Relaxin'

It has been a quiet week or two in Warcraft for me. I decided to take a break from heroic Icecrown as I saw signs of burnout imminently flashing orange and red on the anger meter of the HUD that is my brain. Thankfully, my guildies decided to back me up on a side-winding detour into Ulduar to wrap up some achievements.

In addition, we saw a bunch of people get close to their mounts and spent the last night dragging them through the first half of the place picking up achievements and killing Algalon again for titles and the cool Rhonin quest and stuff.

Right now is a good time to do this sort of thing - relax, hang out, kill some bosses, make some money, grab some titles and achivements, earn some mounts... no stress, no fuss, no muss.

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So, there is a lot of doom and gloom about Protection Paladins in Beta/PTR. Last time I checked, I played a Protection Paladin as my Main character of choice in this game we called World of Warcraft, so I grew concerned!

I downloaded the PTR, copied my main over, saw that I had an option to modify my character and decided to make him a Female Draenei, added an effeminate affectation to the name to make it less manly and jumped in! I spec'd away like crazy, fumed after finding no Glyphs on the Auction House, redid my tool bars, wept at the simple joy of pressing one button to buff an entire raid, fell in love with the high-detail, high-frame-count animation of my Draenei avatar, girded my loins, and queued up for a random.

As my feet landed in Utgarde Pinnacle, I immediately warned my cohorts that this was my first run on the PTR and to give me a bit of time with pulls to generate threat, and to please let me know if my threat was an issue. And then I proceeded to face-pull like a gibbering rabid warthog and finished the place with no deaths in about 12 minutes flat. No one pulled off of me at any point that I could see.

Without access to Inquisition, on AoE pulls I was more or less using:

• Avenger's Shield
• Holy Wrath
• Consecrate
• Hammer of the Righteous
• And I was tab-spreading Judgments around willy-nilley

On bosses I was using:

• Avenger's Shield
• Crusader Strike
• Shield of the Righteous (at 2 to 3 - I didn't pay too close attention to Holy Power, honestly)
  
• Judgment
• Holy Wrath
• Consecrate

The only time I felt like I was in trouble was when I pulled 3 groups at the same time and my health dropped significantly, when I bubbled with DP (I keep forgetting its a very short term cool down now, so I can use it way more often).

With how fast trash died, I don't think I ever really had Vengeance scale up and bosses were dying pretty fast too so I didn't see really big numbers from my attacks at any point but I held threat fine. Also, getting up to 60k in heroics from just priest, druid and self-buffs was kinda sexy. I only had time for one run last night but it was enough to give me a lot of confidence and faith that when the patch drops, we'll be just fine.

Also, I might race-and-gender-change Joachim if I get too used to my tail-wagging friend on the PTR. That'd be something. O_o

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Anyway. I'll be away from game (and possibly the blog) for a few days. Due to a real life thing happening tomorrow...

/mysterious_omen!

Fucking Yogg

Last night was an off-night. We don't normally raid on Wednesdays but when I put up an Ulduar hard modes raid on the calendar as a break from ICC just to mess around in, a lot of people signed up so we actually wound up raiding Ulda last night.

As I mentioned earlier, a number of us are one achievement short of the Rusted Proto-Drakes (One Light In The Dark) and we've started this journey no less than four times now.

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1. Back in Tier 9, we went in and got up to the General. We had all the hard modes done up until Yogg when ICC landed on us with a thud. We promptly began to ignore all other content and focused on ICC.

2. Fast forward a month or so, a few folks we'd done all those Ulda achievements have moved on, and there are 5 of us short 1 achievement, and just before I headed off to horde side and the dissolution of the guild, we spent a couple of nights in Ulda with a team where half of us had One Light remaining and everyone else was virgin.

In two nights we cleared up to Yogg again doing every hard mode along the way to catch up the other 5 folks and then spent one night on Yogg and just could not get it done. I blame that night to a lot of our melee playing off-spec from heals or tanks and just not having the DPS to get Brain Room done, and for the second time, we stopped short, I went Horde, and I thought that would be it.

3. Nope. I come back, people start talking about drakes again, and now we have 7 people in the guild with all but Yogg left, so, on some off-night, we went back in with three NEW folks who needed the achievements and, yep, we get to Yogg and it's almost midnight, and we call it. Never to go back.

So, last night. We have a team of the 7 original people, plus three who're somewhere along the way but I decided I wasn't going to get all the achievements again. We're going to powerclear our way to Yogg.

4. So, it's raid time, I have my team, we start pulling, we get to the Keepers, and on a whim, we one-shot every keeper on hard-mode including fucking Firefighter. We get to Yogg with an hour and change left on the raid.

And our rogue starts getting connection issues. One of our DKs has his mouse die. And I'm sitting there with my face beating on a wall. We finally pull and the team is shaking off the phase 1 rust, we wipe twice and then consistently make it to phase 2. Great.

As usual, surface team is moving as a unit, we're keeping tentacles clear, but brain room just can't get it together once again. We keep loosing people in brain-room and the one time we get everyone into brain room and they power clear up to the brain in a few seconds, the rogue disconnects, comes back in insane, and starts one-shotting healers.

I called it at that point.

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A few things that make this really annoying:

1. I'm just tired of this whole thing. If I had finished my achievement, I'd be okay with taking people through it again, but as it is, I'm sick, sick, of doing Ulda hardmodes only to wipe and fail on Yogg. And the sad part is, I love Ulduar. It's my favorite raid of this expansion.
2. Yogg isn't that hard. The brain room isn't that hard. Since nobody else wants to tank Phase 1, I wind up tanking it every time so I can't take someone's spot in the brain room (when you want to do something right...)
3. The fact that I'm considering giving up our ICC heroic modes tonight just to wrap up Yogg since we can just go in and do him directly tells me just how much of an albatross this is around my neck.
4. Because this has happened so many times, at this point, when we get to Yogg, my brain just becomes this cesspool of pessimism that refuses to acknowledge that things will go well, that we can succeed, so while I still play my best, my attitude is total shit and I'm sure that's infectious.
   

There are, I think, 7 or 8 of us who'll finish the meta if we kill Yogg. I think at this point, with the sour taste in my mouth from last night, I know just how badly I need to get this shit done.