Mend Pet

Wednesday night, Razorblade Arcade took advantage of the raid lockout extension feature to finally push through Singdragosa. With new Frost Resistance gear for our tanks and an improved block placement strategy, we were able to get her down on just the second attempt… and that left us with just the Lich King.

That’s when I realized – this is the last boss! We’re about to BEAT THE GAME. This is really significant to me, as I have a nasty habit of not finishing games of any type. Whether it’s because I don’t want it to end or because something new takes my inerest, I just never seem to reach the “final boss”.

World of Warcraft has been no different. In Vanilla, I was no where near the end of the game (mind you, not many were.) In Burning Crusade, I wasn’t even ready to set foot in the final raid dungeon. But Wrath has opened a lot of doors for a lot of people, and I am glad of that. There’s a feeling of conclusion to a story this time around, and I am a bit humbled by it.

I’m both excited to finally kill the last boss, and also scared to be finished. I know there will still be plenty of things for me to do, alts and hard modes waiting to be taken on, but this really is the end of the core story until the next expansion.

This demonstrates the strengths of this expansion. Yes, I’ve had issues with how raids have been released, and the 10 vs 25 setup has had it’s faults, but I think Blizzard has accomplished what they set out to do: All players, no matter how much or little they play the game, have the ability to follow a whole story through questing, dungeons and all the way to the final encounter.

I really hope they’re able to build a similar feeling with Cataclysm, even though they can’t have quite as interesting a villain to focus on as Arthas.

Last  night I raided from someone else’s computer.  His computer is way better than mine, and I think you could fit my monitor into his at least twice.  So visually, it was pretty sweet.

However, he’s got some issues with his sound card.  Everything has this annoying echo.  So while I tried to play normally for a bit, I eventually gave in and turned my game sounds off – I even turned vent down and could barely make out a word from it.

I am not used to playing without game sounds – and it really does change the game for me.  For example, I have become accustomed to hitting Feign Death whenever I hear Omen’s “WATCH YOUR THREAT!” sound.  Sure, I still had the flashing red on my screen, but it just wasn’t enough.

Even the sound of my arrows going off helps me know that things are going right.  If I don’t hear my arrows shooting, I know I need to pay more attention – am I web wrapped or stunned?  Am I facing the wrong way?

It’s amazing how I’ve adapted my play style to use my various senses.  I found myself getting a bit overwhelmed by how much I needed to watch the screen, when usually I leave some things to be taken care of by my ears.

Next challenge: Play with my monitor turned off and use only audio signals. 

When was the last time you queued for a battleground?  The other day I decided to try Isle of Conquest, and I hopped in the queue.  And that’s when I realized how spoiled the new Dungeon Finder has made us: it’s “Estimated wait times” are actually pretty accurate with that system.  But for BGs, the queue timer has been useless since the day it came out.

Here’s where I think it fails.

See that Last 10 players note?  What does that even mean? It’s a ambiguous.  For a BG like Isle of Conquest, which requires 40 people per side… how does the average over the last 10 players help me?  It doesn’t.  This number means nothing.  All it does it give people a false sense that they might get into the battleground in that time, while in truth only about the last five people to queue had wait times below that time.  The other 35 had to wait much longer.

They seem to have managed to get the estimation working for Dungeon Finder, why they haven’t just ported that system over to the BG queue is beyond my ken.  In fact, it might be simpler because there are no roles defined or needed, just numbers.

They should either improve this estimation or remove it entirely.

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

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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!

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