Why hello there…

Hey ho. Just a little update to prove I am not dead… I was stuck at home the whole last week being sick and all and as much as I was looking forward to writing some lengthy and silly posts, all the tea sipping and staying in bed made me very lazy.  Heck, the most heroic thing I did was to pull my laptop in my bed to play WoW because the television entertainment sucks these days. Especially in this part of the world. Charmed re-run. Walker, Texas ranger re-runs. JAG re-runs. Thanks, but no thanks. Anyways, I am really ashamed about not finding the time and being a lazy sob. On with the updates then.

I spent a little time on Rahana that week actually, mostly due to loading problems – the patch seriously fucked me up. It took me two GFX drivers reinstalls, one WoW repair, one AddOns folder deletion and reinstall of addons completely till I managed to load to some randomly created level 1 human warrior with red head without any addons just to discover that all my graphic settings were maxed out. Well no surprise that my poor addon equipped Rahana was unable to load Dalaran in prime time. The issue somehow got better, the only thing bugging me is that the game does not want to save my “particle density” setting so to play it safe mode I always have to load my bank alt and lower it down (doing so on the loading screen does not get saved either). It drives me nuts.

As for Operation: Rahana’s blues – I unfortunately didn’t have much time to farm the instances I wanted but at the very moment all I am missing is a ring and a trinket. Gems are ready, enchants are being prepared and I should be ready to test the waters of unfriendly PuGs soon. I just can’t get myself to farm Venture Bay for the totem. I didn’t really like it the first time I did it for my libram. Torpedo riding was quite some fun though (first three times at least).

As for the raiding and sharing experience part, it pretty much sucks. People are burning out left and right, finishing their exams or using the last time to enjoy their winter holidays this side of the year. Add some emergency cancels to the mix, some login server crap, addon issues and you are considering raid with just three outsiders a win situation. Which is as well why we weren’t even able to clear Sindragosa past two weeks which is very frustrating. We got some recruits in lately and all is looking good, although the either miss gear or experience; yesterday’s raid proved to be rather succesful though, we were three healing ICC (talk about rebuilding healing team) and I was sloppy as hell, looking around how the other two are doing from mana management to heals needed out. We had to stop at Putricide because that was where the gear issue caught up on us, but barring that issue, the future looks bright. But as you can see, nothing much to blog about as it would probably end up being depressive and annoyed rant.

So what the hell was I up to the whole week lying in bed doing nothing at all? Let me tell you. Hanging out with Single Abstract Noun – and god bless that guild during illness time, as even if I logged into Cute Poison people were at work or at uni or something and there was lonely me wiggling my tail in Ironforge with no one to talk to. Anyway, I abandoned my shaman I played there (seriously why are Horde totem quests so retarded?) and went to try out Death Knight. Just for fun. I already pushed one Deathknight to 75ish before so I knew what I am getting into – I went for dualwielding frost dps (again) as it resembles enhancement the most and well, I prefer swinging two hammers (albeit smaller) to swinging one hammer into my enemy faces. I don’t know where the energy was in me, but I managed to get him from 55 to 73 in 9 days, including leveling mining and blacksmithing to 400ish. Bleh.

Sidenote – Un’Goro crater is excellent place for Thorium mining, like really the best ever. And did you know Quest Helper can now track achievements as quests and puts  waypoints on your map for easy exploring achievements? Handy stuff, really.

Anyways back to the Deathknight – the 3.3.3 buff is awesome, at least in solo play (and seeing the log from our raid yesterday in raids too I guess) and it’s great deal of fun. I am as well able to get myself to around 1,500 dps overall in heroics, which is significant improvement. Sad thing is that even if I don’t really care about rotation, priorities and ideal spell selection at all and just literally roll my face from left to right, I am still able to outdps most of the people I PUG with. And no, that does not mean I am good, that means many people are just terrible. I really don’t understand how a ret paladin can do 600 in Nexus with capable tank. That is beyond me. And you bet I have some “great” stories from my PuGs, guess the PuG karma is not Rahana-bound, but account bound.

How was your week?

Being a guildmaster…

I wouldn’t imagine so many things will change with the shift from officer-in-charge to guildmaster position that happened week or so back. I must say, I was really surprised when I looked back and compared my time as officer to my time as guildmaster, because honestly, I wasn’t expecting much to change. But lots of things did change. Maybe not anything major that would strike you at first sight, but enough small changes that add up to something you can notice.

The post was supposed to be about what changed about me, but turned into post about discovering the absolute truths of guild leading by myself. Truths that you can see on any blog written by guild leader, but hey, it was fun to write.

Well met, and how I was an arse in PuG

Heyho. Well, yesterday, something interesting happened to me. And it was very pleasant thing. We assembled for some guild runs through the new places, it went all smooth and dandy apart from Tame who kept on dying (his own fault to be honest), vent was lively and jokes were many, generally great evening spent doing PvE stuff. Well, we’ve done all three in order, teleported back to Dalaran and we are thinking about PuGging some more heroics to get me enough badges to finish off my upgrade path in Triumphs. Guys went to Ironforge to enchant new gear they got and I was idling in Dalaran, repaired and ready to go. Well, standing there, it came to my mind that I maybe could be useful again, and I popped guild recruitment macro into trade and looking for guild channels. Well, an interesting whisper came back.

[Chayah]: Hello there – Blueberry Totem?

Blueberry Raiding: Rahana’s interface

Well, the first topic I wanted to start with was some basic restoration shaman guide, but at these days Drug at ShieldsUp posted a great guide about shaman healing beyond the basics. Far few of his points were about tracking buffs and debuffs in raids and besides praising him in the comments, the displaying of buffs was most hot issue there, even leading to his next post about tracking buffs and debuffs. In the comments, I presented my UI and drug seemed to be quite interested in it, so, like, here we go I guess, eh?

Twin Valkyrs heroic down…

So, yesterday Fiction went on to proper Twin Valkyrs progress. We faced them for first time, with 48 tries left after downing Faction Champions with considerably easy comp. I gathered for the raid, with flu and feeling real bad, but knowing there is no healing alternative to jump in for me. I made myself promise not to suck and I wanted to stick to it to the fullest. Yeah. Totaly did that. We buff, we talk tacs, we buff some more, discuss totem / aura / blessing use and we move on to the pull.

So yeah. Chainhealing left and right while picking up white orbs. Debuff! Switch! Rahana runs around like headless chicken dodging black balls on her way to black porta! Yay! Now, clicky clicky! RT up, wrong ball! Heck. NO! NO! NO! No I don’t really fancy those three white balls coming to get me! HEEEEELP! Rahana runs away. Twins at 60%. Something feels a bit off. Now what could that be? Oh ya… maybe this thing… so, you say, this Earthliving thingy is good to have on? Eh? Tank died. Wipe.