Archimonde is History

Don’t have a lot to say today. Last night I took a little swim.

IN THE WELL OF FREAKING ETERNITY.

From the beginning of Lonetree, the character, I have sought after a moment of achievement that would complete the conceptual journey of a Druid’s life and give him a moment of absolute vindication. This was that moment, this was that achievement. Perhaps not the most difficult battle he (or the guild) has ever endured, but certainly the most meaningful for Me.

Archimonde, the World Tree is not yours. Her power does not belong to the Legion. Be gone from this world and leave the beauty of this land to Her stewards.

Incidentally, there’s just a few boulders at the bottom. But damn is that thing deep.

 

The Fruit Saga Continues

Teron Gorefiend went down last night after a few hours of ironing out the construct/ghost management, including a second round of trash clearing. It was our third time meeting him but only our second real night of any significant glass chewing time. A special thanks went out to Karlott and Rimuni whose early handling of their constructs provided the stable platform from which we were able to finally tear the last 35% of his health away.

In this screen shot, I am being an ass. One of My favorite jokes in TBC has been the running (and ever-evolving) plot between Cro Threadstrong and the mysterious Fruit Vendor. Follow the link if you enjoy a good conspiracy theory. I have several of the best quotes shouted across Shattrath macroed for easy asshattery. I like to pull them out before and after boss fights, in the tradition of the great /y macro jokes. Typically for Blood Fist this involves yelling something obscene, silly, or quoted from either a different boss fight or encounter in the game or some in-joke amongst the guild. One of the classics is:

HE LIED!

…a reference to the AQ20 Cenarion Circle NPC, Lieutenant General Andorov. This was often shouted after Andorov says the line “Remember, Rajaxx, when I said I’d kill you last? I lied…” During the BWL days, “Vael is emo” was often shouted and can probably be found in some archived screen shots of our glass chewing and kills of Vaelastrasz. We have another running joke which started in SSC by a fellow Druid who warned Me to “Watch out Lonetree” over TeamSpeak approximately 3 seconds after I died to a loose trash mob on the way to Leotheras. I thanked him for his posthumous (read: useless) alarm. The next time he died, I did a /y “WATCH OUT HONAS” and a new meme was born. This joke has since seen many variations and to be quite honest has nearly warn out its welcome.

I wish I could remember all the running jokes we’ve ever had, but some of them were fairly short-lived. Two of the longest living in-jokes however date from the Molten Core. The “Lilbilly giants” are two specific mobs so named after the tank that couldn’t help but face pull them on at least one famous occasion and possibly even more. The other in-joke is to casually ask at any random interval after a particularly bad idea is either offered or attempted if anyone is aware that “you can pull Golemagg from the bridge-” a reference to a nasty wipe caused by a hunter who shot Golemagg in the back of the head to prove a point and caused a stampede of angry mobs to stomp the raid into sticky red goo.

The Fruit Vendor saga provides Me with nearly endless entertainment and fascination. Why Cro doesn’t just move the damned thing himself is beyond My ability to comprehend but then that would ruin the nearly epic rivalry between him and a little old lady named Granny Smith. I honestly believe that the cart is not hers and does in fact belong to a mysterious and deceased fruit gatherer high above Nagrad. The two funniest quotes are, IMO:

“Does this fruit vendor not value his life? YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME FRUIT VENDOR!!”‘
and
“HA! I CRUSHED AN APPLE, FRUIT VENDOR! THIS WILL NOT BE THE LAST!!”

Such drama, such passion… I love it.

 

Of Apostrophes and Regrowths

Ah, another fine week for the Fist in first kills. Azgalor in Mount Hyjal and Naj’entus in Black Temple fell on consecutive raid nights. Naj’entus was particularly hard on the healers. We’d heard it was so, and that many guilds take 8-9 healers on their first attempts. Some of My healers are still a little green, a little undergeared, or both; last night they overcame those obstacles and pulled out a wonderful performance on our final attempt. Truthfully, the Frost Resist potions helped us a good deal, reducing our workload by a fair amount. But by the same token, a healing assignment shift was made before the last attempt and I think it made a significant difference.

Normally I am on board the flexibility train when it comes to healing assignments. I like to assign people to tasks which I think suit their talents. That is to say, individually rather than based on class. But lately I’ve been experimenting with class-based assignments which has admittedly worked out rather well in many circumstances. Traditional WoW wisdom like, Shaman are excellent raid healers, Druids are excellent tank stabilizers, Paladins are excellent single-target healers, etc. That’s all well and good, and yes I can and do shatter the Recount meters on Hyjal trash, spamming Lifebloom non-stop to great effect; thus proving that Druids performing this task are exceptionally suited. But this sort of rigid application of healing classes, I must remind Myself, is to be tempered by knowledge of your guild and its people. My healing all night in BT was nothing more than above average, output wise, but I think I mismanaged the assignments a bit, misusing strengths in favor of the “common wisdom” approach.

Once I swapped Myself off the MT and on to raid healing and began spamming rank 8 Regrowths on the raid the whole setup seemed to click better. The reason for this became obvious, in hindsight. Raid healing is more intensive on Naj’entus than MT healing, and required more of the seasoned, quick-response healers than Main Tank duty.

It hadn’t occured to Me to try it because, well, I’m not in the habit. The 2.4 patch has made this sort of tactic far, far more viable for Tree Druids than it ever was. Being high-Spirit oriented (rather than +healing, which many LB spammers are), utilizing the Idol of the Crescent Goddess I had no mana issues keeping the raid alive and ticking with dozens of little Regrowth crits. Sure, other classes might theoretically be suited better for playing whack-a-mole with Grid but again I’d forgotten My own rule: play to your strengths.

Now while all this may come off a little self-congratulatory, My point is not to declare My superiority or knock the abilities of the other healers in My crew. Rather, I think the message I would rather convey is to know your healers… know their strengths and weaknesses… know their personality, know their gear, and know yourself.  Don’t trust wholesale in the wisdom of EJ or its collection of theorists and practitioners. It’s far more impressive (and in My view, fulfilling) to know how to succeed with a non-optimal arrangement of people you like than it is to suffer the torturous process of wrangling a bunch of well-geared, fast-clicking whiners and egomaniacs.

ToL Druids: 3
Holy Priests: 1
Resto Shaman: 2
Holy Paladins: 2

Naj’entus: 0

On an unrelated note, what is with all the apostrophe bosses? Buy a vowel, Blizzard. Yeesh.

 

I Caught the Bug

…the fishing bug. Again. Yesterday the Fishing Daily quest yielded a Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat. Since the patch I have been doing the Fishing Quest almost every day, and My efforts of late have also yielded a Magical Crawdad Box. I feel utterly compelled to attempt the Fishing Tournament once again for the ultimate fishing pole. I gave up on the idea long ago, both due to a couple of frustrated attempts in the past and the difficulty of finding time on a Sunday morning (I’m on PST, -3 hours off server time) to even attend. eBay taunts Me with its Gone Fishin’ Cards. Must… resist…

Yesterday was also a big day for UI improvements. Prompted by an update to (and My subsequent discovery of) the Fundamental UI, I also caught “Extensive Retooling of User Defined InTErface” syndrome, or ERUDITE for short. A debilitating condition, ERUDITE causes sufferers to spend hours staring at their AddOns as they reconfigure and reposition every on-screen element to a new matrix. To be fair, most of the AddOns contained in Fundamental UI were already in My AddOns folder, with the exceptions of Skinner and OneBag, both of which I am now utilizing. I displayed the artwork into WoW through eePanels2 (rather than Discord) and added My own signature to the action pane, but credit to the author for all the original pieces.

Since I wasn’t installing a full UI, instead appropriating its artwork for My own use, I spent several hours last night recreating the basic setup. This involved recoloring and tweaking Pitbull, re-doing Bartender, setting up chat panes to fit, creating a dozen little FuBars, aligning everything, not to mention the time spent in GIMP altering artwork. I spent a long time in game just staring into space. I decided to make Myself available as an alternate for a Karazhan run, though I was never needed to jump in. Later, I was asked to substitute for another of My Tree druids in a heroic Magister’s Terrace, so the minor tweaks continued there. Ultimately I’m pretty happy with the setup. I used to need action bars in the middle of My screen, since I used them to heal along with a few keybindings. These days I have fully converted to an almost complete keybinding/macro setup for healing using My Nostromo n52. I still use action bars for damage spells, CC, and some other spells, but overall I can safely phase out the prominent action bar scheme and move into a cleaner UI.

 

New Theme

I haven’t done web site design in years, and I’m way behind on design and technology. For now Blood For Life will use WordPress blog themes. I think this one looks a lot nicer than the gray, and it’s a lot easier to read. I guess I didn’t anticipate the blog’s appearance once a fair amount of posts were added.

I’m going to try to get better about categorizing and labeling posts, and adding improvements. Perhaps the writing will be interesting enough without a lot of bells and whistles.