Lest this become a wall of text that drives you batty, how's about a summary:
- AddOns stink, at least on patch day
- X-Perl is the schiz
- Crit Alert, where's my bloop????
- Attumen drops leather gloves
- Moroes dies without fuss
- Maiden looks more like Hillary every time I see her
- Romulo & Julianne die within 10 seconds of eachother
- Curator gets reprogrammed
- The Ground Shakes in Cali
- Kudos all around
If you're only skimming, try this one and this one, they might be more interesting. Who knows?
AddOns stink, at least on patch day
Wednesday night was our first Karazhan run in the 2.4 era.
That pretty much means that nobody's got their UI or their addons squared away.
Omen was the biggest issue, as the out-of-the-box Omen is a drop shaky. Gotta really play with the options configuration to get it the way you want it, versus in the past it was pretty much how everybody wanted it without much fuss. Biggest thing is that the aggro sound alert turns back on when you install the new version, so through the night as each person got their omen working, you'd hear them grumble about the silly aggro noise.
Lots of "oh man, i dont have dbm or bigwigs working". Ouch, those are pretty helpful, it'll be interesting to see how much benefit they supply for fights that're more or less on farm status. I wouldn't try Aran without them yet :-)
X-Perl is the schiz
As part of my clean sweep of AddOns with this patch, I tried replacing Perl Classic Unit Frames with X-Perl.
Love It.
Somewhat scary how impossibly many config options there are, but during the very early part of the raid, I tweaked as much as I could, and I'm loving it.
The biggest things I notice over Perl Classic:
1) Easy view window for all tanks and their targets. That's one of the key things I was looking for.
2) Nice easy to swallow view of the whole raid. .
3) Buff comparisons. Mouse-over your own well-fed buff and it'll show you a summary of all raid members who DON'T have the well-fed buff. Tsk tsk. Same goes for Fortitude and other such castable buffs.
4) Ready Check. X-Perl shows the whole raid's responses to a ready check which Perl Classic didn't provide for me.
5) Overall cleaner appearance.
One thing X-Perl does is remove the icons for any buffs or debuffs that I have on my toon from their normal position by the mini-map, and moves them over to right by my unit frame.
Will take some getting used to, but I think the added screen real estate will pay out.
Crit Alert, where's my bloop???
Kill Command is my friend. When not button mashing my shot macro, due to needing to watch my threat levels when FD is on cooldown or resisted, or when not button mashing due to needing to manually weave shots during various haste effects (rapid fire, improved aspect of the hawk) I need to know when I crit so I can invoke Kill Command.
Crit Alert bloops audibly to let me know when that happens.
Its not working, and curse.com seems to be the only site that hosts it, and curse was down at the time also.
Luckily, I have the best GF in the world and she offered to be my addon and watch the Kill Command icon and make a bloop noise anytime it activates. Love ya, babe!!
Attumen drops leather gloves
But oh well, lets roll.
Scheduled start time: 9:00
First Pull: 9:03
w00t. Everybody took it to heart that we want to move through this stuff and get to the goodies. Starting on time is clutch.
Moving through Attumen's stable, our main tank was setting a nice pace. Still room for improvement, but the only limiting factor was him marking targets and waiting for patrols to leave, never really worrying about mana issues.
Insane with nobody's Omen working though. Hardest part was that one of the tanks didn't even have an omen installed. Most pulls, no problem, just stay under the other tank. On Attumen, for part of the fight, they're tanking different guys and we need to focus on the non-omen tanked one. Crazy, but thankfully none of my FD's were resisted.
Very nice. Dead Horsie.
Drops Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation.
Nobody wants them. For me, they represent a moderate attack power and agility upgrade, at a loss of (A) some intellect, and (B) the 2-piece Beast Lord set bonus that reduces trap cooldowns by 4 seconds.
Not sure how I feel about them.
For trapping, I suppose I can keep the beast lord gloves in my bag and equip them anytime I'll be chain trapping (heroics, certain trash pulls, etc). I'm sure I'll end up forgetting to switch, so that may be problematic.
But the intellect decrease. Hmmmm?
I asked the group if they mind if I roll need, with the plans of testing them out to see if they're truely an upgrade or not.
Er'body is cool with that so w00t on new gloves.
Now to blow a nice chunk of gold on a +15agi enchant and two gems, then use them for a sustained fight like Curator and see how my numbers change. Will the attack power and crit provide more benefit than the reduced mana pool will gimp? We'll have to wait and see.
And besides, they're purple !!!!!!
Moroes dies without fuss
Pish posh. Nuttin to speak of here. Dead boss. 2 more badges for me.
Maiden looks more like Hillary every time I see her
Nuff said. 2 more badges. Great job by main tank and main repentable healer (since the Pally had Blessing of Sacrifice up, he was not repentable) proactively kiting the boss when Repentence was on the way, thus allowing the consecration to very quickly wake up a Holy Priest.
Romulo & Julianne die within 10 seconds of eachother
This one was fun!!!
We pull up to the stage. For the first time ever, we decide to NOT make somebody strip and die in an effort to discover what event it is. We're all familiar with the 3 choices, except for the other hunter who has only seen Oz. Bah, if its red riding hood, newbie hunter just feign and stay dead till debuff wears off. If its R&J, just listen to Amava call out what DPS target to be hitting and don't open fire during transitions until tank has solid aggro.
Ok, its R&J. Gave us trouble the first time we saw them, but we killed them the next night, not too easy, not too tough.
Ah, but our Rogue called in sick, so we're going to have to switch it up. The two mages will stay on Julianne during phase 3 and do their interrupt that's got a 30 second cooldown, and the tank will shield bash.
We get through phase 1 and 2 easy as pie.
Phase 3. Some heavy DPS on Romulo, and the two Mages on Julianne.
Romulo down to 12%, switch to Julie.
Julie consistently getting interrupted, but with a 30 second cooldown, and a tank who's Deadly Boss Mods isn't working so he can't reliably interrupt with his shield, she's healing herself regularly.
It's taking us forever to burn her down.
And forever.
And the tank who is still handling Romulo calls out that with just him attacking for threat-generation purposes, Romulo's getting close to death.
Crapola. Julia is at 25%, oops, nope, just landed another heal, 56%.
Damn.
Romulo at 3%
Grrrr
KK, you got mana pots, drink them. You got DPS cooldowns to blow, blow them. You got interrupt ability, f-ing interrupt.
Like magic, we all of a sudden got our act together with the interrupts.
Tank calls out that Romulo's at 1%
Julianne dies
Romulo dies.
We loot!!!!
Felt great to realize just seconds before the fight that we didn't have our roguely interrupts, and adjusted our strat immediately and on the fly. Couldn't have asked for better execution by the team, especially near a WoW patch that's left many of our addons inoperable.
Curator gets reprogrammed
I guess the menagerie isn't just for guests after all, b1tch!!!
Although we did accidentally pull him while clearing trash and he showed us what he thinks of us (wipe).
The Ground Shakes in Cali
While deciding who would get the T4 gloves that dropped (the ones that priests and maybe warriors can use, thus meaning 4 of our teammates have to fight for them), the Holy Paladin shouts all startled on voice...
SOMETHING JUST EXPLODED!!!!!
um? what?
He was gone for a while, and we all sat in bewilderment, wondering if he's ok.
He comes back a while later and said that there were two earthquakes right by his house, and everything's fine.
Never been happier to live in Western New York, where the chicken wings are hot, the snow is cold, and the fault lines are dormant.
Kudos all around
At this point, we're 2 hours and 25 minutes into our raid, and I'm dancing a jig on Curator's corpse.
We're trying to decide what to do next?
Head for Shade of Aran? Nah, he's still really tough for us, and we'd rather not try him at the tail end of a late night.
Head for Chess Event? Nah, any trash we clear will respawn unless we kill Aran, and since we'll be doing Aran next time, that only means about 20 extra minutes to clear over to Chess on that night.
Ok, lets go to bed.
Couldn't have asked for a better opening night of the raid week.
All the farm bosses were killed. Not too many unnecessary deaths.
We did all this with marginally functional threat meters, and an assortment of other dead addons.
9 Badges. Hey, at this rate, I'll might be able to get the sweet new badge crossbow some time in 2008 :-)
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