Screenshot Sunday: Elekktrofied

So, I've been making a huge push to get my shaman to level 70 before patch 2.4 hits. This week's screenshot is from Blade's Edge earlier in the week, back when he was 68. I hit 70 yesterday at 10 days, 3.5 hours, which I figure isn't so bad since a) I wasn't trying to keep a pace, b) I have a tendency to stick him in an in and wander off without logging, and c) a fair bit of his Azeroth leveling happened before the leveling changes in patch 2.3.

The best part about leveling my shaman, in addition to the sheer fun of whacking things in the face and having a short-timer interrupt, has been leveling on rested XP from 61-70. That just rocks.

I've also had a great time leveling enhancement, and will probably keep the spec as I finish out most of the early quests -- I have a tons more to do in Netherstorm, and I haven't even touched Shadowmoon Valley. But the other big push this weekend has been to get my Kara key. Sure, they may be unnecessary in just a few short days, but in the meantime, our Monday newbie Karazhan raid needs a second healer, so I volunteered my undergeared self to the task.

Will I survive? More importantly: will my raid survive? I'll let you know.

Screenshot Sunday: Pwned.

Archimonde has us on farm.

Screenshot... Um, What Day Is It Now?

It's been a busy week at Girl Meets WoW, not that you'd know it since I haven't stopped by to share anything. (Oops.) As you can see above, my raid has been working on Gurtogg Bloodboil, and we finally downed him Sunday night.

More accurately, they finally downed him Sunday night, as my main contribution was getting my mage the heck out of the way so that less squishy people could step in. Gurtogg is not a good fight for Firkin -- the raid takes tons of damage, and in the recurring phase two, everyone has a chance at being the tank.

Mages make very bad tanks.

So that puts us at 4/5 Hyjal, 5/9 BT, and in high spirits for moving on to Reliquary of Souls.

On the personal front, I've spent the last week and a half throwing my heart into a new freelance job, which has been cutting into my play and blogging time more than usual. So far it's been incredibly fun, which is a nice bonus on top of the whole paycheck thing. I promise I'll be writing more here though now that I've gotten into the swing of things, so thanks for bearing with me during the downtime.

PvE Tokens and Badges Tradeable for PvP, Arena Gear

Late-breaking news this evening reports that the latest achievement on the Sunwell Plateau on the PTR unlocked a vendor that will exchange tier tokens and badges for different seasons of arena gear. I talked a little about patch 2.4 altering the pvp gear progression path to move people back into instances yesterday when discussing purchasable, reputation-based pvp blues that will be added to the game, but it looks like Blizzard's changes are set to make this even more dramatic. Here's the current exchange rate:

• Tier 4 tokens = equivalent Season 1 pieces (gladiator set)
• Tier 5/6 tokens = equivalent Season 2 pieces (merciless gladiator set)
• Badges of Justice = Veteran's boots (40), bracers (25), belt (40)
• New T6 tokens = equivalent Vindicator's gear (boots, bracers & belt)

I expect a lot of QQing about raiders getting free epics, but the truth is that the current pvp gear progression is even more time consuming than raiding -- a serious pvping friend of mine who's leveling a warlock for arenas did the math and figured he'd need to log 100 straight hours of Alterac Valley to gear his character up for Season 4.

While this change might even be a bit too far in the opposite direction, I still maintain that increasing the pace and means by which players get pvp gear is going to make all arena play -- not just the high end -- much more about skill and much less about who's managed to log enough pvp time to get ___ amount of resilience.

Shade of Akama Sheep Macro

image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Today's post is just a quick one, inspired by a search query in my Google Analytics. This one goes out to all the mages currently working their way through Black Temple or getting ready to enter BT in patch 2.4.

In the Akama fight, groups of adds are periodically entering the room from either side and have to be systematically CC'd and killed. This is a great fight for a sheep macro because the adds spawn instantly at the doors and will take off running immediately. Here's the macro I use to target, sheep, and re-sheep the dps caster in each group:

/stopcasting
/tar Ashtongue Elementalist
/focus
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph

We tend to kill the spirit binder first, then the rogue, then the elementalist. If your dps is fast enough to kill Akama, it's unlikely you'll need to re-sheep unless something goes wrong.

Screenshot Sunday: Boo!

Right now my raid is in Black Temple working on Teron Gorefiend. BT's my new favorite instance, thanks to cool fight design and some some neat little details like this one, above. At a certain point as you're clearing trash, you enter the room where the Shade of Akama is being held. Without warning, Akama himself (for whom you've previously created a distraction so that he can sneak into the temple) appears out of nowhere, looming over you (especially if you're a gnome!). It's a cool effect, and a fun fight.

All kinds of patch 2.4 excitement is bouncing about the interwebs now that the PTR is up, and I'll be on the PTR and talking about what we have in store, soon.

Update: Gorefiend down, moving on to Azgalor.

Become a Better Raider: Learn Your Own Bad Habits

image by zoomar

If you've been raiding for any serious length of time you know that eventually, everyone makes mistakes. Whether you're the tank who forgot to face that nasty mob away from the group, the DPSer who broke CC, or the healer that was too concerned with watching the MT's health to notice his own, we've all been there. In most cases, a single mistake here and there isn't raid-breaking, but there are plenty of encounters in WoW where errors can compound and spiral out of control towards a wipe.

For me, there's nothing worse than the knowledge that my own mistake, small or large, was the catalyst that led to my entire raid dead on the floor. It's easy to talk about bringing your A-game to a raid, but as anyone whose ever wiped on a "farm status" boss is aware, knowing and doing are two different things.

If there's a secret to successful raiding, it is this: every player in the raid must know they're not screwing up. This doesn't mean mistakes won't happen, but it does mean that your entire raid is actively working to avoid potential pitfalls and screw-ups.

So how do you avoid screwing up? Know your own bad habits. If you make a mistake, raid wiping or not, own up to it, no matter how embarrassed you may feel. Once you've informed your raid, stop and analyze the root of your error. Were you unfamiliar with the boss strategy? Not paying enough attention to voice chat? Failing to watch your threat meter, your tank's health, or your surroundings? Falling asleep at your computer?

Once you've identified the source of the problem, it's time to ask yourself if this is a one-time error, or part of a pattern. If it's the latter, you must take steps to fix it. A quick example: for a long time on Firkin, I would get distracted keeping up with the dps target and not keep a close enough eye on my sheeps. While a single sheep running around for three seconds before it gets re-polyed is usually not a big deal, no one wants to be The Mage Whose Sheep Always Breaks And Eats the Healers' Faces... especially not me.

After a particularly egregious night of loose sheep in Serpentshrine Cavern last summer, I decided it was well past time to solve the polymorph issue, so I pulled up the trusty Wowwiki and started researching focus macros. In my mage macros post, you can see the macro I use to sheep now, which lets me re-sheep my polymorph focus without ever losing my dps target. The five minutes I spent researching and setting up that macro has paid off tenfold in game, and I am a better player because of it.

Of course, sometimes you'll be able to identify the root of a problem, but you won't have a solution. If the root of your error is boss mechanics you didn't know about, the solution is to read more strategies before you fight an encounter, but what if you were a protection warrior struggling to kill your demon on Leotheras, or a mage having trouble resheeping quickly enough who didn't know about the /focus command?

If you can't find an answer by simple research, or don't know what you're looking for, the solution's simple: ask your fellow raiders. In the case of the protection warrior, a fellow tank could inform him that a prot warrior's best bet is to save spell reflect for the demon's shadow bolts. Similarly, a veteran mage could point a struggling raider to /focus macros and sheep timers. Even if you're not a newbie, it's always better to be inquisitive than to not ask questions and cause a wipe, so don't be afraid to ask!

Everyone has a few weaknesses as a raider, but if you learn your own bad habits, you can work to combat them. You don't have to spend all your out-of-WoW downtime theorycrafting and reading boss strategies to be a good endgame raider, but you do have to be proactive about improving yourself. Just remember: those other 24 people lying dead on the floor aren't all that interested in "I'm sorry." The most beautiful words to a wiped raid's ears are "it won't happen again."

Screenshot Sunday: Death By Spine

Today's Screenshot Sunday comes from the Naj'entus fight.

With SSC and TK on farm, my raid's attention has turned to new encounters in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. On my mage, I don't really get too excited about Hyjal (yay, another wave of trash!) , but I really like the feel of BT. High Warlord Naj'entus is the first boss in the Temple, and is reached by entering through a crack in the wall and fighting your way through the sewers.

The fight itself is noteworthy primarily for requiring everyone in the raid to have at least 9k health. For mages, this means throwing on all kinds of PvP gear, or old mage tanking gear from the Maulgar fight.

The reason you need at least 9k health is that every 45 seconds or so, Naj'entus puts up a tidal shield, a giant bubble effect that makes him impervious to all damage. In what I consider one of the coolest fight mechanics in the game, there's only one way to break this shield. Periodically during the fight, Naj'entus will throw a needle spine at a random player. (You can see Firkin dead to one above.) Another person in the raid must pull the spine out of the targeted player's body and then throw it to burst the shield bubble. When the tidal shield breaks, everyone in the raid takes 8500 frost damage.

Naj'entus went down for us last week along with Supremus. The first few fights in BT and Hyjal are definitely easier than Vashj or Kael, which is a nice break. As The Boy put it last week: "You've beaten Kael'thas. Here, have a cookie."

Vashj Phase 2 Tips (From a DPS Perspective)

Last night my raid went back to Serpentshrine Cavern to get Vashj's vial for a few more raiders. It took us one wipe to get back into the swing of things, which got me thinking about all the complexity involved in learning the Vashj fight. I thought I'd share a few tips and one handy map that helped convert SSC to farm status for my raid.

Vashj's second phase is really the worst, because you've got to have people handling enchanted elementals and tainted elemental spawns, tanks picking up elite naga, dpsers kiting coilfang striders, and healers healing everyone through all that chaos plus Vashj's forked lightning.

You can cut down on the initial chaos by making sure everyone in your raid doesn't just know strats (you have read the strategies on Bosskillers and MMO-Champion already, right?), but has also taken a look at a map or video of the fight and knows where they should be standing in phase 2.

Work out your positioning ahead of time, especially for the elemental dpsers. There are a lot of labeled maps for phase 2 out there, but most of them are pretty vague and just divide the elemental sides into four areas.

Our favorite map is the one below, by Starslayer of the guild Stack and Die. It not only labels the north, south, east and west sides of Vashj's platform, but it also shows every spawn point for the elementals. This lets you assign your elemental dps to specific spawn points (ie, South side, spawns B & C) instead of just a vague area. Be sure to assign less mana-dependent dpsers (hunters are great for this) to cover areas that have an additional elemental spawn.


Once you have your positioning worked out, it's also worthwhile to remind everyone that healing becomes even more complex than usual in the Vashj fight since the healers will also be the go-to people for tossing tainted cores to eliminate Vashj's four shield generators. This is one of those fights where it's critical that everyone make not dying their number one priority - it's a dps race, and it's unlikely you're going to have the druid mana for more than one or two rebirths.

Everyone needs to do their utmost not to die here: squishy folk should use pots, healthstones, and above all stay out of the way of striders and naga. Be aware that naga cleave and sometimes take a few seconds to get picked up, and avoid standing at the very edge of the outer ring where a newly-spawned naga could one-shot you into oblivion.

Once you've looted the fourth tainted core (and tossed it to the final receiver using your tainted core macro*), hold off on dropping the fourth generator for a second and assess your situation.

How are you looking on striders? One or more coilfang striders up at the start of phase three can really undermine your transition. If you can, finish off any remaining striders below half-health, switch your dps to any existing nagas, and use your timers to deactivate the final generator right before any more adds spawn. This way, you'll be spending most of your time in phase three killing Vashj, and not dealing leftover adds.

Of course, if you've got that kind of coordination going on at the very end of phase two, you're well on your way to beating Vashj anyway. Good luck!
___________________________________
*You do have a macro for tossing tainted cores, don't you? The usual one is:
/use tainted core /y <-------TAINTED CORE TO %T /ra <------ TAINTED CORE TO %T /script SendChatMessage("YOU HAVE THE CORE!!!", "WHISPER", "common", UnitName("target"));

I Want This Nightmare to be Over!

image by Jeff Kubina
I was feeling some empathy for my old friend Aran today while trying to complete today's daily battleground quest. Alterac Valley was the name of the game today, and for some reason the Alliance just could not get their act together in the Shadowburn battlegroup.

It was like the first day of 2.3 all over again: no one knew how to play the new AV. I started the morning out with turtles.

"WTF u nubs take SH!" Stonehearth Graveyard, it seemed to my fellow puggers, was the lynchpin by which we would halt the onslaught of horde and win the day. This lasted for about four games.... then I gave up and made some oatmeal. Seriously people, your pug AV strategy is "hold SH"? What are you, nuts?

This afternoon brought me back for more pain, in the form of spreading ourselves too thin, favoring Galv over anything with, say, a timer on it, and leaving no defenders on our only graveyard. Now, I'm no AV wizard (oh wait -- yes I am! *pew pew*), but the lack of basic competence was enough to make me question my resolve ten times over.

See, I've been trying to complete the BG daily every day, rain or shine, and then quit after that unless I find an org group to play with. It's a nice strategy that lets me net at least 500 honor a day; often a lot more, since pugs are rarely successful on the first try. Up until now, this has meant I play a moderate number of BGs every evening on my priest and mage -- maybe six a day, on average.

Today took me 23 games to get one win on my priest. I don't think I can bear swapping over to my mage to do it all again.

On a related note, in between BGs I've been reading through my blog roll and trying to catch up on all the stuff I missed while at my parents' house for a week. Sometime around AV #19 I hit Tobold's proposal to make raiding more like PvP. Like so many of the posts Tobold writes, it's carefully argued and thought provoking (seriously, head over there -- even if you disagree wholeheartedly with him, there's food for thought), but when I consider the proposed outcome, I can't help but find it ludicrous.

As a voice for the casual WoW player, he's musing on the possibility of creating a new level of randomly-puggable PvE raiding with the same sort of guaranteed return on your time invested that you get with the PvP rewards system. That is, easy versions dungeons where killing anything would get you points or tokens that you could grind to turn in for PvE loot.

Now, maybe I'm just too far removed from the so-called casual masses of WoW, but a pure battleground-like pugging of even an incredibly nerfed Karazhan sounds horribly painful. I mean, let's face it. You can debate the merits of resilience and AFK mechanics all you want, but at the most basic level, battlegrounds do not require rebalancing. That is, even if you throw two horribly unbalanced, incompetent and disorganized teams together, someone is still going to win.

The same can't be said for raiding, even in a nerfed form. A pure pug of level 70s, even a balanced one, could easily fail at BWL from lack of coordination alone. Making raiding more accessible isn't a bad thing, but if there's one thing running battlegrounds daily has taught me, it's that the true lowest common denominator in WoW can be staggeringly low.

With this in mind, battleground-style pugging just isn't a good solution. Unless of course you'd like to go through 23 different raid groups just to get Attumen down on a bad day. But if you ask me, that doesn't sound like fun for anyone.

That All-Druid Karazhan I Mentioned?

...Apparently it went very well.

Attumen, Moroes, opera, chess, and Nightbane (and almost Prince) before they called it a night. Go go dancing bears!

The Perils of Looting

Our guild stopped using master loot because of a long-standing bug in vanilla WoW, so our raids tend to run with free for all loot up.

This means one person in our 25 man now gets the vaunted job of going around and picking up all the various BoE accoutrement that drop off of trash mobs, along with linking the occasional epic drop and nether vortex for people to roll on.

Now, some people love looting in raids. I'm just not one of them.

I had to be the looter for all of AQ40 back in the day, and I hated it, every scarab and idol-filled minute of it. ("Oh look it's another bug mount. Who wants a bug? Roll for a bug. No, you don't get to pass until a red bug drops, take your damn bug and like it.") Embittered by this experience, I now attempt to get out of looting at every pass.

Tonight in SSC our regular looter was on his tanking paladin instead of his shadow priest, and needed to concentrate, so I got tapped for the job. Serpentshrine isn't quite as bad as AQ40, but it's close. There's marks for flasks, coilfang armaments for rep, and greens to DE, on top of a lot of trash epics, most of which we'd seen five or more times by now. The only thing the mobs stubbornly refuse to part with is [Pattern: Belt of Blasting], which I've mentioned before.

So when I got a tell from my raid leader saying "You have assist and are looting, feel free to crow about it, I sighed, and typed the following:

/rw I am the looter. Some people enjoy this position, and I am not one of them.

Ten seconds later, the [Belt of Blasting] pattern drops.

...I think I'm now the looter indefinitely.

More Zul'Aman Thoughts

Just finished up a spur of the moment guild ZA run (we managed Bear, Eagle, and Lynx, and got Dragonhawk down to 25%), and thought I'd share a few additional thoughts and observations on the instance.

• Badges of Justice: Nalorakk drops only one, but all the others we killed dropped two badges each.
  
• Flamecasters are my new favorite trash mob to spellsteal. Run speed + spell haste = mach 10 mage.
• Jan'alai's entrance is in a non-intuitive location. You can see him from the center, but you have to go back to the front of the instance and over Nalorakk's platform to get to him.
• Amani Scouts will spawn every few minutes in the huts in front of Jan'alai's pyramid. If you can kill them before they reach a drum (not hard; they don't have much health) , you won't have to deal with the two adds they call. Once you reach the first set of steps, you shouldn't aggro scouts anymore.
• Jan'alai's Dragonhawk Hatchlings are much weaker than I expected them to be. A coordinated group should be able to take a dozen or so down, not 5-8 like I initially suggested.

Lady Vashj Swims With the Fishes

Much celebration last night as my raid took down Vashj for the first time. If you've never fought her before, the final boss of Serpentshrine is not a nice lady. Just look at those fangs!

She takes 10+ hours of concerted learning wipes for your average raiding guild, which for us (splitting our time between TK and SSC, with some attendance issues to boot) meant we've been working on her for over a month.

Why so long, you ask? Lady Vashj is a major test of raid coordination. Her second phase requires you simultaneously to tank incoming elite nagas, manage AOE-fearing fen striders who will one-shot the casters in charge of kiting and killing them, kill elementals constantly spawning from over a dozen locations around the room, and play an ultimate frisbee-esque minigame of killing, looting, and tossing drops from "tainted elementals" in order to disable her protective shield and move the fight into the final phase.

If practically anyone dies before you take out her shield generators, you're toast, but either way, a lot of people are likely to die soon after. Once you move into phase three, Vashj calls forth a small army of toxic spore bats which drop poison clouds. If you don't take her down quickly, they'll soon blanket the platform on which you fight her.

Above all, taking down Vashj requires good coordination and lots and lots of practice. I'm proud to say we've finally beaten her. Now it's on to Kael!

Patch 2.3 Loot Preview, Part 2: Zul'Aman DPS Caster Gear

This weekend's round of troll-killing was cut unexpectedly short by PTR server maintenance, so I spent the rest of my time analyzing DPS caster drops in ZA. Each boss in Zul'Aman drops one item and one badge of justice. Killing an animal boss (Nalorakk, Akil'Zon, Jan'Alai, or Halazzi) within the 20-minute sacrifice timer will reward you with an additional bonus loot chest. (The Amani War Bear mount is one of several items that appear to be part of a shared timed-event loot table.) So, what can DPS casters look forward to in Zul'Aman? Put on your robe and your wizard hat, and let's go down the list:

Weapons
With 217 spell damage on each, all four of the Zul'Aman dps caster weapons fall somewhere between the [Nathrezim Mindblade] from Karazhan and the [Fang of the Leviathan] from SSC. The Merciless Gladiator weapons are still generally better, but if you don't PvP enough to pick one up, it's time to start figuring out which ZA weapon is best for you.

• [Wub's Cursed Hexblade] Jan'alai the dragonhawk drops this dagger, which may be favored by elemental shamans.
• [Amani Punisher] If you're looking to pick up one of these maces, you may have to contend with a tanking pally or two, but solid stats and spell hit make this drop from Akil'zon the eagle boss a decent choice for spooky priests or moonkin.
• [Blade of Twisted Visions] My mage is eying this haste-heavy sword from Zul'jin, the final boss in ZA.
• [Amani Divining Staff] Generally speaking, even when you gem it up this won't put out as much damage as any of the current one-handed weapon + offhand combos, but I know lots of mages who are looking at this as the new +int choice for evocation weapon swaps.

Gear
Zul'Aman gear for dps casters features a lot of spell haste, which is more valuable the longer the length of your average spell cast or channel. While you should never wear a crappy piece of gear just because it has spell haste on it, current theorycrafting suggests that in 2.3, haste may be the next thing to stack once you've reached the hit cap. That is, unless you're a shadow priest, since Blizzard loves you guys, but hates itemizing for you.

• [Footpads of Madness] Dropped by Jan'alai the dragonhawk, these are decent for a caster putting together a haste set, and may be especially valuable to non-tailors who don't have access to [Boots of Blasting].
• [Signet of Ancient Magics] This ring can be socketed with a +dmg gem, and like the Mana-Attuned Band is one of the best rings in the game before BT/Hyjal.
• [Mana Attuned Band] Spell haste is pretty worthless for shadow priests, but for the rest of us, it may well be the next best thing to stack after +hit. This ring has both, plus a ton of +dmg, and seems to be part of the timed loot table.
• [Fury of the Ursine] Better than Veteran PvP gear, but not as good as the [Mindstorm Wristbands] off of A'lar. Depending on your class and spec, you may find these a better or worse choice than the [Runed Spell-cuffs], which will be purchasable with 35 Badges of Justice in 2.3.
• [Hex Shrunken Head] Hex Lord Malacrass drops this trinket, which gives 53 damage on equip and has a two minute cooldown on its +dmg use.
• [Hood of Hexing] As with Tier 5, I'd break a Spellstrike set for this hat. It's lacking a meta slot, which makes it pretty similar to the [Cowl of the Grand Engineer] off Void Reaver.
• [Loop of Cursed Bones] An extremely nice BT/Hyjal level necklace for everyone except shadow priests, this will be a must for any +haste set. It drops off Zul'jin.
• [Mantle of Ill Intent] Another heavy-hitting haste item, but without any sockets, I expect most people will stick with their Tier shoulders instead of these.
• [Moon-walkers] Moonkin gear! Yes, you read that right. Note the two red sockets and spell hit bonus — why are moonkin the only ones who get decently itemized socket bonuses? What's that you say? The [Footpads of Madness] are actually slightly better for an oomkin? Oh. Well. At least they're leather, right?
• [Robe of Departed Spirits] Another unsocketed haste-heavy piece of gear. I'm really looking forward to seeing some more number crunching on the relative value of increasing amounts of haste after capping spell hit, but I don't think this will be a huge upgrade, at least for tailors.
• [Shadowcaster's Drape] Like the Loop of Cursed Bones, the cloak spot's an excellent place to stack some haste if you're hit-capped and of a class and spec that benefits from it. In relation to other gear, this appears to be roughly on par with the [Brute Cloak of the Ogre Magi] off of Maulgar, but there just aren't that many good PvE cloaks in game at the moment, so it's a welcome addition.
• [Tiny Voodoo Mask] The Barov Peasant Caller of TBC, this trinket summons three tiny voodoo gnomes, which bite off the kneecaps — I mean, uh, cast little lightning bolts at your enemy. Sadly, the timer on this is too long for it to be used in arenas.

This concludes part two of Girl Meets WoW's three part series on dps caster loot in patch 2.3. You can read part one on Badge of Justice rewards here (soon to be updated with mouseover tooltips and moonkin gear). For the last post in this series, I'll be analyzing the upgrades to level 10-60 dps caster gear in the patch. Check back later this week to read it!

Fighting Nalorakk: You Got Your Troll in My Bear! No, You Got Your Bear in My Troll!

Ok, neither bears nor trolls are great tastes, but when it comes to the Amani lord of bears, they go together whether you like it or not. My 10 man raid spent Friday night fighting the good fight against finnicky PTR instance servers and the first boss of Zul'Aman, and here's what I've got to report.

Nalorakk isn't a pushover, but he's not an especially complicated boss either. Best of all, you only have to clear about six pulls to get to him: one AOE pull after you talk to Harrison Jones (it'll have two elites, too), a double troll pat, a couple of angry bears, and then some packs of trolls and trolls riding bears that Nalorakk sends at you as you get closer to him. Quick tip on the bear-riding trolls: their bears' growl debuff stacks, so be sure to space your tanks far enough away from each other.

Once you get through that trash, you'll need two tanks for the bear boss himself; one for each phase. Nalorakk will start as a troll, and alternate between troll and bear form. In troll form he casts mangle, which increases bleed effects. Then in bear form he hits whoever's tanking him with a lacerate and rend. (You can remove his mangle with stoneform, but if you've got it, save it for that emergency missed taunt.) Put your better geared tank on bear form, and have your tanks swap each time Nalorakk shifts to bear or troll. Finally, you want your tanks to stand on top of each other so that when he uses his 14k brutal swipe attack, its damage will be split between both of them.

Aside from the tanking, it's pretty straightforward. In troll form he'll charge at random and can cleave anyone around his target, so spread out. In bear form his deafening roar will damage everyone for ~1.3k and silence the raid for two seconds. Other than that, he's a tank and spank with 1.7 million health, so pile on the damage. The best kind of bear-troll-thing is a dead bear-troll-thing, after all.

What's New in the WoW Blogosphere

What's new with GMW, you might be wondering? Well, I'm seeing a ton of traffic to my post on how to summon the Headless Horseman (so much so, in fact, that it appears I've exceeded my bandwidth on the Google Pages account that hosts my blogroll and my banner image... working to get those back up asap!), my guild is hard at work trying to take down Vashj, and when I'm not raiding, I've been poking around on the PTR checking out all the new goodies. But it looks like I'm not the only one...

Szilia on the World of Raids forums has scooped the post I'd been putting together on the new Dustwallow Marsh quests. (He doesn't include a map though; that's me, all me!) They're currently only partly implemented on the PTR; you can accept them, but most of them don't actually complete. One of the nice things about the new UI changes is that your cursor will now tell you if someone has a quest for you when you mouse over them, even if your level is too high for (!) to display over their heads. It's not quite as good as a pink exclamation point, but it's still a welcome change.

Mania's Arcania has done some PTR testing on how hunter pets will get behind their targets in patch 2.3. Essentially, pets won't bother circling if they have aggro (though it would be funny to watch them try), but they will move to the side of the mob if someone else is tanking. Since they don't attack while repositioning, this could mean a fair bit of dps downtime on a boss with a large footprint.

AFK Gamer, as usual, has the most fantastic-looking screenshots up. That's his picture of the headless horseman's pumpkin shrine in Scarlet Monastery at left.

Big Bear Butt's got the news on druid itemization changes. His shiny new Earthwarden is getting an extra 156 attack power in the patch.

Matticus has a public service announcement for all raiders: use your cooldowns! He's right, too: stop waiting for an emergency and break out the big guns already.

Breana at Gun Lovin' Dwarf Chick has written an awesome post called How to Survive in a WoW Marriage. If you're not married like me, just pretend it's called How to Survive Playing WoW and Living in Sin. (*wicked grin*) The advice still applies.

I've got a date with 9 other people on the PTR this Friday, so unless the the PTRs go down, I hope to be back covered in troll's blood and riding a bear to deliver you all the latest on Zul'Aman sometime this weekend.

The Five Raiding Addons You Need

Karthis at Of Teeth and Claws has a nice post up about the four types of addons that every raider needs, with examples of each. I thought I'd share which mod I use for each of his categories, plus one bonus addon that I consider essential for casters.

Encounter Adviser - the mod that tells you when a boss will do what
I'm currently using Deadly Boss Mods on my mage, but some recent comparisons with my fellow guildies have me almost convinced to switch back to BigWigs.

Enhanced Raid Frames - the mod that shows the status of your fellow raiders
Since I'm a dps caster, I really like the condensed view of the raid that Grid provides - in the addon world, it's the raid frame mod with phenomenal cosmic power... and itty bitty little living space.

Statistics Gathering - the mod that lets you review your leet skillz after the fight
My raid leader uses WoWWebStats, which means I don't have to install an addon like Recount. More FPS for me!

Threat Meter - the mod that lets you - OMG I HAS AGGRO! *invis*
I use Omen for this, and highly recommend it over KLH Threatmeter.

Bonus Category for Casters:
Modular Cast Bar - the mod that helps you reduce the effects of casting delay caused by lag
So far, Quartz is the only worthwhile mod in this category. Quartz provides a new cast bar that will show you how much of your cast is longer than necessary due to latency issues, allowing you to shave off some of this time with /stopcasting macros. Here's an example of a /stopcasting macro for fireball:

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast Fireball

If you hit your /stopcast macro in the red latency phase of the Quartz cast bar, it will allow you to begin casting your next spell immediately, but by the time the signal to stop casting gets from your computer to the server, your first cast will already have been completed. Thus, combining Quartz and /stopcasting can greatly increase heal speed and caster dps, especially on spells with long cast times.

WoW's Worst Raiders

So I started this post during my SSC raid (don't look at me like that, we were taking a 5 minute break!), which reminds me of a funny vanilla WoW story. Once upon a time, my guild had a mediocre dpsadin who won a lucky roll on Eye of Sulfuras in MC. A couple months later, we're in BWL and he's doing even less of his job buffing than usual. Our pally class leader whispers him to ask what's up and doesn't get an answer, but the guy's still healing, so he figures it's a fluke. We get to Nefarian, and sometime in the middle of the fight we realize this guy's toon is just standing there, not doing anything.

Those of you who fought Nefarian back in the day remember that he was an extremely long fight. As we're fighting, people start asking what's up and sending the /afk guy tells to see if he'll answer. Phase 1 goes by, nothing. Phase 2, still nothing. We down Nef, and the guy finally comes back to his keyboard and has the gall to attempt to roll on a Tier 2 chestpiece. The next day, he /gquits and we figure out where he was for those ten minutes: alt-tabbed, and apping to the best guild on the server. Which promptly rejects him.

So, a contest of sorts: which Girl Meets WoW reader has the worst raider-from-hell story?

How to Stab Solarian in the Eye

Now that patch 2.2 has come out, the new Solarian mechanic makes her laughably easy. No more bouncing debuffs, no need for arcane resist gear. She's pretty much Baron Geddon if he spawned intermittent packs of adds. The new wrath debuff is incredibly easy to see: your character turns an evocation shade of blue with lightning bolts coming out of you, and then you have about 6 seconds to run away from everyone before you get "bombed" up into the air. Anyone within about 10 yards will also get knocked into the air, and unlike the person with the debuff, will take falling damage. We positioned ourselves in a close semicircle in front of her and went to town. As soon as you get your raiders to remember Running Away 101, this fight's a cakewalk.