PSYAE.COM

The Revolution is upon us!

Or something.

I've MOVED to:

psyae.com


Please address all further inquiries there, thank you verymuch and havaniceday.

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Tunic of Assassination AND Abacus of Violent Odds with One Kill

So, we were planning on doing some raiding last night, but, as usual, we lacked a certain absolutely needed class. It's always tanks or healers. Last night, we were lacking healers.

Sometimes a smaller guild really doesn't do better. Ah well, we'll pull through.

I split up the guild so that we could do some supplemental instances. Sent one team into Steamvaults and the team I was in decided to head to The Mechanar.

Yay.

Well, I had never been there. Turns out, it was lots of fun. Although the robots were immune to my poisons (and I hadn't brought sharpening stones), there were enough blood elves to go around to even out my damage.

It didn't take us too long to get to the final boss, Paletheon the Calculator. He was a toughie. Actually, it wasn't him, it was these little ghostie adds that he kept summoning. They were ripping through our clothies, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. We were cloth-heavy that night: Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Mage, Priest. A great team, though, with superb players, so we got through stuff I'm sure was designed to kill us. Always helps to have some extra CC, anyway.

Well, as we're hacking away at the Calculator's health (oh, he's a blood elf, btw, not some robot), these ghostie things totally shred everyone in the group but the warrior and me. So, no healing, just a bit of tanking and dps, and we finally take the bastard down!

But, we had three casualties, so we waited for them to come back.

Lo and behold! The elevators were BLOCKED with the pink laser doorblocker thingies! WTF! The mages and priest couldn't get back to get their part of the key for that funky quest line, AND, we hadn't looted yet, so they couldn't even get access to the loot. Or, actually, one of them couldn't, because she released too soon after dying (thinking that mega-warrior Kyosan and mega-rogue Psyae wouldn't be able to defeat mega-calculator). That was irrelevant, anyway, because, after figuring that our teammates wouldn't be able to return, we looted, and....

The Tunic of Assassination AND the Abacus of Violent Odds (like, the ONLY reason for a rogue to even be in Mechanar that far) dropped!!! Wow, I was so excited and stuff.

Well, the Tunic is my first Assassination piece, and it's definitely an upgrade for my pvp set. I can't wait to spend all my money on some gems for it. Hah.

The Abacus is a great dps upgrade. We went to Shattered Halls afterwards to get some rep for our warrior (rep = heroic keys), and I got to test it out. Basically, the trinket gives 10 seconds of insanely high haste rating every two minutes (the cooldown). I'm going to be playing with macros in the next few days to try to maximize my usage of the trinket (like linking it to cheap shot or something, so that if it's not on cooldown, I'm using it every time I make an opening, which is probably something around 2 minutes). If anyone has better suggestions about that, lemme know.

Here are the Thottbot linkies to my lewts. Woot!

Tunic?

Abacus?

(I haven't gotten that thingy that lets you see items on mouseover, and not even sure Blogger lets you do that. Maybe I'll figure it out one day.)

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THE ORDER

Like, when you finally get to level 70 with the majority of your guild, and you've geared up a bit, but not a lot, and you're all working on getting attunements, keys, reputation, oboy...

What order should you really do all this stuff in?

Okay, lemme tell ya.

You should start by writing this stuff down. Even if it's on a post-it, it's helpful, because you can easily lose track of your goals, and it's also exciting to see those goals progress and realized.

There are two "tracks" you should focus on. A personal and a guild track.

Your personal track can be timed according to your own schedule, and progression varies tremendously from person to person. Personal tracks involve a few things:

-single/small group quest lines in each area
-professions
-reputation via repeatable quests

Allot yourself a certain amount of time per week to accomplish these things, and do them in a logical manner. Also, have backups and variety to keep you from getting bored. It's also a good idea to have backups in case you planned on farming one day, but find that your favorite farming area has been taken over by gankers. Stay and suffer, or go finish some of those quests? It's good to have choices. Also note that when you're doing these quests, most of them chain quests, you really don't "need" a guild, and you don't always have to keep bugging guild mates to fly from Netherstorm to Shadowmoon Valley to help you kill a few demons, especially when there are plenty of other "soloists" hanging around trying to accomplish the same thing. Be resourceful and social, and you'll accomplish a lot more with less burden on your guildies (who will feel obligated to help you, but regretful that you couldn't do more to help yourself).

When you get to the 5-man quests, *then* start asking the guild. Why is this a good time to do so? Because if your guildmates were anywhere as resourceful as you, they have also done the chains up to the 5-man quests, and have been biding their time with other progressions till more guidies get the quest. Don't freak out if you announce in guild chat that you need to do that quest, and no one responds. It happens. If you have an event manager addon or a forum or anything like that, use it. Be patient. Perhaps you've gotten the 5-man quicker than your guildies. Perhaps they're genuinely busy. Ask at times when there are plenty of guildies online to choose from, and ask the ones in the same or nearby areas (ask them with /whispers, and they'll be more likely to respond).

Personal progression is important for many reasons. It gives you an opportunity to upgrade your own items with quests or professions. It allows you to get instance quests. And it gives you a break from doing the same thing over and over, whatever that may be. Also, don't forget that you can progress solo (or with a few friends) in Eye of the Storm pvp, or arena pvp, both of which offer huge gear upgrades for relatively little effort. (you just have to be patient!)

Your guild track is generally managed by your guild leader and/or officers. There are so many instances, it can quickly get overwhelming, and officers and guildies can get confused about where the guild is headed, and why. Not only that, but the guild leader can often get off track. It's important to communicate the goals of the guild, and to make course corrections as needed.

Guilds should focus on having members available and assembled for the instances that correspond to level, gear, and experience. When you first get to Outlands, the order is:
-Ramparts
-Blood Furnace
-Slave Pens
-Underbog
(plus Caverns of Time, Tempest Keep, etc.)

When most of the guild is at 70, the focus could shift to "end game" material.

Current starter end game stuff consists of Gruul's Lair and Karazhan. Gruul's Lair contains two bosses, and is a 25-man raid instance. Karazhan is a 10-man instance with 12+ bosses/minis. The alternative to those instances are the Heroic instances. Heroics are "upgrades" to the earlier 5-man instances, requiring Revered reputation with the factions generally controlling the area of the instances.

What I originally tried with my guild was getting keyed for Karazhan as quickly as possible (which includes a lot of instances I haven't mentioned), and working on acquiring gear to take on the Heroic instances. We took Attumen with ease, but got stuck on Moroes. Well, 5% away from not being stuck, but with extreme difficulty. After much investigation, I realized that in the Outlands, having a *single* guild focus is unrealistic. Here's what I currently think is the right way to do things:

-get keyed for Karazhan asap (yep, it's worth it)
-run Attumen runs every week (two epics each time)
-get everyone revered with Honor Hold and Cenarion Expedition asap (same time as keying for Karazhan, if possible)
-run Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbog at Heroic (you can do ONE run per instance per person per day).

Each Heroic boss is guaranteed to drop an epic.
Each Heroic bosses drop Badges of Justice for each teammate, which can be used to purchase very nice epic upgrades.

Once your guild gets to a comfortable level of gear (this is very subjective), then try Moroes.

Moroes is the *bridge* for Karazhan. Basically, if, without flasking and over-potting, you cannot take Moroes, then your gear is probably not sufficient. (Yeah, player class/role configurations are also very important, and obviously tweak those before you totally give up.)

I plan to take the guild up against Moroes once per week to test our relative gear strength level. During the week, I'll be pushing everyone to get their Heroic keys and to conquer the Heroic instances to gear up.

Once we take Moroes, I'll combine Heroic instances and Karazhan.

Once we've defeated about 3-4 Karazhan bosses, I'll throw in a Gruul's Lair run.

Fun!

Hope DST didn't kill you guys like it did me!

-Psy

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The Cycle of Hatred

Someone in the TN official forum was jokingly complaining about the "Cycle of Hatred", which basically consists of the misapplied revenge taken on an unsuspecting member of the opposite faction.

Let me 'splain.

Beezlebot is farming clefthoof hide in Nagrand, minding his own beezwax. He's an alliance rogue, let's say. Over the course of a few hours, half a dozen horde have passed by. Most have ignored Beelzebot, some wave, some even stop and help for a few minutes.

Then, right as Beezlebot makes a kill, some horde hunter rolls up and dismounts. Well, considering what's already happened, Beezlebot thinks nothing of it, loots the beast, and then starts to skin it. Lo and behold! Horde hunter, Bucshot, sits back and aimed shots poor Beezlebot. Beezlebot tries to recover, but is immediately hit with a concussion shot, slowed by some pet, dazed and confused, and couldn't get to the hunter if he tried, which he did, and very quickly dies. Not much you can do with farming gear on vs. a hunter with a full pvp set who gets the first shot at you.

What, personal recount? Pshaw, naw, I'm just makin all this up, right?

Anyway, by the time Beezlebot gets back to his corpse (which takes a while in Nagrand), Bucshot has long since left to go find other victims. Beezlebot is like, damnit, and I always leave farming horde alone, damnit, that isn't fair. Damnit, I want some revenge.

So, Beezlebot creeps around, or flies around, and finds some other lowly horde, and GANK.

Thus it begins.

That lowly horde only saw exactly what Beezlebot saw. Some random alliance ganking him.

So, that lowly horde does the same thing in return, but not to Beezlebot. To some other alliance.

And soon, it's a vicious cycle that keeps repeating. Why? Because there's always at least one true, heartless, relentless ganker, and that's all it takes.

I'm not complaining about ganking. Just saying.

Well, in my case, I'm kinda like Beezlebot. But I make slightly different "revenge" choices.

Nagrand has some pretty intense PvP, if you haven't noticed. It can be fun and strategic.

Well, Bucshot, my friendly hunter that did, indeed, gank me, was nowhere to be found. But... there were plenty of horde to be had at Halaa. It was horde-owned, and they only had 1 guard left, which meant that they'd be trying to protect it.

So, I snuck on over to a wyvern post, and capped it.

Now... Nagrand pvp. For a rogue.

I'm not going to give away my strategy, sorry.

It's just too good.

Let me just leave it at this:

I did go flying once, to try to drop a few bombs and maybe hit Bucshot, but I couldn't find him.

When I returned, as I expected, there were a few horde waiting for me.

What I didn't expect was that there were six horde waiting for me!

Well, I didn't last long.

But, I returned. Ultimately, the score ended up something like this:

They killed me: 2 times
The number of total kills (and tokens) I got from stealthfully killing them: 13

I win.

The moral of the story?

I redirected my thirst for revenge at horde who were anticipating combat, and who offered a real challenge. It was much more satisfying for me to take out same-level horde who were engaged in pvp (especially when I was killing one of them when two other of them were trying to kill me) than it would have been if I had merely found some horde farming, and ganked that horde.

So, I ended at least my potential cycle of hatred by strategic redirection.

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Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Swords Again

So, Forge, my guild, is "in" Karazhan.

yay.

Well, they're not in at this very moment, of course, but we're trying some bosses in there, and doing fairly decently.

Here's how it went down:

I got all the keyed people together. 16 at that point. Hard to make two 10-man teams with 16, and hard to fill one and not have 6 angry players. Well, I can't satisfy everyone. I made the best 10-man team I could, more or less to set the par. If the best 10 guildies can't take the first boss, then perhaps we shouldn't be in there. If I took anyone other than the best 10, then if we failed, I would have too many factors, and would have to try it again, anyway, with the best 10. Regardless of why I do the things I do, after a few quick trips through the insanely fast respawning trash mobs (that hit much harder than the boss), we took down Attumen, on our 2nd or 3d attempt. Either way, not a bad way to start.

We then made our way through the "back" way to the banquet hall, which takes you through the kitchen. Let me tell you. Avoid going that way. It's a nightmare. Too many mobs, and the chefs really know how to carve you up. Either way, our biggest problem was the non-crowd-controllable mobs. Stewards, valets. They really suck.

After a very arduous clearing of the banquet hall, we laid out a plan to take down Moroes, the Boris Karloff impersonating undead rogue host of the phantasmagorical party. He proved infinitely more difficult than Attumen. So much so, that after about 3 wipes, having to re-clear our way at least once, we suspended activities for the evening, and went to think about how we could defeat him.

A few days later, we were back. But this time, we decided to clear the stairwell direction, which led us through a corner of the ballroom. This was a much better way to go, as we only had to clear a handful of mobs before clearing the banquet hall. Our plan was this: we would shackle the "heavies" of the minions, we would ice trap the paladin, and we would kite/dps the holy priest. Then we'd kill the paladin, then one of the shackles, then the other, then Moroes.

Well, with shackles breaking all over the place for a variety of reasons, and with our healers getting one-shotted by stray minions, and with a variety of members getting garroted to death quicker than they could announce it, we didn't last too long. So, we modified our approach. Now we'd kill the priest and then paladin, but we'd keep the other two shackled while we worked on Moroes (ultimately reducing the number of garrotes he could issue).

5%

That's what we got him to. Ugh. So close!

We tried a few more times, and tried again another night. No success. I'm really not sure what the problem is, other than the fact that we all need to gear up a bit more.

We'll try him again, but I want to get everyone some gear from Attumen while we're at it, and try some of the beasts in the meantime.

Oh, and post-script, the 6 who didn't go with the main group found 4 pugs willing to go, and they took down Attumen as well! Woot!

Gruul's Lair.

I plan to take the kids into Gruul's Lair this coming Friday to see how we all fare. Just for the first boss, of course. But he drops some phat lewts, as they say, and it's important that the guildies are getting a challenge as well as an opportunity to gear up a bit.

I think we're going to get slaughtered, myself.

But that's me.

I'm pessimistic and cynical.

Naw, I'm not. I'm optimistic and rational.

And schizophrenic.

I'll let you know how Gruul's Lair goes.


Swords Again

When I was doing Molten Core back in the day with a companion guild, I got some nice sword that dropped. Well, as you all know, I'm totally addicted to my mace spec. However, I wasn't really getting the kind of damage I needed for a raid group with my Mass of McGowan and Cold-forged Hammer, or whatever I was using. They were old, and it was a pain to get any mace upgrades (like it is now, mostly). But this new sword had some very nice dps stats. So, I grabbed my second best sword, which was sitting in the bank, and slightly altered my spec, with an eye for pve. (I usually travel around with a more balanced combat spec, which allows me some survivability in pvp, but still lets me kick ass in raid instance damage). And, it worked. My damage shot up so much, it was sick. But then, Blizzard released their firm grip on high level pvp items, so I spammed pvp until I could get the Grand Marshal one-hand maces. Yeah, two of them. Scroll down, you'll see them. Anyway, they were wonderful, and helped me get over the curve of not being sword or dagger specced. I've used them up to just the other day in the expansion without too much problem.

Of course what that really meant is that my damage in groups was decent, but not up to par with what I thought it should be (like, #1). Not only were all the mages out-damaging me, but the friggin druid tank was out-damaging me!!! Well, I can't have that.

So, like any WoW addict, I started to farm for Aldor rep. Then I figured it'd take me about a year to farm to exalted, at the rate I normally farm. So, I bought it. It cost about 1000 gold to get from 3600 in revered to 21000, which hit exalted. I bought up all the marks of sargeras and fel armaments the auction house had to offer, and BAM, I was exalted. That felt good. No more forced farming.

Why'd I pick Aldor? Vindicator's Brand. So, bought that for a hefty amount, and then grabbed my next best sword, Revenger, modified my spec again slightly to account for swords, and then skilled up.

So far, I'm impressed with my damage output. It's quite high, and I think in the right setting, I can be #1 again. (but not in those instances that require a ton of aoe damage, or where I'm getting CCd all the time).

So, now, I'm working on gathering up gear from instances and raids, and slowly increasing my arena points in order to get my Gladiator maces and switch back to my fave!

woot

etc.

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