Spark from Tzia

I'll have to post a shot when I'm actually in a Raid, but here's a 'light' version of my in-game UI. Obviously I don't run around with my bag open all the time so that's never in the way when I'm fighting. I'll update this post then, and have some details about the addons that I have.

So.... Midsummer Festival

It's been about a month since my last post...... again. Nothing too big to report. it's still summer time and people are hit and miss on being in game, especially me. Camping, working, hanging out with friends, and in general enjoying the wonderful weather.

Though I did transfer my Alliance Druid from Uther to Bronzebeard and have it almost lvl 48. I log in at least once a day to get my Red Battle-Bot Fuel, but that may be the extent of my activities.

What of the Midsummer Flame Festival you ask? Sunday, June 21st when it began, the Lazer Turkey was crowned "The Flame Keeper", and I was done. I got my title, I got my vendor pet, and called it good.

Summer time

So, 1 to keep Tzia from hounding me when she returns from her honeymoon (4 years late)/vacation in New Zealand, I shall take a slight initiative roll (Natural 20. YES!) and make a post before her return.


So it's summer, people are going on haiatus, vacations, breaks, or whatnot. Shadow Templar has slowed down it's raids to compensate. I discovered that my 'ol man's alliance guild on Bronzebeard is having some issues in Naxx-10. Now to give them their dues, none of them had ever stepped foot in Naxx before and their first boss fight was Anub'Rekhan. That isn't a very nice boss to step into and suddenly have a Locust Swarm go off on the raid and not know what to do with it or how to handle it.

My very first toon was a Night Elf Druid on Uther. What I'm going to do now it level it up from 43 (45 now) and transfer it to Bronzebeard to better help them learn the raiding ropes, considering I'm a Raid Leader, and Guild Officer in ST on Deathwing. Additionally, my Boomkin has been having Feral thoughts, so I figured I may as well quell those tendancies by using this lower level Druid to tinker with Feral....... and I'm LIKING it!! Still have a lot to learn about the Cat DPS, and the Bear Tanking, but for all intents and purposes of leveling, it suits me well. Especially since low level caster takes so much time for mana regen and everything. I really do think having a 80 OP Boomkin has really spoiled me for the caster part. So the speed of Feral is suiting me well.

Lucien Millevoye

So, I got suckered into this one by Tzia... I just had to go read her latest post, only to find out she tagged me for on of those goofy album cover thingies. Curse you tricksy woman!

So, without further adieu!





If you're curious to how this works:
Instructions:
1 - Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More” or click here.
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to “Random quotations” or click here.
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click here.
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Credit: Kelly Burnham for the photo

And now for the rest of the info about my album:

Lucien Millevoye (1 August 1850 - 25 March 1918) was a French journalist and right-wing politician, now best known for his relationship with the Irish revolutionary, and muse of W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

P. G. Wodehouse (1881 - 1975)

It has been brought to my attention.....

That I haven't posted in *now* over a month. Thank you Tzia for pointing out that painful little fact.

So, They nerfed Ulduar a 'little' bit. Or we just became better raiders by getting Naxx-25 on a more readily farm status, but we dropped Flame Laviathan on our second shot, dropped Razorscale on our second, or third, attempt. We dropped Xt-Deconstructor on our 2nd shot after the enrage timer expired, but he never enraged(?) Then we got the guy with the face and arms after about 17 tries. So he was a learning experience for us and we all had a pleasant time about it.

Guid drama is about as much as Guild drama is. Had some people getting burned out /gquit this morning, and other such stuff. So I tried to pick up the Naxx-10 one of them was leading.

That flopped, so a little bit later I picked it up as a hand picked 8-man attempt. The only wings that were left were Plague and Military. Plague was a breeze. I solo healed from the first pull to Heigan. Then had one of the priests swap to healing to help with Heigan so they could cleanse and help heal... Should have just let them heal while I DPS'd. Ran through the gauntlet to Loatheb without a death, then had the priest solo heal Loatheb while we had me and 2 mages drop 4k dps on that sucker and we missed our 10man record by 10 seconds!! I only dropped in DPS (1st to 3rd) because I had to Tranq my group for one of the last heal windows of the fight.

Then we went and had the tanks learn the Razzy fight. Beginning of the wing and the first boss attempt I solo heald again. Boss fight wasn't so bad, just the tanks didn't know what they were doing so as we were wiping, I was about to run out of mana. 2nd attempt the priest swapped back to heals to heal the Understudies while I raid healed. Tank lost control of the Understudy and Razzy started eating faces. 3rd & 4th attempt the Shaman healed while I DPS'd. had one understudy get loose, then had one die and the shaman couldn't quite keep up on heals so we ended up wiping. One of the mages had to leave so we called it there, getting 3 bosses with 8 people in the raid.

Working on Achievments!!

So, I'm hosting 25 Mans now.

Yup, that's right. As a Raid Officer of Shadow Templar, we are now hosting 25 man raids. Last week (our very first) we hosted a rough 25 man Naxxramas. It wsa very rough as in one night we cleared 3 wings. The next run we cleared one, the next run we downed Sapph, then the next day we downed KT. So we successfully cleared Naxx-25, but it took nearly a week, and all weekend.

We stepped back, did a lessons learned review, then have given it another shot this week. Tuesday we cleared 2 wings. TOnight we plan on clearing the other 2 wings and going after Sapph, and hopefully KT. We seemed to develop a good reputation last week because this week we had a vast amount of people from last week wanting back in. Probably doesn't help that we had about 50+ people saved to our raid because we were constantly changing people out. I think this week we're only up to 32 or so, thus far.

But for the run this week, we had 4 priests in the group for starters, so we took advantage of this fact and took on Military quarter first. We had out big snag on Horsemen, but dropped them and handed out teh phatty lewtz. Then we went and cleared out Plague. *hums* "if you can't dance, if you can't dance" by Spice Girls. ** Loatheb was a chump. Dropped him super fast, and with the entire raid still standing (well done to the healers). Now we hope to have that feral Druid back so we can go take care of Patchwerk. ^_^


Which leads me up to last night. We hosted a OS-25 +1. it too kus a couple tries, but damned it all, we dropped Sartharion and Tenebron. Woot! Achievment points! lawlz.

Tzia started it......

So, Tzia started it, I had to post mine.

This is for my one and only true character. The Tauren Lazer Turkey, Daemetos.

He was started back in May of 2007 (holy crap, I remember that far back). So, I honestly should have more time on him, but there are several factors to bring into consideration here. Firstly, I was in the military, so with always travelling, and deployments and such there were periods where I could go for weeks without playing (Jan-Mar '08, for example). Then, I was newly married in June of '07, so there was time and distraction to be had there. Then of course, there was just the generalized boredom and pissed-offness at some of the nerfbat beating Druids got around Lich King, and then after the 4 day power playing session upon launch of Wrath.

WE DID IT!!

As of tonight Shadow Templar has FULL CLEARED NAXXRAMAS!!! We have our key to start Malygos. But more importantly, in an EPIC finish Kel'Thazud dropped to the overwhelming pwnage that was brought down upon him.

And then the after party as we pose on Kel'Thazud's throne!

Tanks on the arms, Healz on the seat, and Deepz around the bottom.

So, it's update time.

It's been a couple weeks now, so I figure it's time to do some updateage.

Things in the SHadow Templar are going REALLY good right now. I was promoted up to Raid Officer. We officially have Plague and Spider Quarters on farm status. And in a momentous turn of events, Thursday night we (Vlex and I) decided to let everyone smash their face on Patchwerk a couple times before going to do OS-10 and then calling it a night......... We downed Patches in the guild's VERY FIRST ATTEMPT!! Honestly, neither of us as raid leaders expected to 1-shot Patches, we made it through Frogger and on to Grobbulous, had 3 wipes then got him on the 4th attempt. Then moved on to Gluth. Put in 1 attempt there then called it a night on a really high note.

This weekend, I ran a PuG Maly-10. We downed Malygos after 4 attempts and 'lo! I got [Footsteps of Malygos] So I think it has been a good week for me.

I'm still doing some work on the new forums for the Guild. Eo and Vlex are liking the calendar system there, and I think they like the Rapid Raid plug-in too. (But I'm not sure)

So, I'm working on a side-project

http://shadowtemplar.guildlaunch.com

If you're a friend of the guild, on Deathwing then feel free to apply. These aren't officially in use yet, so there's no activity but It's always best to be ahead of the game.

*SQUEE* FINALLY!!!!

IT FINALLY DROPPED!!! 2-1/2 WEEKS OF FARMING HEROIC NEXUS AND IT DROPPED!!!


Now to get that bad boy enchanted with the +63 Spell Power enchant, that's valued at about 1.3-2k gold. ugh.

Getting into the Raid of things

So, my guild has finally started getting back into the swing of raiding. We hosted a 1/2 pug Vault and OS tonight.

Yours truly got their T6.5 glove token from OS-10, and then screwed it up by not paying attention and picked up the Balance gloves instead... after a couple minutes of cursing, I put in a GM Ticket for it and get the "High ticket receipt" bs message... or more appropriately, "We're just sitting on our rear ends, not answering tickets, so there are many that we're ignoring" a few hours later I get a response and my ticket was "Escalated" and remained so for over 5-1/2 hours. and when I logged off at 2:30am it was still "Escalated". So I may look into it before work and hope they've done something. Maybe by the time I get home from work, they'll have it taken care of.

But anyways, We then ran a 9/10 guild run of Naxx-10 (Spider wing) and ran into some confusion on the first boss. Things were 'discussed' and we decided that before we save someone to the raid, that we'd call it until a later time to allow for better research to be done.

Sportin' the Wood: Tales of the petrified Chicken

So yes, it has been officiated. The Super Lazer Chicken is once again getting in touch with his roots, quite literally. I have said it before, and I shall reiterate it once more. From lvl 10-60 I was always known as Dae the Healer. Once I hit Outlands and ran headfirst into a brick wall with the mobs outside Thrallmar, and the lack of being able to solo one without popping a potion and using innervate to have mana for a single fight I turned tail, screaming all the way to Thunderbluff and gave the fabled Balance spec a whirl. Finding it much easier, and only needing to drink once every 4 fights, I was set to being a Boomer. I learned much as the DPS, and became good at what I did. Right before the launch of Wrath, I respecced Resto to give it a whirl in the sub-par gear I had been collecting for a Resto set. I quickly discovered that I was a tad rusty, but I didn't care because the following day we were all given free respecs upon release of the Pre-Wrath patch which unveiled our new talent trees. So I returned once again to Boomage and resumed my title of Uber Boomer of Pwnage.

All through Wrath I continued to uphold my title by doing DPS where ever I could. Upon the moment of dinging 80, armed with Spellpower instead of "Bonus Damage/Bonus Healing" I was asked to try to heal a Heroic Ahn'kahet (AK/OK) The first boss was very problematic, but it was a learning experience for me again, and I held the lesson close. I also learned that healing had returned to me quite naturally, though I was still slightly rusty. Over the couple weeks I have/had surpassed the Holy Paladin of my new guild. I am currently sporting a 1555 SP Woody with a 14/0/57 Resto Spec.

I do consider this a fairly cookie cutter spec for any serious Resto Druid/Raid healer. Additionally, stacking gear with Haste/Crit/SP is important. Also along with acquiring Glyph of Healing Touch I currently can spam Healing Touch faster than a Priest/Paladin can spam Flash Heal / Flash of Light, at .9 sec. The only issue I have come to realize with this is that if you're not careful, and watching your GCD, having a lightning fast Healing Touch isn't useful. I have found myself many times trying to cast as fast as the spell cast and not regarding the GCD of 1 sec, and getting the "I cannot cast that yet" error speech.