I know people who collect swords (in game!), folks who are eternally searching for the perfect hat, guildies who change hairstyles on a daily basis. The fact is that WoW has a very visual component, and I think it’s fair to say that most frequent players develop an attachment to their main and want to see them look coordinated or pretty or badass. I am a big fan of min-maxing, theorycrafting, and using math voodoo to make Liore the best she can be at healing or DPS, but there is one area where my resolve weakens, and that area is staves.

I love staves. They are big and fantastical and often iconic. Think of priests running around with Benediction, or the corn staff from the green dragons. Ever since I first set eyes upon Will of Arlokk (can we get the Zul’Gurub armor designers to come back, please?), I was sold on Liore being a staff wearer. This wasn’t a very controversial decision in Classic WoW, particularly with Benediction around.

Maces plus an offhand gained some traction in TBC, although Solarian’s Ethereum Life-Staff and the Priest on a Stick were still pretty competitive weapon choices for their armor tiers.

So here we are in Northrend, and, sadly, maces really are the way to go. There are plenty of good weapon choices and lots of great offhands floating around, whether you’re healing or DPSing. And I had indeed remained true to my inner min-maxer and stuck with my mace. Oh sure, I managed to fairly obtain a Spire of Sunset and a Staff of Restraint, but although both are gorgeous they currently sit in my bank, two more exhibits in Liore’s Gallery of Staves. They just .. weren’t.. quite enough.. to make me switch.

Then, last night, Gluth fell and suddenly IT entered my life. My precious! You can keep your theorycrafting, jack, because I have DAMNATION. Oh, sweet Damnation. My new weapon math goes as such:

(awesome name + badass model + spinny bits) > dumb mace

I lost some spell power and am going to have to regem a couple of sockets for +hit, but la la la I do not care. Sometimes a girl just needs a big fancy stick.

My recent treatise on How to Quit Your Guild seems to have gained some notice, and this morning was linked in a retort by Gevlon. He recommends that people in most situations refuse to go quietly, decline to talk to their officers, call specific people out, and basically try and cause as much unrest as possible. Perhaps it’s my Canadian politeness, but I just don’t see the point. If, as in his example, one feels that their guild is not strict or focused enough, why not just move to another guild that better suits the player? Doing that and having a hissy fit against the machine seems .. selfish, to be honest. Your old guild will, ideally, continue to be happy with their old ways, and you will be happy with the ways of your new guild. Everyone is happy, and basic social niceties still stand. Hooray!

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My fledgling shadow UI is atrocious. Witness the horror that is currently my playing area (cropped to show just the center):

Blargh! So first on the left and top right of my character I have ClassTimer. I added it on the right just so I could see when Shadow Weaving was fully stacked, and my Inner Fire timer and a few other things show up there. I’m starting to think that I should just move it back down to my user frame. I don’t need to check on Shadow Weaving THAT often, and running around out of combat with an Inner Fire timer floating in the middle of nowhere is making my OCD side crazy.

Since I was already using ClassTimer, and I’m used to how it looks, I’m still using it on the top right for debuff bars. I should, really, eventually switch this over to DoTimer, although it kind of intimidates me. (I unchecked the “Simple Mode” setup for DoTimer, and my jaw fell to the floor.) I DID manage to get it set up correctly as a cooldown timer, which you see on the lower right of my character. The biggest adjustment I made was having the “ghost bar”, like Mind Blast in this image, last 15 seconds so it will definitely catch my eye.

Right above my user frame is Quartz. Quartz is, as many people know, an awesome casting bar. The latency and GCD information is stuff I need to see — while I was quite good at anticipating the GCD on my healing spells, for some reason I am terrible at it with shadow. Quartz has little extras that pop up every so often during combat (debuffs? something..). Usually this happens in the middle of fighting a rather cross dragon, so I just shout rude things at my monitor and promise to look into it later.

Right now I’ve kept my old Pitbull user frames, complete with the totally unnecessary casting bar.

I played around a bit with IceHUD as a replacement for Pitbull, but I’m not sure my brain is ready for that big a switch. I also tried EventHorizon as a replacement for both ClassTimer and DoTimer, and while it’s a really neat way to view spell priority it just didn’t groove well with my playstyle. It’s worth a test for the unique “Guitar Hero”-like display if nothing else.

I am usually so careful about my UI, moving elements one pixel at a time until I am satisfied, and this is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve already noticed an overall improvment in DPS, though, so I suppose I’m just breaking a few eggs to, eventually, make a sleek face-melting omlet. Right?

On a seperate but also mod-related topic, I have never ever found an Auction House mod that I liked until No Stock UI recommended Auction Lite. It is quick, light, and adds some pretty awesome functionality to your buying and selling. It even inspired me to try my hand at “playing the AH”, and I’m pleased to say that thus far I’ve made 10g profit from buying low and selling high. I will try to not spend it all in one place.

Last night at officer insistence the raid killed Sarth 2D with 20 people. It took about an hour with a thrown-together random raid makeup, but it was good practice for 3D and a challenge for the team to chew on a bit. The reaction to our plan was amusing, with most people saying, “You know there’s no achievement for this, right?” Um, YEAH, I know. Why does everything challenging need to come with an achievement now? I mean, achievements are great, and I have chased some mercilessly, but everything we do doesn’t need to be validated by some flashing lights at the end. We’re done with 25-man content and we’re bored. Let’s spice it up a bit, even it it’s outside the official Blizzard channels.

That being said, I feel extremely fond of some of my completed achievements. And in a stroke of synchronicity, I noticed yesterday that the shared topic over at Twisted Nether is “What three achievements are you most proud of?”. Let’s see…

Heroic: The Twilight Zone (covered in detail here)
This one is probably fairly obvious, and I bet it would appear on many people’s lists. This was the very first and last boss encounter thus far in WotLK to give me that “new kill buzz” and to make everyone cheer on Vent and congratulate each other. Plus, I have to give it to Blizzard, the title mechanic is pretty awesome. Only one person (not me!) walked away from that fight with a pretty new drake, and only a handful (also not me!) got some gear from the fight… but all 25 of us have a piece of our accomplishment that we can wear proudly.

Ambassador of the Alliance (covered in detail here)
I usually shy away from multi-day achievements, because I am lazy and have a short attention span. Or, if I do have to do them, I throw a lot of gold at the problem until it goes away. This achievement is tied to so many others, though (exalted reputations, mounts, Seeker, Loremaster, and all the things you can do while running around), and I was trapped at home over Christmas by bad weather, so I figured I would do this one the old fashioned way. A few days of doing low and medium level quests, grinding corpse parts in AV, and just a tiny smidge of runecloth.. and I was Ambassador Liore, pleased as all get out.

Level 80
No, I was never in doubt of reaching level 80. However, getting there was dang fun. I hit level 78.5 early on a Thursday night, and then did something completely impulsive and unlike me — I decided to call in sick to work the next day with Level 80 Fever. I level in a holy smite spec (yes, I could go shadow, but that would be too easy), but fortunately my DPSy raid leader took pity on me and spent almost the next 24 hours marching us through every single quest in Storm Peaks. The highs of hitting level 80 (hooray!) were very shortly followed by the lows of discovering that We Were Not Prepared for heroics (boo!). It was a crazy couple of days with some crazy friends, and one of my favorite leveling memories.

This weekend ended up being very much a WoW weekend. I finally got exalted with the Kirin Tor and Oracles, farmed a lot of Hodir rep, ran many heroics, got a badge upgrade for my shadow gear, twiddled with my UI, 8-manned Malygos, and cleared out the quests in Zul’Drak and Borean Tundra. I also started seriously working on Higher Learning.

For those who still haven’t looked yet, Higher Learning is an achievement to collect 8 books from around Dalaran. The books have a one-hour spawn window which occurs three hours from the previous spawn. So, for example, if the last book spawned at 8am, the next spawn window will be 11am-12pm. The  book spawns for three minutes from the moment it is first read, and multiple people can read it. Additionally, often a ‘fake’, or non-achievement, book will spawn, which again sets the timer to three hours. Completing this achievement (and following the instructions after it) takes you to our old friend Archmage Vargoth, who gives you a Kirin Tor Familiar pet.

Stalking the book spawns comes with it’s own lingo:

OTC: “On the clock”, aka the location is on the 1 hour spawn window
LLL: The lower bookshelf (by far right entrance) at the Ledgermain Lounge
ULL: The upper bookshelf (straight in front of you as you go up the stairs) at the Ledgermain Lounge
VG: Beside the right bookshelf in the Violet Gate
VH: Violet Hold, next to the regular daily quest giver
UVC: The upper bookshelf on your left at the Violet Citadel.
LVC: The lower bookshelf on your right at the Violet Citadel.
TOF: The upstairs balcony at Threads of Fate
DVC: The bookshelf on the right in the Dalaran Visitor’s Center.

Fortunately the 3-minute window mechanic means that people benefit from working together to track the spawns. There are a couple of different ways to leverage this:

• Find out if people are using a channel on your server to discuss spawn times. On Uldum Alliance, it’s #bookclub. People report if a spawn is fake, cover multiple locations, share timers, and so on. This is extremely valuable if you’re out farming and want to track what’s going on.
• Install a mod such as Higher Learning. It will sync up with your server book channel and track spawn times. An important note, though: Daylight Savings Time seems to have messed with Higher Learning, so occasionally it will automatically set the respawn time for 4 hours instead of 3. This is remarkably irritating. I often just reset my timers manually using the command “/hl set LLL” (or whatever location you’re tracking), which WILL automatically set the time for three hours.

As a final note, the timers reset when the server does. If you’re lucky enough to be sitting at home on a Tuesday morning, the minute that maintenance is over and see if you can’t find a book or three.

All told over the weekend using these methods I managed to nab one real book (for a total now of four out of eight) and be around to witness 4 or 5 fakes spawn. This is NOT a quick achievement, which makes the pet all the more special. Happy spawn hunting!

No leader likes to contemplate it, but sometimes people decide to quit their guild. Maybe they are quitting the game, or perhaps they want something different, but quitting a guild can lead to drama, bad feelings, and burned bridges. Over the years I have seen everything from people disappearing in the middle of the night to big drama-filled goodbyes to sad departures by people who will always be welcomed back in the Cats. I think it’s impossible to quit a guild with absolutely no repercussions at all, but with the right approach and attitude you can definitely minimize any conflict.

art by nataliedee.com

There is one universal policy about leaving a guild, no matter what the cause: any guild leader worth their salt wants a minimum of disruption to the rest of the team. If you can help them with that, it will go a long way towards making everyone as satisfied as possible with the outcome. That means no lingering drama posts on the guild forum, and no hissy fits in chat. When you do go, make a clean break and wait at least a couple of weeks before popping back on the guild website to say hi. Consider actually /gquitting during off-peak times to reduce the number of alarmed witnesses.

I think there are two basic reasons that people leave a guild: they want to move to a different guild (usually with “better” progression), or they are quitting or reducing their gametime in general. Honesty is the best policy — be straight forward about what your reasons are. Don’t make up crazy stories. To be very honest, people who are quitting WoW or going ultra-casual will get much better treatment from me than people who are hopping to a more progressed guild, but if you’re going to do the latter at least stand up for your reasons.

If you are looking for a new guild, don’t start applying before letting your guild leader or favorite officer know that you’re looking. GLs on the same server talk more than you suspect, and we have a sixth sense about these things. Part of our job (as recruiters) is to keep tabs on all the usual recruitment avenues, so there is very little ground that we don’t cover. Being honest, while difficult, is better than being caught.

And keep in mind that, in my experience, people come back to the guild or to WoW about 90% of the time. Perhaps you won’t come back to the exact same role, but history shows that you will likely want to come back in some capacity, so don’t burn any bridges.

So, in conclusion, five tips to quitting your guild:

1. Talk to your guild leader or favorite officer first. Give us a chance to fix things!
2. Be honest. Have the conviction to stand behind your reasons. Act professionally, and your guild leader should respond in kind.
3. If you start “secretly” guild shopping, you will likely be busted.
4. If you’re quitting WoW or reducing your game time you’ll probably be coming back at some point, so don’t burn any bridges!
5. Remember that your guild leader wants this process to go as smoothly as possible, so any help you can give along those lines will count for a lot.

** Note to my guild: no, no one is quitting. That’s why I decided to write this post now!

With all the current available 25-man content cleared and a surplus of very good healers, I seem to have switched almost completely to shadow in these hazy pre-Ulduar days. I’m finally hit-capped, I’ve got all the right glyphs, my keybindings are mostly set correctly, and more impressively my guildies have stopped giggling to themselves every time I go into shadow form. Really, though, I’m a 3-week old DPSer, so while I think I have a lot of the basics down now the experience and subtleties still elude me. Also, when flustered I have a tendency to stand there slack-jawed and mash on my Mind Blast — which is always on cooldown — until either it comes back up again or my brain kicks in and tells me what to do now.

Anyway, none of the below tips will help the experienced shadow priest, but if there are any other of my holy brethren exploring their dark sides some of this might be interesting:

1) Don’t rush the Shadow Word: Pain. It will stick on your target forever in most cases, assuming you’re using Mind Flay, so wait until you have a full five stacks of Shadow Weaving before unleashing the Pain. My usual single target boss opener is Vamp Touch – Devouring Plague – Shadow Word:Death – Mind Blast – Mind Flay – THEN SW:P.

2) Mind Searing herds of trash is almost illegally fun, but from my observations it only seems to be efficient with three or more mobs. When you’re dealing with two fairly resilient trash mobs, dot them both up and then do single target damage to the same one the rest of the raid is focused on. When pulling a pack of trash mobs with one big guy, throw VT on the big guy (why not, more mana and damage is good) and then Mind Sear to your heart’s content. I recommending giggling evilly to yourself at the same time.

3) This is going to sound stupid to any DPS person, but as a healer I didn’t know this: either use your tab key, or set up a tab macro. DPSers hit tab all the time to find their next target. I know, I was surprised too.

4) Shadow priests can dispel while in shadow form. This will most likely be taken care of by the healing priests and paladins on your run, but be prepared to help out when necessary. Resurrecting a player WILL knock you out of shadow form. Don’t be a Liore and end up DPSing two Naxx bosses in normal form. Also, you DO have healing spells, although god knows using one of the dirty things will seriously impact your spot on the charts, man. At least keep Flash Heal on your hotbar and be ready to use it if things get ugly or you’re about to die during a critical fight.

5) When examining the logs later (oh please, if you’ve read this far you know exactly what I’m talking about, you crazy min-maxer you) check and see how many times each of your three main dots ticked during a fight. They should be pretty similar numbers. If your SW:P is much higher than the other two, you need to watch your dot timer better.

6) Shadow priests are just going to kind of suck at some things, like the trash phase of Gothik. C’est la vie.

The thing I haven’t figured out yet: when is it optimal for me to stay on a target and not the add? Take Grobbulus — a lot of shadow priest damage takes a while to crank up, so when the blob add appears I am loathe to leave all my dots and cooldowns and switch to it, only to have to slowly build up damage on the add as well. Mind you, I know from running raids for years that getting DPS to stop casting/hitting the boss and focus on the add can be challenging, and I don’t want to be one of THOSE people. More research is needed!

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I spent the weekend offline (again!) in another city celebrating my raid leader’s birthday. Some things are more important than blogging. I know, I know…

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Still Alive

First up, this is not a complaint that getting The Undying is too difficult. It IS very challenging, but I don’t mind a good challenge and it’s nice to have something to sink our teeth into while waiting for Ulduar. Given enough time, we’ll get this achievement. Instead I’m more complaining about the concept in general.

The problem with Undying/Immortal as it stands right now is that the majority of the time someone is going to be the goose. I’ve been on two attempts and was fortunate enough to not be the person who died either time, but in both cases they were strong players with a history of being awesome and not standing in crap. They just made one split second wrong decision, and that was that.

Most of our usual 10-man team is pretty good about someone dying. There is some sighing, some awkward silence, but c’est la vie. A few people get a little grumbly and tense, but no one has yet devolved into finger pointing and namecalling. However, we’re a fairly mature, close knit guild. I can only imagine in some guilds where there isn’t as much emphasis on social niceties it doesn’t go as smoothly for the poor goose.

And what of the healers? These “no death” runs are simply terrifying from a healing perspective. I act like I imagine a new mother does around her child: “Don’t let them touch that!” “Stay away from there, you could fall and hurt yourself!” “You can play.. but don’t go out of my sight!” It feels like just a matter of time until I screw up. The Undying was actually a big part of the reason that I’m raiding as DPS until Ulduar… at this point in the game, I just don’t feel like putting myself through the wringer.

The very clear and easy alternative to the current system is to unlink everyone’s success. You have to clear Naxx during one lockout timer without dying on a boss. The dude beside you dies? No problem, he’s out, you’re still in. It’s slightly easier on the healers, and it’s not as much of a drama-generating pressure cooker. It does lessen the challenge of the achievement, but there is something to be said for maintaining an emphasis on an excellent personal performance without encouraging finger pointing and poor sportsmanship.

Between Undying and all the 8 and 20 man achievements, sometimes it seems like Blizzard has it out for those who play the WoW guild management meta-game.