Mend Pet

This week’s word is brought to you by Lady Deathwhisper and Christie Golden’s Arthas: Rise of the Lich King.

ken

\ken\, noun:

Knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception.

Example: “Through our master all things are possible! His power is without limit, and his will unbending! Those who oppose him will be destroyed utterly! And those who serve, who serve wholly, unquestioningly, with utter devotion of mind and soul? Elevated! To heights beyond your ken!” ~ Lady Deathwhisper

---

WoW Word of the Week is my weekly Sunday post to encourage the expansion of the average WoW player’s vocabulary beyond “noob”, “pwnd” and “FAIL”. I’m going to try to use the WWotW in my other posts this week, and I urge you to use it as well!

I must say, this week was a bit of a roller coaster for the Razorblade Arcade raid team!  Sunday night, we ventured in to Icecrown Citadel to finish clearing up the bosses we could.  The plan was to make our way to Putricide, taking out Rotface on the way.  Well, one of our raiders had forgotten about the raid… so we had to bring in some PUG DPS.  This is the kind of PUG that I get mixed feelings about.  He seemed to follow instructions fine, no blowing up the raid or anything… but simply was not pulling the numbers we were looking for.  I felt bad for him.  But we realized after an attempt at Putricide that he was doing half the DPS of the person he was temporarily filling in for, so it wasn’t a good idea to waste our valuable attempts.

Instead, we headed to Blood Princes and took them out pretty quickly.  I took up my post on Disco Ball duty (which is not nearly as fun as it sounds). I was pretty pleased – we managed to take out both Rotface and Blood Princes in a couple hours, when before they took entire nights of attempts to get down.  Progress!

Monday night we all hunkered down to push through and finally beat Putricide into the ground.  Confidence was high and things were looking good – but alas, just two attempts in our Resto Shaman lost his connection, and we know from experience that meant he probably wouldn’t be back for the rest of the raid.  It sucked, but we took advantage of it and did a Sarth 3d to get someone a mount, and 6-minute Maly to get some Glory of the Raider achievements.  Unfortunately, the night was also spattered with some drama within the Officer class… but I won’t get in to that here.

Wednesday, on the other hand, was a beautiful raid night.  7 bosses in less than 3 hours!  Putricide took us just 4 attempts (including one where our Abomination tank disconnected at the start).  I really don’t know what we were doing much differently from our previous attempts (in which we could barely get him below 70%) but we really hit the nail on the head this time!

Sunday night we head in to hopefully take down the Blood Queen with our remaining 16 attempts and maybe even get a peek into the new wing!

---

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to expatiate about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

It’s been a few months since the latest overhaul of misdirect (v1 being the 2 min cooldown 3-charge style, v2 with 30 sec cd and 3-charge).  I was unsure how I’d feel about this new Tricks of the Trade version, and I’m still not completely used to it. On the surface, it almost feels just like the old MD, but there are a few small but noticeable things that I miss.  Allow me expatiate on them:

No cooldown. Ever since the cooldown went from 2 min to 30 seconds, I have become used to being able to pop MD while waiting for the tank to pull, and if it expired before he pulled I could just pop another right back up. Not anymore! While it seems like there’s still just a 30 second cooldown on MD, the 30 seconds doesn’t begin counting until your MD has expired (either through using it or through it falling off). This means if the tank takes 31 seconds to get ready to pull, I have to wait half a minute before I can put MD back up.

Selective MDing. This is a pretty specific case, but it still happens. An example is when we were working on Blood Princes. I was happy to help the shadow tank by MDing the purple balloons to him, but that would have been a lot easier with the old misdirect. Since it was 3 shots, I could take my time and target 3 different things with each shot and send them over to their target. But now I’ve only got 4 seconds, which really only lets me grab 1, maybe 2 if they’re close together.  Also used to do this when farming Gorillas with my Gorilla.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of benefits to make up for it – the most important being:

Volley! Need I say more?

Multiple MDs from multiple hunters. Boostah and I used to have a nasty habit of casting MD at the same time back in my 25-man days, which you might remember caused them to actually cancel each other out sometimes.  It was almost not noticeable (until one of the hunters gets aggro off the bat, of course).

What do you think?

When Blizzard added Achievements in patch 3.0, they also added a less noticed feature called “Statistics”.  It’s that fun little page that tells you how many times you’ve killed Hogger, and how many times you’ve died to falling damage (5 for me…)  Of course, it only records your statistics starting from patch 3.0, so all the stuff you did before then doesn’t matter, unfortunately.

Well, the other day while I was waiting in the Random Heroic queue, I decided to have a closer look at my statistics, and I found a few interesting things.

First, under the “Player vs. Player > World” tab:

No world honorable kills?  Hm, that’s odd.

But on the “Kills > Honorable Kills” tab:

Well, that’s a bit better.  I guess all but 6 of my kills are in Wintergrasp?  Because I clearly didn’t get 773 kills from Northrend any other way on a PvE server…

Alright, moving on… if you know anything about me, you know that I don’t do Arenas.  I’ve set my foot in their once, right after they were released in BC, and that was it.  But since it was so long ago, it shouldn’t be on my statistics page.

From the “Player vs Player > Rated Arenas” tab:

Woo!  They got one right this time!

From the “Kills > Honorable Kills” again:

Well, 1 out of 4 isn’t bad…. (did I mention the 1 time I did arenas, it was 5v5?)

Now, from under “Deaths > Arenas”:

I bet I’d have a pretty good arena rating if I’d really killed 25 but only died 3 times!

Now, time for a quick math lesson:

779 + 294 + 957 = 1792, right?  WRONG!  It equals 2030.  That means my “Total Honorable Kills” is off by 238.  It would have made more sense if it was 294, meaning the weren’t counting my imaginary arenas, but no:  238.

One last thing… I can’t really say whether this is true or not.  But either way, it makes me sad that almost 30% of my player deaths have been caused by MY OWN FACTION:

Allow me expatiate upon my ordeal this week.

Shortly before Monday’s raid, I realized I had only 1 Flask of Endless Rage.  Usually I get someone to craft some for me, but with the price of Frost Lotus at the time, it was cheaper to just pick up 2 on the Auction House for about 38 gold each.  So I hopped onto my bank alt, picked up some Flasks.

I logged into Brajana and proceeded to head out to Icecrown to fit in a few dailies before raid time, and then headed to the Citadel.  Monday was our night of Professor attempts, so I was pretty excited.

We mowed down the trash quickly, and found ourselves buffing at the Professor’s front door.  I looked at my hotbar, where I recently removed a few unused macros and placed some other more often used things (like my Flasks).  But what’s this?

Hmm, odd.

Now, if I had left them on my bank alt, Bagnon would have a little line saying something like “Tazdingo (Bags: 2)”.  But as far as Bagnon knew,  I didn’t have any Flasks anywhere, no alts, no banks.

Oh, I though to myself, I must have forgotten to get them out of the mail.

But there was no little “New Mail” icon on my map.

Oh, I must have opened the mail but not taken the flasks OUT of the mail.  Silly me!

So I apologized and quickly hearthed to Dalaran to get them… but my mailbox was completely empty.  What the heck?!

I must have left them in my bank alt’s mailbox!  What a dummy!

So I apologized again, and quickly logged over to Tazdingo to find… an empty mailbox.  Well, it’s clear I did buy them from looking at my gold reserves. Maybe I typed the name wrong when I sent them?  Maybe they’ve gotten lost in the mail system?  I opened a GM ticket and borrowed a Flask from another raider and went on with the raid night, confused and frustrated.

Wednesday comes around and we’re raiding again.  I’d received a response from the GM telling me they couldn’t find my missing mail.  After giving up and hoping “Brajan” or whoever I must have accidentally sent the mail to is enjoying their free flasks, I picked up FIVE new flasks and made sure I got them, had them in my bags and was ready to go at raid time.  We did a quick Sarth 3D zerg (it was the weekly) and started heading to Icecrown.

That’s when I happened to notice I’ve got the Flask of Endless Rage (52 minutes remaining) buff.  Confused (as I didn’t bother to Flask for Sarth), I look at my hotbar again.

…

BUT THERE WERE FIVE OF THEM!!!

And then it begins to click.

Although there clearly is no indicator of it, maybe that hotbar location is bound to something.  So I put something else in that spot (a Red Rose) so that I would KNOW if I somehow hit that button (when it tells me “I can’t equip that with a 2H weapon!”).

Low and behold, we rushed into battle, I sent my pet in and… “I can’t equip that with a 2H weapon!”

Turns out that was the old location of my Hunter’s Mark + petattack macro.  However, since that keybinding was set before I installed Bartender, it had no label on it.

Every time I tried to send my pet in to attack something for the last 2 raid nights, I burned a Flask.

/facepalm

I might also add that I took that macro off of my bar because in last week’s raid, I confused it for my just Hunter’s Mark button and sent my pet in to pull Rotface all by himself while we were buffing.

That macro is cursed!