The Best 2009 WoW Fanart Poll highlights some of the year’s best WoW Fanart.   A number of the pictures were depictions of Sylvanas.  Part of that is doubtless due to her outfits.  I found the different ways in which her face was pictured to be particularly interesting.  In some pictures she looks like a goddess of vengeance while in others she appears to be acting more in sorrow than in anger.

Sylvanas – Fallen by *TheFirstAngel on deviantART

Jaimie and I got our hunters up to 80!

I thought our dot-fear-win team of overpowered, but for leveling 2 hunters had them beat.  The problem with dot-fear-win was that they’re at their strongest against many strong mobs.  You want to load up a mob with dots, then immediately move to the next mob as the dots tick on the first one.  Either the mobs would die before half the dots had a chance to tick or they’d make it to us and beat us down.  With the hunters it was a nice straightforward pull, kill, pull, kill.

We went to Molten Core in our mid 70s and picked up a pair of Ancient Core Hounds.  I thought I’d miss my cat’s dash a lot, but it turns out that the core hounds’ lava breath is great for pulling distant and caster mobs.  I made sure to have my Core Hound Pup out as well so it was fun to have four core houds running around burning up the landscape.

As a  special bonus Jaimie was hunting Northrend rares and she ran across Skoll the spirit beast wolf.  She very kindly didn’t kill him and let me get onto my hunter to tame him.  Getting a spirit beast was one of the goals I didn’t think I’d get to on my hunter.  Thanks hon!

Back in the old days when Alterac Valley used to last for hours or days, I ran it a lot on my holy priest. I was determined to get my epic mount and the savings for buying the PvP mount at exalted was huge! Once I get the mount, I didn’t do much more PvP. Mostly I’ve run my toons through Alterac a couple times at level 55 for the XP from the initial quests, then ignored the battlegrounds.

Now that I’m leveling another priest, I’m having a blast playing in Alterac Valley again. The XP isn’t amazing, but it’s decent. I still stink at PvP but as a holy priest I can heal those who are better at it than I am (and hopefully annoy the other side). I feel as though I should get the Benediction staff to make it easier on the other side to know who to kill.

A few tips to remember:

• Use the terrain – healing from behind rocks, bushes, and trees can give you a few more precious seconds of life
• When you’re not sure who to heal, use Tab and Target of Target to find someone being targeted by the bad guys
• No matter how weak your stats, you can capture / defend an unguarded objective
• Buff the raid before the battleground starts – it’s free (except for the reagent cost). Buff yourself immediately upon rezzing.
• Have fun! It’s easy to find groups with the dungeon finder or to go do quests, so don’t put yourself through PvP if you’re not enjoying it.

I joined in on a Blackwing Lair raid for fun last night. We went through the instance, got some lower level toons some pretty purples, and got the achievement for a bunch of people. It reminded me of my first raiding toons and why I became a raid leader.

I was sure I had highlighted this earlier, but WoW.com had a video guide to faster raiding. What takes time in raids is not the fights, but the dead time. It’s the time you spend waiting for people to find their way to the instance, waiting for someone to regain that last tenth of a percent of mana, or debating who gets the latest shiny object that kills your momentum and leads to people wandering away to take a nap. I had gotten sick of slow runs, which is one of the reasons I became a raid leader. As a tank, I had the bonus ability of pull whenever I felt ready.

The current heroics are a great way to get practice for speed runs. If you’re the tank, just keep pulling if your healer has over 50% mana. As a healer, let the tank know you’re fine with chain pulls. As DPS … play well so that the healer doesn’t waste mana on you, I guess?

This description of tank roulette made me laugh:

I’ve heard all about “Tank Roulette”: a game in which the tank stands at the edge of Krasus’s Landing, queues using the Dungeon Finder as a Tank, jumps off the edge and either:

* (a) ends up safely in a dungeon before they die a horrible death from falling.

* (b) or – there’s a small chance – that they might hit the ground before they are matched with a party.

via Hots and Dots Absolute Power.

I’ve had a lot of fun running PUGs as a tank.  Unfortunately I got tired of it just as my death knight got his Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement.  I still haven’t run Pit of Saron with him.

Insanely enough, I’ve been running the regular Northrend dungeons on my shaman as a healer.  I do NOT sign up as party lead with him.  All I care about is making the green bars go right.  If I feel enthusiastic, I may occasionally throw in a flame shock or a fire elemental.  It’s an interesting change from tanking and I look forward to getting him ready for heroics.

photo by Zach Klein

Larísa at The Pink Pigtail Inn wrote that  The activity feed in Armory should be optional.   As Gevlon posted in her comments, really this was all available before it was just much harder to get.  Simply stalk the toon you want to know about, check their achievements at every opportunity and you can collect all this information in game.  (There’s probably an addon out there that does that.)

What bugs me is having the equivalent of a permanent record hanging over my head.  For example, when I decided to twink my rogue, I screwed up in buying the heirloom weapons. (I bought sword/dagger instead of sword/mace or at least dagger/dagger.)  Not a major mistake, but if I wanted to get into raiding with him on one of the better guilds having this type of mistake in my history could get me branded as a noob.

“…if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.” Bruce Schneier’s Answer to Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Privacy

It’s enough of a troublesome issue in real life, do we have to drag it into games as well?

This comment by Enkylanos on Azure Shadows’ We Didn’t Start the Fire post sums up the added difficulty of tanking / healing for me.

It’s *often* the case that a single mistake by a healer or tank can wipe the raid. It’s *rarely* the case that a single mistake by a DPS can wipe a raid (though the DPS may die, or his or her damage done may be poor that fight).

I know that when I play DPS in groups I make stupid mistakes but there is that margin for error.  I can over-aggro, blink into an un-aggroed mob, knock my keyboard onto the floor and most likely the group will be just fine.  My toon may be on the ground dead whilst I die of embarrassment but nine times out of ten I get rezzed and the run goes on.  If I forget to hit the right cooldown  or stand in the wrong place or let my attention wander a little, the result is often a refreshing run back from the nearest graveyard for everyone.

To make things complicated, it’s also harder to objectively measure your performance as a tank / healer.  As DPS you get a nice simple number and as long as your DPS keeps going up and you’re not pulling aggro you’re doing fine.  As a tank or healer I’m always wondering if I’m doing a good job, or if the tank/healer/DPS is carrying me.  There isn’t a nice simple number to look at – without a deep theorycrafting analysis the best you can say is “Nobody died, so I think I did okay.”

photo by 3d Dan

This is the kind of thing I enjoy: Time-to-Emblem Ratios – Cold Comfort « Cold Comfort.  I love seeing math applied to situations where it probably will never actually be used.  (Maybe I should study economics.)

Anyhow, this is a calculation of how many emblems you can expect from a typical run of a heroic dungeon versus how much time it takes to run that dungeon.  Thus, your best bet if you are collecting emblems is to chain-run Gundrak (at 2.8 minutes per emblem) and stay away from Pit of Saron (at 6 minutes per emblem).

An interesting point to note is how many of the instances have a minute per emblem number very close to 3.  This indicates that Blizzard did a good job of balancing the time to reward ratio (emblem-wise) across instances. Realistically, run any dungeon and you’ll get roughly the same emblem rewards in the same amount of time.

(via Wow.com)

“Gogogogogogogogogogogogogo”:

- If you want your tank to accidentally let you die, use gogogogo.

This actually enrages basically every tank, it’s pushing and annoying, and could easily be repaced by: “I’m ready ” or “Pull when you are ready”.

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Guide: Don’t spank the Tank !

(via Achtung Panzercow)

My death knight is 3 instances short of Northrend Dungeon Hero and I can’t bring myself to finish it off because of annoying PUGs.  I plan to resume random dungeons as soon as the bad PUG debuff wears off.

If you have a death knight, have them pop Army of the Dead in stage two of the Black Knight fight in the Trial of the Champion. Sit back and watch the armies of zombies tear each other to bits.

photo by joelf

This wasn’t even mentioned in the official patch notes but it’s really useful:

Never catch junk from pools. Fish any pool successfully with skill 1.

via El’s Extreme Anglin’ – WoW Fishing Guide.

This means that you can get the fish for most buff food with a fishing skill of 1.  Find a fish pool for the buff you need, fish away and profit!

photo by Hamed Saber

photo by takomabibelot

After tanking some runs on my death knight, I logged into my paladin.  I haven’t done anything with her for quite a while, but I used to tank heroics on her just fine.  Looking at her hitpoints now, I’d probably get laughed out of any heroic I tried to tank.

When Wrath heroics were new, if you had 540 defense you were good to go.  Now I read about tanks equipping DPS gear and dropping to a pitiful 32k health and their low hitpoints make healers nervous.  It may be theoretically possible to hit 30k health without doing any any heroics, but that seems to me an arbitrarily high barrier.

My paladin at just over 20k health was fine for tanking Wrath heroics two patches ago.  Now she is no longer considered adequate for tanking those same heroics.  Is this another case of requiring Northrend Dungeon Hero prior to running heroics?

Tank like a girl has updated her Pre-raid Shopping list: the 3.3 edition for protection warriors.  This list would work pretty well for paladins as well, and if you keep an eye out for shield specific stuff it would mostly work for death knights.  Death knights would want a two hander or two one handers as weapons as well.

I got the Northrend Dungeonmaster Achievement this weekend on my death knight.  Oddly enough, that’s the first toon I’ve gotten it on – my warrior never finished Oculus or Culling of Stratholme.

I’m looking at moving on to tanking heroics and I want to make sure that I take the instances in a reasonable order to avoid being a detriment to the group.

Here’s what I’ve found for Wrath Heroics by Difficulty:

• Utgarde Keep
• Nexus
• Drak’Tharon Keep
• Culling of Stratholme
• Azjol-Nerub
• Violet Hold
• Gundrak
• Oculus
• Utgarde Pinnacle
• Ahn’Kahet: Old Kingdom
• Halls of Stone
• Halls of Lightning
• Trial of the Champion

Oculus has apparently been nerfed to the ground, so I moved it lower on the list.

I’m not sure where the three new ones would fall, but I suspect they’re tougher than Trial of the Champion.  I’m planning to run some heroics before giving those a try on regular.

• Forge of Souls
• Pit of Saron
• Halls of Reflection

Here’s where I got the rankings: Heroic Instance Difficulty (incgamers), Difficulty for Wrath Heroics (wow_ladies), Heroic Difficulty (Tankspot), 5 man Heroic Mode Difficulty (mmo-champion).

My Teddy's Hitchhiking sign by Michael Spencer

I spent the weekend taking full advantage of the Dungeon Finder tool. It’s been a lot of fun.

Most of the time was spent running on my 30ish priest – Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Downs over and over again. It was usually pretty quick to get a group together and most of the groups were good ones. For these low-level instances the healer paradox comes in – good groups make healing boring and bad ones make it overwhelming. It feels right to be healing on a priest again. If Cataclysm takes a while to come out, I may well go level Flint through dungeons as well.

My rogue went through Scarlet Monastery Graveyard twice. It was one of those “Everyone grab your own mob and tank it!” runs. Pretty chaotic but the runs were over fairly quickly. I think I’m going to stick with questing on him.

I wanted to say that I’ve tanked on all four tanking classes, so I geared up my death knight and signed up for regular Nexus and Utgarde Keep. My thinking was that if I screwed up, it likely wouldn’t be fatal to the group. I only did two runs, but I feel that I’m getting a solid grasp of basic death knight tanking. My worst screw-up was a triple group pull in Nexus and thanks to AOEs and cooldowns, the group survived. The best death knight frost tanking guide I’ve found is Swam’s on Tankspot. The layout is a little confusing but the information is solid.

I only have one of the new instances to go on Tristam. Pit of Saron was just about the right level of challenge – tough but not overwhelming once we figured out what we were doing. I’m looking forward to Halls of Reflection. We had to PUG two DPS for Pit of Saron, but after getting rid of an obnoxious player -”I don’t know what the bosses do or where they are, but you should definitely be chain-pulling everything!” – we had a good time.

I’ve run across some incompetence, stupidity, and possible malfeasance in the PUGs I’ve done, but so far nothing serious. The worst was a paladin tank without righteous fury or consecrate. A few people politely suggested that he use them, at which point he left group. It was prime time, so getting a replacement took seconds. I may be more concerned about ninjas when I run max-level instances for gear but for now it’s just fun and I’m not stressing.

A number of people have commented that the Dungeon Finder makes WoW even more solo-friendly. This will doubtless affect the role of guilds. I’m still waiting to see how it all plays out. At this point, I’m looking for more of a solo experience so it works out fine for me. I hope that Blizzard has something up their sleeves to encourage more social interaction in WoW because this pushes the role of other players to that of supporting NPCs with random skill/gear levels.