I knew it!

I was just randomly playing Warcraft 3 in the battle.net, when in a map loading screen I found the information why Fandral Staghelm is behaving as such a jerk and why nobody likes him.

Update, and stuff

As you probably have noticed, I haven’t written anything on here for quite some time, and I apologize for the lack of updates (or update, at least).
I stopped playing WoW about three months ago, which might explain the lack of posts on here, but I should at least have told you that…
Because of my neglecting of this blog, I totally missed its first anniversary last month.

I don’t know what will happen to this blog from now on, if I will keep posting occasionally about random stuff, if it will be totally neglected from now on, or whatever else will happen.
I’m still grateful for being part in the great community that is Blog Azeroth and the WoW blogging community in general. I still do read WoW blogs and former WoW blogs, I may be visiting BA chat some more, and I hope I will never forget the time I have had in the past year.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll be back to playing some time in the future!

Obligatory feral form post

Click here for the full glory.

Not so unbalanced bear tank on Thorim?

I have been thinking a bit today, and I hope that some of my readers that are more into theorycrafting than me could correct me on this one…

I was thinking about Thorim’s Unbalancing Strike ability, which reduces the defense skill of the affected target by 200, making them crittable.
At first I was thinking about how high his crit chance would become when the tank got that debuff, and, if the math is the same as with defense above 400, this is what I calculated:

According to wowwiki, 1 point of defense skill reduces the chance to be critically hit by 0.04%, so
200*0.04%=8%

What now if the tank somehow manages to overcome that 8% gap?
(This mainly applies to druids, I don’t think the other 3 tanking classes would have any chance of gaining an additional 984 defense rating)
For druids, we must somehow get 7.6% less chance to be crit, which is basically 623.2 resilience rating, and that should be fairly easy when thinking that our 3.1 BiS tanking gear might probably be the S6 stuff.
Basically, I was thinking that it might be possible to tank Thorim with just one tank without having to rely on taunting the boss, which would allow the other tanks to do a bit more damage (switching forms, stances, or presence) and therefore beating him more easily.

I came upon this idea after thinking that a feral druid might use glyphed Barkskin to survive being hit by the Unbalancing Strike, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any information on the cooldown of that ability, so barkskin might not be ready every time one might need it…

Comments and corrections are appreciated.

Moar stuff about that last post

Now that Jacemora linked to my video and explained his way of doing all that stuff, I thought that I might add my own advice/ideas regarding how to do that stuff.
At first I must apologize for not doing that in the video right from the beginning. I intended to do so, but before I got into serious editing, the hard drive where I stored the frapsed files broke and so all I had left was the video I uploaded, and after that I didn’t bother editing it further…

Now on to the real content of this post.

Spec recommendations
Remember that this is pre-3.1 and I don’t know if it will be as easy once HotW gets nerfed.
There is no real needed feral spec, but I would totally say that Survival Instinct, Berserk, and Protector of the Pack are mandatory for this run, so you might want to use either a full bear spec or an OT kitty spec (both work) that include those talents.

Gear recommendations
I currently, and in that video, wear full T7.5 gear, but that isn’t needed at all. My recommendations sit at about 32k+ health unbuffed in dire bear form, and at more than 22k armor (which you don’t really need that much, because the hard fights use elemental damage).
I don’t change any gear in that run besides the one trinket change before I start the Priestess fight.

The run
At first I start by stealthing into the instance far enough to see the adds of the Priestess PvP fight, because I read in the German forums that the windfury totem of the shaman add would be quite hard to overcome, which is why I look if the shaman add is there. If he’s there I normally run out and reset the instance until I get a better constellation of adds (you can reset the instance by simply switching the dungeon difficulty to normal and back to heroic).
For Selin Fireheart, you might go kitty while he’s charging his mana from the crystals, but tank’n’spank is safer, I think.
Vexallus is quite interesting in that he only deals arcane damage. If you feel unsure, you might equip your stamina gear, but for the fight be sure that Barkskin, SI and Frenzy Regeneration are available and activate them all once you get below 50%ish health. Oh, and be sure to kill all the sparks asap, they won’t be hit by any AoE you throw (which means Swipe, glyphed Maul and berserk’d Mangle) and enjoy the 20k+ maul crits 😀
Priestess Delrissa is quite easy. Wait for all your cooldowns to be available again, pounce her (just for the bleed effect for more maul damage), pop berserk, maybe Barkskin, and spam mangle and maul. Lacerate again when the bleed effect from Pounce falls off, and switch to swipe when Berserk stops, maybe bash a heal from her, but just keep going. SI and Frenzy Regeneration as needed. Once the priestess is down (remember, you focus on her, because she keeps healing herself that way) at lest one of the adds should be quite low if not already dead. Keep killing the adds, stun, cyclone and heal yourself if needed.
Now comes the hardest part (at least for me, I always die at least once to that damn trash group…). The magisters, warlocks and blood knights do the most damage, so be sure to kill them first.
For Kael’thas, start in kitty, otherwise the Pyro will get you. How long you stay in kitty depends on how many Fireballs you resist and stuff like that. Use Berserk when the phoenix comes and mangle and maul it and the egg in a position where you still hit Kael’thas. SI and Frenzy Reg might be needed sometime during phase 1. Once the gravity lapse starts you can’t really die any more, so wear him down slow or fast, or however you want to do it.
Enjoy your new mount, or your phoenix pet, or be angry at not getting either of them after more than 20 runs.

More randomness which isn’t random at all

This one’s for Aurik.

Video of solo heroic MgT as a feral druid (mount run stuff)

Honest Scrap

Well, there goes another meme, and me got tagged for it by Engy over at Zap!.

I still don’t know if he even looked at my blog when he asked in BA chat if there was anyone that didn’t get tagged yet, and I said “me”… I should stop volunteering, by the way 😀
But still, I want to thank anyone that reads me, and blahblahblah *insert random speech here*

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

Well, as I said above, I don’t really know how I got the honor to get this :D. But still, for me to accept this award, I have to fulfill some points:

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

So, I already fulfilled point 1, and I will tag more than seven people in the end, so I might as well go on with the honest stuff, which I don’t think will be that easy… But I can always steal ideas from other bloggers, so it’s all right! 😀

• I started playing WoW as one of those lesser classes, in fact my first toon that hit 60 (before I even started playing an alt) was my hunter (she’s on her way to tame a Spirit Beast at the moment).
• Like Trustyn, who tagged me, I’m left-handed, but I still use mouse and keyboard the way most right-handed people do.
• I love my druid, period!
• I will get dual-specs asap when 3.1 hits, but I still don’t know which two specs to use with my druid, because I love them all.
• Like Stop I play on a RP server and my last time participating in any kind of RP event was about 2 years ago…
• It’s getting harder to find more points already…
• I’m a fourth-grade computer science student.
• I never ever drink or have drunk alcohol (besides for medical purpose) in my entire life.
• I’m from Germany, if you didn’t know 😀
• I’m finally finished with these 10 posts, which is quite a relief.

Now comes the fun part: tagging at least 7 other bloggers for this stuff. I thought a bit about it and came to the conclusion, that I will just tag all the EU druid bloggers that I have in my blogroll (besides the ones that already got tagged) and the two bloggers, that volunteered in BA chat.
First the volunteers:

Sylly, from Rolling Hots, because (s)he? never got tagged before.
Noobie, from The Incredible Noobiewan because he… well… nearly asked for it.

Now for the real tags, and I don’t even know if those people read me, in no particular order:

BoomMummy and Boomdaddy of Wrath of the Boomkin because they write awesome and funny stuff (especially jokes about mages)
Riverwish, of A trees tale because I like pictures
Alyviel, of Bitter Roots, although not playing on EU servers, still comes from the EU
Rhil, of dark spot in the corner, because I like the Kukren on his blog
Ayeba, of Healer Envy, because the posts are a great read and quite insightful
Gwyn and Cablin of moonfire.org because they are druids, and I likes druids
Kaso, of Naturalist, just because I can tag him 😀
Niniel, of Swiftmend, because I like the way she writes about endgame raiding

and finally, not from the EU, Forks, of Omen of Clarity, so that he may again have a post to write.

Still alive

Going back to writing more or less much stuff soon, including explanation for rather long non-writing.

Random

Just linking back, instead of trying to write a real post.

Me got tagged!

As some/all of you might now, there’s a whole bunch of tagging going round in the WoW blogging community. The task is to post your sixth screenshot from your sixth subfolder in your screenshot directory, and I got tagged by Stop and Byaghro to do this, mainly because I said in BA chat that I had not been tagged… I should shut up when such stuff gets up, otherwise I will have to do much more like this in the future.

So, to start I must say that I do not have subfolders. So I’ll randomly pick all my two folders where there actually ARE screenshots of WoW. The first one is a bit older, dating back to the days pre-BC, should be about 6 months prior to the addon-release, where I was running a bit of Alterac Valley on my warrior alt, who back then was my main raiding toon.

As you can see, I wasn’t that bad.

Now for my actual screenshot folder.
It’s sorted alphabetically, which means that the pictures from January of this year are first, so I might be posting more than just one, sorting in different ways for choosing.

This one already got posted in this blog to show that mammoths are, in fact, immune to damage.

The sixth from the back, showing me and a nice orc huntress two-manning all those Vrykul arena quests (well, we did need help for the last one).

So now for the sixth one recorded in my folder:

Well, not much to say for this one… and that’s it! Hope you have enjoyed these screens!

Now for me tagging people…
Ruffin over at Confessions of a Part-time Panzerkin
Forks over at Omen of Clarity
Pookies over at Pookies is not a bear
C. Jones (too lazy to look up the toon’s name) over at Spam Moonfare!
Kalon over at Think Tank
Llanion over at Mooonfire
and Yashima over at Yashima Plays