Ninja Alert

This fucker joined us in the middle of our ZF run. After a couple of trash pulls, the mace drops and he ninjas it & like the coward that he is, leaves party & signs off. Don't group with this hunter if you're on the Drenden server.

Updating My Blog

It's been more than a month now since I changed from my pew pew chicken to my leafy tree form. It's been a very good month, we've downed Gruul twice and our 2 groups are consistently farming kara every week now with the occasional setbacks on Prince.

We've also started an alt run last week, I brought my rogue to that one and we were able to do Attumen - Curator before we called it, which is pretty good for our very first try on our alts.

Now... on to my rant.

Every guild has their own way of raid loot distribution which Fio explains in his blog. Now, our system isn't perfect as it can be exploited. But when is it time to set more rules? We had an off-spec bidding against a primary spec just because he had the points to spend, twice. If that's the case, I should've bid on every dps caster drop too just because I can.

And last night, our MAIN tank blew all his points on T4 leggings which he really needed since he was still wearing blue pants only to be outbid by a dps who had more points than him. I was pissed as it just didn't seem right.

I then remembered this one time where I was "asked" to pass on something if it drops because I had more points than the other person, I was offended because first, even without someone telling me, I would've given it to the other person for minimum bid, second, it was like saying the other person was better than me and deserves it more. We were playing the same role and were equally geared.

Some people have no social skills

I should start acting like an asshole to people who don't know how to ask for favors. This guy has done it to me twice, once last night while I was on my way to Kara, he ran after me shouting for me to stop, and even though he was rude, I made him his arcanite bar and just let it go.

And tonight, as soon as I log in, this is the whisper that I got from him.

First of all, this guy is NOT in my guild, I have no clue how he found out I was an alchemist since I've never made anything for people outside my guild. Second, I don't charge on stuff that I make, but at least make a general courtesy of offering to tip, he's using my cooldown and doesn't even bother tipping.

He even mentions that he's in a hurry. Who does he think he is? Do you think I just logged on so that I could make you your stupid bar? The next time you try ordering me around and shove your mats at me, I'm going to keep them, better yet I'm putting you on /ignore right now.

Maulgar Down

Our guild was very excited and eager to try our very first 25-man raid. Officers were busy discussing strategies, people running around buying food buffs and whatnot. Everyone was optimistic but at the same time wondering whether the raid is still going to happen since it's nearing our raid time and we still didn't have enough people on. We finally got 25 people some time after our scheduled run, which was completely fine since organizing 25 people is much more difficult than organizing 10.


I re-specced to resto last night to fill up the last healing spot. I was excited to try a new role and at the same time worried because I have never healed a group bigger than 10.


/begin rant
I installed some healing mods like grid and smart debuff but these seriously messed up my game, I kept getting kicked out and my screen was freezing. I didn't have enough time to play around with them so I ended up with just ctraid assist on.
/end rant

I was assigned to heal the person tanking Kiggler, I was either lucky or somebody else was throwing heals on my tank that I didn't know about. My tank's health never went below 80%. My tank's target was also the last to die so I didn't get to see much of the fight :(

I never got to try the 3 tanks lifebloom that I was imagining would happen. lol. I need to practice more on refreshing lifeblooms, I lose track of it everytime I scroll thru the list of 25 names that might need healing. After the 4 adds of Maulgar was dead, I was frantically running around the room trying to get to people that needed healing, that for me was the hardest part of healing, trying to get to people who are out of range, and you have no clue where they are in the room. It also didn't help that my run speed is 20% slower in tree form.

I never doubted that we could beat Maulgar, I was more concerned about having enough people that will be on for one night. I'm very proud of our guild, we have accomplished a lot in the past few months. We have just cleared Karazhan and on our first try at Maulgar we got him down, and we got Gruul down to 45% on second try, if not for the fact that it was late and people were starting to leave, I'm sure we could've taken Gruul down too if we tried. I'm just hoping that the next Gruul attempt won't be that far away.

25-Man Support Healing?

This is an honest question as I've never had a chance to be a resto druid for a 25-man raid.

I'm aware that normally you can refresh lifeblooms on 3 tanks, 4 tanks is also possible but the risk of having lag or mistiming a lifebloom can be a big problem.

By constantly refreshing the hots, that would leave me with only a 4 sec window to play with and I will never be out of the 5SR. Taking these things into consideration, I would like to know the following:

1. How long does the High King Mulgar fight usually take?
2. The usual question of Spi vs mp5
3. Do you use rejuv with your cycle, if so, do you cast it on 1 tank per cycle

Sweet Revenge

Last night's goal was just one boss.. Prince.

Each try ended the same, we got one bad infernal drop after another. At one point we even got him down to around 10k hp, stuff like these would just make you want to break your keyboard in half. I'm glad that everyone shares the same hatred for this boss that we've decided that he will die that night even if it meant clearing respawns.

Thankfully, we didn't have to clear respawns. After countless wipes, elixirs, food buffs, wizard oils, mana pots, our OT Brigin volunteered to step out for another dps class. And officers made sure that his spot didn't go to waste and picked up Doom. Without trying to make Doom's head bigger, his dps was just what we needed to bring down Prince faster and was able to one shot him.

It's been too long since we last killed Prince, to be able to kill him again after so many tries, we couldn't help not to spit and curse on his lifeless body. I'm hoping we get a balanced group again this week as we attempt to kill Netherspite and get a full 13/13 clear of Karazhan.

/begin rant
Is it just my bad luck or am I just grouped with casters that also want what I want? For example last night, Prince dropped the following:
Malchazeen - only 1 rogue in group so he got to bid minimum on it.
Helm of the Fallen Hero - no warlocks, mage already has it, hunter bids minimum
Ruby Drape of the Mysticant - something I want and I had to fight for it

I don't think I've ever won a caster drop where I had to bid just the minimum, except for healing leather. Then once I already have something and it drops again, somebody new would just bid minimum for it, what's annoying is it's usually not even the person I was trying to outbid before.
/end rant

Karazhan Bug

It was a very interesting run we had last night. A mix of annoyance, frustration and fun.

It started with the raid leader doing a ready check and everyone checked ready. First pull, one mob, tank takes a hit, tank dies, squeakie priestie starts yelling in vent :P, Fiord dies, I die, mob is still running around trying to pick us off one by one, then Brigin picks it up, dps resumes, we survive. lol.

We reached Aran's room, got buffed up and started positioning ourselves in front of the door, somebody walked too far ahead of the tank and pre-maturely starts the fight. Our hunter got stuck on the other side of the door but his pet was able to get in. A couple of rezzes later and Aran was dead. This fight is added to one of our best recoveries on Aran :) I think we killed him with 5 people left before.

On the next pull, Brigin thought it was a good idea to back up onto a decorative railing and fell to his death.

We tried to kill Prince but each time we got unlucky with the infernal drops, and on our last wipe, the rogue vanished which caused Prince to bug out. We have a video of us walking along around him. We sent a ticket so hopefully tonight we can re-try Prince again.

We went down and did Nightbane, I can't believe how easy this fight was, we had Brigin bring his pally instead so we could have 3 healers. Our mage was still very squishie & died a lot of times but we had enough dps to kill add the adds before Nightbane could land again. We killed him on our second try, first try we had so many people dying and we used up a lot of mana on rez.

It was still early so we decided to kill the Animal Boss, after clearing all the rooms guess what? NO Animal Boss. We tried to search every inch of the rooms to find a hidden mob or something with no luck.

I hope that Prince will be fixed tonight and T4 would drop for me, but I would probably lose since the other guys have more dkp than me.

Toning Down

My friends have been telling me to stop posting negative comments on my blog, then what would be the point of my title, "The NEGATIVE Druid"? Everyone else is already posting about happy stuff and/or offering technical advice.

Anyway, I have agreed to this so the previous post would be the last time I would be complaining about damage meters and pointing people out.

I would probably need new ideas on what to post now. XD

Bad Week In Karazhan

We had high hopes. After last week's performance of Group 1 almost killing Prince & Group 2 killing Nightbane, we went into this week hoping to match or exceed our previous attempt. Group 2 did an awesome job and downed Nightbane for a second time. Group 1 however, suffered a setback, not only did we not get to fight Prince, we failed to kill Aran as well.

Now, what went wrong here? We have almost the same group except for 2 dps and 1 healer. I actually liked the balance we have on dps, 4 guys at around 15% unlike last time which was topped by 2 guys and everyone else trying to catch up. I think our healers were trying their best to keep everyone up even as our mage dropped dead within the first minute every time.

Aran's arcane missles hurt the most. You can't bandage while he's casting because it's channeled, so you just pray that he doesn't hit you twice with it. As a caster you have a hard decision, drink a health pot that might save your life now but have no mana for the fight later, or stand there and hope that you get healed in time.

For our last try, I put on my healing gear and tried to see if it would make a difference. The mage still died early on the fight but everyone was at 100% before the mass polymorph, but with all bad luck the elementals also spawned and started popping people out of sheep and Aran happily one-shotted people with his pyroblast.

Hopefully this week, with a little bit of shuffling, Group 1 can kill Nightbane too.

Karazhan... Renoobifying

I wasn't even supposed to be part of the Kara group last night, but I begged the GM to let me go to just Attumen to get my leather drop. The mage that I replaced didn't show up so I happily went with the group from Attumen onwards.

Now, how do I describe the entire run? The raid leader/MT, as composed and calm as he is, was probably cursing & shouting with mic turned off everytime he died on a trash pull.

I've grouped with the two healers we have on separate heroic runs and they're actually good. But the coordination they have healing 10-man was sub-par. So many times that the MT's health went down below 10% and I had to throw a heal to get him back to 35%, I know the GM would say that's part of a moonkin's job to offheal, but when you're also the top dpser and have to heal at the same time that makes things a little more complicated. One heal takes up a big chunk of my mana (850), and most times I had to cancel my starfire cast to de-curse, de-poison or heal.

On Moroes, I dunno if the healers found it funny to let me die. I was the last to get garroted before Moroes died, so I had a full 5 min. of it on me so I asked the healers to heal me thru it but not a single heal came. The pally's bubble was on cooldown, but that doesn't mean his heals are too. At this point my mana was low and I had to heal myself everytime I go below 30%, after about a minute of healing myself I finally got a bubble.

After our first wipe on Maiden, we gathered around the entrance and was buffing up, then the hunter "accidentally" shot Maiden which caused an unnecessary wipe.

On Opera we got R&J, we almost got them down the first time but Julienne was able to heal herself twice and we couldn't recover.

It was a bad night for casters as only plate & leather healing gear dropped.

This normal run of 4 bosses usually take 2 hours, but last night took us 3.5 hours to complete. I would like to recommend a gear check for everyone that wants to go to Kara, getting a key doesn't mean they're ready for it, people can easily run you thru to get keys. Now people might say the reason we go to Kara is to get gear, you can go to my armory and see for yourself that I only have 2 pcs of gear that are from Kara, my gloves, which I got just last week, and a ring.

I was second in dps last night behind Jerkhead, and I understand why our feral druid is 3rd because he was offtanking on some fights. But where are the other 3 dps classes? The feral druid was 220,000 damage below me, and the 4th person was 4% damage less than the 3rd, you do the math.

To my rantings, I would like to remind you of egotistical priest's blog, which most of you have already read.

Heroic SL Raped

Our group Brigin, Doom, Snow, and BRK tried heroic SL for the first time last night. I think this instance was not on our to do list because we got intimidated with the fact that there will be two 6 mob pulls in this instance.

In Hellmaw's room, Brig only marked 3 because we didn't know that there are 4 mobs now, we quickly adjusted and took them out. Our first wipe came on the 5 mob pull in Blackheart's room, it was just purely bad luck. On pull, an assassin decided to ambush me so Brig had to leave the 3 guys he was tanking to grab the assassin off me, then the sapped mob decided to break and kill BRK, it went crazy from there.

Now the 6 mob pull was done in a precise and well-coordinated manner. 1 sap, BRK's unparalleled chain-trapping skills, BRK & Hobbes taking down the pet, Doom blinding 1 & stunlocking the main target while I take it down, Brig tanking 1 & Snow's uber heals to keep all of us alive.

Our second wipe came on Vorpil as we didn't know he had a new trick up his sleeve, he now does banish. On first try Brig got banished, aggro'd on to me, lots of running around & we wiped. On the next try, he only had time to cast 1 rain of fire and down he went.

Murmur now does an aoe that hits everybody hard, I decided to offheal so Snow could concentrate on healing Brig. First try and we kicked his ass, BRK got phat lewt. This instance is stupid, I'm not sure if this is the only HEROIC instance that drops lvl 68 items on the first 3 bosses.

Defeated and Infuriated

I'm going stop using images for my blog entries as it takes up too much time to look for one.

Last night was our second attempt on Prince in Karazhan for this week. Last night was a lot better than the previous night wherein the most we got him down to was Stage 2.

With all those bad infernal placements and ugly wipes. We had 3 chances of actually killing him, getting him down to 2% on two tries and the most annoying time that I still can't get out of my head is staring at his 7,000 hp left when an infernal decided to land right beside the dps while we were hugging the wall, which forced us the move near the boss, wherein Prince happily threw a shadow nova that knocked us back right into the infernal.

I ended up first in damage meters and I understand why the rogue was lower in dps since he had to run back & forth between enfeebles. But I can't help but think, if only we had more dps, we could all be enjoying phat lewt and dancing over Prince's body. I was 200,000 damage above #2. I forgot to screencap so I can't prove it. I miss having BRK and Doom as my dps buddies. The BM hunter we had in group would make BRK cry, he was #5 and down by about 10%.

I complained in raid that I ran out of mana even after using innervate on all tries, to which the grumpy pally later said that people need to get better gear to not run out of mana. FYI, the first time we killed Prince with a different group, I had no problems with mana and my innervate was used on healers.

Epic Flight Form

I got my epic flight form the other night. After dying 3 times on the bear form quest I requested assistance from Sashara (feral druid), after the bad timing of a server kick right as we pulled, a quick rez later and the guy is dead. The caster form quest went so easy, 2 shots of starfire and it's over.

I had a good group to Heroic Sethekk Halls. The Squeekie Priestie, Bigredkitty, Fiordhraoi, and Celli the tank. This instance is easy if you have people that know what they're doing.

Do Not Move!!!

How hard is it to comprehend these three simple words?

Last night our raid included 3 new people in the mix, the goal was to get free loot at chess event and try to bring down Aran for the first time. We did chess first and had 30 min. left to defeat Aran before respawns.

We have a good raid leader who is very clear on instructions and explains what to expect on the fight. He does this before and during the fight.

What I don't get is why some people think they are exempted from these rules and do whatever the hell they want. The rogue for example, died twice from arcane explosion, it's not because he's melee or his toon is slower than the rest, it's because he tries to get 2-3 shots in before trying to run away when everyone else is trying to get as far away as possible. And backing up isn't running away, it's like you wanting to see who kills you before you die. Dying in an arcane explosion is fine since you only kill yourself and not hurt the raid since you don't know what you're doing to begin with.

What pisses me off the most is the Flame Wreath. We tried Aran 4 times and 4 times we had someone blow everyone up with Flame Wreath. I don't care what class you are, where you're standing or facing, when you get a raid warning and raid leader announcing nobody move, it doesn't mean go fix your line of sight or go move a centimeter to your left or try hugging the wall because it makes you feel safe. It simply means DO NOT MOVE.

My Talent Build

My build is focused on maximizing my dps and mana regen. I will try to explain the points I took up and why.

BALANCE

Tier 1

Starlight Wrath - reduces the cast time of your Wrath and Starfire spells by 0.5 sec
* Every fraction of a second it takes for you to cast is a fraction of a second that the mob stays alive

Nature's Grasp - while active, any time an enemy strikes the caster they have a 35% chance to become afflicted by Entangling Roots.
* This is pretty much a pvp talent

Improved Nature's Grasp - increases the chance for your Nature's Grasp to entangle an enemy by x%
* Better chance to entangle somebody every 1 min = waste of points

Tier 2

Control of Nature - gives you a 100% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting Entangling Roots and Cyclone
* A very useful talent when grinding as you can easily root a mob and move back.

Focused Starlight - increases the crit chance of Wrath and Starfire by 4%
* More crit = more damage

Improved Moonfire - increases the damage and crit chance of Moonfire by 10%
* Even if moonfire is mana inefficient, it's going to be part of your spell rotation. And it's very useful in pvp

Tier 3

Brambles - increase damage done by Thorns and Entangling Roots by x%
* Waste of talent points imo, thorns is a buff for the tank primarily, entangling roots isn't usable indoors and mobs break out of it after 1 or 2 ticks anyway

Insect Swarm - spell that decreases chance to hit by 2% and does 792 damage over 12 seconds
* This should always be up on the target as it's a very mana efficient spell and does a good amount of damage.

Nature's Reach - increases the range of balance spells by 20%
* Being able to stand farther is a good thing

Tier 4

Vengeance - increases crit damage bonus of spells by 100%
* More damage is always better

Celestial Focus - gives Starfire a 15% chance to stun target for 3 secs, avoid spell interruption of Wrath by 70%
* I wouldn't put any points in this. In an instance or raid, you shouldn't be getting hit by melee at all, if you are, cyclone and run back to your tank. When grinding, you should be using entangling roots to get away.

Tier 5

Lunar Guidance - increases spell damage and healing by 25% of total intellect
* Every bit of +spell damage helps

Nature's Grace - all spells that crit reduces your next cast time by 0.5 sec
* This is a double edge sword, it produces the most dps from chain critting, you can get around 6-7k damage in 3 secs (Wraths) or 9-11k damage in 7.5 secs (Starfire), but it would also draw so much threat and you're in danger of pulling aggro.

Moonglow - reduce mana costs of spells by 9%
* Our spells are not mana efficient, this would help us out a little bit

Tier 6

Moonfury - increase damage done by Starfire, Moonfire, Wrath by 10%
* More damage

Balance of Power - increases spell hit by 4%
* Every spell that gets resisted is mana wasted, you should get this

Tier 7

Dreamstate - regen mana equal to 10% of intellect every 5 sec.
* Every boomkin should have this if you dont want to be an oomkin.

Moonkin Form - increases armor by 400%, gives 5% spell crit party buff
* Owl dance. nuff said :)

Improved Faerie Fire - faerie fire spell increases chance to hit on target by 3%
* This is only useful if majority of your group is melee, since you are a caster this doesn't give you any benefit. And most if not all classes have a talent to increase hit %, and everyone should have gear that increases hit % anyway.

Tier 8

Wrath of Cenarius - Starfire get 20% and Wrath gets 10% more spell damage
* Again, every bit of spell damage helps your total dps

Tier 9

Force of Nature - summons 3 treants to attack the target for 30 sec
* These are very useful on bosses that don't have aoe. They die easily, but if they survive the full 30 secs. they do a lot of damage

RESTORATION

Tier 1

Improved Mark of the Wild - increases the effect of Mark of the Wild by 35%
* More stats is always better. And we're not going feral so Furor is basically useless

Tier 2

Naturalist - reduces cast time of Healing Touch by 0.5 sec
* You can skip this & go to Shapeshifter or Nature's Focus, only reason I took this is I like to be able to off-heal or main-heal on some fights and that 0.5 sec can prevent a dead tank

Tier 3

Intensity - allows 15% of mana regen to continue while casting
* As stated earlier, my build is focused on not being oom in a 7-8 min. fight. I have a good mix of +spell, INT, SPI to keep my damage and mana balanced. I use 2-3 mana pots depending on the fight & save my innervate for healers.

Subtlety - reduces threat generated by spells by 16% (4/5)
* You can have 0 points & never pull from a good tank or 5 points and always pull from a bad tank. You can have more or less depending on your tank, a good minimum is 3 points.

Thorns

Thorns
400 mana 30 yd range
Instant cast
Thorns sprout from the friendly target causing 25 Nature damage to attackers when hit. Lasts 10 min.

What is this skill useful for? It is best applied on the tank, It does free damage & threat everytime the tank gets hit. Now you can spend 3 pts in the balance tree to increase the damage by 75% which brings it to 43 damage, but that would be a waste of points since there are better places to spend points at.

What I want to see is this talent removed and replaced with something better and make thorns scale with gear like say 2% of spell damage, so if you have +1000 spell damage you get 20 damage which would make it 45 damage.

This is just me ranting with nothing to talk about.

Karazhan - Day 2

Big Bad Wolf is DOWN!!!

It was really nice that we were able to start on time last night with everybody from the other night's group. Our goal for the night was to kill Maiden and Curator.

I dunno why our tank was noobing it up last night but he was calling the wrong cc, banish for undead & shackle for demon. But everything goes well and we get to Maiden's room.

While explaining where people are gonna be standing, one of the first-timers didn't hug the wall and pulled Maiden which caused a wipe. We all get back in, get in position, tank pulls, first repentance, tank dies, party wipes. At this point people start mentioning that they need repairs because their armor is busted. Now this I don't get, I died 7 times and none of my armor was yellow.

Reminder for people going to a raid:
1. BE ON TIME. Nobody likes waiting for that last special person to make an appearance.
2. Armor should be at 100% when you start.
3. Bring your OWN water and food supply (unless you know a mage ^_^).
4. A stack of Heavy Netherweave Bandages.
5. Potions. Casters at least 10 mana pots, Melee at least 15 health pots (A healer's primary target is the tank, not you)
6. Now, this is very important, if you know your gear sucks make it a point to have elixirs, wizard oils, food buffs, anything to make yourself more useful to the raid.

Now back to Maiden, we explain the fight again but the execution was still poorly done and we wipe again. So the GM steps in and re-explains the fight and ooooo aaaahhh, suddenly everyone gets it when the GM just repeated what was already been said twice. Now, if you were given a very important job (heal main tank or dispell) and that will be the only thing you'll be doing the entire fight, we expect you to be on top of it. Now, if the group healer ends up having to heal the group, dispell and heal the main tank, then this is something worth pointing out. We kill Maiden and nobody's dead, woot!

Now, on to the opera. On the part where you need to get the stagehand out of the spotlight, I told everyone to stay at the bottom of the hallway while the tank stays near the top. But nobody wants to listen to me and they decide to fight in the very small box at the top of the hallway. So they pull 3 instead of 2 and it's another wipe. We went back in, they did the same strategy but got only 2 this time, what happens when casters are not at max range? It goes to them of course (dead squishies). And since the area we were fighting in was so small, the tanks couldn't move them out of the spotlights, luckily with a good tank & good healer & good dps, we were able to clear them.

On the Opera event we got the Big Bad Wolf (BBW)
We had 2 straight unlucky pulls where the main tank was turned into Red Riding Hood (RRH) which caused the wipe. Now, the strategy for this fight is to stand in a straight line from where the bbw is being tanked. In a perfect scenario where the tank has him at the NW corner of the room, everyone else should be standing SW. Now, after the bbw runs after rrh or fears, he's not gonna end up standing on the same spot, this is where it becomes complicated, people have to actually move around the room to position themselves in a straight line from BBW where they can actually run away when they become RRH, but for some reason people become fixated on one spot. And run away means run away!!! NOT run toward bbw & die.

On the last try, with a couple of people dead including the good healer because he was turned into rrh, bbw's health read 16.7k remaining and 14 secs before next rrh. I sent out my trees and went crazy with wraths hoping to crit one after the other and luckily i got 6 crits out of 10 & down he goes. WOOT!!!

Short end of the stick?

Our guild, for the first time, ran two groups to Karazhan last night. I don't know if this was just a coincidence but Group 1 was filled with officers and people that have good gear (including 2 of the top 3 dps in the guild).

I was assigned to Group 2, consisting of 2 guys that have never been to kara, and guys that were still in greens.

Me and my friends were at the gate early for the 8pm time that was set for the raid. 8pm came and the ONLY officer assigned to our group was going to be late and nobody knew what time he's getting on and the hunter who signed up was a no-show. At 8:15pm our group took it upon themselves to go ask the guild for replacements. Fortunately, one of the officers got his plans cancelled for the night and was able to go with us, we were able to start clearing at 8:30pm.

On one of the pulls, our shadow priest got so excited and went ahead of the tank and accidentally pulled the mobs while we were still marking, I started hitting main target but unfortunately the tank was still busy trying to get control of the loose mobs that weren't marked so I died.

On attumen, the moment he spawned, I accidentally grabbed aggro, probably a chain crit from my starfires. Our healers tried to overheal me while the OT tried to pick him back up, but after 6-8 secs of just standing there, I took more dmg than the healers could heal so I died. So I waited for 4-5 minutes for my group to kill him. woot!

First try on Moroes, I got silenced right as the tank pulled even though I was way at the back. So for 10 secs I couldn't do anything and the other dps couldn't take down the holy priest fast enough and this turned ugly, our tank died and we had to reset. Our second try went so smooth that our group looked like we have been playing together for a long time.

The only reason our group was successful is we had the best tank (Brigin) & best healer (Grazen) in the guild. I was expected to top the dps but because of untimely deaths, I ended up 2nd on the list.

Hopefully tonight we can get 10 people to continue thru Maiden & Opera.

Crowd Control ??

It's funny how some people would not even attempt a heroic instance if they didn't have a mage/warlock in the group. We've finished heroic mech & bot without either and no wipes.

Our group relies only on two forms of cc, a rogue sap & hunter trap. My point is, group coordination is the most important part of doing a heroic run successfully, not re-castable cc. On mobs of 3, we have enough dps to burn down the main tank's target, then onto the trapped target and have enough time before sap wears off. On mobs of 4, we do the same for the 3 mobs but have a blind, gouge, cyclone on 4th mob. You also need a very good tank to hold aggro on groups that you can't cc, we have a tank that does at least 30% more threat than any of the dps can generate.

I just laugh at people who says this or that can't be done without a specific group or gear. You just have to know the strengths and weaknesses of your group and adjust accordingly.

Blog Problems

For some reason, my blog won't refresh by itself, if you want to see if it's getting updated try adding "?" and some letter like http://thenegativedruid.blogspot.com/?a

What really grinds my gears..

Prot warriors that brag all day about how much HP, defense and armor they have, yet couldn't hold aggro on anything even if their life depended on it.

Let me tell you about my spell cycle to give you a better picture. Tank has a sunder on, I cast Insect Swarm ... wait 12 secs for Insect Swarm to fade, cast another Insect Swarm, now let me cast my 3 sec Starfire ... BOOM!!! from #10 on the threat list I'm now #2 with 80% threat, I give tank a benefit of a doubt that he can get more aggro before my 2nd Starfire hits target. Starfire hits, I reach 130% + threat , mob aggros on to me, I die. My bad, I gave tank too much credit.

This has been the scenario for a few runs now, so last night I came up with the best way to not pull aggro and it actually works :) I downranked all my spells by 2, I still have to watch my crits from time to time but hey, I wasn't pulling aggro and that's all that matters.

By the time we reached curator, I was #6 on the damage meters. Pathetic yeah, but that's what I have to deal with. Since I didn't have to worry about aggro on this fight I went all out, and at the end of the fight I shot up to #2 in damage meters and I believe that's saying something.

The worst thing about this is the real warrior who generates 2-3x more threat than this guy isn't given a spot in the raid because he's not an officer.

I like and support the idea of letting people spec the way they want to but come on! I saw a prot warrior in our guild with 0/3 pts in defiance. What the hell ?!?

Edit: According to my friends who grouped with the warrior with 0/3 defiance, they found him really good because he never lost aggro. So I guess defiance isn't necessary anymore, it becomes more of a luxury when you have a good player.

Caving in to fear of the DCOE

Disclaimer: The sole purpose of this blog is to vent out my frustrations on the game World Of Warcraft. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, I just hate drama & putting up with noobs who think they're good.

I play a level 70 NE Druid and claim NO expertise on this game. I play on a PVE server because that's what I want, if I wanted to do PVP I would've just continued playing guildwars.

I have yet to find better 5-man group than ours, there hasn't been an instance that we cannot do. We used to do 45 min. baron runs with a warrior, 2 rogues, mage, pally and none of us had anything better than tier 0.5

Don't expect much of this blog. I will only update it when I feel like it.