When your fishing lure runs out on the second-last cast in a pool.
Category Archives: Playstyle
The “Oh Shit” Button
Having picked up the [Vial of the Sunwell], which doesn’t activate the global cooldown, I thought it might not be a bad idea to make up an emergency panicbutton for healing use, for those times when Lay on Hands is just overkill (or you’re going to need mana before your potion cooldown is up).
/use Vial of the Sunwell
/cast Divine Favor
/cast Holy Shock
All three items are on various cooldowns, so you may wish to add the following line to the end of the macro:
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
which will suppress “Spell is not ready yet.” error messages.
Provided nothing’s on cooldown, this will deliver a crit Holy Shock and trigger the Vial of the Sunwell heal, for a total of 4200-5600 healing in one instant cast (range dependent on +heal, and whether the Vial crits). Extremely useful for spike damage situations!
(If you’re beyond 20 yards, the Holy Shock won’t proc, but the Vial still works out to 40 yards.)
Farming for Shattered Sun Rep
If your server is anything like mine, finding groups for Magister’s Terrace can be … challenging, to say the least, since apparently every single tank has gone on holidays this month and the only ones left are kinda Donald-y. But you want your Shattered Sun faction, don’t you, for those tasty recipes and epics? And the dailies just don’t roll your faction rewards in fast enough…
Lo, paladin, find yourself a friendly mage, preferably one who’s as eager for SSO rep as you are so they don’t bitch and moan about how tedious this is going to be.
Then hie thee to Magister’s Terrace, and kill the first four mobs. Over and over again.
- Set it to normal mode. Do not try this on Heroic unless you are uber.
- Zone in, pally in tanking gear (with tanking buffs, ie Righteous Fury *ahem*), salv the mage.
- Take the first pair, making sure the patrol isn’t pathing anywhere nearby.
- This pair will be 2x Mage Guards. They’re basically melee mobs, although they have an annoying ranged damage/stun attack called Glaive Throw.
- Sheep one, tank the other. Tank and spank, and the pally should have little risk of dying unless things go pear-shaped.
- Of note: when they throw their magic dampening field thingy, pull them out of it and tank them a decent way away from it. The field dampens all spell attacks against them, which makes them slow as hell for your mage to kill, and your threat generation drops to almost nothing.
- Before breaking the sheep, bandage yourself back up to reasonable health. Then kill the second one.
- Eat and drink back to full health. Don’t bother trying to heal yourself up; your mana pool is tiny and your heals won’t do jack. It’s quicker to just eat as well as drinking.
- Check out the patrol. There are a number of mobs that can be in the patrol:
- Warlock: very high dps caster, fire based, with an imp pet. The pet should always be the first thing to die.
- Magister: frost-based caster, fairly high DPS but manageable.
- Physician: a melee mob, despite the name, with a poisoned melee attack. Fairly trivial.
- Mage Guard: same type of mobs as in the first stationary pull. (I think these are potentially in this patrol, although I can’t remember.)
- Blood Knight: pain in the neck. A paladin mob with a self-heal (or cross-heal if you have another mob up as well) and an aura/dot that does a surprising amount of damage.
- Tips for dealing with the patrol:
- Physician + Magister: the easy pair. Sheep the magister, kill the physician, then kill the magister.
- Some other combo: relatively easy. If the patrol has the blood knight or the warlock, sheep that mob first. If it has both, then read on.
- Warlock + Blood Knight: the difficult pair. Sheep the warlock, tank the blood knight, kill the imp, then kill the blood knight. The pally should be ready to interrupt the blood knight’s heal with a stun; the mage should be ready to spellsteal the blood knight’s buff as soon as it appears. Once the blood knight is down, bandage and regen some mana – drink a potion if you’ve got some cheap ones (eg Major Combat Mana Potions) on hand. You don’t want to tackle the warlock when you’re already half-dead and low on mana.
- The reason I suggest this order is: if the warlock breaks sheep early while you’re killing the blood knight, the warlock will get a spell off and do a bit of damage before being resheeped, no big deal. If the blood knight breaks sheep early while you’re killing the warlock, the knight will get a heal off and you’ll have to kill the warlock all over again, which – given how much damage they do – could well be fatal.
- Zone out. Eat, drink, reset the instance.
- Perform above steps four more times.
This will net you 240 rep (264 for humans) in about 20-30 minutes, and will use up your five instance resets for the hour. Go make some lunch, do some chores, come back in half an hour, and repeat steps 1-8 again.
I used this to push me over the line to Revered so I could make my healing trinket in time for our first night in Mount Hyjal, since the daily quests were going to reset in the middle of the raid. I used this again today to push me over the line to Exalted so I didn’t have to wait til tonight for a fresh daily reset to get more rep.
Obviously, this is not an awesome way to get to Revered or Exalted SSO by itself. However, a few iterations of this – if it’s in company with a partner you enjoy playing with – can be a fun way to polish some skills and get just that bit of extra rep to reach a particular milestone when you choose, instead of being dependent on being able to get proper Magister’s Terrace groups.
An embarrassment of trinkety riches.
Thanks to Magister’s Terrace and the new Shattered Sun faction rewards, I’ve picked up the following in the last week:
- [Vial of the Sunwell]
- [Figurine – Seaspray Albatross]
- [Redeemer’s Alchemist Stone] (well, actually, I’ll be crafting this tonight when I hit Exalted)
Very shiny, very epic. Given that they’re leaps and bounds better than my existing trinkets (which hadn’t been upgraded for a looooong time), I’m pretty much replacing everything at once – which means I have to work out a whole new set of mental guidelines about what I use when.
The [Vial of the Sunwell] is the one I’m really thinking about. The 15 mp5 equip bonus is very nice; I’m trying to work out how useful the rest of its abilities are. Theorycrafting post due shortly.
Isle of Quel’Danas Progression
By now, all servers should be well into the world event to unlock the village on the Isle of Quel’Danas. If you’re interested in your server’s progression compared with the rest of the world – or you want to check on your server’s progress without logging into the game – there’s a handy website collating all the data.
Check out the leaderboards for US realms and EU realms at Gorgonnash.
(I’m particularly proud as my server, US-Proudmoore, as we’re top of the US charts. As I write, we’re currently at 35% of the way through Phase 2 and 60% of the way through the Portal; the nearest competitor is US-Medivh on 32% and 55% respectively. Pwnmoore, excelling at PvE grindfests since 2004!)
It’s only for a night…
I’ve never been one of those hybrids who changes spec at the drop of a hat to meet the needs of a group; I change specs once every few months at most, agonising over the placement of every talent point. Regardless of my championing of the “hybrids should be able to perform all their roles”, that doesn’t mean I want to respec twice a week and go holy for raids, prot for 5-mans and ret for soloing.
But. After a fruitless day of searching for Magister’s Terrace PuGs, wherein it seemed I was competing with every healer on the server for a group spot, and there were about 3 tanks compared with the 789237852 DPSers and 11872735 healers looking for groups… I snapped.
And here I am, one Magister’s Terrace group later – still Prot-specced, with my new best friend Bernie, and a good chunk of Shattered Sun rep up my sleeve. I’m just happy my group was patient and understanding about my utter nubbyness.
Time to go back to Holy… although perhaps not before I see what the PuG scene looks like tomorrow.
Just how stupid do they think we are?
Riiiiiiight.
In other news, hooray for patch 2.4! Expect reports from the trenches.
What do you pack for a raid?
I apologise for the lack of tasty content over the last few days; I’ve been extremely tired, and doing the bare minimum.
This is something I’d been talking about with a friend lately anyway, so when I saw Anna of Too Many Annas blogging about what she packs for a raid, I thought I’d join in!
Here’s what I take for a raid – for reference, I’m a holy paladin with a main healer/off tank spec. (As you doubtless already know, if you’re reading this!)
Consumables
- 20x [Mana Potion Injector]
- 10x [Mad Alchemist’s Potion]
- 15x [Bottled Nethergon Energy] (if it’s a Tempest Keep raid)
- 10x [Blue Ogre Brew] (if it’s a Gruul’s Lair raid)
- 10x [Dense Stone Statue]
- 5-10 charges of [Brilliant Mana Oil] (which I prefer to [Superior Mana Oil] for the more balanced stats)
- 20x [Blackened Sporefish]
- 20x cheaper stam-only food, eg [Feltail Delight]
- 20x [Golden Fish Sticks]
- As many [Charged Crystal Focus] as I can get my hands on affordably
- 20x [Adept’s Elixir]
- 20x [Elixir of Major Mageblood]
- Up to 20 each of [Elixir of Healing Power], [Elixir of Draenic Wisdom], [Mageblood Potion] which I use for less-intensive fights
- 1-2x [Flask of Mighty Restoration]
- 10-20x [Elixir of Major Agility] and 10-20x [Spicy Crawdad] for when I’m called on to tank
- 300x [Symbol of Kings]
- 5x [Symbol of Divinity]
- 20x [Heavy Netherweave Bandage]
- A handful of [Elixir of Water Breathing] if we’re doing Lurker Below
- 1x [Shattrath Flask of Mighty Restoration] or [Unstable Flask of the Elder] if we’re hitting a relevant zone
- and the most important consumable of all, 1 stack of [Savory Deviate Delight].
Gear
- Healing set 1: focused on spell crit & +heal
- Healing set 2: balanced between +heal and mp5
- A metric bajillion extra trinkets and librams, for situational use
- Offtanking/AoE tanking set
- Spelldamage set – not that I usually need it for raiding, but there’s no way I have room for it in my bank!
And this is why I have full 20-slot bags, both in my bank and equipped, and I still only ever have 6-10 empty bag slots.
Fake That Focus
If you’re like me, you use the Focus target part of Blizzard’s interface a lot – you make a relevant player or mob your focus, display the focus frame on screen, and it allows easy retargeting (and watching for buffs, debuffs, CC breaking and so on). And, of course, you can use the [target=focus] option in macros to apply something to your focus without having to change targets, and some actionbar mods (eg Trinity Bars) even allow you to set an entire action bar of spells to apply to your focus. (Which makes one-click shielding, healing or CCing very easy, without having to retarget anything at all.)
However, I’ve often wished for two focus frames on screen, when I need to keep an eye on two heal targets at once, or a mob and a friendly, or whatever.
Presto! With a combination of macros, you can fake up a similar effect.
Targeting
Firstly, I use F1 to F5 as the default – targeting myself and my party members. I’ve set F6 to target my focus.
So, time for a new macro:
/target playername
(eg mine currently says “/target Everlight”, as Everlight was one of the two people I needed to throw healing at in the last boss fight I did)
Then either put that on an action bar and give it a hotkey, or use a mod that allows you to assign keybindings directly to macros (such as Trinity Bars, or SpellBinder). I gave it F7, to work nicely with F6 for the focus.
Unit Frames
I haven’t found a solution that allows you to put a new frame for a specific player or mob on your screen. If anyone finds one, let me know.
In the meantime, I’m just using the Blizzard Raid UI for this (crazy, I know) – I pull the frame for the specific target onto my playfield, and position it next to my existing focus frame.
Spell Targeting
Obviously, you can’t use a bar mod that points your spells at your focus target for this, and you can’t use [target=focus] in your macros – because this person isn’t your focus. However, you can use [target=playername] in a few key macros if you know you’re going to need to cast a spell on this person quickly without retargeting them first. “/cast [target=tankname] Lay On Hands”, perhaps, or “/cast [target=mobname] Polymorph” if you’re handling sheeping.
Edit, with thanks to Button of Button Mashing: in 2.3, Blizzard added a ‘targetexact’ macro option, which is case specific and handles targets with spaces in their name. So if you wanted to target, say, Shade of Aran using a macro like this, you could use either [target=shade] (but that would also risk targeting someone in your raid called ‘Shadeface’, for instance) or [targetexact=Shade of Aran]. In other words, targetexact is a good option when you have multiple mobs or people around with similar names.
The Upshot
As you can tell, it’s all a bit of a kludge – the Blizzard UI isn’t intended to let you have more than one focus target, so you have to mimic the elegant functionality of focus behaviour with a few specific macros. However, I’m still finding that it’s more helpful than not using it at all. It doesn’t work well on the fly, but if you know what you’re facing ahead of time, it can make a big difference.
If anyone comes up with any extensions of the concept, or better ways of executing it, I’m all ears!
How to be a Happy Farmer
There’s a lot of stuff in the game that requires farming, and farming is pretty tedious by itself. You can skip it if you want, but you miss out on quite a lot like that.
I know farming. Since TBC’s been released, I’ve solo farmed my way to:
- 375 fishing skill
- Exalted with Consortium
- Exalted with Kurenai
- Revered with Aldor
- …and then Exalted with Scryers (starting from Hated) because I wanted all the Jewelcrafting patterns
So, here are a few tips and tricks.
1. Break the job into chunks.
Don’t try and fish yourself from 300 skill to 375 in a day. It’ll seem like a dishearteningly mammoth task, you’ll burn yourself out, and never pick up your fishing rod again – not much point in having 375 skill at that point, is there?
Instead, just say to yourself “I’m going to get 5 skill points on this fishing trip before I log off and play that alt instead.” Do that, and do another 5 points later in the evening. You’ll get your 75 fishing skill within a couple of weeks, and you’ll still be fairly sane to boot. Apply the same principle to anything you’re farming – “just another 10 drops and I’ll go”.
2. Maximise your returns.
Take a look at what your goal is, and work out how you can get incidental benefits.
- Farming Consortium rep? Why not kill the Ogres in Nagrand for their warbeads – they drop Crystal Powder Samples for Halaa token rewards (like an 18-slot bag), and they give Kurenai/Maghar rep with every kill to boot. I hit exalted with Kurenai solely through Consortium rep grinding.
- Trying to level your fishing skill? Why not fish up, say, Deviate Fish in the Barrens? They still sell very well on most servers (especially if you have the recipe to cook them yourself), they’re easy to fish, and you still get skill points for them.
- Trying to get Dampscale Basilisk Eyes to go from Aldor to Scryer alignment? Cut a deal with a friendly caster who might like to buy all the Chunks o’ Basilisk you’ll wind up with – those things make great spell damage buff food.
Be creative and opportunistic to see what else you can get out of it when you’re farming for a specific goal. Also, be openminded about ways to reach your goal. For instance, I was having troubles with Scryer rep – I was trying to farm for Sunfury Signets, but as a holy pally I found it hard to kill the blood elves fast enough to get a decent rate of return. So I switched back to farming for Aldor rep items off the various demons in Netherstorm – the increased DPS I could get from my demon-specific damage spells turned frustration into ease (not to mention the fact that unlike blood elves, demons don’t run away at 10% health to fetch five buddies). On my server, you can trade Aldor and Scryer items at a 1:1 ratio in the trade channel, so I just farmed for Aldor items, traded them for Scryer items, and handed them in. Presto, exalted.
3. Distract yourself.
No matter how efficient you are, farming is boring because it takes very little mental effort.
So, distract yourself. I find podcasts work really well for this purpose – a farming session is about the only time I listen to podcasts, but they certainly do the job nicely. Other people I know recommend audio books. If you have friends you don’t see very often, hop on Skype or an IM service that allows voice chats, and natter away with them.
A friend of mine on the other side of the world talked me through the killing of about 789235238 ogres for my Consortium rep – he works from home and keeps funny hours, so we’d power up iChat and voicechat for hours at a time… I barely even noticed the ogres falling under my mighty hammer.