The Perils and Pitfalls of 5.0.4

(As I am still in the process of patch downloading, this is currently being posted from my phone. Hence the lack of pictures from one of the more...amusing bugs)

Oh Patch 5.0.4. The pre-expac patch. Since this is my first pre-expac patch, I thought it would be exciting. Oh how wrong I was. I've slowly become accustomed to life without my melee weapon on my hunter, and I really haven't missed my relic on my DK or shammy. My hunter abilities make up for through loss of my weapons. Seeing my girlfriend go "WTF WAS THAT?!?" when Dire Beast summoned a massive spider on her druid during a duel caused plenty of giggles. Mostly because of how unexpected the result was! Finding out my shaman healer only had 100k mana was a bit alarming at first, but I can burn through my entire healbot rotation and only burn through 10% of my mana? And that's with the inclusion of Healing Rain into my rotation.

Out of all the toons I've checked out this far into the new patch, I have to say that the hunters finally got some really fun toys to play with. The aforementioned Dire Beast is so much fun to play with at a target dummy, and Fireworks is a cool vanity glyph. Every time I use it, all I can picture is something out of Mythbusters involving a compound bow and some sort of high explosives. Fetch would be a spiffy glyph to have as well. My druid comes in second for "NEW TOYS!" fun. I love stag form so much, and it suits him far better than the old cheetah form. The fact that he can carry people around on it after it's glyphed is a bonus. Plus Tree of Life now has a permanent Treant glyph. Despite being a Cata-baby, I can see what was so fun about running around as this crazy old man tree. And Blizz finally did something about that godawful seal form. The second I can get back on without crashing, Glyph of Orca will be my first purchase on my druid.

Then there's my shammy. Poor girl. If her totems weren't taken away, they were beaten beyond recognition by the Nerf Bat. Now my old buff totems function like auras, my utility totems are reduced to raid cooldowns, and I feel like I don't know who I am without them. Totems made us shaman unique in the vast pool of healers in the game. Yes, we had our situational CD totems in Mana Tide and Spirit Link. Now even my beloved Healing Stream is a situational CD, and no amount of totem catapults will make that better. At least our spells seem to cost less mana, to coincide with the new mana cap.

All the account-wide stuff is pretty nice too. My shaman can go around with the "Astral Walker" title, which feels like a far better match for her than "Destroyer's End." And once my DK hits 80, he will proudly wear his "of the Ashen Verdict" title as he flies around on his Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher.

But this patch isn't without its glitches. And this one seems to have them in spades, if the tech forums are to be believed. I've only witnessed two of these glitches. One is more hilarious than game-breaking, but I do hope they're fixed soon. The hilarious glitch causes all player characters to have no armor on their backsides. Needless to say, I've been seeing a lot more than I ever cared to. If I see one more saggy gnome butt, I will probably cry. I have attempted everything to fix this glitch, but no luck. Maybe it'll get itself sorted out soon. If not, I guess I'll have to learn to live with saggy gnome butt.

The second glitch I've had the dubious honor of encountering is the dreaded error 134. It causes random game crashing due to some sort of corruption an unlucky mpq file. Luckily for me, mine is more a case of my OS getting confused when my game tries to load something from the textures.mpq file, since my game is still patching. Basically, data is still being downloaded into these compressed mpq files, but Windows will read them as being complete. In attempting to bring up data that isn't there, the OS gets confused, can't figure out what to do, and a fatal error occurs in the form of error 134. I can only hope that this error won't affect my gameplay after the patch finishes downloading, since quite a few players are experiencing the same error with their world.mpq files. Scuttlebutt is that it could have something to do with these new cross-realm zones they're creating for the lower population servers, but that's just hearsay until there are new Blue Posts on the tech forums.


Obvious edit on 9/1/12 to include the insane glitchy fun of the nakedness!

My game hadn't quite caught up with my girlfriend's Vial of the Sands cast here, leading to this interesting pose.

 Yeah, I don't know what went wrong here. But EVERYTHING was exposed there. This happened after one too many Error 134 crashes.

Farewell, Old Friend. A Retrospective on My Melee Weapons.

With the release of the pre-expansion patch tomorrow, there will be many, many changes. You can read up on them here, since I'll be musing on the changes to my hunter. First off, the general change that I'm looking forward to is the AoE looting. Which means lots more skinning! One can only hope that AoE skinning will be implemented one day for those of us who kill everything that drops leather JUST so we can clear an area, loot and skin, and move on. Saves time, speeds up farming. And all the account-wide stuff is just really nice. Means that as a mount-whore, my hunter will finally have the mounts I managed to rep-grind for on my druid that I never did for her (I had never set foot in an instance prior to level 30 or so on Hecubah), and vice versa for all the mounts my hunter won/went through hellgrinds.

But the heart and soul of this post lies with my hunter and my melee weapon. Nowadays, it's just a stat-stick. But I've been told that Survival hunters were actually able to competently melee fight back in the day. I won't mourn the loss of my relic on my DK, shaman, or druid, since those were just to give us something to fill a slot with with free stats. But I will miss my melee weapon on my hunter. We've gone through good times and bad times together, like when I was a complete noob at the game and thought I could slash and hack at the bears in Darkshore. And I will forever miss my disengage/wing clip macro for pvp. True, having no "Dead Zone" where I lose the ability to shoot things will be nice. But there's just something so...fun about bashing the brains out of the DK or Rogue trying to kill me with a beatstick so I can shoot them from a safe distance. Plus now I actually have to worry about Expertise? I have no idea what that is or what it does for me. I've only even done ranged dps, tanking, and healing.

Currently, my Staff of Coagulated Globules is transmoged to look like the Stanchion of Primal Instinct off of the Eredar Twins in Sunwell. It goes very well with my "Green Sentinel" look on my hunter.

Then there were the Dreambinder days. Oh, how I'll miss that look as well.

(Yay for whale shark kill shots!)



Of course, not all were good times. Like the time my only pve pieces were my weapons and slowly had to build up my set piece by piece (accidentally sold my agi mail instead of the int mail drops on my hunter). I still think that polearm is pretty and I regret selling it because I NEVER run Lost City of the Tol'Vir anymore.

And for the record, Val'kyr are bitches.




Then was my most Huntardy moment in the game. Even more huntard than trying to kill bears at melee range with only raptor strike and no pet (I said I was a noob back then). I'm talking about single-wielding a one handed weapon.

Yeah...that I have no excuse for. But it all got fixed in the end. And thank god that the staff from the Well of Eternity dungeon dropped for me.

Farewell, melee weapons. Stat-stick or not, you were a vital part of my game plan for a long time, and it'll be interesting to learn how to function without you.

On a More Serious Note...

Last night was my weekly Dragon Soul run. It's normally two other guildies and whoever we can PuG from trade chat. Last night, we decided to try something a little different and ask other guild members to come along with us. All went well for Morchok and the trash in Zon'ozz's room. But we encountered problems during the actual fight. Due to insufficient heals and Zon'ozz spawning the Void of Unmaking at a wonky angle, we wiped. Normally we have trouble with Zon'ozz at first anyway, but it was the healing numbers that worried our raid leaders. Our Pally healer was fine, and so was I. Our other guild healer, a resto druid, was not. Upon inspection, her gear was hardly gemmed, she only had her leatherworking enchantment for her bracers, and she had absolutely no reforges. This resulted in her only having 125k mana, which is a major problem after the Hagara fight and would be absolutely hellish if we had proceeded to the Spine fight.

Our leaders discussed some things which I was not privy to, but the decision was reached to kick the guildie druid healer because her gear wasn't up to non-LFR standards. The Pally healer, an officer in our guild, abruptly left after saying it was childish and petty to kick someone whose gear wasn't up to normal raiding standards. I jumped up to our Vent's lobby and heard the Pally healer just raging about what had happened in the raid and how we had been petty and cruel to a fellow guild member.

This only raises one question with me. Is it fair to kick a guild member whose gear isn't up to the DS10 normal minimum? Extending on that, was it also fair for said officer to all but bully a fellow guild member and one of our strongest tanks out of the guild?

When I ran DS for the first time last week on my shaman, my gear was a combination of Firelands and Hour of Twilight gear, and my gear wasn't the best for what we were attempting, but it was fully gemmed, enchanted, and reforged. I know my responsibilities as a healer and I wouldn't let myself go raid without my gear being as optimized as possible. I could make up for my lack of gear and I managed to heal successfully. Our guildie Druid was in LFR and Valor gear, and I didn't feel horribly comfortable healing with her in the first place. It goes without saying that I'm now left with feelings of awkwardness regarding my guild and all of the drama that went down last night. I even refused to go on my main and help them with an ICC achievement run and spent the rest of the night on my lowbie DK tank. So what is a player to do when disillusioned with their guild?

DS 10 Normal from a Restoration Shaman's Perspective

So, last weekend, my Shaman was finally geared enough to make the weekly guild DS run. I was a little apprehensive at first, but I knew the fights well from a DPS perspective. My girlfriend, who has a DK tank and a Druid healerkitty, talked me through the healing. Let me just say, making the jump from healing HoT Heroics to DS is a HUGE leap. At the time I hopped into the raid, my item level was 381, lower than what our raid leader usually felt comfortable with, but he knew my GF would talk me through it all in Vent.

First fight of the night? Heroic Morchok. I don't care if the Aspect buff was up to 30% at the time, as a newbie raid healer, the fight still seemed daunting. I hadn't even successfully completed it on my hunter! So we dive right in, and we wiped on our first attempt. This was normal, since we normally attempt Heroic Morchok a few times before everyone gets fed up with the fight. But our second attempt? Flawless victory. I was stationed on the main tank, riptiding, healing waving, and chain-healing my little Draenei butt off. But we did it! Zonn'oz and Yor'sahj went as expected, as did Hagara.

Ultraxion...how I loathe thee. We made some good attempts at his heroic version, but it didn't go so well. He would cast his wonderful Twilight Eruption spell far earlier than the Raid Journal's six minute timer. So we decided to forget Heroic Ultraxion after our sixth wipe on him and downed him normally. One thing I found I didn't have to worry about as a healer that I normally do as DPS was the Fading Light debuff. Plus I got to use the Ysera crystal to maximize my healing (I have such a soft spot for The Dreamer, it's not even funny). My poor girlfriend though kept incurring the wrath of Ultraxion, who kept glitching and killing her in one hit, which is not good at all when she's our off-tank. Funny thing after that Ultraxion fight. The Belt of Shattered Elementium dropped, my best in slot belt. Nothing had dropped for me that I desperately needed so far, so I need-rolled on it with no opposition (quite a change from what I'm used to). Blackhorn even went smoothly that night! It seemed like I was on top of the world that night. Until the dreaded Spine fight.

Funny thing about the Spine of Deathwing fight, he's got that lovely little debuff his blood likes to put on people, absorbing all their delicious heals and whatnot. I thought I'd figure that a stronger healer would help me out, but we were all low on mana about halfway through the fight. Mana Tide Totem to the rescue, though! I swear, that is the best little totem in my arsenal of totems for DS. We recovered enough mana to get all of those plates off, and the next thing I know I'm on a little rock in the Maelstrom. We wiped once on Madness due to poor platform choices. We tried again, using the LFR platform rotation, downed Deathwing once and for all, and then this little beauty dropped. Reins of the Blazing Drake. I've seen it drop once before on my hunter, and my girlfriend won it on her druid. We have open need roll, and I won! I've never won a need roll on a mount in a raid before! So now I get to cruise around on this pretty dragon.

All in all, I'd say it was a good raid night.

Well, we all have to start somewhere, right?

Hi! I'm Hecubah, level 85 Survival Hunter/85 Resto Shaman/everything else under the great big WoW sun. I don't know how much of a following this little blog will get, but I figured this would be a great way to share my experiences wandering around the crazy world of Warcraft. As my blog says, Bifaction is sexy! I have no real faction preference, considering I'd like to punch both Garrosh and Varian in the berries for being oblivious meat-headed idiots. I mainly choose my class based on the race, since I'll be staring at my toon for quite a bit of time. My preferences are the elves, the hooved and horned races, trolls, and undead (although I'd love to roll a crazy dwarven fury warrior one of these days).

Since I've played my hunter pretty much from day one, that's the class I have the most expertise in, along with my resto shammy. I will admit, I am a Cata baby, but I've known about the game since BC and would watch friends and cousins play it. I won't make the claim to being the BEST hunter out there, but I do know my class. My main server is Uldaman, so if anyone does wind up reading this blog, feel free to whisper me on Hecubah or Dennissee (pronounced Denise). Hopefully I'll have something fun for you guys in a while.