Last night, while questing around Desolace with my priest, I got two unsolicited tells from a certain jerky paladin whose name is on my Do-Not-Party list. The first time he just said, "RFK?" The second time, just "SM library." Of course, I recognized the name immediately and turned him down. In each case, I thanked him for asking, as I always do, and wished him luck. I really was busy questing with my husband's warrior toon, but after my last experience with him, there is absolutely no way I would have joined his party even if I had the time to spare.
After his second tell, I was browsing my blacklist a bit. It's a short list (which may surprise you given all the whinging about pugs here so far), scrawled on a pad of paper next to my computer. It's arranged in the order I ran into each person, and next to each name, there are just a couple of words to describe why they're on the list. Ninja. Jerk. Yells at everyone. Runs ahead and wipes the party. Not too many details, but I hoped that in each case that it would be enough to make me remember why I wouldn't want to party with them again. It looks a little worse for the wear, given that the cat has overturned at least two glasses of water on it, but I can still make out most of the names.
With the jerky paladin, his name is weird/recognizable and my memories are fresh thanks to writing the blog entry, so the decision will always be clear on that one. For others, I found that the memories were hazier. What instance did I run with them, and what, more specifically, bothered me? I'm pretty sure I don't add a person if they are simply annoying. They need to be a special kind of annoying to make the list, a kind that says I could not stomach another instance with them. Some offenses are definitely worse than others though. For example, take "runs ahead and wipes the party." What if the leader was very good, and they were able to keep the person under control? Or, what if they'd learned some better grouping practices since our last meeting? It might be ok to party with someone like that again. On the other hand, I absolutely want to steer clear of the loot ninjas, because I know I'll just get mad if they do it again. So, it seems I need a better way to keep track of people, perhaps something better organized (and more cat-proof).
After reading Nibuca's thoughts on WoW player ratings, I casually looked into addons for keeping track of other players and storing notes on them in the game. One that intrigued me was DiggKarma, which also allows you also to share notes on players with others who have the addon. I wouldn't mind being able to warn others about the jerky paladin, but I'm not sure that I'd really want to share my friend/ignore lists. I'd have to see what kind of settings it has for privacy.
Really, I just want a way to keep notes for myself. NotesUNeed seems to be a rather popular download, but perhaps something simpler like Player Notes or NoteIt would be sufficient. Oooh, wait a second, I just found a WowAce one that's FuBar compatible: AuldLangSyne. I'll give that a try this weekend and report back.
Now, the other issue... It's easy enough to avoid these folks if they are the one asking me to join the party, but what if I join a party invited by someone else, and find that someone on my blacklist is in the group? This is not something I've been faced with yet... would I politely excuse myself? (Sorry guys, gotta log...) I don't think I'm confrontational enough to actually say why I'm leaving to the person (unless they -really- pissed me off), but would I whisper my reason to the leader? (Look out for the rogue -- he's a ninja...) I think I'd have to say something to someone. I always find it annoying, even if it's clear that the pug is terrible and going to be unsuccessful, when people leave the group without saying anything, especially if you're already inside the instance. I genuinely hope I won't be faced with this, but I'm curious to see how I'll react when I'm actually in the situation.
How do you keep track of players you'd like to avoid? And if you find yourself in a group with one of these folks, what's your next move?
Friday, November 9, 2007
Thursday, November 8, 2007
A Little Help from the Damage Meter
Last night, I played my level 33ish mage for the first time in ages. My hunter did the 30-40's in Stranglethorn Vale, my 34ish priest has just headed to Desolace to quest there, and so I took my mage to Tarren Mill with the intention of running to the Arathi Highlands to quest there. May as well mix things up a bit so I don't get bored leveling two toons in the same area.
Anyway, when I got to Tarren Mill, there were several Alterac quests available, so I picked them up and started wandering around. May as well take care of a few things here, too, I thought. To make a long story short, I wandered into a zone loaded mobs a few levels above me and completely got my butt kicked. It was kind of embarrassing. I was killing the green stuff just fine (and naturally, the grays), but an yellow mobs were totally destroying me. Not even elites -- just plain yellows! My priest certainly hasn't been having trouble with the yellows, so ... what the heck?
I got smushed several times before I realized I needed to take a step back and really look at what I was casting. This is where Violation, the damage meter I installed came in really handy. I found some green mobs and started playing with my spell rotation until my DPS was looking better. I also spent some time reviewing how much mana each of the spells required. I'd mentally assigned values to them (evidently based on my very poor memory) that were way off. Good to know.
So, with increased DPS and a better idea of how to conserve mana, I proceeded to the Arathi Highlands. (I might go back to Alterac some day, but I must give the mobs some time to forget, lest the coach call the outfielders in... easy out, easy out...) I found the cave with the Ogres I was supposed to kill, and made my way inside. I actually did quite well in killing them. I did have to stop and eat leftover Halloween candy a few times, and I died once after some ill-timed respawnings, but I successfully completed the quest and ran to Hammerfall, feeling very proud of myself. And boy, were the greens easy after that...
----
So, clearly, using damage meters as a diagnostic can quickly improve one's game play. There are stories stories all over the place, however, about folks using damage meters instead to try to outdo each other's DPS in a group, sometimes to the detriment of the party, pulling aggro from the tank and so forth. I do agree with BRK's sentiment that "Wow is NOT a DPS race," but I can see how people fall into this...
The game keeps you hooked by offering you goals, some big, some small. The game even tricks you into completing bigger tasks (like grinding for experience) by offering you seemingly small tasks: "Collect 10 naga eyeballs." 10, you say, rubbing your bleary eyes. I can do that and still be in bed at a reasonable time tonight. And then the drop rate isn't as high as you hoped, and you've killed 100 nagas (90% of which are blind, apparently), and you're up for an hour longer than intended... Anyway, my point is that having a damage meter there offers another small goal that you can probably achieve during the course of an instance if you're a DPS build.
I won't lie, either -- it's fun to be at the top of that DPS list. Before I go into an instance now, I reset Violation so I can check it periodically and see how I'm doing. My goal isn't to be at the top, however. I tweak my casting rotation in response to the threatmeter, not the damage meter.
I also don't make a big deal out of it should I find myself at the top of the list. I've been in instances where the players beg someone to post the damage meter stats, presumeably because they know they'll be at the top. When I ran Scarlet Monastery with my hunter a while ago, a paladin, who was the sole healer, even requested that the healing stats be shared, too. "Why? You're the healer, so of course you'll be at the top," someone pointed out. "I just want to see it," they said. Somehow it makes people feel like they're winning the game, I guess. Again, the wisdom of the man they call BRK: "...topping the damage-meter is not The Goal; defeating the instance is." Well said.
Anyway, when I got to Tarren Mill, there were several Alterac quests available, so I picked them up and started wandering around. May as well take care of a few things here, too, I thought. To make a long story short, I wandered into a zone loaded mobs a few levels above me and completely got my butt kicked. It was kind of embarrassing. I was killing the green stuff just fine (and naturally, the grays), but an yellow mobs were totally destroying me. Not even elites -- just plain yellows! My priest certainly hasn't been having trouble with the yellows, so ... what the heck?
I got smushed several times before I realized I needed to take a step back and really look at what I was casting. This is where Violation, the damage meter I installed came in really handy. I found some green mobs and started playing with my spell rotation until my DPS was looking better. I also spent some time reviewing how much mana each of the spells required. I'd mentally assigned values to them (evidently based on my very poor memory) that were way off. Good to know.
So, with increased DPS and a better idea of how to conserve mana, I proceeded to the Arathi Highlands. (I might go back to Alterac some day, but I must give the mobs some time to forget, lest the coach call the outfielders in... easy out, easy out...) I found the cave with the Ogres I was supposed to kill, and made my way inside. I actually did quite well in killing them. I did have to stop and eat leftover Halloween candy a few times, and I died once after some ill-timed respawnings, but I successfully completed the quest and ran to Hammerfall, feeling very proud of myself. And boy, were the greens easy after that...
----
So, clearly, using damage meters as a diagnostic can quickly improve one's game play. There are stories stories all over the place, however, about folks using damage meters instead to try to outdo each other's DPS in a group, sometimes to the detriment of the party, pulling aggro from the tank and so forth. I do agree with BRK's sentiment that "Wow is NOT a DPS race," but I can see how people fall into this...
The game keeps you hooked by offering you goals, some big, some small. The game even tricks you into completing bigger tasks (like grinding for experience) by offering you seemingly small tasks: "Collect 10 naga eyeballs." 10, you say, rubbing your bleary eyes. I can do that and still be in bed at a reasonable time tonight. And then the drop rate isn't as high as you hoped, and you've killed 100 nagas (90% of which are blind, apparently), and you're up for an hour longer than intended... Anyway, my point is that having a damage meter there offers another small goal that you can probably achieve during the course of an instance if you're a DPS build.
I won't lie, either -- it's fun to be at the top of that DPS list. Before I go into an instance now, I reset Violation so I can check it periodically and see how I'm doing. My goal isn't to be at the top, however. I tweak my casting rotation in response to the threatmeter, not the damage meter.
I also don't make a big deal out of it should I find myself at the top of the list. I've been in instances where the players beg someone to post the damage meter stats, presumeably because they know they'll be at the top. When I ran Scarlet Monastery with my hunter a while ago, a paladin, who was the sole healer, even requested that the healing stats be shared, too. "Why? You're the healer, so of course you'll be at the top," someone pointed out. "I just want to see it," they said. Somehow it makes people feel like they're winning the game, I guess. Again, the wisdom of the man they call BRK: "...topping the damage-meter is not The Goal; defeating the instance is." Well said.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
My world at 5 fps
This past weekend when I was loading some new interface mods, I added PerformanceFu, which monitors your frame rate, latency, and some other stats on how well the game is running. At first, having the frame rate immediately available was nice, because when I'd see the frames per second drop, I'd just calmly say, Ok, I'm lagging. I'd wait for the number to increase again, and then start moving. Whenever I saw oddities, like the fps shoot way high and then drop way low (usually while in the elevator in the Undercity), I'd calmly say, Ok, I guess I'll be disconnected in a second. Somehow, just seeing that fps number and knowing what the next few moments were going to be like made it a little less frustrating. At first.
Now, those regular dips in frame rate are just making me spend a lot of time at Dell.com, shopping for a new computer. My computer is about five years old, and although I haven't looked at the minimum specs for running WoW since I first installed the ten day free trial all those months ago, I'm pretty sure it's below what they have listed as required. (It's certainly far below what is recommended.)
When I first decided to play WoW, I did shop for video cards a bit, thinking that just upgrading that would be good enough. At the time that I got this computer, I was playing some games, but nothing so graphics intensive that I noticed a slowdown. The first game I noticed it choke on was Civ 4, so I usually played that on our laptop instead, which was newer and slightly beefier than my desktop. I couldn't imagine playing WoW on the laptop though. Civ 4 made the laptop run pretty hot, so I think WoW would probably cause a total meltdown. Anyway, WoW seemed to run well enough on my desktop, so I abandoned the idea of an upgrade pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what's happened since then. My lag problems seemed to get worse just after the last patch. I don't know if it's all the fancy effects they've added with the sunlight or what. I've changed some settings to reduce the video quality a bit, turned off the music, moved a bunch of extraneous non-WoW files to an external hard drive (because it was getting pretty full), and defragged the heck out of it. According to the PerformanceFu thing, my mods aren't adding that much of a strain, so I don't think that's it. With every patch, I guess the game gets a little bigger and more complicated, and it's just more than my little computer can take.
I found a mid range video card that I thought might be a good, sturdy upgrade, but then I noticed how cheap PCs are getting. For just twice the cost of the video card, I could get a whole new system. (I do have a nice monitor, so not replacing that already makes the whole venture cheaper.) But you know how things go. If you're going to spend $800, then what difference would a few more hundred bucks make? And then a few more, and ... well, this is a major source of entertainment for me, the last computer did last five years, so if I just beef it up a little more, this could last me another five, and ... yeah. I want a whole new computer, and not just a moderate upgrade. I want it to kick ass. I don't ever want to see Azeroth at 5 fps again.
So, I'm shopping seriously now. (And getting no work done.)
Edit: The new computer has been ordered! Est. shipping date is the 19th. Now, the agonizing wait...
Now, those regular dips in frame rate are just making me spend a lot of time at Dell.com, shopping for a new computer. My computer is about five years old, and although I haven't looked at the minimum specs for running WoW since I first installed the ten day free trial all those months ago, I'm pretty sure it's below what they have listed as required. (It's certainly far below what is recommended.)
When I first decided to play WoW, I did shop for video cards a bit, thinking that just upgrading that would be good enough. At the time that I got this computer, I was playing some games, but nothing so graphics intensive that I noticed a slowdown. The first game I noticed it choke on was Civ 4, so I usually played that on our laptop instead, which was newer and slightly beefier than my desktop. I couldn't imagine playing WoW on the laptop though. Civ 4 made the laptop run pretty hot, so I think WoW would probably cause a total meltdown. Anyway, WoW seemed to run well enough on my desktop, so I abandoned the idea of an upgrade pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what's happened since then. My lag problems seemed to get worse just after the last patch. I don't know if it's all the fancy effects they've added with the sunlight or what. I've changed some settings to reduce the video quality a bit, turned off the music, moved a bunch of extraneous non-WoW files to an external hard drive (because it was getting pretty full), and defragged the heck out of it. According to the PerformanceFu thing, my mods aren't adding that much of a strain, so I don't think that's it. With every patch, I guess the game gets a little bigger and more complicated, and it's just more than my little computer can take.
I found a mid range video card that I thought might be a good, sturdy upgrade, but then I noticed how cheap PCs are getting. For just twice the cost of the video card, I could get a whole new system. (I do have a nice monitor, so not replacing that already makes the whole venture cheaper.) But you know how things go. If you're going to spend $800, then what difference would a few more hundred bucks make? And then a few more, and ... well, this is a major source of entertainment for me, the last computer did last five years, so if I just beef it up a little more, this could last me another five, and ... yeah. I want a whole new computer, and not just a moderate upgrade. I want it to kick ass. I don't ever want to see Azeroth at 5 fps again.
So, I'm shopping seriously now. (And getting no work done.)
Edit: The new computer has been ordered! Est. shipping date is the 19th. Now, the agonizing wait...
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Good, the Bad, and the Inconsistent
= The Good =
After playing my priest all day Saturday (now at 33 -- woo!), I decided to take my hunter out for a spin on Sunday. To take full advantage of the huge amount of double experience I'd racked up, my cat and I wandered to the Alterac Ruins to kill elite ogres and finish the last quests in the chain The Crown of Will. My mission was to find and kill Mug'thol inside a building with tight corridors, teeming with ogres. The layout of the building made it a tad challenging, because often you didn't know how many you were pulling until you actually walked in the room and they leapt upon you, but was fun and I was doing fine, even taking on several mobs.
Then, I got a whisper... "You have all the heads?" Heads? What heads? Was I in the LFG for Uldaman, because I'd considered trying to get a pug together for that? No, I wasn't in the LFG channel and there was no Uldaman quest involving heads. Then, a Tauren hunter appeared from around the corner with his cat. Oh! That's right... the quest before this one involved collecting the heads of a few other baddies in the area. I whispered back and said I'd done that one, but that I'd be happy to help him with it, so we partied up and headed upstairs for Mug'thol.
We did pretty well together, killing our way up to the third floor where Mug'thol was. The Tauren drew aggro a few times and he died twice, but seemed to take it well. We cleared the two mobs in front of Mug'thol without drawing him, and then sicced our pets on the big guy. No problem.
The Tauren asked if any of his kills were in this building, and they weren't, but I remembered where the others were, so we marched north, stopping in buildings to collect the heads that he needed. I then agreed to help him go back in and kill Mug'thol so he could complete the quest, too. All in all, a good time, with good banter, and mostly clean pulls. I added him to my friend list, and will look for him again for group quests, I'm sure.
= The Bad =
Of course I had to run into at least one jerkface over the weekend. After turning in Mug'thol's head in Tarren Mill and then the Crown of Will in the Undercity, I added myself to the LFG list for Uldaman. While I was still clearing out my inventory from the last quests, I got an invite to a group. "u want 4 ulda?"
I think I'll spare you the play by play on grouping with this guy. The summary:
1) When we still needed one more for the group, he asked me specifically to advertise this in the trade channel since I was in a city. The trade channel?! I suggested he advertise in LookingForGroup instead. General is one thing, but the trade channel? That is so annoying.
2) He is one of those people that just cannot stay put. While everyone else is sitting, drinking, rebuffing, and waiting for the leader to mark the next pull, he is wandering off way up ahead. He was a rogue, so he was often sneaking around invisible right next to the next set of mobs. He did a few accidental pulls this way when nobody was ready. Again, very annoying.
3) In one part of the instance, rather than clear all the mobs in the area before summoning the boss (as the leader asked us to do), he just walked right up and summoned it. The leader of the group was like, "oh well, I guess we're done here... you just ruined the instance." I thought this was a bit dramatic (though never having done Ulda, I had no idea whether it was true), but the rogue said, "no just pull the boss." Turns out we'd cleared enough that we could just pull the boss, so it did turn out fine. After that, for the next 10 minutes we got to hear from the rogue, "so did i ruin it? huh?" over and over.
4) A strong iron lockbox fell at one point, and we all rolled greed except for the the rogue who rolled last: Need. "Mistake," he said. So, all this and a ninja, too. Brilliant. At about 5 o'clock this morning, when I was lying in bed wondering if I'd remembered to change the time on my alarm clock, I was thinking about this again, and I realized that if you are a loot ninja, particularly a rogue, this is the ideal drop to make your "accidental" need roll, because presumeably, you can just unlock it and whatever is inside will not be bound to you. I know he could unlock these, too, because earlier, when I won the roll on a lockbox, he said to me, "I unlock 4 u." I said no thanks, that I'd take care of it later. Sounds like I made the right decision.
5) At the end of the instance, he was complaining his head off about how much it was going to cost to repair his armor. (I whispered to the leader that maybe whatever was in the lockbox he ninja'd would cover it.)
Anyway, this guy is on Do-Not-Party List now. What an ass.
= The Inconsistent =
So, this would be our entire Ulda party, myself included. I mentioned before that I was nervous about my role as a hunter in instances, and someone putting me in charge of trapping something since I hadn't practiced it much yet. When the leader explained the marks he was going to use and the kill order, he said, "blue square = freeze trap." Hoo boy, I thought. Here we go. When he marked our first big pull and I saw that blue square, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, but I was pretty sure I knew what to do. I laid the trap and selected the mob, and waited for the tank to run in before shooting the square to lure him to me.
The leader wanted the moon sheeped, the star sapped, and the square trapped. The kill order was skull, x, star, square, and then moon. Charge! *insert Benny Hill music* I shot the square, but someone (I'll just assume it was our rogue friend) drew him away and he was diverted. The tank was getting a huge beatdown from the skull, the x, and the star. I sent my pet into assist the tank and resumed trying to draw the square. Then I saw the moon chasing the mage, and they ran right at me and into my trap. Wow... it was a complete and total mess. We managed to kill everything and stay alive, but this did not bode well...
The second pull, same general theme. We seemed to be completely failing at crowd control, as the sheep and square kept getting hit before or while they were trapped. I whispered an apology to the leader, and mentioned the problem of folks breaking the trap, and he reminded the whole group that they should be wary of what they were hitting, and to be careful not to break the cc traps and spells. The following pull went much better, but then the one after was as bad as the first. As we got deeper into the instance, we were terribly inconsistent and did not seem to improve from pull to pull. There was just no telling what was going to happen. We wiped at least three times before getting to the final rooms.
I did get some successful trapping done in there, but I admit a few bonehead maneuvers where I accidently broke my own trap. By the end, I was pretty comfortable with what I was supposed to do, but had to improvise many times when the trap got broken or resisted. In one terrible pull, both the trap and the polymorph spell were resisted, and everybody died except me and the rogue. (I thought for sure we were going to die, too, because the rogue kept messing around in stealth mode near our next set of mobs while the others were still running back from the graveyard. Argh.) As we approached the final boss, it was pretty clear we were not going to be able to complete the instance. Two wipes in a row in the room after the one where the stone statues come alive one by one, and we decided to call it a wash. Our crowd control skills weren't strong enough, our DPS wasn't high enough, our healer (a non-holy specced paladin) couldn't keep everybody healed because we were all taking too much damage, and our tank wasn't holding aggro. Alas. I did level in there though... that was nice. (45!)
It was fun to try a new instance, and one where the pulls were quite challenging. I'm frustrated that we didn't seem to improve over the course of the instance though, like as a group, we weren't learning anything about how to do these pulls better as we went along. In the cases where things did go better after a wipe, it was only because there were fewer mobs, since we managed to knock off a few in the previous battle. I look forward to trying Uldaman again if I can get a group together, hopefully with a more consistent performance from myself as a trapper and the group as a whole.
After playing my priest all day Saturday (now at 33 -- woo!), I decided to take my hunter out for a spin on Sunday. To take full advantage of the huge amount of double experience I'd racked up, my cat and I wandered to the Alterac Ruins to kill elite ogres and finish the last quests in the chain The Crown of Will. My mission was to find and kill Mug'thol inside a building with tight corridors, teeming with ogres. The layout of the building made it a tad challenging, because often you didn't know how many you were pulling until you actually walked in the room and they leapt upon you, but was fun and I was doing fine, even taking on several mobs.
Then, I got a whisper... "You have all the heads?" Heads? What heads? Was I in the LFG for Uldaman, because I'd considered trying to get a pug together for that? No, I wasn't in the LFG channel and there was no Uldaman quest involving heads. Then, a Tauren hunter appeared from around the corner with his cat. Oh! That's right... the quest before this one involved collecting the heads of a few other baddies in the area. I whispered back and said I'd done that one, but that I'd be happy to help him with it, so we partied up and headed upstairs for Mug'thol.
We did pretty well together, killing our way up to the third floor where Mug'thol was. The Tauren drew aggro a few times and he died twice, but seemed to take it well. We cleared the two mobs in front of Mug'thol without drawing him, and then sicced our pets on the big guy. No problem.
The Tauren asked if any of his kills were in this building, and they weren't, but I remembered where the others were, so we marched north, stopping in buildings to collect the heads that he needed. I then agreed to help him go back in and kill Mug'thol so he could complete the quest, too. All in all, a good time, with good banter, and mostly clean pulls. I added him to my friend list, and will look for him again for group quests, I'm sure.
= The Bad =
Of course I had to run into at least one jerkface over the weekend. After turning in Mug'thol's head in Tarren Mill and then the Crown of Will in the Undercity, I added myself to the LFG list for Uldaman. While I was still clearing out my inventory from the last quests, I got an invite to a group. "u want 4 ulda?"
I think I'll spare you the play by play on grouping with this guy. The summary:
1) When we still needed one more for the group, he asked me specifically to advertise this in the trade channel since I was in a city. The trade channel?! I suggested he advertise in LookingForGroup instead. General is one thing, but the trade channel? That is so annoying.
2) He is one of those people that just cannot stay put. While everyone else is sitting, drinking, rebuffing, and waiting for the leader to mark the next pull, he is wandering off way up ahead. He was a rogue, so he was often sneaking around invisible right next to the next set of mobs. He did a few accidental pulls this way when nobody was ready. Again, very annoying.
3) In one part of the instance, rather than clear all the mobs in the area before summoning the boss (as the leader asked us to do), he just walked right up and summoned it. The leader of the group was like, "oh well, I guess we're done here... you just ruined the instance." I thought this was a bit dramatic (though never having done Ulda, I had no idea whether it was true), but the rogue said, "no just pull the boss." Turns out we'd cleared enough that we could just pull the boss, so it did turn out fine. After that, for the next 10 minutes we got to hear from the rogue, "so did i ruin it? huh?" over and over.
4) A strong iron lockbox fell at one point, and we all rolled greed except for the the rogue who rolled last: Need. "Mistake," he said. So, all this and a ninja, too. Brilliant. At about 5 o'clock this morning, when I was lying in bed wondering if I'd remembered to change the time on my alarm clock, I was thinking about this again, and I realized that if you are a loot ninja, particularly a rogue, this is the ideal drop to make your "accidental" need roll, because presumeably, you can just unlock it and whatever is inside will not be bound to you. I know he could unlock these, too, because earlier, when I won the roll on a lockbox, he said to me, "I unlock 4 u." I said no thanks, that I'd take care of it later. Sounds like I made the right decision.
5) At the end of the instance, he was complaining his head off about how much it was going to cost to repair his armor. (I whispered to the leader that maybe whatever was in the lockbox he ninja'd would cover it.)
Anyway, this guy is on Do-Not-Party List now. What an ass.
= The Inconsistent =
So, this would be our entire Ulda party, myself included. I mentioned before that I was nervous about my role as a hunter in instances, and someone putting me in charge of trapping something since I hadn't practiced it much yet. When the leader explained the marks he was going to use and the kill order, he said, "blue square = freeze trap." Hoo boy, I thought. Here we go. When he marked our first big pull and I saw that blue square, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, but I was pretty sure I knew what to do. I laid the trap and selected the mob, and waited for the tank to run in before shooting the square to lure him to me.
The leader wanted the moon sheeped, the star sapped, and the square trapped. The kill order was skull, x, star, square, and then moon. Charge! *insert Benny Hill music* I shot the square, but someone (I'll just assume it was our rogue friend) drew him away and he was diverted. The tank was getting a huge beatdown from the skull, the x, and the star. I sent my pet into assist the tank and resumed trying to draw the square. Then I saw the moon chasing the mage, and they ran right at me and into my trap. Wow... it was a complete and total mess. We managed to kill everything and stay alive, but this did not bode well...
The second pull, same general theme. We seemed to be completely failing at crowd control, as the sheep and square kept getting hit before or while they were trapped. I whispered an apology to the leader, and mentioned the problem of folks breaking the trap, and he reminded the whole group that they should be wary of what they were hitting, and to be careful not to break the cc traps and spells. The following pull went much better, but then the one after was as bad as the first. As we got deeper into the instance, we were terribly inconsistent and did not seem to improve from pull to pull. There was just no telling what was going to happen. We wiped at least three times before getting to the final rooms.
I did get some successful trapping done in there, but I admit a few bonehead maneuvers where I accidently broke my own trap. By the end, I was pretty comfortable with what I was supposed to do, but had to improvise many times when the trap got broken or resisted. In one terrible pull, both the trap and the polymorph spell were resisted, and everybody died except me and the rogue. (I thought for sure we were going to die, too, because the rogue kept messing around in stealth mode near our next set of mobs while the others were still running back from the graveyard. Argh.) As we approached the final boss, it was pretty clear we were not going to be able to complete the instance. Two wipes in a row in the room after the one where the stone statues come alive one by one, and we decided to call it a wash. Our crowd control skills weren't strong enough, our DPS wasn't high enough, our healer (a non-holy specced paladin) couldn't keep everybody healed because we were all taking too much damage, and our tank wasn't holding aggro. Alas. I did level in there though... that was nice. (45!)
It was fun to try a new instance, and one where the pulls were quite challenging. I'm frustrated that we didn't seem to improve over the course of the instance though, like as a group, we weren't learning anything about how to do these pulls better as we went along. In the cases where things did go better after a wipe, it was only because there were fewer mobs, since we managed to knock off a few in the previous battle. I look forward to trying Uldaman again if I can get a group together, hopefully with a more consistent performance from myself as a trapper and the group as a whole.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Addon... addoff...
I remember hearing about of lots of different mods during my Diablo II days. They were a violation of the terms of service, so Blizzard was threatening to remove accounts that ran even a single addon. "Even Maphack?" people would say. Yes, even Maphack, said Blizzard. I was never tempted to download any of these things (even Maphack) afraid that I would inadvertantly pick up a virus, or something that would cause my computer to go up in flames the next time I killed Baal.
So, I waited a long time before running any addons with WoW. I guess I assumed they would be a violation of the ToS for this game, too, but evidently they're not. I'm sure there are some that Blizzard frowns upon (and I've read about creators that have retired addons after such frowning, as with BottomFeeder), but there are tons of useful, legitimate addons out there. I know there are some that view using any addons as cheating, but if Blizzard thinks it's ok, then I'm okay with it, too.
I got a little crazy with the addons at first, and downloaded all kinds of stuff that I've long since abandoned. I used Koordinator to show my in-game coordinates, but scrapped it once I picked up Titan Panel. Also abandoned were Cartographer (maybe this is weird, but I like having the terrain slowly revealed to me as I explore), and DamageMeters. You know, I actually really want DamageMeters, but when I installed it, the little module thing appeared in the middle of my screen, so I clicked on it with the gloved pointer to move it. Then, I somehow could not let go of it. No amount of clicking (with shifting, alting, or anything else I could think of) would allow me to get it off my glove (get it off meh!), nor could I even use the pointer any more to exit the game. I had to alt-tab out and end the game through the Task Manager. That sucked. Any insight into this one is welcome.
Initially, I picked up KLHThreatmeter, because it seemed like the most popular threatmeter at wow.curse.com (one site my brother-in-law told me it should be perfectly safe to download stuff from). I liked it fine, but heard from several (usually with a bit of superiority in their tone) that Omen was better. Sometime after the most recent patch, KTM started behaving strangely, appearing in random spots on my screen when I logged in, often just off the edge of my screen, offering barely a sliver for me to grab it and move it to a better position. (Sometimes I'd never be able to grab it, so I'd just have to give up and keep it hidden for the session, since I didn't know how to reposition it.) So, I got rid of it and have Omen now, and yes, it is lovely.
I also run Auctioneer, though I still don't think I've scanned the auction house enough times to truly benefit from this mod. I don't use the automatic pricing features, but I do use it to give me a ballpark idea of what things are going for. I have certainly made more money since I picked up this addon, but I also spend more time in the AH these days anyway.
Another one of my favorites is Lightheaded, which is like having wowhead right in the game. This is very convenient for me, because if I alt-tab out for a quest hint and open my browser, my computer sometimes makes a funny grinding sound, and the game is sluggish when I return. No matter where I am, I'm doomed to lag like I'm in front of the bank in Orgrimmar until the next computer restart.
For consolidating my bags, I'm currently using Bagnon. It broke after the recent patch, but it was updated and seems to be fine now. The only thing I don't like is that I can never see what keys I have. When I click on the key icon, it just opens my inventory. I may switch to something else when seeing these keys becomes more important.
Two recent additions (courtesy of BRK's addon list) are Autoprofit and Bartender3, and both are quite handy. Autoprofit is a bit dangerous when you have low level characters that might be carrying around gray items that they actually intend to use. My poor little paladin accidently sold her shield without noticing it when I clicked autoprofit. When she decided to put away the 2H weapon and level up the sword, well... turned out to be too late to get it back in the buyback. Heh...
I'm sure I'll collect more addons as I advance in the game, particularly as I start running higher level instances. I imagine cooldown timers and things like that can really improve one's efficiency.
What's the addon you couldn't play without?
So, I waited a long time before running any addons with WoW. I guess I assumed they would be a violation of the ToS for this game, too, but evidently they're not. I'm sure there are some that Blizzard frowns upon (and I've read about creators that have retired addons after such frowning, as with BottomFeeder), but there are tons of useful, legitimate addons out there. I know there are some that view using any addons as cheating, but if Blizzard thinks it's ok, then I'm okay with it, too.
I got a little crazy with the addons at first, and downloaded all kinds of stuff that I've long since abandoned. I used Koordinator to show my in-game coordinates, but scrapped it once I picked up Titan Panel. Also abandoned were Cartographer (maybe this is weird, but I like having the terrain slowly revealed to me as I explore), and DamageMeters. You know, I actually really want DamageMeters, but when I installed it, the little module thing appeared in the middle of my screen, so I clicked on it with the gloved pointer to move it. Then, I somehow could not let go of it. No amount of clicking (with shifting, alting, or anything else I could think of) would allow me to get it off my glove (get it off meh!), nor could I even use the pointer any more to exit the game. I had to alt-tab out and end the game through the Task Manager. That sucked. Any insight into this one is welcome.
Initially, I picked up KLHThreatmeter, because it seemed like the most popular threatmeter at wow.curse.com (one site my brother-in-law told me it should be perfectly safe to download stuff from). I liked it fine, but heard from several (usually with a bit of superiority in their tone) that Omen was better. Sometime after the most recent patch, KTM started behaving strangely, appearing in random spots on my screen when I logged in, often just off the edge of my screen, offering barely a sliver for me to grab it and move it to a better position. (Sometimes I'd never be able to grab it, so I'd just have to give up and keep it hidden for the session, since I didn't know how to reposition it.) So, I got rid of it and have Omen now, and yes, it is lovely.
I also run Auctioneer, though I still don't think I've scanned the auction house enough times to truly benefit from this mod. I don't use the automatic pricing features, but I do use it to give me a ballpark idea of what things are going for. I have certainly made more money since I picked up this addon, but I also spend more time in the AH these days anyway.
Another one of my favorites is Lightheaded, which is like having wowhead right in the game. This is very convenient for me, because if I alt-tab out for a quest hint and open my browser, my computer sometimes makes a funny grinding sound, and the game is sluggish when I return. No matter where I am, I'm doomed to lag like I'm in front of the bank in Orgrimmar until the next computer restart.
For consolidating my bags, I'm currently using Bagnon. It broke after the recent patch, but it was updated and seems to be fine now. The only thing I don't like is that I can never see what keys I have. When I click on the key icon, it just opens my inventory. I may switch to something else when seeing these keys becomes more important.
Two recent additions (courtesy of BRK's addon list) are Autoprofit and Bartender3, and both are quite handy. Autoprofit is a bit dangerous when you have low level characters that might be carrying around gray items that they actually intend to use. My poor little paladin accidently sold her shield without noticing it when I clicked autoprofit. When she decided to put away the 2H weapon and level up the sword, well... turned out to be too late to get it back in the buyback. Heh...
I'm sure I'll collect more addons as I advance in the game, particularly as I start running higher level instances. I imagine cooldown timers and things like that can really improve one's efficiency.
What's the addon you couldn't play without?
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