A Long Strange Trip up The Mountain O’ Mounts

Around three years ago, Blizzard introduced the achievement system into World of Warcraft.  Yeah, it really has been that long.  What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been stood out from the rest for two reasons, first it was the only way any of us could be guaranteed to get our hands on a 310% speed mount.  Not everyone’s going to place in an Arena season (or would even want to).  Not everyone has access to a raid group capable of doing the heroic raid achievements while they’re still current content.  Everyone. however, had a shot at completing the Long, Strange Trip.

The other reason it stood out from the crowd was that it was going to take a year, minimum, to complete it.  This was the daddy of all meta-achievements, and so naturally I set about completing it.  My employer had other ideas, however.  That year and the year after I got packed off, first to the Falklands, then to South America each summer, making it impossible to complete the Summer Festival achievements.

But this year was different!  Behold, and tremble before my mad leet obsessive compulsive achievement farming skillz!

So I finally got this:

And so to celebrate I treated myself to another pointless mount from those nice Sons of Hodir chaps.

Which led to this:

And this!

Now all I need is someone to write some sort of addon that allows me to ride more than one mount at once, so I can feel like I’m at least getting my money’s worth!

Stuff That Winds Me Up.

Selfish dps.  That’s what I hate.  Prima donnas whos’ obsession at dominating the damage meters comes at the expense of everything else, including…  you know… killing the boss?  Yes, we know the boss is the one with all the dps-boosting debuffs on him, but if you don’t switch targets and kill those adds, you’re wiping the raid, fucknuts!

The Weekly Raid Quest this week on Hellscream was Lord Jarraxxus in Trial of the Crusader.  Since he’s the second boss, you have to defeat The Beasts of Northrend to get to him.  I’ve seen so much failboating in that instance this week it stopped being funny, oh, around Thursday last week.  I did the weekly first on Shinano, my Tree.  Everything was going hunky-dory, the ridiculously overgeared tanks were staying up just fine thanks to the ridiculously overgeared healers and Gormok the Impalers’ health was dropping fast thanks to the ridiculously overgeared dps.  Then the Two Jormungar appear at the gate, but something wierd’s going on – I’m still having to dodge Firebombs… what the hell?  Yes, there are still two Snobolds up, fact fans.  The reason Gormok dropped like an overweight jogger with a cardiac arrest wasn’t because the dps were so good, it was because the dps were so shit, most of them ignored the snobolds and just nuked the boss, which meant we went into phase 2 with firebombs all over the arena and a healer who couldn’t cast a heal thanks to being zerged by Gerald.

It wasn’t pretty.

Then tonight The Mighty Jingles is in a Vault of Archavon 25 man PuG and…  well a picture is needed at this point.

Fourth from the top, Midds the hunter.  6080 dps, not too shabby.  That’s The Mighty One at 10, doing 4.2k dps overall, which is about where the rest of the ranged dps are sitting, considering all the target switching you have to do on Toravon, it’s nothing special but it’s about right.  Cast your eyes further down to the tooltip and you will see, however, that of that 1.19 million damage he pushed out over the course of the fight, only 60k of it was on the Frozen Orbs.  By contrast, each and every one of the other ranged dps, including the newbie hunter in the raid who did far less dps overall, did at least 180k damage to Frozen Orbs.  Special mention to Twixxy the Shadow Priest at number 3 on damage done who not only did more damage than Midds but also did 230k damage to Frozen Orbs into the bargain.

And then the level 264 Hunter pants dropped, and of course, Midds won them over the newbie hunter who was actually doing his job, as opposed to showboating on damage meters at the expense of everyone else.

Midds, and all the other selfish turds like you, die in a fire please.  Or learn to play.  But preferably die in a fire.

How The Other Half Live

It seems I owe you, my readers, an apology.  After starting work at a new posting, one where I actually have to work for a living, I’ve come to approeciate just how much of my time at my previous post was spent wasting time on the internet.  Most of it, it turns out.  I’ve also been upgrading my various characters’ gear at a frantic pace, all of which leaves precious little time to update the blog.  It’s a shocking state of affairs, I’ve neglected you all for nearly a month!

So anyway, what’s new in Calli World?  Well quite a lot actually.

Calli’s been slogging her way through Icecrown 25 man Heroic modes.  So far only Professor Putricide, Sindragosa and Old Lich Face himself elude us, although we’re making solid progress on the Professor.  Lady Deathwhisper was a barrel of laughs.  Not.  What is quite shocking is the level of difference between people geared in Icecrown 25 man heroic gear and…  well..  everyone else.  It’s one of those things that you know to be true in an abstract kind of way but until someone with that gear level joins your group and proceeds to stomp your ego into a snotty heap with their dps output, you don’t begin to realise just how massive that gear divide is.

Take the raid weekly quest for example.  This week on Hellscream it’s Anub’rekhan in Naxxrammas.  Not particularly challenging, it’s one of the easier Tier 7 content bosses, and given that most new 80’s these days are going to be sporting mostly Tier 9 gear with the odd Frost badge reward, getting him down is something of a snoozefest.  I’d downed him 9 times this week on various alts until I decided I should drag Calli along too, I can always use the badges to buy Primordial Saronite or something.

So most PuGs for the raid weekly use one tank and one or two healers, not the two tank/two or three healer combo you used to need.  And he’s usually dead in under a minute.  Well under a minute, in fact.  From start of trash pull to portal home, Anub’rekhan takes five to ten minutes these days.  Enter Calli, who is not, I should remind you, the best geared or skilled dps in our 25 man raid group.  Not by far.  We pull the boss and Calli pops her cooldowns.  Mirror Image with the four-piece Tier 10 set bonus, trinket, Arcane Power and Icy Veins all go off, Calli does fifteen thousand dps, three times the dps of the next two highest dps in the raid and the boss drops flat on his face thirty seconds later.

Seriously, three times the next highest on the damage meter.  And these guys weren’t scrubs, just your average-geared players farming badges.  Of course, being an Arcane Mage on a fight that lasts exactly thirty seconds it’s easy to shine, but come on!  The difference in damage output between a player in 10 man Tier 9 gear and 25 man heroic Tier 10 is just ridiculous.  You can begin to appreciate how worried Blizzard were getting with the unexpected extra tiers of content they had to shoehorn into the game before Icecrown was released.  Makes me slightly concerned about just how tough the Ruby Sanctum is going to be, too.  Are we talking about Sunwell levels of difficulty here?  I hope not.

“Ah Sunwell…” you all reminisce, “What a great raid that was….”   Bollocks.  It was bastard hard and an absolute nightmare to build a raid around.  Most of the fights may as well have had a sign over them saying “You must have x number of class y to enter or don’t even bother”, yes Priests on Felmyst, I’m looking at you in particular.  And all of the fights were “No mages or Holy Paladins required, but leave your paladins at the entrance in case we need rebuffs.”  So go poke yourself, Sunwell, we don’t like your kind around here.

So yes, it’s ridiculously easy to impress as a dps class, not so easy to impress as a tank or healer with equivalent gear.  Most of the weekly raids can easily be solo healed, even some of the Ulduar ones.  And as for a 264+ geared tank…  well a tank is a tank.  You either hold aggro and don’t die or you don’t.  Having 60k health or 30k health is pretty much the only difference and a decent healer in just about any level of raid gear can keep a 30k health tank up for 30 seconds.  If you can’t do it with Rejuvenation alone and have to spam Greater Heal continously, no-one cares or even notices, but fifteen thousand dps on a single target, not aoe spam?  Yeah, people notice that.  The funny thing is, that much dps isn’t out of the ordinary in ICC.  Difficult to sustain, sure, but not impossible.  It’s just when one of these Icecrown Raider dps demigods deigns to mingle with the mortals that it becomes apparent just how out of control it really is.

Speaking of absurd dps.  Shinano recently specced Laser Chicken for her offspec and got into an ICC10 PuG over the weekend.  It was a really nice little PuG, two excellent tanks in particular and we got 7 bosses down.  Shinano’s boomkin gear is pretty much just her Resto gear with some bits of 10 man heroic +hit and crit gear thrown in, not really optimised for boomkin, but she’s hitcapped now and her crit is improving.  Anyway, there’s a trash pull at the entrance to the Plague Wing where you get a couple of Plague Scientists, a couple of big nasties and a whole mess of geists.  Ready for this?  Strap yourselves in, it’s a big number.  A REALLY big number.

68,000 damage per second.

Yes you read that right.  Sixy-eight thousand.  Glyphed Starfall and Hurricane really need a nerf.

Meanwhile, The Daddies finally got Old Lich Face deaded on Friday night.  I was overjoyed, truth be told, they’ve worked so long and so hard for it, they really deserved their Kingslayer titles.  Long-term readers will know who The Daddies are, but for the benefit of everyone else, they’re our third regular 10 man raid group, composed of decent folks who don’t have the time to put in to regular raiding or for whom our normal raid times aren’t convenient, with a scattering of the alts of other raiders to help fill gaps.  The Daddies are not about heroic modes or achievements, just killing bosses at a nice comfortable pace and collecting loot.  This weekend they finally got the Defile mastered and Arthas dropped like a rotten kebab.  Askara got her Kingslayer title into the bargain, which is nice.  Loot?  Oh Tainted Twig of Nordrassil and Warmace of Menthil, both of which went to very good homes.

And last but not least, Calli got one step closer to the 100 mount achievement and got her X-53 Nether Rocket, which means Tinuviel no longer has any excuse for being late to raids again!

Cya next time!