As the sign says i’m away. Might be a bit quiet around here for two weeks (unless my blog gets hacked).
Any bets on 3.3 dropping while i’m away? (probably not)
*turns out the lights*
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging 
This isn’t directly WoW related.
For a while now i’ve considered putting advertising on this blog. More specifically moving off the free WordPress and on to paid-for WordPress or similar. Then putting ads of some sort on this blog. So far my natural laziness has been winning the battle of progressing this idea.
Part of me is interested to see what sort of income I can make blogging (if any) and seeing as I have about 3-3.5k readers it might be feasible now. Another part says I could jazz up the look of it and add stuff like support for WoWHead links, which I can’t do ATM.
The main blog I read where I notice adverts is Just My Two Copper run by Markco. I find this very mildly annoying. Not enough so i’d stop reading his blog.
What do you guys think? Hate advertising with a passion? Don’t care?
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging 
This isn’t directly WoW related.
For a while now i’ve considered putting advertising on this blog. More specifically moving off the free WordPress and on to paid-for WordPress or similar. Then putting ads of some sort on this blog. So far my natural laziness has been winning the battle of progressing this idea.
Part of me is interested to see what sort of income I can make blogging (if any) and seeing as I have about 3-3.5k readers it might be feasible now. Another part says I could jazz up the look of it and add stuff like support for WoWHead links, which I can’t do ATM.
The main blog I read where I notice adverts is Just My Two Copper run by Markco. I find this very mildly annoying. Not enough so i’d stop reading his blog.
What do you guys think? Hate advertising with a passion? Don’t care?
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging
v3.2.2
Game time has been a bit quiet recently. Wednesday night we cleared ToC 25 (normal), VoA and Onyxia 25 for an enjoyable nights raiding. Once again I DPS’ed the entire night except for going discipline for dispelling vs Faction Champions. I seem to be DPSing more and more on my priest. Part of the reason is our raiding shadow priest (and his wife, one of our best healing priests) evaporated a month back and we have almost no Boomkins for some reason either. The mages have been getting twitchy without a 3% hit debuff 
So i’ve been pushing about 4.2k DPS in fairly decent item level 245 gear, which is nothing on the mages and hunters (about 6k), but apparently low DPS from shadow is normal…
Thursday night we again cleared ToC 25 again up to Anub before a server reset. This time I was unfortunantly on my elem shaman. I used to like my shaman but these days I just can’t get into him. Totems are cool and his DPS is decent as elemental. His AoE is weak, but he switches single targets much better than my shadow priest. I’m not a huge DPS fan and elemental is ok, just not my thing I think. Healing-wise I just can’t get into resto shamans. I just find it slow and dull. No idea why although I guess I probably compare him to my priest. Probably doesn’t help that about six other raiders have shaman alts.
Anyway I did my thing for the guild and raided on him, but Thursday was kinda, meh.
Thats it raiding-wise. Real life kept me away the other nights although Sunday I did get some time on my “current favorite” Moowall. I have been mainly farming normal ToC 5 for The Black Heart. Over about six runs it dropped once and the fury warrior won the need roll… At least he offered to heal some runs on his main priest some time so I could get one.
I’m still scared about tanking on him, although I think i’ve got Toc 5 down now. I LFG’ed a few times to try and get into heroic UK but nothing came of it. Its wierd being back at ‘heroic level’. I mean on Turkelife i’m confident to heal anything but on Moowall i’ve got this kinda mental block about tanking heroics. I must break it! I mean i’ve got 29k health, 33% avoidance and 535 defence unbuffed, which is apparently heaps for heroics (I can get 540 defence easily enough by swapping gear). I’ve even gotten rid of my 75 defence rating green shoes 
I will tank one sometime soon.
I did get into heroic UK yesterday but they needed a DPS so I loaded up my Arms spec. The dust was thick in the air as I put on my warrior DPS gear. The off spec of an alt is practically new ground every time I do it. Arms DPS was quite fun and I did managed to get up to about 1.8k DPS anytime the targets stayed alive longer than 5 seconds. I was reminded how much I don’t enjoy melee DPS with all the fiddling and repositioning continually.
So I ended up doing heroic UK, heroic UP, heroic AN and heroic OK. I gotta get off my arse and tank these sometime. There were deaths and a couple of wipes. A shaman we picked up for H OK responded to requests to drop totems with “i’m too lazy”. Lucky I wasn’t running the PUG other-wise I wouldn’t have been too lazy to drop-kick his arse from the group. Heroic AN dropped Essence of Gossamer on Moowall’s first ever visit to make my trinketing decisions even more complicated and I got some badges, but not enough for anything useful yet.
I seem to be drifting a bit now Turkelife has run out of things to do and I don’t have much incentive to go too hard on Moowall as the heroics will all drop Emblem of Triumphs in 3.4 instead of Emblems of Conquest. Emblems of Conquest are so passe at this late stage in the patch.
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Priest, Warrior 
v3.2.2
I think you’re going to be getting a few posts about addons and my user interface (UI) in the near future. I’ve been fiddling with my UI a bit recently and i’m still feeling the urge for more fiddling. I find posts about other peoples UI generally interesting so perhaps this might be worth a read also.
This post is just a warm up and is mainly to tell you about a pair of great addons I have discovered of late.
This is awesome! It is very basic and allows you to do something quite powerful. You can enable/disable addons without logging out. Testing out new addons and want to turn them on or off easily? Been at the auction house and still got fat addons like Auctioneer enabled? Getting disconnected in Onyxia 25 and want to slim down on addons? Bored of starring at Recount and want to turn it off for a while? This is your addon. Just open the addon panel in the interface menu and enable/disable as you like. Many addons require you to /reloadui (a button is provided to do this), but it is better than completely logging out and back in again.
Those guildies reading who keep logging on and off to disable/enable addons should get this. Much easier.
Ampere by Tekkub
See what I did with the title? Tricky eh? Stuf is a set of unit frames which appears to be a replacement (rewrite?) of StellarUF (notice the name?). It replaces your default player, target, target of target, focus, pet and party unit frames with something very configurable and much easier to look at.
I have zero expereince with unit frames mods like X-Perl and Pitbull so I can’t compare but they would have to be pretty good to be better than Stuf. Stuf is light weight and easy to set up. The default, out-of-the-box, setup is very usable and requires very little/no configuration. Conversely, if you like, you can configure pretty much anything you like about the unit frames through a mixture of option in the addons interface panel for most basic stuff through to actual LUA if you want to do fancy stuff.
Originally I looked at some oUF UIs, like oUF_Nivaya, after seeing Llyra’s post on it, but it looked a bit complicated for me. Stuf seems to be a decent compromise.
Things i’m immediately liking about Stuf (other unit frames can probably do this but the default can’t) includes visual representation of incoming healing on unit health bars. This works both for healing and for DPS on enemy targets. This shades the health bar of your target to show approximately how much incoming healing/damage is happening on the target. This uses the standard libraries (LibHealComm-3.0 and LibRangeCheck-2.0) and is compatible with most other similar mods (they share data).
I’m going to write some more about Stuf at some stage as there is little to no information about it available. This will probably be along the lines of how to install/setup and maybe a post about some useful but basic LUA code for displaying stuff in your Stuf.
I am not using the associated StufRaid, which are raid frames as I have Grid to fill that function.
Stuf by totalpackage
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Addons 
This isn’t directly Wow related although it does affect you readers because it affects us writers.
When you create a blog which achieves any kind of decent readership you also attract leeches of various types. This post is primarily about the type of leeches who duplicate blog posts and then pass them off as their own.
Although this gives me (and most other bloggers) the shits I have been just ignoring it, but Miss Medicina’s recent post on the topic, got me to thinking I should put my opinion out there and provide readers with instruction on how you can legitimately copy my work. So here goes.
If you want to republish any of my posts you need to credit me as the original author. Preferably note somewhere near the top of your post that I’m the original author and link to the original post which you are copying. That’s it. Nothing complicated. Personally I can’t see why you would want to copy one of my posts in its entirety and re-post it instead of just linking to the original unless you were hoping to attract readers to your website. This applies to blog posts, forum posts, ‘wow guides’, etc.
I realise some are screen scraping my work, usually using an automated process, and I have little hope that they will magically stop because I ask them to. I’m happy to ignore them as they are the “junk mail” of blogs anyway.
Sorry for the gloomy nature of this post, but I felt this needed to be said.
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging 
v3.2.2
Been pretty busy lately so this is just going to be a post about some random thoughts. I’ll get to the crossroads in a minute, but firstly some links.
MK @ Dwarfpriest posted after about 12 months of silence. For those who don’t know MK wrote some of the best priest posts of 2008, especially around the 3.0.2 patch and Wrath. S/he has been unable to play due to health issues, which many of us are sorry to hear. Don’t make an idiot of yourself like I did and read the post before you comment. Sorry MK I realise my comment was a bit tactless.
No Stock UI has an excellent post about moving from Fubar to DataBroker. I made this move about 6 months ago and i’d never go back. The post has some decent plug-ins for your favorite data broker (I use Fortress myself).
There have been lots of posts about T10 set bonuses. My short take on them is that they have returned from awesome 4 piece Tier 8 bonus for discipline, back to the “meh” days of tier 7. Some are excited about the 4 piece tier 10 for priests (15% chance of removing the Penance/CoH cool down on Flash Heal cast), but this isn’t that good IMHO. I might post on them in detail when they get closer to being finalised. Until then Rez the Weak and Duct Tape and a Prayer both have interesting takes on them.
My last shout out goes to Holyform’s post on Power Infusion. This is a good overview and it lead to my amazing discovery of the week. Ready for it? Power Infusion doesn’t trigger the global cool down! Massive, eh? Despite using PI regularly for months and months I only just learnt that.
Ok to the crossroads. BTW this is nothing to do with the Barrens this time.
For most of the year Turkelife has had a list of things todo (a bucketlist?) which included:
Well she’s raiding regularly and i’ve seen most of the sights. She’s also fairly well geared (don’t look at my trinkets) and even her shadow off spec is strong thanks to Voa 25 dropping shadow gear regularly. So thats done. Unlike Ulduar hard modes our guild isn’t that enthused about heroic ToC raiding. More of the same but slightly harder? No giant robots? No thank you. We’ve killed a few bosses in ToC 10 heroic, but no one is that excited about progressing.
Loremaster is done. It was long it was kinda fun but now its done.
Last week i finished the Son’s of Hodir Exalted rep grind. Actually it wasn’t that much of a grind, especially once I discovered there are actually quite a few Everfrost chips lying about if you know what to look for.
So now she’s into the maybes. Argent tournament is still pretty “meh”. I’ve done a bit but it’s just not doing it for me.
So i’m at the crossroads. I’m kinda thinking of leveling a druid (currently 45), but leveling a 4th 80 isn’t motivating me, even with +20% xp. I feel like I need a second toon at at least entry level raiding because as a guild we are doing a lot of gearing alts ATM. We’re running 2 x ToC 25, about 4 x ToC 10, multiple heroic daily runs, etc, etc, and with one toon i’m missing out on some of the action. The guild really needs a few more tanks as we go through them like vindaloo. So I was thinking a resto/bear druid…maybe.
Currently at 80 I have a disc/shadow priest (my main), a elem/resto shaman and a prot warrior. I like shaman but I find DPS fairly boring over any extended period of time and for some reason I just can’t get into resto shaman healing. I think its the limited number of buttons to push.
So last night I pulled my finger out and dusted of Moowall my prot warrior. He needed about 10-15 defence to reach the defence cap and normal ToC was a prime target. In I went still trying to remember how to tank. Once again I was reminded by the sheer number of buttons prot warriors have to push. I think I need a lot of buttons to be happy.
Anyway normal Toc is cake. The jousting is easier than the Grand Melee daily I was doing on Turkelife, the tanking was fairly easy, even though I suck big time at targeting in melee range and there is epics. Epics fall from the sky like candy. Kill a slightly harder trash pull, get a chest of epics, kill the Paltress, get a chest of epics, kill the Black Knight, you get the idea. I didn’t get my Black Heart, but did get a couple of other upgrades (mainly for my very weak Arms off-spec).
Wow this post is getting long. To cut a long story short I replaced my rare gems with epic gems and when I have my +75 defence Golem Sabatons on not only can I reach the 535 heroic defence cap but I have exactly 540 defence. Rawr! Let me tank a raid!!!
Looks like Moowall is my main alt (for now)
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging, Priest, Warrior 
v3.2.2
Been pretty busy lately so this is just going to be a post about some random thoughts. I’ll get to the crossroads in a minute, but firstly some links.
MK @ Dwarfpriest posted after about 12 months of silence. For those who don’t know MK wrote some of the best priest posts of 2008, especially around the 3.0.2 patch and Wrath. S/he has been unable to play due to health issues, which many of us are sorry to hear. Don’t make an idiot of yourself like I did and read the post before you comment. Sorry MK I realise my comment was a bit tactless.
No Stock UI has an excellent post about moving from Fubar to DataBroker. I made this move about 6 months ago and i’d never go back. The post has some decent plug-ins for your favorite data broker (I use Fortress myself).
There have been lots of posts about T10 set bonuses. My short take on them is that they have returned from awesome 4 piece Tier 8 bonus for discipline, back to the “meh” days of tier 7. Some are excited about the 4 piece tier 10 for priests (15% chance of removing the Penance/CoH cool down on Flash Heal cast), but this isn’t that good IMHO. I might post on them in detail when they get closer to being finalised. Until then Rez the Weak and Duct Tape and a Prayer both have interesting takes on them.
My last shout out goes to Holyform’s post on Power Infusion. This is a good overview and it lead to my amazing discovery of the week. Ready for it? Power Infusion doesn’t trigger the global cool down! Massive, eh? Despite using PI regularly for months and months I only just learnt that.
Ok to the crossroads. BTW this is nothing to do with the Barrens this time.
For most of the year Turkelife has had a list of things todo (a bucketlist?) which included:
Well she’s raiding regularly and i’ve seen most of the sights. She’s also fairly well geared (don’t look at my trinkets) and even her shadow off spec is strong thanks to Voa 25 dropping shadow gear regularly. So thats done. Unlike Ulduar hard modes our guild isn’t that enthused about heroic ToC raiding. More of the same but slightly harder? No giant robots? No thank you. We’ve killed a few bosses in ToC 10 heroic, but no one is that excited about progressing.
Loremaster is done. It was long it was kinda fun but now its done.
Last week i finished the Son’s of Hodir Exalted rep grind. Actually it wasn’t that much of a grind, especially once I discovered there are actually quite a few Everfrost chips lying about if you know what to look for.
So now she’s into the maybes. Argent tournament is still pretty “meh”. I’ve done a bit but it’s just not doing it for me.
So i’m at the crossroads. I’m kinda thinking of leveling a druid (currently 45), but leveling a 4th 80 isn’t motivating me, even with +20% xp. I feel like I need a second toon at at least entry level raiding because as a guild we are doing a lot of gearing alts ATM. We’re running 2 x ToC 25, about 4 x ToC 10, multiple heroic daily runs, etc, etc, and with one toon i’m missing out on some of the action. The guild really needs a few more tanks as we go through them like vindaloo. So I was thinking a resto/bear druid…maybe.
Currently at 80 I have a disc/shadow priest (my main), a elem/resto shaman and a prot warrior. I like shaman but I find DPS fairly boring over any extended period of time and for some reason I just can’t get into resto shaman healing. I think its the limited number of buttons to push.
So last night I pulled my finger out and dusted of Moowall my prot warrior. He needed about 10-15 defence to reach the defence cap and normal ToC was a prime target. In I went still trying to remember how to tank. Once again I was reminded by the sheer number of buttons prot warriors have to push. I think I need a lot of buttons to be happy.
Anyway normal Toc is cake. The jousting is easier than the Grand Melee daily I was doing on Turkelife, the tanking was fairly easy, even though I suck big time at targeting in melee range and there is epics. Epics fall from the sky like candy. Kill a slightly harder trash pull, get a chest of epics, kill the Paltress, get a chest of epics, kill the Black Knight, you get the idea. I didn’t get my Black Heart, but did get a couple of other upgrades (mainly for my very weak Arms off-spec).
Wow this post is getting long. To cut a long story short I replaced my rare gems with epic gems and when I have my +75 defence Golem Sabatons on not only can I reach the 535 heroic defence cap but I have exactly 540 defence. Rawr! Let me tank a raid!!!
Looks like Moowall is my main alt (for now)
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Blogging, Priest, Warrior
v3.2.2
eplandslide posted a comment with a story about a 25 man raid s/he did recently and asked from some advice about making the transition from 10 man healing to 25 man healing. This is my suggestions on the transition and some things to be aware of.
My impression of healing Normal 5 man instances is that they are fun and pretty easy.
Heroic 5 man instances scare the crap out of you when you first start doing them as a healer. No more thoughts like, “hmmm the tank has lost 25% of his health, I guess i’d better top him up.” Its more like a nervous first person shooter where the healer sits hunched over the keyboard twitching and mashing keys at the first sign of damage. “OMFG, DAMAGE!!!!!!! HEAL NOW, NOW, NOW. FASTER! BIGGER!” But you get used to them and you twitch faster with practice
10 man raids are kind a like double heroics 5 mans but with a difference. The bosses take longer to kill and most importantly you are no longer responsible for healing everyone. You can share the blame load with other healers who will vary from making you wonder what they are doing as you heal your arse off to making you wonder why your even there as they heal everything.
25 man raids are like school. Some raiders are quite, some are noisy. Some seem to be the popular ones and others play, but you know nothing about them but their name. The teachers generally are trying to get the class to do something, but not everyone follows instructions. Some wander off unannounced and then return at a time which suits them. Others seem to have far too many beans and bounce around like they have ants in their pants. Healing 25 mans is like being a soldier. You follow orders (everyone is happier when you do it without question) and it consists of long periods of bordom followed by short moments of terror.
I know. Not a very useful answer was it? Let’s call it a segway and move on.
eplandslide asked:
I wonder if you have any sense of the difference between being buffed in a 10 man raid versus a 20 man raid. My mp5 on Ony 25 was approaching 950 (and something like 600 while casting), with a ridiculous mana pool (26k). It felt like I was never going to run out of a mana. And sure enough, I pumped out about 2 million HP with some mana to spare.
Given these enormous jumps in mana pool size and regen in 25 man raids, my sense that healing here means chain-healing seems reinforced…. looking forward to your response!
Oh I totally missed eplandslides point… focus BobTurkey focus!
This is actually harder to answer than it looks, but the short answer is yes, more chain healing.
Depending on your context, and i’m going to assume normal 10 and 25 man raiding, you normally spend say 50% of your in-combat time healing in a 10 man raid and something more like 80-90% of you time in 25 man healing. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly there are are 2.5 times more raiders needing healing. There is of course about the same additional multiple of healers, i.e. 2-3 in 10 man to 5-6 in 25 man, but with more healers comes more opportunity for over healing.
Secondly there is more damage in 25 man. Sounds obvious but there is. Everything hits harder and there is more of it. E.g. Kologarn grabs 1 person in normal and three in heroic. His Focused eye beam does about 2.5k DPS in normal and 3.5k in heroic. Etc, etc.
So even though you will almost always have more and a greater variety of buffs giving you more mana to heal with in 25 mans there is more healing to be done per healer.
Does that make sense to anyone else?
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Priest 
v3.2.2
eplandslide posted a comment with a story about a 25 man raid s/he did recently and asked from some advice about making the transition from 10 man healing to 25 man healing. This is my suggestions on the transition and some things to be aware of.
My impression of healing Normal 5 man instances is that they are fun and pretty easy.
Heroic 5 man instances scare the crap out of you when you first start doing them as a healer. No more thoughts like, “hmmm the tank has lost 25% of his health, I guess i’d better top him up.” Its more like a nervous first person shooter where the healer sits hunched over the keyboard twitching and mashing keys at the first sign of damage. “OMFG, DAMAGE!!!!!!! HEAL NOW, NOW, NOW. FASTER! BIGGER!” But you get used to them and you twitch faster with practice
10 man raids are kind a like double heroics 5 mans but with a difference. The bosses take longer to kill and most importantly you are no longer responsible for healing everyone. You can share the blame load with other healers who will vary from making you wonder what they are doing as you heal your arse off to making you wonder why your even there as they heal everything.
25 man raids are like school. Some raiders are quite, some are noisy. Some seem to be the popular ones and others play, but you know nothing about them but their name. The teachers generally are trying to get the class to do something, but not everyone follows instructions. Some wander off unannounced and then return at a time which suits them. Others seem to have far too many beans and bounce around like they have ants in their pants. Healing 25 mans is like being a soldier. You follow orders (everyone is happier when you do it without question) and it consists of long periods of bordom followed by short moments of terror.
I know. Not a very useful answer was it? Let’s call it a segway and move on.
eplandslide asked:
I wonder if you have any sense of the difference between being buffed in a 10 man raid versus a 20 man raid. My mp5 on Ony 25 was approaching 950 (and something like 600 while casting), with a ridiculous mana pool (26k). It felt like I was never going to run out of a mana. And sure enough, I pumped out about 2 million HP with some mana to spare.
Given these enormous jumps in mana pool size and regen in 25 man raids, my sense that healing here means chain-healing seems reinforced…. looking forward to your response!
Oh I totally missed eplandslides point… focus BobTurkey focus!
This is actually harder to answer than it looks, but the short answer is yes, more chain healing.
Depending on your context, and i’m going to assume normal 10 and 25 man raiding, you normally spend say 50% of your in-combat time healing in a 10 man raid and something more like 80-90% of you time in 25 man healing. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly there are are 2.5 times more raiders needing healing. There is of course about the same additional multiple of healers, i.e. 2-3 in 10 man to 5-6 in 25 man, but with more healers comes more opportunity for over healing.
Secondly there is more damage in 25 man. Sounds obvious but there is. Everything hits harder and there is more of it. E.g. Kologarn grabs 1 person in normal and three in heroic. His Focused eye beam does about 2.5k DPS in normal and 3.5k in heroic. Etc, etc.
So even though you will almost always have more and a greater variety of buffs giving you more mana to heal with in 25 mans there is more healing to be done per healer.
Does that make sense to anyone else?
Gobble gobble.
Posted in Priest