It's been a while since I wrote here. Sad as it is, I'm going to have to step away from this for a while. I've got too much to sort out with my guild right now to manage this on top of my playtime and workload IRL.
What can I say? There's no point in writing about how to be a good recruiter, or raid officer, or whatever if you're not actually going to follow through with it in your own guild.
So! Thank you all for reading, and see you around the intarwebs!
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Roxi's 10min Disc Priest Cookbook
Because there aren't enough guides on the internet, and I'm sure by now I've established myself as That Chick You Really Shouldn't Listen To... I give you Roxi's Ten Minute Disc Priest Cookbook: Pandalicious Edition. (Actually, I'm stuck at work and bored out of my gourd, but don't have enough time to figure out something more useful. Bwahaha.)
- Step One: Buy one of those really big bottles of Malibu coconut rum, and a case of diet cherry Dr.Pepper. You may also need a giant-sized novelty coffee mug, preferably one that says "Rogues do it from behind" or "Alchemist's Flask" or something. Anything but a mug with kittens on it, really. You're learning to play the Roxi way. Embrace it.
- Step Two: Log into World of Warcraft and roll a priest! Before Mists of Pandaria, you were required to do a careful survey of boobies and booties to figure out what suited your tastes now, but the expansion streamlined things a lot. Roll a female Pandaren priest, and name her something Roxilicious. Just don't use Roxina, because that's MINE dammit. Some of my favorite Roxi variants have been Roxtoberfest, Roxiloxi, and Chatterbrox. (The last one was a stretch, but I literally just used her to harass people in general channels.)
- Step Three: Fill your mug! I recommend mixing at 2:1 soda:rum or 1:1, but your mileage may vary. DO NOT USE ICE. Ice dilutes the drink and is for pussies. If you can't drink it before it gets warm, DRINK FASTER. Got a problem with that? Roll resto shammy and spam chain heal. GG.
- Step Four: Level! 1-15 is for getting drunk. 15-85 is for being drunk and pugging as a healer. Or DPS. You're running up as Disc after all, so you're going to be able to pace shadow priests at least into your seventies, these days. "But Roooxiiii!" you whine. "How do I spec?" Hold on a moment.
- 4A - Smack yourself. Disc talents aren't hard these days. The game basically does all the work for you. All you have to do is pick some flavor abilities and your glyphs. Levelling, you'll want reflective shield, smite, and either holy fire or holy nova. Capped out, you'll want smite, penance, and power word:shield. Minors are garbage. As long as you have the levitate glyph, you can put shadow glyphs in the rest and no one will care. Seriously. I think I have shadow ravens and the alternate shadow form on my disc spec. Our minors are THAT bad. As far as talents go... The ones that really matter are Mindthingy that improves your shadowfiend, Power Infusion, and your level 90. The others are all really about which oshit buttons favor you best, or how little you PvP. I grabbed tentacles, feathers, and the omgwtf bubble that has saved my ass a lot. YMMV. (And yes, my level 90 is Cascade. No, I don't like it. Yes, I'm too lazy to spec out of it for Halo.)
- Step Five: Download add-ons! This is actually kind of meant to be done at the beginning, but...yeah. Healing without addons is a pain in the ass. I run with a pretty minimalist addon set- Quartz castbar, Xperl unit frames, Bartender, Decursive, Tidy Plates/Threat Plates, and Auctionator. I have function keys, and I use them. Click-to-heal on things like Grid and Healbot make people lazy.
- Step Six: Refill your mug. If it's not empty yet...you are doing it wrong.
- Step Seven: Pick up tradeskills! For the love of god don't do Alchemy. I am an alchemist/herbalist. It is bad. Blizz has given us no reason to be on main characters. In MoP, go Herbalism/Inscriptions. The haste buff from lifewhateverthefuck can be alternated with power infusion so that every time you drop a squiddy (shadowfiend) he's getting more attacks in and you're getting more mana back. Inscriptions gets you a really nice staff or offhand, shoulder enchants, and darkmoon cards. This early in the expansion, crafting epics are actually worth having, so...yeah.
- Step Eight: Pick up a second spec! Because...you know... It's not like dual spec is 1k any more. You may as well. Go holy if you really feel the need to be a pansy prissypants vagina-spawner, and shadow if you like mudkips. Not that shadow ravens actually look like mudkips, but they SHOULD look like mudkips, and i herd u liek them. Yeah... moving on.
- Step Nine: Read someone else's guide to figure out how to actually play your class. In general, pw:s and prayer of mending on incoming, both on CD after that. Penance as much damage as you can. When you're not needing to direct heal, holy fire, smite smite smite smite smite, HOLY FIRE, smite smite smite. I usually hit power infusion/shadow fiend when I hit 80% mana, and keep him on cooldown after that. For 90% of everything outside of raids, atonement will carry your ass through everything. If you're taking groupwide damage, prayer of healing. If you have big incoming damage, hit spirit shell, then prayer of healing, then stack some shields on your tank. If you're getting bored and just want to nuke, spirit shell, hit the tank with penance and then a greater heal, then smite your li'l arse off. The CD on spirit shell is short enough that i'm pretty liberal with it.
- Step Ten: Stop in the middle of a pull and ask your group why the rum is gone. Wipe. Be told you're a terrible person. Blame it on me. Profit!
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Mists of Pandaria - First Impressions
I heard you like pandas. I know I like pandas. A lot. And not just because I look like a Pandaren irl. (Minus, you know, the fur. Because that would be weird.) Mists of Pandaria launched a week ago today, and as evidenced by the total lack of blog posts and streaming... I've been more than a little obsessed with it.
MoP introduced an entire new continent with something like five adventuring zones, a shiny new I Can't Believe It's Not Dalaran city, a shitload of new factions, gear, instances, these new scenario things... Oh. And World of Farmvillecraft. Because killing dragons wasn't enough, now we also need to make friends, grow random shit, and decorate our farms. And I do mean need, because unless you want to pay a ton of gold for your cooking ingredients, farming is just about the only way to get what you need for making food. In short: there's a LOT to do, and in seven days of playing stupid amounts of hours, I've only begun to scratch the surface.
Now. To catch up those of you who weren't my single sad mystery viewer on launch day, I'm playing my disc priest as my main right now. The week's guild drama may change that on me again, but for now I'm a priest. I went 85-90 as disc, and given the chance...I'd do it the same way all over again. It was slow, but safe- a lot like levelling as prot, which is how I plan to run my warrior up. Spent the week in the same room as an arms warrior and a holy priest running up as shadow, and from the sound of things... I definitely had the easiest time with the quests. MoP mobs are more or less tailored to people in LFR gear or better, so if you're dragging up a toon with less than probably 380 ilvl, you're going to be in for some pain and frustration. (Hell, my priest was 396 when I started her out, and by about level 88 she was getting her taint punched in.)
The quests are fun. Lots of fun. Most of them amount to Go Kill Ten Monkeys and Click On Fifteen Piles of Poop, but between the mobs yelling shit at you like "I'm gonna ook you in the dooker" and using abilities like "hit you harder"... I felt pretty well engaged. I loremastered the first four zones before I hit 90, which was just enough to meet the Pandarian Night's Watch (seriously, if you listen to the Shado Pan guys... We are the watchers on the wall? HELLO! GRR Martin called and he wants his money) , the Farmville people, and the fishermanz. Oh, and Hemmet Nessingwary. Because he's everywhere innocent critters need mass murdered. I have yet to find this expansion's answer to the Ring of Blood/Crucible of Carnage, but I'm sure it's somewhere in the Dreadwastes or something.
The crafting is easy. I was a bit perturbed when I discovered that every last one of my goddamned alch recipes is a disco after the heal pots you train at 525, but they've massively upped the disco rate since Burning Crusade. I had all of my recipes by 600, minus any reusables or the epic alchemist stone, which I'm starting to think are a myth. There are flowers literally everywhere, excepting Golden Lotus, which is nowhere and yet needed for every single flask or gem transmute ever. Now, you CAN trade your spirits of harmony (the asshole primal thingies this time around, which are BoP and you might have ten of by the time you hit 90) for three golden lotus, but... You can also use them to bypass your 24h cooldown on your living steel transmute. (Remember Truegold? Yeahhhhhh....) With herbs and ore being ridiculously common and beasts being everywhere, I've yet to hear of anyone having issues with the primary tradeskills. The secondaries, on the other hand...
Hooooly crap, did they turn cooking into a chore. There are now six different "ways" of cooking, and each levels independently of the others. Each way represents a stat, except Way of the Brew, which...hell if I know. It's there. It's booze? I haven't looked at it too much. Each Way takes different ingredients, from meats to fish to vegetables, as well as "fuel items" (if you've played EQ2 and crafted, you'll know what I mean by that) that are purchased with cooking tokens. I'm currently stalled right the hell out at 595 in Way of the Oven because you have no option but to make feasts to progress through each Way, and they take a fucklot of mats. The meats and the fish aren't so bad, but having to come up with 50 vegetables, when you're lucky to harvest twenty in a day before you've upgraded your farm (which you can only do with faction) is a royal pain.
Yeah. Love the idea Blizz, but if I wanted to play Farmville or Harvest Moon, I'd play those games. I don't want to play Warcraftville on three different characters to be able to feed my raid every week. (And yes, you need to max all six Ways to get the recipe for the raid feast for this expansion. Lame-o.)
And then there's fishing. You would think that fishing wouldn't be too bad, especially with the guild perk that makes you get more frequent skill-ups, but... Yeahno. I'm sitting at 560 if I'm lucky, and I've done a LOT of fishing for my tradeskill crap. Archaeology's a lot easier, and marginally more interesting because now you have a random chance to spawn mobs that drop Yay More Fragments. I've yet to get anything good from them, but...not complaining.
Anyway. On the whole so far, I'm loving MoP. I only just got my ilvl high enough to queue for heroics, so hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get a good write-up done of those, the new scenarios, and my baby mistweaver.
MoP introduced an entire new continent with something like five adventuring zones, a shiny new I Can't Believe It's Not Dalaran city, a shitload of new factions, gear, instances, these new scenario things... Oh. And World of Farmvillecraft. Because killing dragons wasn't enough, now we also need to make friends, grow random shit, and decorate our farms. And I do mean need, because unless you want to pay a ton of gold for your cooking ingredients, farming is just about the only way to get what you need for making food. In short: there's a LOT to do, and in seven days of playing stupid amounts of hours, I've only begun to scratch the surface.
Now. To catch up those of you who weren't my single sad mystery viewer on launch day, I'm playing my disc priest as my main right now. The week's guild drama may change that on me again, but for now I'm a priest. I went 85-90 as disc, and given the chance...I'd do it the same way all over again. It was slow, but safe- a lot like levelling as prot, which is how I plan to run my warrior up. Spent the week in the same room as an arms warrior and a holy priest running up as shadow, and from the sound of things... I definitely had the easiest time with the quests. MoP mobs are more or less tailored to people in LFR gear or better, so if you're dragging up a toon with less than probably 380 ilvl, you're going to be in for some pain and frustration. (Hell, my priest was 396 when I started her out, and by about level 88 she was getting her taint punched in.)
The quests are fun. Lots of fun. Most of them amount to Go Kill Ten Monkeys and Click On Fifteen Piles of Poop, but between the mobs yelling shit at you like "I'm gonna ook you in the dooker" and using abilities like "hit you harder"... I felt pretty well engaged. I loremastered the first four zones before I hit 90, which was just enough to meet the Pandarian Night's Watch (seriously, if you listen to the Shado Pan guys... We are the watchers on the wall? HELLO! GRR Martin called and he wants his money) , the Farmville people, and the fishermanz. Oh, and Hemmet Nessingwary. Because he's everywhere innocent critters need mass murdered. I have yet to find this expansion's answer to the Ring of Blood/Crucible of Carnage, but I'm sure it's somewhere in the Dreadwastes or something.
The crafting is easy. I was a bit perturbed when I discovered that every last one of my goddamned alch recipes is a disco after the heal pots you train at 525, but they've massively upped the disco rate since Burning Crusade. I had all of my recipes by 600, minus any reusables or the epic alchemist stone, which I'm starting to think are a myth. There are flowers literally everywhere, excepting Golden Lotus, which is nowhere and yet needed for every single flask or gem transmute ever. Now, you CAN trade your spirits of harmony (the asshole primal thingies this time around, which are BoP and you might have ten of by the time you hit 90) for three golden lotus, but... You can also use them to bypass your 24h cooldown on your living steel transmute. (Remember Truegold? Yeahhhhhh....) With herbs and ore being ridiculously common and beasts being everywhere, I've yet to hear of anyone having issues with the primary tradeskills. The secondaries, on the other hand...
Hooooly crap, did they turn cooking into a chore. There are now six different "ways" of cooking, and each levels independently of the others. Each way represents a stat, except Way of the Brew, which...hell if I know. It's there. It's booze? I haven't looked at it too much. Each Way takes different ingredients, from meats to fish to vegetables, as well as "fuel items" (if you've played EQ2 and crafted, you'll know what I mean by that) that are purchased with cooking tokens. I'm currently stalled right the hell out at 595 in Way of the Oven because you have no option but to make feasts to progress through each Way, and they take a fucklot of mats. The meats and the fish aren't so bad, but having to come up with 50 vegetables, when you're lucky to harvest twenty in a day before you've upgraded your farm (which you can only do with faction) is a royal pain.
Yeah. Love the idea Blizz, but if I wanted to play Farmville or Harvest Moon, I'd play those games. I don't want to play Warcraftville on three different characters to be able to feed my raid every week. (And yes, you need to max all six Ways to get the recipe for the raid feast for this expansion. Lame-o.)
And then there's fishing. You would think that fishing wouldn't be too bad, especially with the guild perk that makes you get more frequent skill-ups, but... Yeahno. I'm sitting at 560 if I'm lucky, and I've done a LOT of fishing for my tradeskill crap. Archaeology's a lot easier, and marginally more interesting because now you have a random chance to spawn mobs that drop Yay More Fragments. I've yet to get anything good from them, but...not complaining.
Anyway. On the whole so far, I'm loving MoP. I only just got my ilvl high enough to queue for heroics, so hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get a good write-up done of those, the new scenarios, and my baby mistweaver.
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