Bash My Face In

For the past days, an hour each morning, I’ve been chain farming Ahune, The Frost Lord in an attempt to get the Icebound Cloak. It’s the best tanking cloak outside of raiding, which I don’t really have time to do. I currently have the Platinum Mesh Cloak, so this would be quite an upgrade. Unfortunately, since there’s a shortage of tanks, Blizzard decided it would be a great idea to lower the drop rate of the Icebound Cloak in order to keep tanks queuing for the boss.

I understand where they’re coming from, but it’s a low blow by Blizzard, I think stormforce1234 sums it up best:

Come to think of it this is a brilliant move by Blizzard…towards the end of xpacs tanks tend to be hard to come by and what better way to ensure that there are fast queues for the daily runners than to place a carrot on stick in front of the proverbial horse tank

Thank you Blizzard for mistreating a class that is already overworked, underappreciated and often verbally abused for bad runs beyond their control.

Yep.  Good ol’ Butterbean invading Sarama’s blog to give a shout out at you guys and let yall know who I am real quick.

I’m a Warrior from the Rexxar realm on alliance.  Currently I’m in the 2nd ranked Alliance guild for raid progression on Rexxar.  I have known Sarama for years, and he was even nice enough to give me my own blog for my own madness to be unleashed there.  He gave me permission to write on his blog here as a guest poster since he is very active in work and real life stuff and I’m…well, I’m unemployed and have nothing better to do! *insert cheesy grin and two thumbs up here*  I’ve currently got about six level 80 toons that I hop between here and there, but my main is currently my warrior, which I am currently mainspec fury with an arms offspec for pvp, however, i change that back and forth to prot here and there, so I still have some tanking glyphs in there because I’m about how Sarama once was and very financially unstable in-game (only, I have 2 epic flyers on two of my toons, so take that, Sarama!)

So yeah, enough about me.  I suppose you want some sort of content, so since I’m mostly a raider, figured I’d give you guys my views on the new raid instance, Ruby Sanctum.

Ruby Sanctum is actually very similar to Obsidian Sanctum, only you have to kill the minibosses before you can challenge Halion.  There is no Halion +3 or anything.  Thats what you have the Heroic switch for.  The minibosses in here are fairly tank and spank with their own little twists that add some minor challenge.  You have one that summons mirror images of himself, you have another that has an air phase where you have to stay away from the people with arrows over their head, and then you have another than summons adds that should most definately be killed swiftly and interupt their casts (rogues, deathknights and warriors come in handy there with their interupts).  The minibosses are simple, but interesting, and that is always nice.

Halion himself is actually the ball-buster here, as you would expect.  He is a boss with 3 phases (as you come to expect anymore) and each phase has its own little twist.  In each phase, you have a mark to deal with which, when cleansed, will leave a circle of fire (or shadow) on the ground that has a radius dependant on how long you had the debuff.  In phase one, he has a meteor that comes down and sends a trail of fire across the combat area that you have to avoid, and in heroic mode, it summons a fire elemental add that must be AoEd down on top of halion.  In phase two, there are orbs that float around and will periodicaly create a beam between the two that will one shot anyone if it touches you.  In normal mode, there are 2 orbs, and in hard mode, there are 4, which makes it form a cross rather than just one straight line.  In phase, three, you have one group of people in his physical realm and another in his twilight realm, basically dealing with phase one and two all at the same time, only each group has to keep him at roughly the same amount of life or he starts healing and doing more damage, and it just gets ugly and causes a wipe.  In all, it is a relatively simple fight once you learn the mechanics and adjust accordingly, and it is also pretty fun to do and you get some nice 277 (or 271…cant remember) loot out of it, so I would suggest giving it a go.

At any rate, I’ll be back sometime and give ya’ll some more stuff to read, maybe some laughs, who knows.  And if you are interested in learning this fight, I also have a detailed fight explaination on my blog (It’s not a Bean), that Sarama has posted a link to on the side of his page, so check it out if the information I gave you here feels a little vague to you.  I can imagine in a few weeks to a month this will be completely pugable, so to all the raiders or part-time raiders, start educating people, and I’m out.

I had a week of vacation this past week, and I decided to use it to do some PvP. I ground around 300k honor and bought all the PvP gear I could, ending the week with 1003 resilience. You can check out my armory to see all my gear. It took a bit of calculating, but I figured out how I could get exactly to the hit cap with the gear I had and the PvP gear I was getting.

I now have 4/5 furious gladiator gear, which I purchased mostly with honor, but bought the gloves with triumph badges. I created an arena team with a guild mate just to get points. The first character he had on the team was a mage which had some level 70 resilience gear, but he brought his hunter to the team after we got owned a couple of times and we actually won a few games. Since I’m on an arena team now I should be able to start replacing the furious gear with some relentless and possibly some wrathful gear, depending on how high the arena team’s rating gets. For now, though I’ll just focus on getting the relentless helm which will make me feel more comfortable with my resilience level.

PvP is really fun, I’m glad I decided to spend my time doing that instead of the usual tanking of random raids or random heroics.

In response to a comment I received awhile back, I’ve been trying to really keep up with which items are flipping well for me on the Auction House.  I have to say, so far the best item I’ve gotten to flip has been the Flurry Axe.  Since I’ve started flipping items on the AH, I’ve purchased 5 of these between 100-150 gold.  I’ve been able to sell all of them within 3-4 days for 350-450 gold a piece. That’s quite a return on investment.

Has anyone else noticed Flurry Axes being an especially successful flipping item? What items are other people flipping out there?

There’s a lot of talk about the gold cap in World of Warcraft. Currently, you can not have more than 214,748g 36s 47c. Since making gold is like a mini-game within the game, hitting the gold cap is a good way to measure “beating” this mini-game.

I’ve heard the reason there’s a gold cap is a “programming thing”. Yes, it is, but why? Let me explain that to you.

When you’re creating a program, each variable you have has a data type. In this case, the amount of gold you have, is an integer. An integer is limited to numbers between -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. It’s limited to these numbers because an integer is stored as 4 bytes. Since each byte has 8 bits each, you’re limited to 2^(8×4)-1. We have to subtract 1 here because 1 bit is used to determine the sign of the number (whether it’s positive of negative).

One way Blizzard could raise the gold cap, would be to use an unsigned integer, since it’s impossible to have a negative amount of gold, the extra bit to determine the sign of the number is simply a waste.  Utilizing this extra bit would raise the gold cap to 429,496g 72s 95c.  While this is still limiting, it would be the easiest change for Blizzard to make without having to increase the size of their databases.

When I first got into World of Warcraft, the whole aspect of modifying the user interface was amazing to me; it gave me yet another thing to do besides questing, leveling, and battlegrounds.

There was quite awhile where I quit caring about what my interface looked like, I have a job, and my play time was limited to about an hour a day.  Why waste that time setting up a interface?  I think that my default interface was actually preventing me from playing my best.  I was a clicker, my frames were too big, so I couldn’t see stuff… I wanted to make a change.  I was listening to The Instance podcast at work, and they mentioned a compilation that someone had put together called CoehlUI.  I downloaded it and setup was very quick and easy.  So now, my interface looks pretty.

What does your interface look like?

For the majority of my time playing World of Warcraft I’ve been dirt poor. I don’t have an epic flying mount on any character, I struggled to get any of the best enchants and gems, and never really had any “spare” gold.

Recently I’ve been playing the Auction House and I’ve been doing fairly well to say the least. I started with about 150 gold on my bank character and after a few of months I’m now up to about 7,000 gold. In addition to this gold, I’ve also been gemming and enchanting any new gear as I get it, which isn’t taken into account in these numbers.

Once I reach 10,000 gold I think I’m going to finally buy epic flying on my warrior.  I think I’m the last person in World of Warcraft to not have this.

I’ve been doing this, mainly by just flipping things on the Auction House.  I use auctioneer to find something priced very cheap compared to the market value, and if I think I’ll be able to sell it for the market value, I’ll purchase it and try to make some quick gold.

I don’t consider myself to be a “master” at auction house, however I think this is something that I would like to talk about on a regular basis, so I’m going to start a series of posts dedicated to discussing making gold in World of Warcraft.  They won’t all come out in a row, and I don’t know how many of them there will be.  I know there are plenty of sites, guides (free/paid), etc about this topic, so I don’t want to dedicate this site to only that, but it is something that I’d like to talk about.

What do you guys think?  Has this horse already been beaten enough or does it actually sound interesting?

With the new cross-realm looking for dungeon feature that has been released with the latest patch (3.3 Fall of the Lich King) I have been running heroic dungeons quite often on my warrior, instant queues are amazing. However, this post is about something that happened while I was playing my shaman.

The other day I was running maraudon orange crystals and I was grouped with a human warrior that was to be our tank. Now, it was quite obvious that he didn’t know much about the game, and admitted that this was one of his first dungeons. I don’t know what came over me, but instead of being nice and trying to teach him how to play properly, I started to flame him made some comments about him in party chat. While it wasn’t the WORST group I’ve ever been in, I did say that it was… multiple times.

After a few of my comments about how horrible this player was, another party member stood up for him and told me to leave him alone, it’s not his fault that he’s new and that it’s much better he makes the mistakes now instead of while he’s tanking for me in Icecrown Citidel. After hearing this, I realized what a total douche I had been and offered my advice to the warrior (for example: equip a shield, change to defensive stance, use sunder armor to gain threat, taunt when the mob stops attacking you and starts attacking me).

I won’t ever be like that in a party again, it doesn’t accomplish anything positive and may have made that tank think twice before queuing for another dungeon, pushing my queue time out another 10 minutes.

So, I hope to make up for my ways in that party and help out any new players that I come across. I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone reading this, but I hope everyone also does the same.

I’ve been doing a lot of raiding lately.  In fact, this week I had every raid instance saved.  Naxxramas 10/25, Ulduar 10/25, Obsidian Sanctum 10/25, Vault of Archivon 10/25, and Onyxia’s Lair 10/25.  I guess that’s not all of them, I didn’t manage to find a group for Eye of Eternity.  For some reason, nobody ever wants to do that instance.  Is it hard or boring?  Is the loot pointless?  I’ve seen videos of the fight on youtube and I thought it looks like a fun fight.

I forgot to take a lot of screenshots, but I did manage to take a couple.  Here are some shots of Onyxia and Sartharion’s dead bodies.  I did get into the raid as DPS, but that’s mainly because there were better geared tanks in the raid.

Here’s a nice screenshot I found.  When I first started playing, I couldn’t believe how big the world was.  I was completely speechless.  I couldn’t believe this game had been around for almost a year before I heard anything about it.  I guess that’s what I get for being a geek and not leaving my Linux IRC channels.

Here’s a screenshot of the group after we defeated Amnennar the Coldbringer in Razorfen Downs.

Here’s what I look like after several months of raiding.  Mish’undare, Circlet of the Mind Flayer and Doomcaller’s Mantle are the only pieces of gear that I can make out (ok, I just wanted to make sure the wowhead powered tooltips were working).  I took this screenshot for a presentation I was giving for my speech class about how World of Warcraft had taken over my life.  As you can see in the screenshot, I have 88+ days played.  This was about a year after I began playing World of Warcraft, and if you check out my gold amount on the titan bar on top, I’m still broke as a joke.