BoP is da poop

Bind on Pickup really sucks. I mean it. With hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

I understand the concept. Since a dungeon drop is BoP, if you're wearing the loot, it means you've beaten the boss. You can't have a pioneer group get all the drops, and as they advance and make their old gear obsolete, just pass it to the new round of recruits who will then blow through the content.

Sho, sho. I get it.

But for the first few minutes after becoming soul bound?

That's the dreaded time when nearly ALL the loot drama I've ever experienced has occurred.

I've been fortunate enough to be surrounded by generally decent people. You've always got your random coconut who's a loot whore, just like in any RL group of friends you've always got that one friend who comes with you to Burger King, brings a "buy-one-get-one-free" coupon and insists that since you're already buying your own whopper, he can just piggy back and get his free. No, you idiot. We either split the cost, or I pay like normal, and you get the F out of my sight because if you even try to just switch over to another one of our friends further back in the line and attempt the same scam, I'll take your coupon and then choke you with MY free burger.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes...decent people...

Nearly all the loot drama I've come across has happened by accident, and has been perpetrated by very honest, decent people. People who had no intention of taking a piece of gear away from another player.

A mis-click here, a fat finger there. Generally somebody is trying to pick "need" on another piece of loot, and they click the wrong one.

Instantly soul bound. You're beyond the point of no return.

So we've got a great team of Karazhan raiders. We've all proven time and again that there's no ninjas or whores in the group. Even our substitutes all seem to be decent folks who are generally more excited at playing the game than getting phat lewtz.

And we've got our two tanks, both prot warriors.

We use a loot master system, and simple rolling to distribute gear. If you need it, roll "need". Otherwise pass and we DE everything at the end of the run. Pretty simple. At this point nobody is really filling in an off-spec, so at the very worst, I've insisted that the Pally or sub Druid roll on something that we'd otherwise be DE'ing, just in case they ever re-spec.

Just good clean honest people who work really well together.

Kill Moroes. Some fancy tanking belt drops. Ok, good, you meat heads can duke it out for that one. I'll be waiting on the stairs to clear more ballroom trash.

Loot Master calls out for the roll on the belt...

Both tanks roll....

Tank B wins...

Loot Master asks on voice "Tank B is the highest?"....

After examining the roll output, Amava announces "Confirm Tank B" (yes, we're lame like that. the RL was in the Navy and so we do silly confirmations like that. i dunno, its kinda fun)

Handfull of gratz's go out on /raid....

Loot gets distributed and soul bound to Tank B....

Tank B says, "oh wait, you can have it, i'm already wearing this one".....

Dead silence....

Raid has a heart attack and visualizes Tank A's hand reaching through the fiber optic cables running across the southern USA and coming out the cable modem at Tank B's house and crushing his throat.


Now, sure, I'll blame this one on Tank B. Knowing the game mechanics, you know stuff gets soul bound. You know we move quickly and don't waste time on rolls. Once a roll winner has been announced, and confirmed, the loot gets distributed immediately. Don't be stupid.

BUT gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh

Blizzard, I beg you once again, please pretty please with sugar on top, give us some way to fix stuff like this.

Make it "pending soul bound" for 5 minutes. Or maybe unbound until the equipper leaves the instance.

Anything. Just anything to let us undo these boo boos so the team doesn't have to hate on eachother for the remainder of the run.

Luckily, Tank B has never shown ninja tendencies and you could hear the genuine sorrow on his voice. We all know he's a decent guy. And Tank A is a mature, reasonable person who did not indeed perform that trans fiber optic throttling that I was visualizing. So we were able to continue the raid and stay friends. No hard feelings (so long as it doesn't happen again).

In a strange way, this actually served as a Mithril Spur for Tank A to push the pace of the raid faster and faster through the trash, probably hoping to wipe us in spiteful vengance. Hmmm, some food for though for future motivational techniques....

What's that you say? Not BoP anymore?

Following a Karazhan run last night, the post-raid conversation was two-fold.

The first and most amusing part of the discussion was about damage meters. Nobody had a DM working for the run, so we'll all have to wait for the WWS report to see how we did. The biggest edge-of-your-seat thriller was that our Warlock who is normally the #2 DPS'er got some new piece that gave him some spell haste, so we're all anxious to see how that'll improve his numbers. And everybody wants to see the resident BM Hunter DPS juggernaut get toppled (or at least I do, just to spur me on to hit the BG's for those last two PvP items that'll be raiding upgrades for me).

Once the damage meter predictions were winding down, we all talked about how the patch changes things.

Warlock says "What? Primal Nethers are no longer BoP? You mean I can sell the 10 that I have sitting in my bank?"

Yepperz.

Then he goes "Sweet, I'm a couple grand shy of epic flight, so this'll help."

Now the gears start turning in my head.....

Well, our raid is covering more and more territory on any given night, and my 20-slot quiver is starting to look a little too tight.

I've been trying to save up 99 Light Feathers without resorting to buying them. I dunno why. They're pretty cheep and readily available at the AH, but I magically became stubborn on this issue back when the quiver first came into the game (patch 2.3, mayhaps?). I've saved up 93 of them.

Check my friends list. My favorite Leather Worker is on and not in a raid. Cool. Can you make me that quiver if I scrape up the mats? Sure, swing on by Shadow Moon Valley.

w00t

So, I decide that a friend in need trumps my gold savings plan and my feather saving stubborness.

Plus, the AH doesnt have any Primal Airs listed, and Mr. Warlock also had a couple of those.

So he's a bit closer on his way to his epic mount, and I've got a sweet sweet new 24-slot Quiver of a Thousand Feathers.


One totally semi unrelated thought...how many times do you end a raid, and then knock out a couple daily quests before running a WWS report, feeding the geese, then going to sleep?

And when you start your quest, oh I dunno, how about Skettis scrambled eggs, how many times have you wondered why the eggs blow up but you dont get credit? Or that damn chicken wing wont drop no matter how many Kaliri your Holy Priest plucks?

I wish they'd change Daily Quests to be do-able whilst in a Raid Group.

I mean, come on. Nobody is forming a raid just to more easily tackle the ridiculously easy content in a Daily Quest. But it would be nice from a social perspective to be able to stay in the raid group to stay in touch and bask in the glory of the raid while closing out your night.

kk, off soapbox.

Balancing Stats when Phat Lewtz Drop

You know, as I write this (I'm nearly done, but writing at the top now :-P ) I realize I'm trying to theory craft! Be forewarned, and please, take nothing you read here as gospel. This is probably the casual players version of theorycrafting to answer the question..."WTF do I do? Equip the shiny new purple, or hang onto my ugly dull blue?"

Short version of the story: Mmmmmm, shiny new purplez. Gotta be better than my stupid blue normal-mode Slave Pens necklace. Put it on, no doubt!

Another short version of the story: New purple necklace provides 0.03% increase in DPS. Put it on, I guess.

Medium verion of the story: When you take the hit rating and hit cap into mind, determining whether a piece of gear is truely an upgrade or not. When you also combine being near the hit cap already, along with some food choices and some gem choices, the situation can get really fuzzy.

Perhaps Amava should play at some theorycrafting? Put it on, maybe.

Long version of the story:

While taking horseback riding lessons with Midnight and Attumen, Worgen Claw Necklace dropped.

I'm more or less satisfied with my damage output, and would rather spread the love to the team, so I suggested the Rogue take it. He said he already had it. Ok, cool, ding, new necklace.

I was wearing Trators Noose at the time.

Looking at these two puppies side by side, my jury is sorta out on which to take.

	Agility	Stamina	Attack Power	Crit Rating	Hit Rating
Worgen Claw Necklace	+20	+21	+42	0	+17
Traitor's Noose	0	+18	+38	+18	+12

So, give up some crit and gain a little attack power and hit. Gain a little stamina, which is nice as I'm still playing battlegrounds a little bit.

On the surface, I'd prefer the crit over the attack power, thus leading me to choose to keep my Noose. As a Beast Master, I love the crit, providing more kill commands and focus for my pet, plus also more frenzies which allow my pet to crit more often, keeping ferocious inspiration up to buff my party's damage. Crit is my best friend.

BUT, Agility's buff to crit chance is nicer than raw crit rating, as Agility scales with Blessing of Kings and it also provides increased Attack Power, Armor, and Dodge (for those moments when you decide to kill a boss melee style and need to avoid a hit or two, lol). Using this criterion, the Worgen Claw is better, because even though it provides for less critical hit percentage, its crit comes from agility rather than raw rating.

Then you've got the hit rating.

Walking in the door, I was at 131 hit. This allows me to eat Warp Burgers for +20 agility during trash, and Spicy Hot Talbuk for +20 hit rating on boss fights.

I don't really like sitting at 131, because then with food buff, I'm at 151, which basically wastes 9 hit rating.

With the Worgen Claw Necklace, I'm at 136 hit rating.

Here's my quandry....

If I continue my dietary habits of +agi for trash and +hit for bosses, I'll be wasting 14 points of hit during boss fights.

I do not have any gems that provide +hit, so its not like I can just swap some of those out for +agi gems to re-gain the 14 hit rating points.

But here's what I'm thinking.....

Why not go the other way. At 136, I'm 8 points away from being hit capped, WITHOUT eating any talbuk.

If I were to replace some gems with gems that provide +hit, I could become inherently hit capped, and then eat a +agi food during boss fights.

So the question is....how can I fiddle with my gems to (A) gain 8 hit rating, and (B) NOT lose the equivalent of +20 agility. If I can pull that off, then I will gain an overall improvemnt for boss fights.

Make sense?

Kinda makes me go crosseyed, but I think its the right logic.

So, how to properly fiddle with gems?

For yellow slots, my normal gem of choice is the Smooth Dawnstone and its +8 critical strike rating (and I haven't yet gotten around to replace them with Smooth Ornate Dawnstones for two extra crit points from Battlegrounds vendor).

I could replace one of these puppies with a Rigid Dawnstone for +8 hit rating.

That would do the trick.

Now recall, that by becoming hit capped without the need to eat special food, I'll essentially be gaining +20 agi on boss fights.

For the sake of argument, lets pretend that I had the Smooth Ornate Dawnstones and their +10 crit, as I plan to get those from PvP over the next week or two, since my other PvP gear needs have been met for the moment.

In essence, the gem change would mean the Worgen Claw gives me an additional +20 agi on top of the other stats and a negative -10 crit.

Still making sense?

Going back to the original gear choices, adding in the potential gem swap and food changes, with an added DPS column that I hopefully got right......

	Agility	Stamina	Attack Power	Crit Rating	Hit Rating
Worgen Claw Necklace	+40	+21	+42	-10	+17
Traitor's Noose	0	+18	+38	+18	+12

So, this means that after re-gemming and food switch takes place, Worgen provides an additional +44 attack power over the Noose.

Now to analyze the crit part...Worgen essentially will provide -28 crit rating, but add +40 agility. How does this impact my overall damage?

Well, 20 agi equates to .5% crit, so worgen will give me 1% crit boost via the agility.

According to WoW Wiki's combat ratings page, 22.08 crit rating points equates to 1% crit chance.

So that means the -28 crit rating will mean a 1.3% reduction in crit chance. Combine that with the agi, and you only lose 0.3% crit chance.

Converting these numbers to DPS.....

The 0.3% crit chance reduction is a direct 0.3% DPS reduction.

Converting AP:DPS at a 14:1 ratio....gaining 44ap means a corresponding 3.1 DPS increase.

So, now we're in the sticky situation of needing to know our base personal DPS. This is where I pretty much lose my ability to theorycraft, assuming I've been doing it even vaguely right up to this point.

On the surface, I could use a number between 850-1050, as that's sort of the average I've been doing on boss fights according to WWS lately.

BUT, those numbers include all sorts of stuff like my pet's damage, kill commands, random melee crits that kill bosses (lol, that's a statistical anomaly that can be discarded). So, lacking any other good ideas, I'll just split the difference and pretend that its a good comparison.

So my base DPS is 950.

Decrease the base by 0.3% from the crit loss, means I'll be at 947.2 DPS

Increase that by 3.1 from the attack power means I'll be at 950.3 DPS

Net increase....0.3 DPS or 0.03% additional DPS.

LOL !!!

I could re-do these numbers to take into account the Blessing of Kings that I normally raid with, but I'm nearly exhausted from trying to figure this out up to this point. Well, actually, BoK would buff the agi increase from 40 to 44, which would make the AP increase by 48 rather than 44, and the change to crit chance would be .125% less. Soooo, with BoK, the overall additional DPS would be 1.77 (or 0.18%) additional DPS.

Net effect of equipping Worgen Claw Necklace, regemming, and new food choice:

• lose: net 0.3% crit chance


• lose: regularly farming for Talbuk Steak


• lose: roughly 40 gold for the new gem


• gain: +44ap


• gain: +40agi


• gain: +3sta


• gain: 0.3 DPS


• gain: one or two bag slots, as I'll no longer be carrying the Spicy Hot Talbuk


• gain: some armor and dodge from agility, but blah, this is as far as I go with the theorycrafting

So you see, a simple drop of a new necklace leads to some twisty thought process leading to a miniscule DPS increase.

I hope I did this right :-)

And the single most important thing that trumps all of this analysis....I want my shiny new purplez and throw away my ugly bluie blues.

Put it on, no doubt!!!

Bloodlust Brooch

After Kara, I went to the bank to dump my raid bag out. And what's this? Lots of badges now? Cool, let me go talk to G'eras and see if there's anything nice for me.

Bloodlust Brooch. 41 Badges of Justice.

Sure, why not?

Of course, after buying it, nearly instant buyer's remorse, or perhaps just doubt, as I hadn't noticed the difference between AP and Crit. This puppy is replacing my Bladefist's Breadth. Nets a big "on equip" bonus to Attack Power, but also a loss of nearly 1% of crit. "On use" it provides a much nicer AP buff, for an even longer amount of time. Not really sure how to directly compare the two, so rather than paralyze myself with over analysis, I think I'll just put on my purple goggles and equip the shiny new trinket.

I was hovering around 28%-ish unbuffed crit, and so I'm none too happy with the 1% drop to that stat. I hope it'll leave my pet with a nice steady stream of focus, and also a continuous kill command ready to fire every time the cooldown is up, which it's been pretty close to lately.

Perhaps a switch

The natural place to go to test out any theories would be Dr. Boom. Personally I dislike using him as a baseline analysis because so much of my talents, gearing, and style are based upon how me and my pet interact, which good 'ole Boomy doesn't allow for.

I'd really like to use a Curator fight as a baseline, as it is really just a "stand and deliver" fight where I'm a continuous stream (well, 96% continuous) of MQoSRDPS.

Unfortunately, by the next time I face Curator, I'll have a new PvP chest piece, which will alter my stats, making a pure Bloodlust Brooch vs. Bladefist's Breadth comparison difficult.

Fortunately, my new chest will help increase my output, so f-it all. Just go purple and don't look back. Keep delivering the pain to thine enemies.

My Fancy Arrows

You hear lots of QQ about the escalating costs of repair to armor. Each stronger type of armor is more expensive to repair than the previous, and as you get better epic gear, the repair costs also continue to increase.

As a mail wearer (and one leather piece, ftw. namely Midnight Legguards with Nethercobra Leg Armor), I've got a moderate repair bill, and FD to help me escape the occasional wipe where FD wasn't on cooldown at the time of the wipe.

But Hunters do have our own costs of operation.

We've got consumables like mana pots, flasks of @ss, buff foods, elixirs when there's no @ss to be found, and so on. But that's nothing special, everybody's got those.

We've got pet food. I usually go with the Smoked Talbuk Venison as it provides a good amount of pet happiness and is readily available from a vendor in any area of Outlands. Keeping a constant supply of these puppies will cost you a little coin. Good idea to mount up or dismiss pet anytime that you're just standing around, because the meter is running.

Then you've got projectiles.

I used to use the best general goods vendor arrows available. Not too costly, just grab 'em by the handfull.

Then came revered with Cenarion Expedition and their nice Warden's Arrows. A little extra DPS, and a little extra silver to each stack.

I was using those for a while, then I decided to grab my Engineering Prot Warrior friend and drag his butt up to Netherstorm and grind away some Blood Elf Archers until one of them coughed up the recipe for Adamantite Arrow Maker, and the Adamantite Stingers they pop out.

Very nice. As a miner, these are ideal. Just scrape a tiny portion of the Fel Iron and Adamantite that you're constantly farming, buy some cheep wood from a vendor, and you've got a constant supply of arrows. Sure, there's the opportunity cost of NOT selling the metals, but out of pocket? nada.

I use the stingers for raiding, and warden's arrows for everything else.

Dinged Revered with Violet Eye the other night in Karazhan.

Cool new ring came from the ringy dingy quest. Digression...I really like that ringy dingy quest. It makes everyone so happy for you when you level up your reputation, and its sort of a common shared experience for the team since they're generally the best rings for all classes at this stage of progression. Kudos to Blizz for that. I hope other raid instances have similar concepts. Ok, back to my fancy arrows.

This morning, I was on my way to bang out an AV or two before work and I swung by the specialty projectile vendor in Aldor Rise.

Hello? What's this? A new arrow available to me - Mysterious Arrow. I knew there were arrows from Violet Eye, but for some reason, I thought they came at Exalted. Nope.

A few more DPS, and also double the cost of Warden's Arrows, at a whopping 80 silver per stack. So that'll add somewhere around 5 or 6 gold to each night of raiding.

The question is, though, when to use them? Should I treat them as specialty raiding arrows, or just say f-it and use them all the time? Its not like the gold is an issue, but part of the reason gold isn't an issue is because I don't typically spend it frivolously.

Doesn't help that the icon for the arrows in my quiver look identical between Mysterious Arrows and Warden's Arrows. Makes it kinda hard to co-mingle them in the same quiver so I have them handy for any circumstances.

Amava Doesn't Know Greenies

Saturday, Eye of the Storm honor weekend. Alliance was on a tear. Won a game or two in a row. Called out on gchat to see if anybody else was playing. Two others in EotS, saying same thing. Horde was just outtie, smokin or something. Just kept winning and winning, fast. Spent a little time, got a lot of honor. I've got no shame 'bout acceptin' welfare.

Sunday morning. Honor in hand, I ride off to the BG vendor in Stormwind. Oops, noob, you left your EotS tickets in the bank. Quick trot past the gold spammers in the central square of SWC, and my last piece of green gear is now in the bank, and Amava is 67% blue and 33% purple. My kingdom for a purple belt with +hit rating, but I digress.

Sunday night, anxious to try out my new boots on something besides other players in BG and mobs in the Netherwing Mines, I hearth to shatt, fill up my raid bag and get my fancy arrows and head off to Deadwind Pass. Raid was starting late, so in spiteful protest, I rode my Swift Mist Saber from Stormwind through Westfall and over Duskwood and into the zone. I showed them, eh???

Either way, after a small delay in getting the raid off the ground, we set into the back door. Not the back door I talked about a week or so ago. That one is the stairs up to Moroes, the back way out of the Stables. This backdoor is the one you gotta leave the dungeon, cross the river, then run up the giant wooden fire escape.

Clear a couple pieces of trashy trash. Including some uber annoying AoE packs of what look to be air snakes. I say uber annoying because I'm next to useless on packs like that. I just sit there plinking away at 1 target or 3 targets on every multi- cooldown. Meantime the mages and warlock are just frying the piles and piles of air snakes into the ground. Ok, have your fun. For now.

My first look at the Curator.

Fun little guy, a nice mix of automated technology in this ancient feeling instance.

From what I read on WoWWiki, this is a pretty basic fight. Kill Astral Flares quickly. When Curator evocates, send as much damage his way as you possibly can. Then switch back to Flares. Use the macro to make target switching easier. Bring lots of mana pots, mana oils, desensitizing creams, and other such longevity aids, as this fight will be substantially longer than you're accustomed to.

Basically a gear check for the raid. You need sufficient DPS to burn him down in 10 minutes, or its a wipe. You need a matching amount of tank health and healer healery to last for as long as your DPS jokers take. No real tricks to the encounter, other than being able to target the Astral Flares ASAP, and a tiny bit of raid spacing and positioning to limit chaining of damage.

My team had run this fight on Thursday, but it was a RL night for me, so I was absent. They had gotten him down to 62%. Full honesty here. I'd like to say "oh that's too bad, i wish you guys had gotten him down". But we're all about being real here over at Amava Knows Aggro, because Amava also knows spite, envy, and a handfull of other deadly sins. That said, I really do like the group, and truely would have been happy for them if they did kill him, but I'd hate to miss out on a guild first kill. Moot point anyways, and curator still stands. Don't judge me, you know you think the same way.

Ok, start off with my targeting macro. I'm a software development guy by trade, so I am always very suspicious of untested code or scripting. This macro was typed in by hand from the WoWWiki page. I've visually inspected it 3 times, and it looks good. Only way to test it is in combat.

We start off the event with the raid leader explaining it. Basic enough, his description matches what I've got in my head from reading wiki.

Then they start handing out some Arcane Resist Potions.

I became a total noob. I've never really used stuff like that and I just completely drew a blank. Royal brainfart. What, you mean you drink it? Like right now? Or during the fight? or when I take damage like a health potion? STFU noob, we'll tell you when to drink it. Um? ok.

Knowing this was an endurance fight, I ask if its a shared cooldown with other potions, such as, oh I dunno, Super Mana Potion? I'm pretty sure I'll be drinking those aplenty.

So now they're looking at me like I bought my toon off ebay. Who brought the new guy?

Either way, I say sure, I'll drink the stupid thing, but you'll never hear the end of it if I can't drink a mana pot when I want to.

Start the fight, burn some mana, throw a funny remark out there on vent when I can't drink quite when I want to.

Pew pew pew. Pew pew pew. Pew pew pe.... Damn, 2% wipe. Tried to kite him, but lol, immune to Arcane Shot.

Lots of chatter about "this is going much better than on thursday". I'll bet ;-)

Ok, we made a little switch in routine and had me stay on the last astral flare till its dead. Our original strat had me switching to Curator instantly upon evocation and allow a couple others fry the last flare. I think that took a bit too long and had our hands full.

This time, I'll show you where you can stick your Arcane Resist potion. I'ma gonna drink my first Super Mana Potion roughly one minute into the fight, and I dont want your silly drinks interfering with my beautiful beautiful mana supply. Just trust me, team, I'm not making this stuff up.

Pew pew pew. Pew pew pew. Pew pew peW!!!!!! 6 minutes and 52 seconds. Dead boss. 'Nuther guild first.

What's the immediate question upon dead boss? Phat Lewts!!!! What'd he drop? What'd he drop?

Mmmmmmm Garona's Signet Ring and Gloves of the Fallen Hero. That's right, out of his whole loot table, he drops the two things I want. Ding.

Oh, wait. What's that? How do Tier 4 tokens work? You mean its not just hunter loot? :-( Ok, so warlock and mage and mage get to roll also. No phat lewtz. Gratz on you.

But wait, there's the ring. Sweet, lemme try that puppy on. Oh, that's right. We subbed in a feral Druid. No phat lewtz. Gratz on you.

Granted, that'll probably be the last time he ever drops the signet for me, but oh well. I'm pretty happy with my gear. And 2 more badges, baby.

After logging out, I run the WWS report, and I got something that made me happier than epics......



Yepperz. Broke the 1,000 DPS barrier over nearly 7 minutes of MQoSRDPS. w00t

Time to read up on the Chess Event.

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Gear Upgrades. The never-ending process.

While levelling a toon in WoW, you've got a handful of options for gear upgrades as you go. But, if you miss a step, or forget about one stat or another, who cares? The gear will be obsolete in a week or so as you level out of it.

At 70, your gear stays with you for as long as you choose to not upgrade it.

You've got a variety of upgrade options: Quests, Normal 5-man dungeon drops, Heroic 5-man dungeon drops, crafting, reputation with a variety of factions, Badge of Justice gear, AH for some spiffy BoE world drops, and depending upon your progression, Raid dungeons. Oh yeah, and PvP in Battlegrounds and Arena. Did I get them all? I dunno, but I'm going cross eyed already.

Then you've got the stats game. Depending on your role and style, you've got a handfull of stats that mean something to you.

Hunters, we've got agility, attack power, crit rating, hit rating, stamina, intellect, haste, armor, ignore-armor, mp5. Yes? More? I dunno, but my eyes are further crossed. And if you like PvP, throw resiliance in there too.

So you've got various decisions and tradeoffs to make.

You a raider? Ok, then you'll want to get your hit to 142. Unless you like Spicy Hot Talbuk, then you only need 122. Unless you're one of the classes who gets a ranged hit bonus, but only with one type of ranged weapon, so make sure you're quipping that proper type. Or, maybe only try to get close to the hit rating, as the fancy folks like BRK promote "balance" of stats over extreme positions like "thou shalt be hit capped or thine appendage shalt be caned".

Ok, we only did hit rating so far.

It goes on and on.

Plus, when thinking about a particular equipment slot, you've also got to consider, across all the possible sources of gear, what the reasonable time horizon is for upgrades. For instance, when picking between a PvP belt and PvP boots, maybe consider what bosses your raid is reasonably expected to face soon. Do those bosses drop boots you like? Then maybe pick the PvP belt. Unless of course, there's also a better pair of some such available for Bages, in which case pick...ooooohhhhhh....I've done it again. I've gone crosseyed.

Oh, man. Its getting worse. Now you've also got to consider patches. With 2.4 Badge of Justice gear and Arena Season 4 gear on their way, maybe hold off a little longer. I suppose Blizzard is in the business of always making us want what's coming next. Never be satisfied with what you have. Like little mice running neatly in place in our little wheels. Run, baby, run.

The real fun starts once you sorta get set up with your toon in some slightly-better-than-lvl-70-greenies-n-bluies. You've sorta got your gear in order, and you're starting to move towards the purple end of the spectrum. You're happy with your hit rating. You're working on a balanced progression of agi, crit, and attack power, without forgetting about stamina and intellect, as nobody likes a glass canon with no gunpowder.

Then you start to get a new piece or two that totally mess things up. Hits a classic one. New piece of gear, lots of extras in areas you like, but has little or no hit and its gonna replace another piece that has lots of hit.

No problem you say. Just re-gem your existing pieces to make up for the hit decrease. Ok, but then you've got to factor in the gem replacements in your calculations of whether that new piece is truly an upgrade for your toon.

Its just discusting how far it goes.

And the question that pops into mind is has Blizzard gone too far? Even if only a bit?

I honestly think its easier to file my taxes than it is to plan out a gear progression.

Sure Ratings Buster helps. And the future enhancements to RB that'll include some gem choices are nice also. And modelling tools like Warcrafter.net help. But is it really necessary to be quite this involved?

I Hate my Hat...

Amava has been wearing the Earthwarden's Coif for quite some time. Ever since running Steamvault for the first time, what seems to be ages ago.

In case you're at work and can't see the tooltip link, it's got a nice amount of +25agi, +25sta, +18int, a red socket (+8agi), a meta socket (+12agi and +3% crit damage), a socket bonus of +4agi, plus +34ap and also +7mp5.

Of any of the easily accessible helmets, I really like this one the most. Even more than the Desolation Helm I've got sitting in the bank.

But it looks attrocious. Sure, you can turn off the helm visibility in the interface options. But Amava don't play that. Helm and Cloak always visible. Alts vary their visibility for aesthetics, Amava shows her helm, for better or worse.

It looks like a combination of a bunch of feathers and a rotten guinea pig pelt.

Its so ugly, in fact that I decided it needed to go.

Looking through Kaliban's list, I just don't like any of the options that're within reach.

I do however see lots of hunters wearing that dark black helmet with the curvy antelope horns and ominous green glowy eyes. What's that all about?

The Gladiator's Chain Helm

Compared to the Coif, this little puppy offers up a little more +agi (once socket bonus is accounted for), a boatload more +sta, same +int, has the same two sockets (red and meta), offers up a +4 resiliance socket bonus, adds +20 crit rating, +20 resilience, and two additional attack powers. And a big increase in armor. At a loss of +7mp5.

Sign me up. How do you get this baby?

What's that you say? Battlegrounds? That's PvP, eh? Yucky poo poo. Me no likey. But, its a pill I can swallow for a better looking, and performing, helmet.

Yadda yadda yadda (see next post), now its monday morning, and Amava's got her new hat.

So I says, "F It"

Set out farming for Eternium. Need lots of that for the 12 Fel Steel bars for my new Stabilized Eternium Scope, for my new Crystalline Crossbow.

Of course, my skill level is 1 at the time, so there's a lot of missed shots in my future.

Looking at the Khorium Scope on the AH that I could buy, knowing full well that it'll get replaced the moment I get my last piece of Eternium Ore, I began to think of my Guaranteed Loot Upgrade philosopy. Investing in that scope will no doubt feed the Tiki God of Pseudo Random Numbers, and cause an increased drop rate of Eternium.

So I says, "F It"

Attached the disposable Khorium Scope and went out into Terokkar Forrest to farm minerals and miss mobs.

Fired and missed lots, quickly earned a few hundred skill points. Got to the point where I was actually hitting more than missing, so I head on over to Netherwing Ledge hoping to do the quests in the mines where I'll be shooting at lvl 70 and 71 mobs, which will hopefully give the higher skill points more readily.

Got to 340 in the cave.

Head up to Skettis to farm some lvl 70 Warp Fleshes. A couple more skill points. At 347 I got bored. Points are coming pretty slowly now.

So I says, "F It"

Dr. Boom, here I come. I wanted to avoid him, as its a bit of a cheep move to skill up on his immobile @ss, but oh well, the count down to my Kara run is ticking, and I've got a bunch of RL good stuff to take care of first (mmmm, pan-fried Aldi's steaks), and I really don't want to go in there non-maxed out.

Stand on a barrel and fire away. And fire away, and fire away. Rapid fire, Improved Aspect of the Hawk shot speed procs, weaving in as many special shots as my mana'll allow.

348, 349. Ok, come on, stupid last point. Just ding already, will ya.

The RL dog is getting anxious to go play in the snow, cuz it's blizzarding outside. Lol, its also Blizzarding inside too, but my pup doesn't like computers. Other than The Daily Puppy!

So I says, "F It"

I put on my boots and snowsuit, with the intention of AFK Auto-Shotting my way through the last point. Now we're really getting into cheep moves :-)

And you know the physiological effect that equipping a full snow suit has on the human pee-pee system? You betcha, it proc'd, so I gotta go take care of that.

Ok, lemme just hit one last Rapid Fire before I head outside.

Ding 350.

On the flight back to Shatt City, flying with Track Minerals enabled on the mini-map...

Ding last Eternium Ore. I guess the sacrificial Khorium Scope did the trick because the rare Eternium Ore was a bit more like medium well done, they were dropping all over the place.

Ding new Scope.

So I says, "F It"

And head off to Deadwind Pass.

Gemmin it up on the Barry Gibbs Gem Show

Wanna blow some gold? Go on a gem binge.

I decided that I was done fartin around with these silly 2g gems, and its high time Amava polished her gear and put some of that pile of dubloons to use.

The name of the game is Delicate Living Ruby, and the nice +8 agi boost you get. A Beast Master's favorite Valentine's Day jewel, they really bring out the red glow of Bestial Wrath nicely.

However, what's a girl to do when the AH only has 2 DLR's listed, but her gear could benefit from 6 of them? When Amava finally gets off her ass and makes a decision to do something, well, she pretty much wants it DONE. NOW.

Except for when it comes to getting high level professional assistance from other players in WoW.

If you recall, it took me quite a while to locate a receptive enchanter who had Savagery. Poo poo on that, good thing I like the +35 agi enchant now :-P Of course, now that I don't want it, I know about 10 savagerists.

Then there's the little fun with my Engineer buddy from the other day. We needs us some Khorium for those power cores. Funny how rare Khorium is, but the day I'm actually looking for it, I find three nodes. I won't complain. Still don't have him up to 375 yet, but close, and I've nearly got my pile of Fel Steel ready for scope-making.

And now, jewels. I picked up some Living Rubies from the AH in the hopes that I could find someone to cut them into the Delicate variety for me.

I really wanted to have the four additional gems in place before wednesday's kara run. No JC in the guild was high enough to learn the recipe. Checking back on AH throughout the evening, I eventually found 2 more Delicate Living Ruby. Sent emails to the sellers saying I'd like to commission their services. No responses. Whispers were met like in Amazon Women on th Moon, when Arsenio Hall said "Aint no thelma here". So these crafters logged in for a sec to post their gems, and logged out before I could find them. Probably AH mules, although one of them was 70.

Spent a little time before heading off to Deadwind Pass barking in Trade for a crafter. Nope.

I guess I'll have to resort to the Blizz official forums, and maybe that'll turn up some action.

Right before bed, I found 1 more gem on AH, so I'm now only one stone away from having my gem situation squared away. Then I'll be able to post my before/after stats for the full impact of my Tres Eppis.

And you can see from the chart on the right (if my damn hosting provider could just stay available for 10 solid minutes) what the impact this little Valentine's Day special had on the savings project.

Dos Equis

...because Tres Eppis sounded like a strange title

In a beautiful move, Amava acquired three epic pieces of gear on Tuesday. And the real and true beauty, none of them were subject to the whims of the Tiki God of Pseudo Random Numbers.

You start off with a run in Kara. Ding Honored with Violet Eye. Try to turn in the quest, only to discover that you need to have the blue Violet Signet in your bag to do the turn in. Lol, had to run back through the Pass after the raid, but alas, I now have the epic Violet Signet with its wonderful +22hit. This means I can pretty much eliminate all +hit gems and replace them with +agi, +crit, +ap, or whatever. I started going through the process of mapping out my gem choices but fell asleep, so I'll have to do that before Wednesday's Kara run. The net effect is going to be pretty huge though.

Next up on the agenda, I decided to stop the analysis paralysis and just f-ing do it. I went to the floating crystal vendor thingie in Shatt and forked over 25 of my Badges of Justice and made my first badge purchase....Ring of Arathi Warlords. I was holding out on the purchase because I was stuck in this endless thought loop of trying to figure out which of the badge purchases would give me the biggest impact over my current gear, while not also being threatened by the potential for conflicting with possible boss drops that might or might not appear in the semi-near future. I went crosseyed, smacked the side of my head, and bought the damn ring. Lovely stuff.

Amava loves her new purple fingers. You'd think she was born in February and loves the color of her birthstone.

Once all that was sorted out, I went to finish up some dailies before the sun came up and the server's day reset. Off to Skettis to bomb the h3ll out of their unhatched yoots. What's that word you just said? What's a yoot? Oh, I'm sorry...youths. That's right. And I "splurged" on a new trinkey...Skyguard Silver Cross. I figured "why not?" Got some advice from some nice readers that would indicate that its a nice little item to have around. I wore it while doing the Netherwing Mine quests. The jury is still out. It replaced the Bladefist's Breadth. SSC gives you a random attack power increase after battle, while BB gives you the ability to control via on use for a smaller attack power boost. I do like the control of BB, as you can proc it when you get into a jam. Who knows, I'll have to give it a couple of days.

I'll have to finish off my gemming on wednesday so I can see the true impact that all this new gear had, but it's looking pretty nice.

And more beauty, I had a couple of auctions sell for prices I really didnt expect to sell, so the fancy gems won't really hurt the overall savings progress. Mo' Money!

I got ya badges, right here

I think it might be time to spend some money, and some BADGES!!!!

Not sure though, so I'll remain indecisive, tyvm.

As you can see from the chart to the right (if you're viewing the site directly and not via RSS), the gold's flowing in nicely, from a combination of daily questing and sales of stuff I gather. Plus the beautiful trash items that you pickup during a run through the Netherwing Ledge mine.

I'm now torn between throwing my savings goal a curve ball by spending a boat load of cash.

The most immediate places I can spend dough on are some improved gems and a fancy leg armor kit. I still wear a bunch of the gems that sell for about 2g. I can upgrade these to the gems that sell for 35-45g. Two problems with this...(1) that 40g difference typically bumps you only a little bit such as +6agi for 2g or +8agi for 40g, and (2) by upgrading some of my +hit gems, I'd be able to then eliminate some of the other +hit gems and still remain Spicy Hot Talbuk-hit capped. #2 would require sitting down and planning these gems out which I lack the patience for right now. My WoW time that's not spent in-game goes to the blog or to a pet project I've got brewing, some what along the lines of the savings tracker chart.

The fancy leg armor that provides +50 attack power and +12 crit are going for roughly 450g (anecdotal evidence only, I haven't personally seen one). So that 450g would give me 10 aditional AP and 2 additional crit points. Ouch. But I did just get these nice new pants, so maybe they're worth the big bucks.

Why do they make it so confusing :-)

Then on to my badges. A full clear of Heroic Slave Pens on monday night left me with 25 Badges of Justice, which means I can actually buy something if I want, or choose to keep saving for the bigger items.

For 25 badges, I can get a ring or a cloak. Of the two, the ring looks like it gives me the biggest bonus. I'm thinking it'll be better to buy now, rather than save for a 41 or 60 badge item, with the motivation being that with improved stats, future badges will be a drop more accessible, and thus will come in faster. Probably faulty logic, and hugely depends upon the rest of the team subscribing to the same school of thought, but bah, I wants me some more epics.

In fact, I want to see how many purples I can be wearing before I replace my green boots.

Rare BoP Drop

Wearing his new goggles, our main tank wanted to show his appreciation for the mats I sent him. I said that the best appreciation will come in the form of taking all those hits from those nasty trashies and bosses in Kara and heroics instead of me.

Insistent on repaying me, we had to get creative, as I don't need/want gold, and as a non-crafter, there's no mats I need (other than about 50 more light feathers so I can get a new quiver crafted for me).

Brainstorming for a good solution, we came up with something he can do as an engineer, namely craft me some arrow makers. The Adamantite Stingers give a nice DPS boost over the Warden's Arrows that I use.

Only catch is, the recipe is BoP and drops off of Sunfury Archers in Netherstorm.

So the plan was for us to pair up and head that-a ways and grind these silly blood elves into the ground until one coughed up the schematic.

Wowhead had some horror stories of hours and hours of killing with no drop.

Lol, he squats down to loot our 6th kill, and ding, he cheers over voice that we're all done.

And then he had to run to go pickup his new puppy dog in RL.

Grats on schematic, and grats on pup.

Super Fast

I was bored on wednesday, and out of work-accessible reading material, and done with (read: still procrastinating) any urgent actual work work, so I started reading some back issues of a few of my favorie blogs. It was pretty cool to go review things that I remember reading when I first found their sites, but I was still in my 40's or 50's, so any of the endgame info was interesting to read, but most of the content was lost on me. Going back and reading some archives was pretty cool.

I went back and found this article from Big Bear Butt, and he mentioned the joys of flying super fast with the 10% bonus from the Riding Crop.

Oh yeah. That ole thang. I don't know why I never got one. I've been just scraping around on my 3% Carrot on a Stick from back in my Zul Farrak days.

Looked on AH, and only one was listed and it was about 150g which is too rich for my blood.

So I looked at the mats. Most of the stuff was listed at reasonable prices, but a stack of Heavey Knothide Leather was listed for next to nothing. Ding. Bought that puppy up, mailed 4 over to Amava, and then relisted the remaining 16. Nearly paid for the entire crop with that little move.

Switched to Amava, found a guild leatherworker, and was off and flying super fast. It really is pretty cool, I wish I had made the move sooner.

Turning Green into Purple

Ok, you've waited long enough. This time, not a week-long absence due to a need to diffuse negative feelings, but rather a raging case of RL hit me and kept me distracted. On to the fun...

Tuesday night, the guild ran our first scheduled, organized, all-guild Karazhan run. And it was full of win.

My story starts out about an hour before the run. I already had all my supplies stocked up from the night before, so I was doing some daily quests up in Blade's Edge Mts. This is the first combat action I'm seeing since my talent respec and pet respec. I had been using the BRK recommended levelling spec, and now replaced with, big surprise, the BRK entry level raiding spec.

Instant panic, because this is pretty different. I'm there, solo in BEM, and it is made painfully clear to me that Cringer is much less of a tank than he used to be. Fighting one of those lvl 71 boars, I see his health dropping way too fast, and my threat is through the roof. Not a whole lot of room to kite up there as the mobs are packed close together, so a bit of scrambling but we're ok. I try a few more and then realize the problem.

Without the 2 points in Bestial Discipline, his focus generates much more slowly. He was either starving for focus because I wasn't shooting (and therefore criting) to manage aggro -OR- he had focus to spare because I was shooting and criting, but I was then pulling aggro. Catch 22. I tried shutting off dash and claw, leaving only growl and bite active. This worked much better.

What a way to inspire confidence, just moments before my first raid.

20 minutes before start time, everybody but one was logged in. Invites went out, people congreated at the stone. A substitute for the absent guy was chosen, and was OK with waiting on standby, knowing he'd get the boot if the originally intended member showed up before the scheduled start time. He didn't so the sub got to run. We zoned in right on time.

As none of us is accustomed to 10-man raiding, we spent a bunch of totally disorganized time in the entry area of the zone discussing various topics like healing assignments, buff assignments (keep your salvation for the mage, pls, i'll take kings and might, ftw), party groupings, whether to focus fire or have each party take its own target (focus, ftw).

Ok, everybody's set, so we get started on the stables. Pretty straight forward. I do enjoy the added complexity that having lots of tanking, CC, and healing options gives you. We did have some communication issues among the healers regarding assignments, and we had lots of chatter of strategy tips and advice and not enough listening to the raid leader, but that improved over time.

I notice immediately that my new spec and buffs will require me to watch my aggro. I was using Flask of Relentless Assault for the first time, and on the trash, Warp Burgers, in addition to the Blessing of Kings and Might. At times, I was having aggro problems even with just white damage, and while being distracted from DPS with trapping. I'll have to talk to the tanks about that, but oh well, for our first run, I'll just pay closer attention to my threat meter, and get proactive on my FD's.

Made our way slowly through the stable to Attumen. Get Midnight down to 95% and Attumen shows up, and one or two shots some healers and we wipe. Ok, next time, off tank be ready to pick him up.

Run back in, buff up, start the fight, and then a bunch of newly spawned horses jumped on us. I had been calling out the time remaining on the respawn to the Raid Leader, as some addon of mine (perhaps BigWigs, or perhaps Cool Down Timers because it looked just like the cooldown timer graphics), but we were just too slow. Ok, wipe.

Not sure what to do about the respawns, we decided to wait for them to all respawn and then start over. While not a speed run by any stretch of the imagination, we did move more quickly though the trash. Got to the boss, and same deal as the first run, when Attumen showed up, the off tank didn't pick him up quick enough. Wipe.

Next try, lets have one of our handy hunters misdirect onto the off tank to help him out. kk. Oops, I messed up the misdirect, more specifically, didnt fire it off, so the threat all went to me and I was promptly dealt with. Watching the fight sucked. And it dragged on forever for lack of DPS, until healers went out of mana, and tanks went out of health, and raid went down. I'll take "credit" for that one.

Still time for one more boss try before respawn again. And this one was a charm. Everything went smoothly and boss went down. Our warlock and other hunter died mid-fight, so it took forever, but Amava was packing heat that night, so we were able to get it done. First fight I was ever able to use Beastial Wrath twice, and multiple mana pots. And stupid me, I forgot to apply the Superior Mana Oil I had in my bag. I didn't want to waste it on wipes, and it wasnt until 2 days later that I learned the effect lasts through death, so I forgot it for the boss fight. Oh well, dead boss, so its all good.

And, 2 hours into our first Kara run, what drops...Stalker's War Bands. And for whatever reason, the Tiki God of Randomness shined down and granted me my first PvE epic gear.

And a mage won some gear that those caster types like. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention as I was running around my house throwing my clothes to the wind, cheering. lol, its ok if you're scared. What can I say, I was happy to replace my second-to-last greenie with an epic pair of bracers.

After some cheering, dancing, chatting, and a wave of incoherent guild chat by one member (ZOMG WE R AWSOME F-ING KARA BITCHN WE KICK HORSEMAN @SS) which I'm sure cemented the upcoming feather ruffling amongst the guildies, but I digress. We decided to go for Moroes. I'm not sure "decided" is the right word, as I don't really think you have a choice as a brand new party. Sure, you can pick a different direction to go in, but realistically, do you have a choice? Lol, not with a combined 2041 raid DPS.

Either way, spent a good 45 minutes clearing the stairs. I've heard so many horror stories about pet pathing issues on the stairs I used Cringer very reservedly, and always with my hand hovering over Ctl-2 to recall in case of emergency.

Got to Moroes. Spent quite some time discussing strategy. Wiped a couple of times and called it a night.

w00t

I Can Go All Night Like a Lumberjack

Did Amava quit dropping bombs for the Sky Guard and pick up a job with Venture Co. Lumber? Nah.

With tuesday's reset, I got my weekly arena points and broke past 1000. Fly off to Area 52, scout around a bit to find the Arena Vendor, and the Season 3 axe is now soulbound to Amava.

As always, my social network of enchanters is not quite as well rounded as I'd like, so it took me about 45 minutes of pinging people to locate someone with the +35 agi 2H weapon enchant, but alas, she be mine.

With this upgrade, my AP and hit drop a bit, but my stamina and crit jump substantially. There's also some "ignore armor" which I'm uncertain on how to compare that to other stats, but I'm assuming it can't hurt since it says "ignore" and not "increase" armor. And the resilliance will help me in Arena, but I doubt it'll be enough to overcome my total lack of skill or true desire to be good in there. I'll keep putzing along, collecting my bit more than 250 points per week.

This puts my crit at a little over 22%, which I think means I might need to reallocate some talent points because Go For the Throat will now supposedly be providing enough focus for Cringer to keep swinging away. I need to find a good boss fight that's pretty standard tank 'n spank to run a baseline, and then respec and try again. Dr. Boom won't be suitable for this, as my intent is to test out my total damage with my pet, which boomie doesn't help you with.

With the stamina boost, I'm now at about 7800 HP, which is much nicer, and one step closer to the 8K that I'd like for starting Kara.

Attack power, while dropping a tad, is still over 1500, so I'm a happy camper.


Next gear goal for me is to reach the hit cap. I'm at 116 now. Cooked up a pile of Spicy Hot Talbuk, that'll buff me to 136. So me thinks I'll re-gem a few spots where I have combination +hit/+agi gems, and replace them with pure +hit gems, which will then hit cap me - OR - read Kaliban's loot list for where the other pieces of Desolation gear live, and farm those until I get a second piece of that set to go with the helm I have sitting in the bank. If I get that +35 hit set bonus, I can the re-gem back to pretty much entirely +agi gems in those slots. And to think, I can remember weeks ago that a piece of Desolation dropped, and I passed, thinking it was Shammy gear. Go figure. I think I won the shard though, so that got recycled into +35 agi on my new axe :-)

It is a bit anticlimactic, as I do feel it is a bit like a handout. To get this gear upgrade, I really only endured a bit of emotional pain at getting spanked in Arena, and a teeny tiny bit of personal discipline in remembering to get my 2 friends together for about 2 hours before each tuesday's deadline.

Welfare or not, she looks awesome as I spam away at Wing Clip to level up my 2H Axe skill.


Edit: title changed from "I'm on Welfare" at the last second, preferring a Hot Shots Part Deux reference instead.

This'll only take 4 seconds

Got to try out my new 2-piece Beast Lord gear set out in some dungeon runs.

Four seconds off of the trap cooldown.

Just silly, I tell you.

Ran Shattered Halls, Mechanar, and Heroic Slave Pens. To sum it up, in Shattered Halls my favorite comment was, "good lord, you're like a machine gun with those traps". Nuff said.

I was happily anticipating the cooldown reduction, but I never realized it would make quite that much difference. In Shattered Halls, you deal with tons of mobs simultaneously and with a Warrior tank, every bit of CC is helpful. I just had no idea that the 4 seconds would make quite that much difference. It was wonderous. No matter how chaotic a pull became, I always felt I had a new trap ready whenever one was needed.

The next day, same group, only swap out a Warlock for another Hunter.

Party Leader gives out the assignments, and says amava=blue square, otherguy=star.

First pull, blue square goes up, no star applied. Mob runs to otherguy.

Second pull, same deal.

Sensing what's going on, just for fun, I start breaking his trap and trap over by me, and chain trap from there.

A few pulls later, and otherguy says "who's breaking traps?"

I say "who's pulling blue square?"

Party Leader says "amava=bluesquare".

Otherguy says "but you don't have any points in survival".

I say "lol".

Granted, I'm fine with him on primary trap duty. With the right points in Survival, you can definitely be better off than I am. But don't ignore the party leader. He gives an assignment, either communicate your alternate strategy to the party along with your reason for preferring that plan, or follow instructions.

Ended up being a pretty cool run from that point forward. Standard heroic wipe-fest that pre-kara beauties like me are growing to loathe love.

Gearing up through PvP

More pondering on the gear upgrades.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to form a 3v3 arena team with him. He is always helping me out, and will run any dungeon I need to grind rep in or hope for a drop. I know he's big on BG's for gearing up, so I figured I'll help him out. PvP is not my cup of tea.

We get spanked in Arena. First week we go 1-9. Second week we go 2-10. Third week we go 4-12. Rating somewhere in the upper 1200's. Total garbage. We discuss strategy (kill the healer, if you can find him before you get ganked), we try executing the strategy (oh sh-t, i can't find the healer), we cry on eachother's shoulder (did the doors open yet? yeah dude you're facing the wrong way. oh, nm, i'm dead).

Then a few days ago, I learn that there's a cool axe available for 1000 arena points. Arena points? I've been doing arena, what're those? So somebody explains it to me, and I'm a sharp cookie, so I follow him to the quartermaster and I see the Axe and a handfull of other beauties. I also possess higher math skills, if not higher spelling skills, and I can see that we've got a bit over 500 arena points after the first 2 weeks, so a quick extrapolation shows that we need to bang out 10 games monday night, and then if the point income rate is linear, one more week and I'll be looking for an enchanter for my new axe.

Then there's also a bunch of other blogs around town that are debating the whole Welfare Epics and AFK players just grinding out their points to get the PvP rewards. I guess that on one side are hardcore raiders thinking that PvP rewards cheepen the glory of the raiding epics. And the hardcore PvP players feel that PvE raiding is painful and the random boss drops leave players feeling like they have no control over their own destiny. Not sure if I captured the argument correctly here, but that's my perception.

What about folks like me? At heart, I'm a PvE player. Not a raider yet, but I'm getting there. I play Arena. Poorly. Looking at me, you'd not know the difference between me and an AFK'er, unless you were listening to the swear-fest on vent during the matches. We do laugh and have some fun, but being dead before you can even target an enemy wears thin pretty quickly.

The matches we win are probably against AFK'ers, or maybe others like us who are trying but are just bad at it. Whenever I kite a plate wearer or an F-ing rogue using a combination of traps, concussive shot, arcane shot and serpent sting, I have a blast. I'm not good at it at all, but when I'm up against someone of equal skill as me (ie, low) at this little game, we have a slow sloppy, but in our minds, EPIC battle.

Even better when we actually do find the healer, and target him, and take him out like we planned.

I wonder where the hardcore people on either side of the PvP/PvE fence stand regarding people like us.

Then I got to thinking about it. Having never fired a shot in anger inside Karazhan I cant say for sure, but it would seem that during a week, it would be reasonable to say a casual guild new to raiding might spend 4-6 hours in there. Maybe more, but that's a starting point for a new guild. In that first week, is it reasonable for someone to get an epic drop? Probably. You as an individual probably shouldn't expect anything, lest the loot gods decide to hate on you. But a few people in the team will get some epic drops.

Now stretch that out, and keep running Kara for 4 weeks. Is it a bit more reasonable to expect that you as an individual will get a drop for yourself to equip? Not guaranteed, but probably a decent chance.

I'm looking at my Arena team. It'll take us 4 weeks to get our first pieces of gear. Or if you don't want that first 1000 point item, then the next items are around 1800, or 7 weeks. Depending upon the Arena queue times, you can get those points done in as little as an hour, or upwards from there as wait times vary.

So what's the difference?

I suppose the first one is time. Just using my entirely fabricated time frames, over that same month, you spent lets call it 6 hours in Arena, and perhaps 24 hours or more raiding. Again, this is semi-casual players, not hardcore players who do their 24 hours on the first 3 days of the month, or play tons of Arena matches. So there's clearly a time investment difference.

Then there's the organizational difference. For my arena team, we just needed to organize 3 people (plus two extras because one didnt show up, and his replacement DC'd, on a monday night when we needed our matches to be done before server reboot). For Karazhan, this is probably my biggest barrier to entry, where you need to organize 10 people plus a couple of subs to cover for absences and fights where the RL wants different classes to try stuff out.

And finally, I suppose there's the universally comparable challenge that a boss kill represents. In Arena, although we are improving (or playing worse teams through the rankings), there's no benchmark against which we can compare our accomplishments. If a guild takes down Curator, anybody else who's beaten him knows the level of challenge that was overcome. Even for good Arena teams, who maintain a high rating which is a big challenge, there's little benchmark for cross comparison. The difference is that good Arena teams will get the phat loot way quicker than the sloppy teams like mine. I do my extrapolations using some pretty minimum expectations at weekly point earnings. A good team would have a much steeper slope. During the course of the season, I will probably get two pieces, MAYBE a third (not sure how long the seaon is). The good players will be fully decked out in the S3 gear.

In summary, who cares? Why all the fuss? Go play your game, the way you like it, and have fun and collect phat loot. Only get jealous of other players if they steal your spot in a Kara raid :-P

Richard Gear

As I ponder the various gear options for my toon, I'm simply staggered by the wide variety of options and number of comparisons and compromises that are to be made along the way.

My current helm is ugly and looks like I dipped my head in rubber cement and then rolled around in a raked pile of leaves in the autumn. Decent stats, but ugly as sin. A Beast Lord Helm would be nice. In fact, I think the only 3 drops I actually care about in normal mode are the 3 remaining Beast Lord set pieces. Two more of those puppies would be nice to add in some "ignore armor after a kill command" effect. Me and my regular crew pretty much have the normal mode dungeons not quite on farm status, but we complete them with little fuss. I consider these gear upgrades to be immediate options, that might drop any night I run.

Note, I don't even consider the Sonic Spear on this list because Murmur have agreed to disagree. He can keep his damn spear.

A scan at Kaliban's Loot List for hunters shows me that there's a couple of epic drops in Heroic mode that would be tasty. Heroics are still a giant struggle for me and the teammates I frequently run with, so these are on my little scrap of paper I've been writing these sort of things down on, but I don't really consider them to be immediate options.

What's next? A nice pair of boots (among other things) in Karazhan. While some organized kara runs might be just around the corner, I don't view this as loot that is in my character upgrade plan at all.

There's reputation rewards.

Honor Hold has a nice gun at Exalted. I'm very early in the Revered stage, so Exalted is quite a ways away. I'll probably try to run Shattered Halls whenever its the normal-mode daily quest, for rep, for the quest, and for the chance that my group's enchanter will get the Savagery formula to drop. Also, the assorted Heroic Ramparts and Blood Furnace wipe fests that do yield some rep. You know, I just found out yesterday that he's at 375 enchanting. That's a pretty staggering accomplishment. Now I wont laugh at him when he tells me he's only got 6 gold in the bank. But then again, he just dropped herbalism for jewel crafting, so I suppose he's a glutton for punishment, followed by opportunity for giant rewards once you level up. But I digress.

Aldor Exalted will give me a better shoulder inscription, which is more of an in-place upgrade, rather than a real gear upgrade, but in any event, I still look on AH for Fel Armaments daily, as there's often cheep ones listed. And in random down time, I go grind for Marks of Sargeras, but it'll take something like 1000 more marks to ding exalted, so that's more of a diversion than anything.

Next up is Badge of Justice gear. As my badges are only trickling in due to the difficulty we have in Heroics, these are too far out of reach for any immediate plan. Every now and again I talk to the quartermaster guy and drool but until Karazhan is providing a reliable source of badges, this stuff is just eye candy.

Other than higher level raid instances, or quartermasters that you get rep for in those higher level dungeons, I think that's it for PvE gear options. Oh yeah, there's crafted items. I don't know what high-level BoE crafted items are available. I'm thinking that at this stage, any upgrades would be BoP, thus making them non-options for me, unless the herb market stays in the dumper for another month, in which case I'm planning on making a professional change.

I think the only remaining source for gear is PvP. The new Arena axe is awesome. I've read on BRK's forums that its equivalent to an axe that drops in some 25-man dungeon. Sweet. This guy costs 1000 Arena points. After tuesday's reboot, I'll check my points, but I think I've got just one more week worth of Arena left to get that little guy. Then the question will be +35 agi or +70 ap? But whatever. There's a nice list of other gear to work towards in Arena, but since me and my team suck, we're pretty much limited to about 250 arena points per week (actually a drop more, but that's a decent baseline), so the next upgrades are roughly 1800 Arena points, meaning it'll take about 7 weeks to get the next upgrade. I'll have to see what my gear looks like when I get there (roughly 2 months from now), but as it stands right now, I'd probably take the Arena bracers first.

There are other quartermasters for the various BG's. Ugh, why are there so many options. On and on and on.

Does anybody know a website like Kaliban's that goes a bit further? Kaliban's seems to stop right at the point where I'm at and its a bit dizzying trying to find all the options so I can make a plan for going after pieces.

Shoulder Massage

I've never been so glad to have an equipment upgrade last such a short amount of time. The new shoulders I got from Botanica look absurd, and from a role playing perspective, are something that Amava would never equip.

Less than a week later, in my third Steamvaults run of the weekend, a beautiful thing happened and Warlord Kalithresh dropped me a fancy new Beast Lord Mantle. Amava's fashion sense is back on track.





This is the second piece I've gotten from the Beast Lord set, so now I can't wait to try out chain trapping with the 4 second reduction in trap cooldown. Those four seconds in a Heroic dungeon are priceless.