Lodur’s Week In Review

A couple weeks ago we heard that AVR/AVRE has an expiration date. Simply put the addon just did too much by allowing a player to draw essentially in 3D on top of the in game environment. This really drove home how much players respond to visual cues. However not everyone is a visual based player. How about those that rely on sound for their notifications?

I started thinking about this last week. I have been using Deus Vox Encounters as my boss mod of choice for a little bit and have grown pretty accustomed to it. Last week though, new requirements for a particular fight called for BigWigs to be installed over any other boss mod. I’ll get into the why of that in just a second. Making this switch really clued me in to how much I actually draw from audio cues. As a healer, and a raid officer, my attention is always in a thousand different directions at once. My own healing, watching where I’m standing and paying attention to the boss fights, but also watching all my healers and the other raider to make sure people are doing what they are doing. Even with screen flashes, and emphasized bars / buttons etc, I can miss things. Well let me be honest here, I WILL miss things. You can only divide your attention so much before it is spread too thin. DXE allowed for custom sounds for all major and most minor events, allowing me to play a different sound for an incoming Infest or a Pending Defile. This way I wouldn’t have to look for an alert, but rather just listen for a sound. I play with most of the in game sounds turned pretty low unless a specific encounter calls for something different, so it made it easy to add another layer of my awareness to playing.

Enter BigWigs. BigWigs has been a pretty common standard among raiders for a while now. The mod is pretty robust and allows you a lot of different choices in your notifications. The reason it became standard for raider was how it alerts you to defile. If you enable a mode called super enhanced, it will actually have a voice counting down the time to cast audibly. Some folks were having trouble with defile and moving away from it, so BigWigs enhanced mode was the answer, and to be honest I do really like that part of it.

This leaves me with two boss mods installed. I tried running this entire last week with only BigWigs and I just can’t do it. I tried, but all it did was make me realize how much I rely on those audio cues to keep my own rear alive while watching everyone else.  It does not have the same depth in the library of sounds that DXE does. Where I could literally have dozens of sounds in DXE, there is only a limited number in BigWigs. I tried adding new sounds by modifying the .lua files as well, but found that to be nigh impossible with BW, but it was something I’ve been able to do with DXE. So, for every encounter BUT LK, I use DXE. For LK I swap BigWigs on. Now if only DXE could do me a super enhanced countdown mode I’d be super super happy.

I’m sure you’re wondering what today’s post image has to do with my post.  This last week I realized exactly how much I love having a ret paladin and a boomkin in raid. I am a haste junkie, there is no denying it. I love the stat and its ability to give me 1.5 second (or lower) cast time chain heals. If you were to roll my character’s sleeves up, it is likely that you would find the tell-tale signs of haste abuse. Before we would rarely have one, and more commonly neither, but recently it has become much more common place to have both in our groups. Improved Moonkin Form gives all players in range of the aura 3% haste as does Swift Retribution these stack as a multiplicative effect with Wrath of Air Totem. With my current haste total, either of these combined with the totem pushes me to the haste cap, and let me tell you it is addicting. The added bonus for me is that our fairly recent new hire and boomkin Friskme is one heck of a guy. Good sense of humor, good numbers, knows how to handle himself in a fight, and as of recent has become my corner buddy on BQL and the sparkle council. We’ve gotten used to each others movements during the encounters and know exactly how to shift around each other without vocalizing. Also, he’s damn fast on the innervate button when I need it, and that makes me happy. I’ve always enjoyed the company of the druids in <Unpossible>, and Frisk fits right in.

Last but not least, for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, I have had a wonderful idea for a new project that a lot of people seem to be behind. Come Cataclysm I’m starting a fun guild up as a side project. No, I’m not leaving Unpossible, that will always be my home. Instead the guild I want to make will be more fun and casual with a slight character quirk. I’ll get more into it at a later date, but for now I need your input. There have been several choices as to where to start this little party, and so far there are 4 major contenders.

So if you think I should start it up on one of those please feel free to vote on it. If you think I should start it on a different server, vote for other and let me know what realm and why in the comments.

Well that’s it for this past week, how about you? Do anything fun? Find out anything interesting?

Special thanks to @immamoonkin for this week’s article image. Thank you!

[POLL] Do you Clear Out Heroic Dungeons?

Lately I’ve noticed an increasing trend when it comes to running heroic dungeons. It usually involves dungeons where bosses can be skipped and the group just collectively decides to skip over it or they decide to take it out. The tank is often the one that decides this. I’ve started asking in the beginning of runs if we can skip optional bosses (like in Halls of Stone) more as a courtesy than anything else.

The geared main

Understandably, the geared main is going to favor an express run over a complete run. When I’m on my Priest, I have no interest in gaining Emblems of Triumph. I’m only in there to to get my Emblems of Frost as fast as possible. If the group wants to take down some optional bosses, I remain indifferent and will do it anyway even though it might take a few minutes of my time.

The undergeared alt

On the other hand, the undergeared alt wants to maximize their “Emblems per hour” ratio. They’ll insist on killing every boss no matter how far out of the way it is specifically for that extra Emblem. They need the armor and the weapons (and other gear). The quickest way to do that is by spending Emblems of Triumph. Perfectly understandable.

Do you make an effort to skip bosses or do you gun for every boss in the instance? Or do you not care and decide to go with the flow of the group?

New Poll: What about Cataclysm excites you the most?

New Poll: Decide Wyn’s Next Topic

You know you want to. I’ll write all of these posts, eventually, but tell me which one I should work on for this week. I’ll have it up over the weekend:

Clicker or Keyboarder? [New Poll]

I had a quick conservation about play styles with my friends which got me wondering. They were talking about players who used their mouse more often to click on their buttons instead of having their keys bound and using that to control their actions.

I’ve played my shared of real time strategy games and first person shooters in the past. Using only one the mouse to issue commands on your character on what spells to cast and what items to use is a strange and bizarre concept to me. Many of the players in my guild are prone to using the keyboard when they turn their characters. We call them "keyboard turners". I’ve done this myself so call me a hypocrite. But, urgh, keyboard turning is bad!

So call me curious! What device do you use most often when using your spells and abilities?

Which Raiding Aspect of 2.4 are you Looking Forward To? [NEW POLL]

Image courtesy of thanx from SXC

The PTRs are chugging along. Every day there are new builds and new changes that are matched by restored abilities (such as the warlock buff). Most of the heckling now revolves around class balancing and the like. The changes to the 25 man raids are aimed at helping every guild at any level to progress in the game as much as possible before the next expansion arrives.

What are you looking forward to in raids?

So, this is a really large patch! There’s no way I can squeeze every change onto my side poll. Therefore, I’m condensing it to raid related changes only.

Increase in gold drops from 25 man bosses

This is a huge boon for players like me who don’t have the time or the energy to farm on a regular basis. It will help offset repair bills somewhat. I was told 25 man bosses would drop 500g resulting in 25 per player. On the other hand, there’s a screenshot out there in existence with Brutalis dropping 250g (10 per player).

Additional set token drops from 25 man bosses

I wonder now if they’ll end up increasing the amount of loot that drops from non-set token dropping bosses to equalize the amount of loot they provide. The extra token drops will help in terms of progression, that’s for sure.

Removal of attunements in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple

There’s been a ton of reactions to the removal of attunements. I killed Kael several weeks ago and all I’m about to get is some lousy title. I can kind of understand where players are coming from about their wasted time and such. To be honest, I’m looking forward to this change the most. Why? Because then I won’t ever have to step back into SSC and TK to attune ONE more player EVERY week. A lot of blogs I’ve read haven’t even mentioned that. I guess they’re too focused on the individual to think of the whole. Just think about all that time that is now freed up without having to go back into the T5 areas.

New raid instance and challenges

The last real world event we had was Naxx, wasn’t it? Even then, I never really participated that much. It’s nice to have another world event to participate in again as well as a new raiding instance.

Shiny new purples

Don’t kid yourself. There’s a small loot whore in every single one of us. We all want the best gear in the game. There’s a ton of new badge loot, faction rewards, and raid drops.

Honourable Mention

Druid nerfs

I was going to list druid nerfs as a possible 6th option. Somehow, I don’t think that would go over very well with several of my esteemed blogging colleagues. I might wake up one morning and find one of my wings on my shoulders shredded or something. Who knows what druids do for pranks anyway?

If what you’re looking forward to isn’t listed on the poll, then by all means leave a comment stating what you can’t wait to see!

Poll Results: Over 50% Raid Between 5 – 15 Hours Weekly

If you’re a GM looking to get started on raiding, then these numbers might be something that you will be interested in. Almost 25% don’t seem to be at the point where they are actively raiding. Almost 20% of those polled raid over 15 hours a week.

However, the largest raiding populations raid between 5 – 15 hours per week. These are pretty standard hours for most players who have to go to work or attend school. That’s the kind of length that they’re willing to commit to in terms of purely raiding. It does not include their time spent farming, running instances, or the like.

So be sure to keep this in mind when you are planning out your raiding schedule for the week. Is it representative of the entire WoW community? Unlikely. But it’s a good start.

If you’re a casual Guild that wants to try it out, start out small and aim for about 6ish hours. If they can handle it, then go ahead and ramp it up slightly.

New Poll: How Often Do You Raid Per Week?

This is another one of my curiosity polls. I’m interested in knowing the amount of time you guys (and girls) spend raiding on a weekly basis. This will help me understand my audience a bit more (hopefully).

For me, I log about 16 hours a week raiding (3 hours for Karazhan, 13 hours on SSC/TK and 12 of those hours are spent eating dirt in Kael’s room). How often do you raid and do you think you spend too much or too little time raiding? How much of it is spent on old or farmed content and how much of it is targeted at progression?

Most importantly, do you enjoy it?

Polls are Closed and the Results Are In

Turns out the majority of my readers have Priests as mains! Druids are a close second. Oddly enough, the next class is Hunters. I’m a little perplexed as to why Hunters would be reading my blog when my focus is on Priests and Raid Officering.

Well, who cares?

Glad you guys read all the same!

On a complete different topic, I love Keynote! I had no idea it could do cool graphs like that. I can even export presentations on keynote into flash files and AVI’s! Now that opens up a LOT of possibilities for me here in terms of the next step I can take with my blog.

New Poll: What’s Your Main?

The old poll is closed. Ventrilo, by far, is the most dominant 3rd party voice client in use today.

With that being said, there is now a new poll up! I’m a little curious as to what class you consider your ‘main’ character.

Several days ago, Exanimo (or the Full time WoW Addict) posed a question: What makes your main “your main”? No doubt there are now several of you with more than one level 70. I myself have 3! Even though nowadays I devote more time to playing my Shaman and my Paladin, I still consider my Priest my main character.

Why?

Here’s what I think.

I consider your main character as the toon that you use to help your Guild progress through whatever it is that they do. Your Guild could be a PvP Guild or a PvE one. But the character you choose to play with when they’re going through content is what I think is the main. Of course, you could always base your main on time played (/played). But then you just might ditch a character that you have invested a lot of time into for an alt which is better suited for the Guild that you’re in.

For example, one of the Priests in my Guild converted to a Resto Shaman because we had 4 Priests at the time. We had no Resto Shamans. It only made sense that he switch to Resto to take advantage of gear drops and further help progress the Guild gearwise instead of having our Priests dogfight over gear.

What if you’re not in a Guild? The answer’s still the same. It’s the toon that you want to progress the most with.

In any case, the reason I ask is for a little demographic reasons. I’m interested in knowing what kind of classes read my blog. Maybe I can tailor some of my content accordingly. *shrug*

Minimum Zul’Aman requirements will be coming up later on tonight or tomorrow morning. Definitely will be a work in progress and it’s based off of my observations.

Addition:

Phaelia mentioned that some players might have a PvE main and a PvP main. She suggests going with the one that’s your primary focus. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.