It’s been a little while since I last wrote a post, and I thought I’d check in and ramble a little about my opinions of the new patch, generically as a DPS and also as a hunter. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been over 2 weeks since I’ve entered the World of Warcaft.  The holidays have seen me jet-setting across the country to visit friends and family.  I’ve been completely out of touch with my guildies and the goings-on of WOW.  And yet somehow I’m still functioning.

I told myself that I would continue to blog during my vacation, but it turned out that I really didn’t have much to say.  I found myself constantly distracted with family drama, and the Christmas holiday.  My only WOW-saving grace was my buddy Nazaries, my Paladin “protégé” for lack of better terms.

Our family’s hubs are in the same town in California, so we both found ourselves home for the holidays waging war against the waist line.  We took the opportunity to exercise several times, and the WOW banter during the workout was very enjoyable…and satiated my WOW-appetite.

We spent a few hours one night re-working his user interface.    I like to use a bastardized version of the ArkiveUI , which is a really sweet suite of mods that completely re-works the user interface.  We started with the complete ArkiveUI, and then removed everything that we didn’t want.  What is left is a very clean UI with all the relevant information at the bottom of the screen.  Here is a screen shot of the full up ArkiveUI – our modified version is basically cosmetically the same.

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Lathandris looks at his future

To say Lathandris has been around the block, is an understatement.  Lathandris leveled to 80 and entered into Naxxaramas as Feral Melee DPS.  When our Main Tank left for greener raiding pastures he became the Off Tank for the guild.  When our healers left the guild, he became a healer.  When dual specs came out he became Healer & Ranged DPS.  Now, with Icecrown looming before the guild, Lathandris is preparing to return to his Off Tanking role as his second spec.  It’s not that we have a shortage of Tanks or that we have too many Healers,  this time it is about providing the team with the most options and some additional flexibility in our roles.  The problem is, Lathandris has not been a Tank since 3.0, so preparing for Icecrown is going to be an interesting feat.

The first step to reaching Tank status was to plug in all leather gear avaliable for badges into Rawr  along with all the gear I still have left over from my Tanking days.  If you have not played around with Rawr yet, you really should.  It is an execellent gear optimizer that really allows you to help maximize your character’s potential… sadly it does nothing for skill, but we’ll touch on that later.  Here are the results of the optimization.

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With the new Dungeon Finder, I have been running a ridiculous amount of Heroics.  All of these runs have brought a concerning trend to my attention.  Apparently, there are very few players out there that understand the etiquette of Rebirth … That’s a “Battle Rez” to you non-Druids out there.  So here is a little refresher of the two simple rules for you folks.

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This week we downed Lord Marrowgar.  Despite the nerfs he still put up quite a fight.  We modified our strategy slightly from last week.  We had the entire raid stack up behind Marrowgar just inside his hit box.  DPS did not need to move to avoid the coldflames.  We had our two hunters stay at medium range so they could still pew pew.  Last week Saber Lash was hitting me for an average of 14k.  This week post nerf it was hitting for an average of 10k. His melee attacks hit for about 6.5k.  We still had issues with the transition from phase 2 back to phase 1.  The tanks (me) struggled to pick him up fast enough.  Part of the problem was that the raid was so scattered he would range the tanks on this 4th Bone Storm target.  Having the raid collapse to the center on the 3rd target helped us get through the transition.  Looking forward to picking back up in January.

Loot:

Shawl of Nerubian Silk gratz Lathandirs

Frost Needle gratz Popkin

Some Interesting Stats from the Combat Log :

Over the course of the night Marrowgar connected 672 Saber Lashes for a total of 7,466,483 Damage (Saber Lash alone).  The largest single blow of the night landed on Arcanefelroy (mage) for 56,750. Ouch