Feng the Accursed - Tactics

We beat this boss last weekend, and below is what we learned throughout the fight.

Composition:
- 2 tanks
- 3 healers
- 2 melee
- 3 ranged

We used the strategy guide from Icy Veins. Their guides are generally pretty damn good, but I can totally imagine that people would like a visual indication of where to stand that is not moving and flashing all about like the videos.

If you do like a video I can advise the video guides from Fatboss. I generally find those fairly clear :)

Phase 1.

Tips:

- Stack up properly in the center to make it easier on the healers, epicenter does a load of damage and heals have a hard enough job as it is. 

- Do not attempt to cast the nullification barrier on the ranged. This may work for some teams, it caused us only a lot of trouble because the boss would move along with the tank. 

- Make sure that melee can be under the barrier

- This is a tank fight, if your tanks are not good enough....good luck. 

Tips:
- Create a weakaura for the Wildfire Spark
- If you do not want to use weakauras, turn on your chatbubbles. DBM will make you say that you're affected and a chatbubble can function as a weakaura
- If you have really high dps you may be able to get the boss to the next phase before he gets to his 4th draw flame, you then want to use the nullification barrier on the 1st and 3rd draw flame.
- Use heroism in this phase, especially when starting on this fight. This phase is the hardest and you will wipe on it a couple of times. We used heroism here, and the first time we got out of this phase into the 3rd phase we wiped, but the second time we got into the 3rd phase we also killed him. Phase 2 is definitely the hardest.

Tips:
- Use any movement speedups to get to the boss faster when he does arcane velocity
- Do NOT overshoot the boss (roll did exactly that for me >_<)
- If you can save at least 1 big raid cooldown for this phase


If any of the more experienced raiders have tips to add please feel free to do so :)

Voice of an Angel - Cranius

I have been a fan of Cranius for a while already. Now I am someone who is really, really bad at following stuff, and I seem to notice stuff last sometimes, as I indicated in an earlier post already.

But I still wanted to point this one out to my readers. Such a beautiful, warm voice. And Legs did a brilliant job as well with the video that comes with the song. A very, very good team those two.

Skiving off from WoW

Have you ever felt guilty about not playing? 

Maybe an odd question, but it's these sort of questions I ask myself at times to evaluate my game behaviour. 

Let me explain how I got to this one.

Every second wednesday my parents watch our doggies during the day (we have two adoring bratling Cavaliers), and after work we then have diner with them. I personally find this a really pleasant arrangement, because it means that I get to sit down with my parents at least every other week, and as an extra-added bonus we don't have to cook, nor clean up after cooking. 

Anyways, we had a really pleasant time with good food, and good company, and it ended up being about 8.30PM that we were actually home again. Not all that late yet, but since I get up earlyish for work I try to be in bed before 11PM. So we had about 2,5 hours before bedtime....

...I knew I should log in and try to get some more valor points so that I could go get my belt this week before raiding...

...I knew I should log in and do my farm, and some dailies...

...I knew I should really create some flasks for raiding, and in order to that as efficiently as possible I should really spend the time to level my elixir master in alchemy...

But I was completely not looking forward to all the 'Chores' I still had to do in the game, so instead I hung in front of the TV and watched some series about hurricanes. 

It felt somewhat bad, I felt somewhat guilty.

Not only because it feels like I should want to play the game, I mean the expansion is only a few weeks old and already I am not feeling like logging on. But also because I felt like I should really take my responsibility as a raidleader and get my shit done. 

Problem is that I dread even more logging on tonight, because my list of tasks has not become shorter, but my time to do it in has. And that means I'm setting myself up for failure. Which means that I might be badly (or in my eyes badly) prepared for raid this weekend. 

I did not do everything I could reasonably do at least...or did I?

I am trying to convince myself that it's a game and that it should stay fun, but I find myself wondering when the fun is going to happen. 

Current WoW Feeling:

Shy's MistWeaver Monk Stat Priority

I was reading the mistweaver guide at wowinsider and I came to the conclusion that I should review the stat priority I posted a few posts ago.

So for my Mistweaver I will be going with:

Spirit up the wazoo > 8.32% haste > Mastery > Crit > Int

• Spirit because I have always been, and probably will always be, a thirsty healer. 
• 8.32% haste because the 5% haste buff is not always available, and haste is always useful, though not as useful beyond the extra tick
• Mastery because I do have a good raid team normally, and they will stand in little green orbs
• Crit because double healing numbers are nomnomNOM
• Then int because...well, bigger heals are nice and all, but a primary stat is way more expensive than a secondary stat and it doesn't do anything for my manapool anymore anyways. 

The other thing I realized when reading this guide is that I should jab more, jab all the time and constantly. It gives the nummy chi's to spend on heals without having to spend mana. 

I also have to set up some weakauras:

• One that shows me when my Serpent's Zeal buff is about to run out. 
• One that reminds me to cast Renewing Mist on cooldown (I didn't have to deal with that sort of stuff as a priest)
• One that tracks when I need to explode my Zen Sphere because, unlike the writer of the wowinsider guide, I do like this talent. I find this really really pleasant in stacked up groups, I cast it on a rogue in the melee and make it explode when it's close to expiration, while I keep my renewing mist travelling around in the ranged with the glyph for example. And I love being able to set it up before hand. 
• One that alerts me that Grapple Weapon is available again, if it goes off it increases healing after all

Things I should explore and play with:

• Xuen - I love the tiger in the dps spec, such a gorgeous pet to have around. So I really will have to try out how well it does for a healer. 
• Glyph of Surging Mist - I've been avoiding this glyph so far, but it seems that none of the major glyphs is really something I want in my playstyle so maybe this is an option. 

Current WoW Feeling:

When you just don't have the people...

Within my guild we have 2 groups of 10mans. This has been like that for quite a while already, in fact we still name them after the names they had when they were formed while raiding Karazhan. (though we used to have 3 groups back then).

One group raids during the week, and the other raids in the weekend (my group). Like a lot of guilds we ran into heavier weather during Cataclysm and a lot of people left. And not only due to Cataclysm, but sometimes personal situations just change. Then some of the people from my group shifted to the week group because the times fit better in their schedule, and now...yeah now my group is short people.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am NOT trying to get people to apply for my guild through here at all. We have an application process where you need a sponsor, and this sponsor needs to have known you for a while already before they can sponsor you into the guild.

This application process is there for very good reasons, and has worked quite well for a looong time already. My guild has a brilliant atmosphere, and we like to keep it that way.

This does however bring problems with it. Because when you lose people, it is hard to fill up the raid again. And my raid group is not just 1 person short...no we could easily add 3 people to our roster.

I've been breaking my head over trying to find a way to fill the gap, but in the mean time the only way to actually raid is with pugs.

Now, I am the first to admit that there is absolutely nothing wrong with recruiting some pugs for your raid. After all, I did lead a 25man pug raid on sundays for about 2 years, and quite a few people of this pug raid became guildies. But bringing pugs does bring issues.

At the least they are not in tune with the rest of the group. Everybody is new to them, and while they can be good, playing with new people is always harder.

Then there are those people who are pretty good, but halfway through your raid all of a sudden have their own guild calling for them. The raid gets disrupted, at best you can find someone to replace this person fairly quickly, at worst you can call the raid and continue some other time.

And then of course there is the possibility of getting an absolute newb for a player. People who have all the best intentions, and maybe they even have the potential to be good, but they just haven't got a clue what they're doing. Every single detail has to be explained to them, while everybody is sighing in guild chat.

But worst is when you get the 'aso pug'. The pug who thinks that they are better than your group and they are a godsend and by their holy presence allow the world to keep turning. Quite often when you review logs these are the people who feel that they 'deserve' to stand in shit while the healers just have to 'pick up the slack'.

In the end none of it is ideal, but not wanting to recruit bodies, just for the bodies, I don't see other solutions on the short term.

Luckily we might have some sort of solution coming up, but until then I guess I'll just be sighing quietly every time I get up at 5 am to try and find pugs to fill up the raid.

Pet Battles - Patch 5.1

Picture found here. 

Yesterday I managed to get 2 of my pets to level 25, yay! I've also created a list of favourites I want to level to 25 so I can compose different teams, and I have started naming pets.

My first two to 25 are Tinker, the panther cub a guildie gave me (thanks Cannae!), and Poker a worgen pup I caught in Kamagua. I've been having fun with the pet battles, and boy oh boy do I need to catch me some pets still.

I'm rather picky though, unless a pet has a very rare skin I keep going until I actually get a rare pet of a type I want. So I don't have a bandicoon yet, though I really really like that pet. But it has to be rare.

Fun, fun, fun!

So imagine how excited I was when I was reading the patch 5.1 notes and seeing that lots of improvements were coming to pet battles.

Some highlights (blue is text quoted from the patch notes):

• A variety of Battle Stones will become available to upgrade the quality of your pets.
  I'm a bit weirded out by the fact that you can buy certain stones with justice points, since I don't think you can earn justice points with pet battles, but hey, I personally have nothing better to do with them anyways. 
• The Pet Journal will allow you to search for pets per zone.
  I hope they also move the pet battle tab to be the first tab (please!)
• Players can now keep up to 650 pets!
• Battle Pet tooltips will now display whether a pet is owned, and how many pets of that type are owned.
• Pet Quality is now displayed in battles, and will be visible on portraits, names and tooltips.
  I was already using a mod for these two, thanks Blizzard!
• Macros have been added that allow for summoning random pets and random favorite pets.
  And woosh, another addon out the door :D
• The I Choose You achievement has been added for defeating Zen Master Aki. The reward for this achievement is 3000 gold.
  Woah, I will so have to find the perfect team for this! 

Things I have to look into:

Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.

• Can you repeat trainer quests?
• If not, how do you get your hands on battle stones and other pet goodies once you've done these quests? (other than justice points)

Either way, this part of the patch notes is quite exciting to me, and I am looking forward to this :)

Current wow feeling:

Sometimes I seem to be the last to find out...

Ok, so I have my day off today and I was working diligently on my dailies, since you sort of have to in the beginning to get some gear...and well, I do want the mounts.

And I found this page on wowhead: The Tillers

I had no idea that you can bring everybody a food dish each day o_O

But hey, for all of you who didn't know either, bookmark the page and go there when you want to know who likes which gift best, and who wants which dish.

Also, since I started the monk I haven't maxed out my fishing yet. To be honest I don't like fishing all that much, and well...yeah.

But when I was doing Angler's dailies I found out that even at very low fishing level you can already fish in the pools in Pandaria. So don't despair! If you need fishies for the cloud serpent dailies, they come from pools and you can fish them! :)

Lastly, I had no idea, but apparently there are eggs scattered around the cloud serpent island. Somewhat like the Netherwing eggs.

If you find one, bring it back and you get rep.

Of course there were none to be seen when I went over to the island, but just saying....

The Stone Guard - Tactics

I wanted to post this on my guild forum for my raid crew, but I couldn't get the pictures there. So I figured I'd post it here. Maybe it'll help someone else as well. 

If anybody has helpful comments please let me know, my raid group has not done this fight yet, and this is just meant as preparation for coming weekend. 

Monk Tips&Tricks

Since I got my ranting out in this post here, I figured I would share a tidbit of positive as well.

My monk is currently MistWeaver main and WindWalker offspec. With my groups I have been running many heroics already, and I have found one talent to save my group several times already.

This ability buys you 5 whole seconds of no tank damage. And it works on not ALL enemies within 5 yards.

Accidental pull? Sweep! 5 seconds for the tank to pick stuff up, 5 seconds for you to pick up the heals.

Lots of adds in a fight? Sweep!

Need to buy your fellow healers some time? Sweep!

Brilliant talent, if you haven't tried it yourself yet, go do so :)

The Nerf Bat

So I haven't set foot in a normal raid yet. I did LFR last week and Sha of Anger, but we just don't have all of our people ready to raid.

Our group is never the first to get to content, but we're most of the times also not last. And generally our group manages to finish content.

Yet, nerfs and buffs have been given out already by Blizzard. And I am wondering...


WTF!


Seriously Blizz? What are you basing these buffs and nerfs on? Players who do have a mountain of time, players who belong to the hardcorehardcore crowd. Granted, that may mean that the buffs were desperately needed, because if even a player from that caliber needs it, then the overal middle ground crowd will definitely need it, but nerfs?

Sigh.

This means that the people who haven't reached certain content yet, and who are already not as good will also get it harder. Because the people who the nerf was intended for already have managed to get gear to compensate for the nerf in the first place.

I think Blizzard is whopping around with the nerfbat a bit too fast and while it may be obvious to what they have seen on parses so far, I think they could just have waited a little to see what the larger crowd was doing.

I feel very very behind and the fact that a new patch is already on the horizon is not making that much better. I feel hunted and chased and as if I will never have enough time to get all of it done on time.

Unfortunately enough I am one of those people that if it reaches this point I sort of turn around and flop down. Done.

If I cannot do it properly, I'd rather not do it at all.

I guess for the moment I'll see where it all goes, but bah, not happy about the expansion at the moment. Too much to do before you can get where you want, too many chores.

Current Feeling about WoW:

5 things I would change about Mists

This expansion is turning out pretty good so far, and I am truly enjoying myself. I am also glad that I made the switch to the monk. The playstyle is pleasant and quite a change from the priest, which is absolutely what I needed.

However, there are a few things I would change, wouldn't be a good WoW player if I didn't have a few peeves, no?

 

1. Mote of Harmony / Spirit of Harmony should be account bound.
I have alts with needs, but also I have alts with trade skills which are useless unless I actually play them. And at the rate the motes have been droping for me (since Sunday I have managed to get 30 or so, and I have done many many dailies and dungeons!) it'll take a looong time to get anything done with an alt.

 

People keep saying, 'It'll get bettter!' and 'They drop more often from high level mobs', well I have no idea how high the mob's level has to be, but doing all the Tillers, Klaxxi and Golden Lotus dailies, plus a scenario and 3 dungeons I got 6 motes yesterday.

That said, the droprate could be a tiny bit higher as well.

 

2. Alts should be allowed to fly.

Again the alts...(I have 6 85's waiting to get their time). Levelling from 85 to 90 takes long enough, why would you gate that as well? It's not all that bad to ride around, but with everything there is to do.

I bet that eventually they'll give alts flying books like the book they gave us a few months into Wrath, but I wish I could use this while stuff is current, instead of when it's no longer all that rewarding.

 

3. Tradeskill cooldowns

With all the artificial gating already in the game, (materials requirements being high, motes of harmony, reputation, not earning a high amount of valor points, justice points being near useless, etc) I do not think it was needed to put a cooldown on just about every major item needed for tradeskills. Inscription has them (scrolls of wisdom), alchemy (living steel), cloth...

I already didn't like them for cloth before, and now they're everywhere. It feels that if I want to get anything done in the game I am obliged to log in every day of the week, or be behind on the content. Not a nice choice.

4. Grocery baskets at the Tillers/Cooking

Did we really need 50 different baskets? And 20 different food items to grant the same stat? The only thing this does is fill up my bank and bags, and I think by now we all know how precious bag space is.

And the baskets...really now. I understand that there are baskets that need 100 of 1 item and ones that require only 20, but that makes for 2 or maybe 3 different baskets, not the outgrowth we have now.

 

5. Spirit food comes from fishing

Why is spellcaster food and healer food completely based on fishing? Are those the only people who are supposed to have the patience to do this? Or are these the classes that are not expected to prefer killing stuff over fishing?

I am very very annoyed by this, since it means that I have to spend all my hard-earned tokens on buying fish, or spend some of the time that I desperately need to catch up on fishing. And then force myself to go fishing more for the items I need. Why can I not go do my quests, kill some mushan cows and get my food? Why are spirit and int users put at a disadvantage here?

New Loot Window

You can type /loot to see who needs/greed/passes
I've done a few dungeons myself during this weekend and I've noticed that some players are simply unaware of this feature, sometimes I saw some people needing on offspec stuff because they weren't seeing any "need" rolls from other players, obviously this can lead to some arguing.

So here it is again for the sake of clarity, please type /loot, /lootrolls or you can just click on [Loot] in the chat window. 
This will open a new loot window that shows you all rolls on every item.
You can also go to Interface->Controls-> and click on “Auto Open Loot Rolls Window!”

(Official Forums)

You can see exactly that people have greeded, who won, which rolls they had.
For the green you also see the + where you can open up the rolls.

Monk Mastery & Blogs

I found some monk blogs that I thought were interesting. Most of them have excellent guides, so I'll not bore you with writing my own version of that.

What I will do is give my opinion on some of the things expressed in these guides. If you want to follow these blogs, they are listed on the left here, in the 'blogs I read' section. The 10 blogs with the most recent posts are shown in that list, though I do have more blogs in there.

From most of these guides on MistWeavers I read that they almost all find mastery a bad stat. Which is how they get to placing this stat all the way at the back in their stat priorities.

I have been thinking, and experimenting, with this a little, and I wonder if the mastery is really that bad.

Of course, I have seen the little green orbs appear everywhere but under the right targets as well. And of course, I haven't done any raiding yet. However, if I use experiences from the past (and I do have quite a bit of that ;)) I think this mastery might be quite a bit better than what people are thinking so far.

In fact, I think I might be nicely stubborn and go for a different stat order than what is recommended in most guides.

Spirit > haste until 1350 > mastery > int > crit

I will use 'Glyph of Enduring Healing Sphere' with this as well even. The most useless glyph, as others will say.

Let me share my reasons for this stubborness...

- My raid has had quite a few years of training in clicking the lightwell. I have been a priest for a looong time, and they've heard 'click the lightwell!' so often that my lightwells were generally used up entirely.

- Yes, the orbs spawn in locations where you might not need them immediately, but with the glyph they stay around for 5 minutes, 2 minutes base, and 3 minutes extra from the glyph.

- Fights always have a lot of movement in them and that means that while moving people will get healed by all those pretty orbs.

- These orbs are free! They do not cost any extra mana, or any effort to create. They happen as part of your normal healing. I have always loved trinkets that gave free healing on equip, this sounds even prettier.

Now of course I have to find out in practice if I am rightfully stubborn, or if I am completely wrong. I will keep you updated on which one it turns out to be.

Level 85-90 woah!

I spent about 35 hours to get to level 85....and I think by the time I reach level 90 I will have spent another 35 on reaching that level. Holy cow those last levels take forever!

My monk is now level 88 and a half...yes, Omi, like a 5 year old, it is important to mention that half!

Yesterday I completed the event in the Valley of the Four Winds. I have never felt so proud to be of a certain race in the game before. When I saw Chen Stormstout storming by, I was like, ooooooh, he's a panda too, just like me.

I've been wanting to change race once I reached level 90, after this, I am not so sure anymore. I think Chen Stormstout may be the first alliance character that I absolutely adore. I mean, Jaina is doing much better now she stopped sobbing, Varian turned out to be less of an ass then he first seemd, but he's still creating wars everywhere. And the other Alliance figureheads? I have honestly no idea where they are at the moment.

I had a discussion with Thror in the car this morning. He has switched to a worgen warrior for this expansion and is in the same levelling boat as I am. We were discussing which races we can relate to.

We came to the conclusion that we can relate to humans because...well, they're humans. Gnomeys are cute, but secretly a bit evil underneath. Dwarves are the happy drunk, merry people. Dranei, holier than god. Worgen...yeah.

Blizzard basically did a piss-poor job adding worgen to the game. After their starting area you don't see them anywhere. Relating to them is hard and I can imagine if you have not done the starting area you can completely wonder about where those wolves all of a sudden came from.

Panda's on the other hand....those are a different story. Already Panda's become fully integrated in the lore, in the stories and in our hearts. Panda's are the chubby, wise people. The people who are proud and elegant, yet they love their beer (no fancy wine for me sir, just an ale please).

I have to say though, if Blizzard ever adds a new class/race to the game I seriously hope they will not be starting at level 1. Any raider will be dead by the time they have levelled this character to full level in time for the first raid. And well..if not dead, at least completely pissed off with the game.

Anyways, that was the rambling for me for today. More levelling to do, but I will get there!

Windwalker Monk Dps Guide & Talent Tutorial

I found this video online that shows in a very pleasant way how WindWalkers work.

The Ultimate Windwalker Monk Dps Guide & Talent Tutorial Ft. Eatmopie