsense. Or you may be wondering why your constantly poping mana pots every 2 min when all the other healers are still at half mana. It's all well and good if your saving the group from a wipe, or you just have to do that much to keep up and under geared tank but if your just spamming heals to try and make it to the top, just stop it your making yourself look like an ass. And probably causing problems for your raid when you go OOM way to early in the fight.

Ok now don't think your gonna get it easy all you DPS freaks. I swear to go if I am in another raid where there is someone who cant wait for 3 sunders on a boss fight. Or thinks they are leet enough that they can ride the edge of the threat meter and just be a hairs breadth from pulling aggro off the tank, I'm going to reach through the Internet and choke the life out of you. Please save me the trouble and learn from this post, or go play tic tac toe in your sand box in the backyard, AND STOP WRECKING RAIDS FOR PEOPLE. People it's not that hard, don't go crazy just because you can, if you have to fine. But if you have stuff on farm and your constantly pushing less then 5% threat away from pulling off the tank BACK THE HELL OFF. Nobody appreciates having to heal you, and I know damned well your tank doesn't want to waste time taunting off you mid fight(presuming thats even possible giving the situation and many bosses Immunities to taunt). So there you are, at the top of the dps meter, just pulled the aggro off the tank, great now what do you do, oh wait I'll use my aggro reduction ability, WRONG ASS HAT for that to work you now need to get BELOW the tanks threat by a significant amount in order for him to regain aggro, and I don't know about you. But I am pretty sure your gonna go squish when Gruul decides he wants to take a swipe at you cause you just surpassed all 3 tanks at growth 8, GG DIAF.

Moral of the story kids, barring an emergency situation, Stay 10% below your threshold for pulling aggro off the tank, use your aggro wipes early and use them often, and Hunters for the LOVE OF GOD, if you feign death and drop aggro onto a healer cause you were to stupid to FD 5 seconds ago save us all some frustration and durability and go play Hello Kitty (http://www.sanrio.com/activities/) and leave the rest of us to a game that actually requires you to have the ability and intellect to wipe yourself after using the restroom.

WoW Addons I Cant Live without

Another great idea from the nice people at blogazeroth.com, I think I will keep this blog a little bit shorter then my last one, Sorry for being a bit wordy but finding my favorite class has been a long fight for me, anyway. To the point, I am going to skip over the class specific Mods/Addons/UI's and go straight for the Main ones that I think anybody who plays this game should have.

First of there is Omen, omen is a Threat meter and Yes I have use KTM(KLH). But I have found that Omen updates much faster and has proven to be more accurate on a number of occasions. Next Is some type of Damage/Healing Meter. Currently I use Recount, it is out of date but has not broken yet. The reason I use Recount is not only does it Provide Dmg/Healing/Over Healing It also records who breaks CC, Where your dmg is coming from, How often you miss, Where you take dmg from and what ability that mob is using. It really breaks everything down so you can disect it and figure out where you are having problems or where you can improve (which reminds me to post another topic about DPS meters and how to NOT use them).

Everyone who has ever so much as looked at the Auction House should download Auctioneer, it's far to handy not to have. If your sick and Tired of Alt-tabbing to look at drops off bosses you can't go wrong with Atlas Loot Enhanced.

Another must have is a coord addon, the one i currently use is Location Fu, I know it doesn't list the cords as 00.0 , 00.0 but common if you cant find something without needing to go to the tenth degree of a cord you need to just quit and go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure or something. All of the FuBar addons are great in my opinion pick and choose your own at will you cant go wrong, they are updated very often and even if they are not they don't seem prone to breaking easily.

Finally a new little Gem I found recently is Quest Helper, this little buddy uses some free ware databases and will actually make way points on your map for your various quests and plot a suggested path to take to do as many as possible and then return and do mass turn ins so as to reduce the amount of total run time. a warning that it does miss some quests but by and large It does help reduce questing time in my opinion.

And last but not least, something no raider should ever have to live without Ratingbuster this little guy is a god send, it looks at a piece of gear you mouse over vs. what you are wearing and it tells you what you gain vs what you lose it calculates all stats down to HP/MP/+DMG/+Crit blah blah blah, no more need to do Agility/Str/Int/+ to crit/ + to hit conversions to find out what % it will increase your actual output by, it gives it to you in an instant. And finally you should have some type of boss mod, I use Deadly Boss mods, there are many others and probably some others that are better out there at the moment, but I just haven't spent the time yet finding one.

Favorite Class & Why?

Well I figure to get things kicked off I would use some of blogazeroth.com's suggestions for blog articles. What class Is your favorite and why? To me this is a rather difficult question, I have been playing W0W for 3 years and have taken several breaks from the game only to come back to it. I have a 70 Druid(Hyjal), 70 Warrior(Tortheldrin), and am now activly working on a 48 Warlock(Emerald Dream).

My very first passion was my druid, I loved the flexibility of being able to respec and play the game 3 different ways at will. I primarily found my best fit healing in Tree form, however I started healing for MC raids pre-tree and enjoyed that just as much. I also enjoyed Tanking in bear form and DPS'ing in Cat, however this takes a huge amount of time to get 3 sets of gear built up all of which can compete at the same level as the other so I found myself constantly updating my 3 sets. I never really got into Moonkin at that point due to not really wanting to try and come up with a 4th set. And thus I took my first break from WoW while because I enjoyed my druid and still do, he was never really the best at what he did and I became locked in as a healer as my guild progressed through Gruul's, and I shortly discovered that I really was'nt a healer, Don't get me wrong here I was rather good at it, I was usually 2nd of 3 in kara or 2nd of 5 in Gruul's and mostly was battling for 1st with a very well geared and exceptionally skilled priest. But I just got bored with it, I wanted to be In the action taking the hits and dishing it out, and When the original Druid Nerf's came out shortly after TBC's release, it made Cat's not a very viable source of Raid DPS. So I switched to my warrior.

I figured I would try raiding as MS or Fury. So I dutifully Leveled my Warrior to 70 got my Gladiators Right & Left Ripper and started stacking up the +hit/+crit/+AP gear. And thats where I hit a road block, Not a lot of people wanted Raid DPS warriors. Sure everyone cries for a MS PvP War, But I'm not much for PvP I truly enjoy PvE raid encounters the most. So I found myself being pressured into becoming a Tank, Something I had done as a Druid and was not particularly found of. While I did become a staple of every group for a small amount of time, and successfully Tanked for a guild up to Curator a few times. I decided I would cut that venture off short because what I really wanted was to be able to spit out Raid DPS.

So now I have my warlock and I am hoping that I have finally found my niche. I have leveled Mages up to a certain point (mid 40's pre-TBC) But there was a little bit of something missing for me. So I switched to the warlock and I think I've found what I've been looking for, Warlocks can indeed rip out massive dps in the long and short term(Boss/Trash mobs) and Depending on Spec and Hit some very impressive numbers as well as be incredibly efficient. It all depends on how you want to spec it out, Right now I am currently looking at doing the cookie cutter 0/21/40 Destro aka Shadow Mage spec for raiding, and it looks rather promising. You can give great debuffs via Curse of Elements and Curse of Shadows, you really should not be CC'ing in Raids due to the unpredictability of Fear UNLESS you are prepared to use Curse of Recklessness to Yo-Yo the mobs a little bit. You can easily dot up multiple mobs and have some nice sustained dps via your Dots and then start racking up some dmg with SB/SP depending on how fast the mob is dropping and how you want to spec (Pure Shadow/Pure Fire/Hybrid). On top of all that you have Pets that you can buff yourself and other's with. And you are basically an Eternal Mana Battery assuming your healers will toss you a couple HoT's every now and again, and you keep a good stock of Health Pots and Soul stones to Health stone with, and Sacrifice your Void/Felhunter depending on which works out better for you 4%MP or 2%HP per 4 second. So basically I'm saying Warlocks are my favorite class for the moment, They seem to be capable of the same DPS as a Mage but they play style has enough to it to keep someone like me entertained.