I am proud to announce that Pew Pew of Dun Morogh has finally killed Kil'Jaeden on the very last ID before arrival of the Lich King himself.
But this is only one out of two big achievements this week. I took part in two raids killing all four Horde bosses, entitling me to ride a black bear with blue laser eyes. Let the pictures speak:
A week back, my UI was a mess. Bit by bit, the old functionality is returning. One of the most annoying broken addons : WIM.
It keeps crashing, and it has yet been released as a quickfixed beta (alpha?), so I appreciate the effort of the author more than I blame him. Not everyone is able to schedule his spare time around Blizz' patches. But I keep missing whispers when afk for a minute and chat goes by.
My hardware is still overdue. The graphics card is the part still missing, and as the whole system has to be set up from scratch, there's no way for a half-hearted solution. I decided not to raid with a half broken UI on my still low performance machine. Maybe I should give it a shot, because every raid is progressing far beyond pre-patch achievements.
Achievements. This is what keeps us busy though. I have finished Nightelf and Draenei starting area quests plus Darkshore, and still have some 300 to go in Kalimdor for my achievement. Stormwind and Darnassus reputation has become exalted, and Exodar has yet another 4k to go. It keeps trickling in with 19 to 85 per quest. I might want to finish it turning in runecloth I am still holding.
The new mechanic called for new macros. The days of the old shot rotation macros is gone. I need a more reactive setup for Lock and Load.
I did not have steady shot bound or anywhere on my screen before the patch. I would not use it without an Auto Shot anyway, so it was woven into the shot macros. On the other hand, I had autoattack keyed, which did not really make sense now. So I replaced Auto with Steady. What I did is macro it to remove the error sound. Far less annoying now!
Another idea was to combine Hunter's Mark with Serpent Sting. Why? Because they go together now, or soon. With Glyph of Steady Shot on the Horizon, HM SS will be the openers for almost every fight.
/castsequence reset=0.5 Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting
Why the short reset? Because a double-click or hit will then execute the whole macro. A single click just puts Hunter's Mark. Ever marked the wrong target on the first attempt and more or less instantly remarked another? Half a second seem enough to recognize the error before combat starts...
I thought alot about a macro for Explosive Shot once Lock and Load procs. A lot of people advocated Explo Arcane Explo in order not to overwrite and thus lose Explo ticks. But why "waste" the proc on one Arcane either? I guess it makes more sense to Explo-Steady-Explo Steady-Explo...
Let's look closer:
Steady Shot will have a an effective c/d of 1.5-2.0s, depending on haste. The worst case scenario is LaL proccing at the very time we fire an Explo Shot. This gives us 6s c/d on Explo with 10s of the LaL buff being up.
It is safe to assume that SS casttime will be significantly below 2.0s. Quiver alone should give us 1.7s, so lets go with this. This makes 4 Steadies at a total of 6.8s until we can trigger the next Explo. GCD till 8.3, another 1.7s for another Steady in between and the second mana- and colldown-free Explo at 10.0s sharp. The last one beyond that won't matter anymore, because the third is "regular" one again.
So this is based on a) no more haste than quiver, and b) no latency. Looks like there will be more haste around almost every time, be it from gear or WF totem or whatever buff. And this is the tightest possible case. If the proc happens at any other time it does not even get remotely this tight.
Question is, shall I /castsequence this, or weave two buttons manually? Castsequence will probably reduce the lost time between shots. On the other hand the shot "in between" may have to be a Serpent Sting to keep the extra damage up. Or shall I risk a loss evrey once in a while? I guess I will. How many DPS loss are we just talking about? Not so much I think...
Anything elso to macro? I might put /love in front Serpent Sting, so I am sure I get it right and love every damn critter to death to get 10 achievement points...
Will we get something for those achievements? I hope more than a vanity pet, a mount and a title! It kind of pissed me of to see that it never seems to finish. It called for 25 exalted reputations. Now I got them it demands 30. WTF! I hate ro farm faction at Arathi and Warsong. Well, the Lich King will ship with some new factions, so maybe I finish this one later...
It tool a while since the implementation of patch 3.02 until my realm or my whole realmpool became stable. My addons where a mess, so I decided to delete them all and start from scratch. This was more difficult than ever, because WowAce pulled their updater out of service, because they were overwhelmed by the bandwith and amount of traffic users generated with it. It was such a great tool and I sincerely hope someone will be able to pick up the project or develop something as convenient as the AceUpdater. The CurseClient is not even remotely a solution. It rather messed up my addons upon use.
So my addons are a mess, and my PC is not quite able to handle the game after the patch any more. Game crashes, freezes, blue screens.. I've seen them all. Regularly. I ordered some new hardware which is slightly overdue. So once the package arrives I will spend a day or two setting up the machine again, and WoW should be a whole new experience thereafter.
So how is huntardism going along?
I originally specced 0/10/51 to give Explosive Shot a shot. It is fun, but there is no life without Go for the Throat, this became clear very soon.
So it was obvious I would have to respec into 11 or 12 points Marks for the time being. Before I did that, I tried to mess around with macros for LoL. Okay, this should reald LaL or Lock and Load. This is a strange bitch. It will proc with every trap that is triggered. That was a funny thing to experience, because I originally suspected it just to work on Freezing Traps. No, even snakes do the trick and any trap is good for a burst now. Just imagine kiting, lay any trap and have two subsequent Arcane or Exploshots without manacosts and cooldowns. That translates into three in a row at the price of one. I like it!
Second and more likely trigger in a raid is Serpent Sting, which has a chance to proc LaL of 6% per tick. That translates into an average of one proc every 50s. This is quite a frequent burst, so deifnately worth speccing. There is no real way around it anyway.
Putting up a macro for it did not work. It seems as if multiple /cast commands in one macro are handled differently than before. So putting up a split macro to spam Steady, use Explosive when out of cooldown and Exlo/Arcan/Explo upon LaL proc is not possible. On the other hand, LaL is not like Kill Command used to be. Roughly one proc per minute can easily be handled manually. The proc animation is obvious to be seen, and with a little help from an addon (Parrot in my case) I get a nice reminder in the center of my screen, that my little burst proc is up.
Another thing that I like is that Volley has a reduced cooldown now. You can chain-volley until oom if you are not interrupted. This translates volley from an lol-ability into something more serious. I most cases Explo/Multi will give better results though, but I am sure it will be helpful in some conditions.
Achievements are a cool thing from Blizz to keep us busy. And they are alot better than the PvP-madness Blizz introduced with the 2.0 Patch before BC went live.
I have 1810 points yet. I finally discovered the last edges of the Eastern Kingdoms lately, and I even finished my 700 Quests there. Khalimdor is a completely different story though. With 600 Quests still to do on this side I will be busy for more than just a little while. I am not sure what the Points are goood for except comparing yourself to other chars/players, but I hope we will get scaling Items or something for it. All in all it should be something that really mirrors the effort of having played "the whole World of Warcraft". Let's hope it is not just another mount or vanity pet...
Inscription is a great thing! I have given up Skinning in favour of this new profession. This will make levelling Leatherworking more challenging, because I have to provide mats through an alt. The alt is an enhancer shammy though, and it seems I will have no problems levelling this char as the first alt.
I just saw that the people at Wowhead have added an item comparison tool to their site.
Check it out here.
I like it already!
A couple of days back, I first tried to copy a char to the PTR. Blizz wouldn't let me, so I kept trying. When I first succeeded, there was an estimated queue of 4 days. One day later, when checking my status, it increased to 8 days. Damn!
Now, I finally had my char copied, but lazy as i was, I dod not download the PTR client yet. Downloading while playing resulted in major lag, so this was not an option. I decided to have the download done overnigt. Clever, eh?
Now, the PTR client is not just that first 1.07GB thing that you just download...
No, you have to incrementally download another after another 50-200MB patch, accept all the terms over again, log in, just to be told that there's another update waiting...
Why can't the tool just download and patch til you are up to date? Why is this annoying login neccessary again and again?
The login screen looks cool, though! I keep trying!
[edit]
Done now. But server load is high, it won't load the character list. Sunday evening, huh?
[/edit]
