Self Centered Tuesdays

Published March 7, 2010 conceited 1 Comment
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It’s all about me!

itsallaboutme1[1]

 

But, Latus, it’s not Tuesday! 

I commend you on a sharp mind to have picked this up.  It is indeed not Tuesday.  It’s a Sunday update.  Unless of course you’re only reading this on Tuesday, in which case it is Tuesday and I suppose your mind is still sharp.

You’ve also picked up on this “weekly” feature not being very weekly at all.  In fact, the first one was written January 19th.  You know what I realized after thinking I had found a new weekly feature?  That all our gameplay is the same and that reading about what Latus does every week would be as exciting as watching paint peel (watching paint dry is so old school).  “I ran ICC a bunch and then I did my daily and then I enchanted this piece of gear and then I ran laps around Dalaran.” Sooo, yeah, weekly feature indeed!

Nonetheless, since January 19th, a few things have happened that not a single other player has done in the world.  What?  What do you mean?  That’s not true?  Well… damn!

ICC Progress

We missed about 70% of the last two weeks of raid due to missing key members of the guild on raid nights.  They weren’t no shows, they just couldn’t attend and as the raid group does not really work around back ups but rather gives everyone a relative guarantee of their raid spot once they’re accepted, that meant no raiding.  We struggled on Sindragosa quite a bit, and so we ended up only having our first Lich King attempts made with 21 raiders.  We practiced phase 1 a bit and called it at that.  It is only this week with the 5% buff that we finally got serious attempts in on him on day 2 (out of 3) of raiding.  And it’s a fun fight, we’re now getting into the third Valkyr phase before all hell breaks loose and someone messes up with Defile.  Defile, by the way, is the single coolest spell animation I have seen to date in Warcraft.  Especially when we mess up and we see it spread all over the place! It might be a wipe, but is it ever exciting to watch!

It’s really a lot of fun to be able to teleport onto the Lich King’s platform after my valkyr doesn’t get killed.  “LOL IM STILL ALIVE BITCH KING!” and then we wipe.

For poor little oversized Cowtch, ICC is not a pleasant experience.  The aforementioned (in previous instalment of Self-Centered Tuesdays) reasons for Latus transferring are still present and very alive in the guilds Cowtch frequents.  Saurfang is as far as Cowtch’s raid groups can go in 10man.  Maybe this week with the 5% buff and with a slightly different group…

 

PVP

For the lack of success with ICC back on Coilfang with my Druid, I’ve decided to get back into PVP.  Resto druids are people I hate to play against, so why not be one of them!  Some old gear that was saved up along with a lot of honor (2000 of those wintergrasp essence things really translate into a lot of it) for new gear and a couple Wrathful drops in VoA25 meant I started up with roughly 750 resilience.  I’m still badly specced and inexperienced as to what is most effective, but I’m having fun healing battlegrounds.  We tried arenas with Morgaina as her disc self and a rogue friend who recently came back to the game.  Yeah, experienced/talented rogue with starter gear with two fairly well geared healers.  We went 4 – 6 on our first week and I had a lot of fun doing it.  I understand it’s a frustrating style of play, and I have a lot to learn as to how to CC, how to choose my targets, how best to heal… but who cares, I had a ton of fun.  Pretty early on we realized that with decent crowd control, Morgaina could mana burn while I did my best to keep the team alive.  That’s something that can really work to our advantage once we figure out how best to use it.  The best part is the disc shielding when a new target takes damage.  Before the health drops too far, a shield pops up and gives me a few seconds to pile up some hots.  By the time the shield is shattered, my hots are in full swing and the opponents are beating their heads against a brick wall.

Of course, we did only win 4 of those matches.  But we mostly went up against 1500-1900 ranked teams (yeah, I kept checking their armory files after seeing the kind of health / mana / weapons / gear they had) and usually held our own and pressured them quite a bit. 

Ok, I just really, really want to have a pvp weapon.  I’d feel so badass knowing I had a high enough ranking to buy one of them.  Even the introductory 1800 ranked one! I’d still feel really badass.

 

Events

Finally got something done on Latus that I had slacked off about last Christmas and Lunar Festival.

purple

You’d think the 30% speed increase wouldn’t be noticed, but omg is it ever.  I highly suggest getting one of these.  -grin-

 

Alevia!  My twink warrior who was infinitely fed up with the changes to the twinking world!  She got so fed up that she went and paid 10g to reverse her lobotomy of no experienced gain and then went in to a final Warsong Gulch match.  Here is the next result of her capping the 3rd flag:

alevia20

She’s now level 29 but hasn’t stepped into a battleground since then.  It’s not that I don’t want to, but I’m trying to enjoy some quests and I’m levelling too quickly.  No, I don’t want to turn off xp gain once more.  One day maybe Morgaina’s mage and Alevia will finally get off their butts and run some Scarlet Monastery together.  I will admit that I have screenshots from the day I created Alevia trying on the full scarlet outfit and thinking “Damn, THAT is what I want.”  It’s close now! My little Scarlet Crusader is almost ready!

 

Olympics and blogdeath

At first I wasn’t going to mention this, but what the heck, I suppose if you’re reading this it’s because you inexplicably care to know.  Yeah, I trailed off massively during the Olympics but not because of a disinterest in WoW.  I kept up my raiding and dailies, I just really couldn’t find time to squeeze blogging into it.  I raided with my laptop streaming live broadcasts, I raided with all sound off and my downstairs TV blasted at full volume, and any time I wasn’t in any way supposed to be on WoW, I’d be watching the games.  I may be a WoW geek now, but I was and am an athlete at heart (believe it or not! I do a few races a year and am slowly working my way up towards the marathon…). 

So, no, blog isn’t dead, by far.  It’ll only die when I stop playing.  Which is not very soon.  I mean, DEATHWING IS COMING!  AND THEN SARGERAS LOOMS IN THE FUTURE! AHHHMAGAHWD!

And with all that, I have a ton of material to present and write about, so expect a slight flurry of activity as is my custom after any longer pause in posts!

*logs on*

p.s. Baron’s mount: still doesn’t exist.

One more week

Published February 22, 2010 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Of Olympics, then I’ll go back to blogging :P (there’s your reason I seem to have died).

Blood Elf Rap… NOT

Published February 17, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Wowcrendor rocks the videos again, this time poking fun at all the incessant blood elf rap songs that come out as machinima.

To be fair, I rather enjoy the wow rap! :P   Now back to being swamped.  Just had to share this one.

Woe!

Published February 9, 2010 lols Leave a Comment
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sob

LATUS IS NOT IMPRESSED!

PVP Heirloom Trinket fail + DK WTF?!?

Published February 5, 2010 lols 3 Comments
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The Inherited Insignia of the Horde can indeed be traded between factions.  My level 27 Draenai (mmmm) Hunter on Coilfang has it now.

Yeah, that’s right. OF THE HORDE.  I can’t equip it.
I call shenanigans.

Also, here’s a quote from Blizzard on the most recent tank hotfixes.  I’m not making this up.

Please note that the death knight change will result in a small survivability increase in PvP, which we think is appropriate. We chose it partially with that in mind.

Am I playing the same game as everyone else?  I didn’t realize Deathknights took damage in pvp…  How about giving Warlocks an Anti-melee shield that makes us immune to all melee hits for 6-10 seconds?  That seems fair.  Without gimping any other ability of ours of course, not even slowing down our attacks.  And please give us plate armor.  And more insta-casts.  And make fear chainable and never break.  And have no cooldown or diminishing returns.

Thank you.

Increasing your FPS in WoW, part 1 – applications

Published February 3, 2010 guides 2 Comments
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I take no credit for having found the tips I will lay out before you.  Others – far better versed in computers than I – have done so, but they are many.  Instead, with no desire but to improve everyone’s gaming experience, here is what I did a few weeks ago to bump my fps from 30 to 60 in raid settings. 

Note 1: Such a dramatic effect is not guaranteed.

Note 2: I vouch for these programs being safe to use, but not that they will necessarily be stable on YOUR computer.  Perform back ups, whatever it is you do, pray to da voodoo, and take all precautions not to lose your data as you would with any other installation.

Note 3: I give you ideas, if they don’t work for you, you’ve lost nothing but a few minutes of your day!

 

1 -  Gamegain

This program is fairly straightforward.  It tweaks all your Windows settings for you, you then reboot and voila, better wow-specced pc instantly.  You don’t know anything about what it really does, how it does it, it just works.

Gamegain official download link

There is slight confusion as to whether it is truly called Gamegain or Gamegain2.  Either way, you get a free 30 day trial at “half” optimum settings and if you pay, you get the “fully optimized” setup.  You have to run this program once to tweak, and then only when you change your system settings – add a new driver, update windows files, add a new piece of hardware –.

2 -  Game Booster

You know how you hit ctrl-alt-delete and look at your running processes and wonder WHY THE BLOODY HELL CAN’T I CLOSE THEM ALL!?!?! Well, wonder no more, this program does it for you.  You keep this one running at all times and either switch to gaming mode or to “normal” mode where it enables all the processes again.  You have the option to select which ones stay open at all times.  I leave my mouse drivers running and close everything else.  I suppose it would be smart not to close my antivirus… hmm.

Game Booster official download link

Another nice utility this program has is the ability to defragment just your WoW folders and files, boosting your speed up ever so slightly.  That 1 gazillion megabyte .cache file, for instance? BAM, loads faster now!

 3 -  Leatrix Latency Fix

I only use this “program” because it simplifies the process for you.  You can find the download at any addon place, and here’s my favorite at wowinterface:

Leatrix Latency Fix download link

You have the full explanations on the Wowinterface page, with everything from what it does to how it works to how to remove it if it causes problems.  For the record, everyone who uses this that I know personally has seen their latency drop by half or more.

 

If you are going to try only one of these, I suggest #3, Leatrix Latency Fix.  However, if you’d like to see some nice changes to your WoW, go for all of them.  What your current framerate is shouldn’t matter, it will allow you to go a few fps above that.  Like I said, I ran around 25-30 fps on medium settings, did a whole bunch of tweaks and suddenly find myself able to sustain 50-60 fps in raids.  There’s something to it…

 

 

p.s. Thanks for the links to those outfit blogs/sites! Much appreciated!

New Class Announced: Infiltrator

Published February 2, 2010 lols 2 Comments
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winners

You laugh, but it took us a long time to finally infiltrate the Alliance side of Dalaran!  And what better way to celebrate than with a picnic and a campfire!

Yes… while others spent their last night preparing for the Lich King tomorrow, and for season 8, we spent an hour running in and flying into the Alliance inn.

Win.

Also: I’m looking for some dressing up information.  Are there any sites that you might be aware of that cater to in-game costumes?  Lists, databases, categories, anything like that…

Here we go baby!

Published February 1, 2010 lols , opinions Leave a Comment
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I predict it will come after 2 expansions at least, but it will come.

How to turn a straight WoWer gay in 1 easy step.

Published January 27, 2010 lols 3 Comments
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Simple.  Show him this newly released picture of [evil] Arthas riding Invincible.

...

I mean, seriously.  That’s like Maximus or Aragorn. It’s just one of the coolest things ever.

Putricide Phase 3 : Dealing With Mutated Plague

Published January 27, 2010 guides Leave a Comment
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WARNING: GEEK POST!!! LIKE, MASSIVE GEEK NUMBERS AND STUFF.

My new guild struggled on phase 3 of Putricide two weeks ago.  We wasted all 10 attempts and the lowest we got him was just under 900,000 health.  I said struggled but it wasn’t that we were literally having problems figuring out what to do.  Everything was fine, we thought we understood the mechanics and all, but then around the same time on each attempt (90ish seconds into p3), everyone would die.

We complained about the damage from Mutated Plague but didn’t fully understand what was going on.  Our tanks established a rotation where each would get 4 stacks and then the next would taunt.  By the time the third tank taunted (so two had 4 stacks), death ensued for the dps. 

The last two weeks, we got him down on 2 or 3 attempts (first we’re noobs, the raid leader tells us so, then we’re good and kill him).  What has changed?  Our tank rotation in phase 3 and a better understanding of what exactly is happening.

Mutated Plague is a stacking debuff that is applied to the tank on melee hits, approximately every 10 seconds.  It lasts 1 minute, then wears off.  If it wears off, or if it gets dispelled in any way including death, it heals Putricide for 500,000 health PER STACK.  So the tanks cannot let it drop. Obviously.  The tricky part is that is also pulses aoe damage on the raid, unavoidable damage.  The amount of raid damage it does depends on how many stacks there are on any given person.  The following is what I gathered from pouring over actual combat logs and piecing together the times.  (That’s also how I decided that it hits roughly every 10 seconds, since the times it would be applied varied from 8.2 to 11.3 seconds).

STACKS OF MUTATED PLAGUE

AVERAGE RAID DAMAGE PER PERSON EVERY 3 SECONDS
1 275
2 750
3 2000
4 4500
5 9500

It goes further and further, if a tank had 6 it would do somewhere around 20,000 or more damage to every person in the raid every 3 seconds.

Now, this goes per debuff, so if two tanks have it, each of their debuffs plays by the rules of the above table.

For example, if two tanks both have 4 stacks, the raid will be getting hit by 4500 damage per person per 3 seconds from 1 tank AND from the other tank as well.  Total of 9000 / person / 3 seconds.  If three tanks had 4 stacks, we’d have 3 x 4500 / person / 3 seconds worth of damage going out.

Our initial strategy was to let a tank hit 4 stacks, another 4, another 4, and then let the first tank get a 5th.  We didn’t understand the relatively exponential damage per stack.

The Solution

It was really simple to write a quick table to analyze the best tanking rotation.  The possibilities (assuming 3 tanks, because with less you wipe and with more you miss enrage timers most likely) are the following.

(format used indicates how many stacks at each taunt.  Taunts indicated by – )

A.  4 – 4 –4 – 5 – 5 – 5

B.  2 –2 – 2 – 3 – 3 – 3  – 4 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 5

C.  2 – 2 – 2 – 4 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 5

D. 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 2 – 2 – 3 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 5

E. 3 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 5

 

By far, the least raid damage done by Mutated Plague is when option B is used.  Tanks taunt off each other at 2 stacks, and then at every stack from that point on.  This means the following (another table).  (Option D also works but it’s just a pain in the ass, ignore the taunts every 10 seconds, they’re stupid.  Stick with option B)

WE ARE ASSUMING TANK KITES THE BOSS TO THE DOOR BEFORE ACTUALLY TANKING.  THIS GIVES ABOUT 10 SECONDS OF STACK-FREE DPS AS A BONUS.

 

Time into phase 3 (seconds) Stacks per tank Damage per person per 3 seconds
0 0-0-0 0
10 1-0-0 275
20 2-0-0 750
30 2-1-0 1025
40 2-2-0 1500
50 2-2-1 1775
60 2-2-2 2250
70 3-2-2 3500
80 3-3-2 4750
90 3-3-3 6000
100 4-3-3 8000
110 4-4-3 11000
120 4-4-4 13500
130 5-4-4 18500
140 5-5-4 you wiped
150 5-5-5 30 seconds ago
160 6-5-5 release
170 6-6-5 run back

 

To compare this method of tanking with our initial approach (4 stacks each, then a 5th each), at 80 seconds into phase 3 we would be getting 9000 raid damage, 9275 at 90, 9750 at 100 and finally 11000 at 110.  No healers in the world can keep up with 9500 average raid damage PER PERSON for 30 seconds while keeping the tanks topped off, and not even mentioning the slime pools and oozes being thrown.  They may save you for 10 seconds or 15, maybe 20 if you pot and use healthstones.  That’s it.  So if at 2 minutes into phase 3 you still have not killed Putricide, you will not kill him anymore as your dps is all dead and the tanks and healers have one foot in the grave already if they are not.

 

Our raid actually chose to go with the 3-3-3-4-4-4-5-5-5 method because it’s simpler to let one tank position the boss for a longer period of time at the beginning.  We take more damage from the 20-80 second mark but then rejoin the same type of damage as the chart above until the end (our or the boss’s death).  If you’re wondering how much more damage, it’s substantial, almost twice as much.  I don’t think my guild’s leaders paid concrete attention to the chart I posted, but they got the general idea and put their own twist on it to keep things in order.  What matters is that from our initial strategy, raid damage was cut in half if not more for the near entire span of 2 minutes.

 

If your guild is struggling on 25 Putricide’s phase 3 (if you’re struggling on the others, it’s just execution and Tankspot does a much much much better job of helping you than I ever could here), read this post and understand the mechanic involved.  Once you do, you’ll be able to grasp exactly when/why it goes wrong, and whether it’s possible or not for your guild. 

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RSS Recent Latus Activity

  • Obtained [Purified Lunar Dust].
    Obtained [Purified Lunar Dust]. (Equipped)
  • Has now completed [Sindragosa kills (Icecrown 25 player)] 2 times.
    2 Sindragosa kills (Icecrown 25 player).
  • Has now completed [Toravon the Ice Watcher kills (Wintergrasp 25 player)] 5 times.
    5 Toravon the Ice Watcher kills (Wintergrasp 25 player).
  • Obtained [Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky].
    Obtained [Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky]. (Equipped)
  • Has now completed [Anub'Rekhan kills (Naxxramas 25 player)] 11 times.
    11 Anub'Rekhan kills (Naxxramas 25 player).
  • Has now completed [Valithria Dreamwalker rescues (Icecrown 25 player)] 5 times.
    5 Valithria Dreamwalker rescues (Icecrown 25 player).
  • Has now completed [Blood Queen Lana'thel kills (Icecrown 25 player)] 4 times.
    4 Blood Queen Lana'thel kills (Icecrown 25 player).
  • Obtained [Valanar's Other Signet Ring].
    Obtained [Valanar's Other Signet Ring]. (Equipped)
  • Has now completed [Blood Prince Council kills (Icecrown 25 player)] 7 times.
    7 Blood Prince Council kills (Icecrown 25 player).
  • Has now completed [Professor Putricide kills (Icecrown 25 player)] 7 times.
    7 Professor Putricide kills (Icecrown 25 player).