Zul’Aman

New Poll: What’s Your Main?

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The old poll is closed. Ventrilo, by far, is the most dominant 3rd party voice client in use today.

With that being said, there is now a new poll up! I’m a little curious as to what class you consider your ‘main’ character.

Which class do you consider your main?

  • Priest (28%, 92 Votes)
  • Druid (15%, 48 Votes)
  • Hunter (10%, 33 Votes)
  • Paladin (9%, 30 Votes)
  • Shaman (8%, 25 Votes)
  • Warrior (8%, 25 Votes)
  • Warlock (7%, 24 Votes)
  • Mage (7%, 23 Votes)
  • Rogue (7%, 23 Votes)

Total Voters: 323

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Several days ago, Exanimo (or the Full time WoW Addict) posed a question: What makes your main “your main”? No doubt there are now several of you with more than one level 70. I myself have 3! Even though nowadays I devote more time to playing my Shaman and my Paladin, I still consider my Priest my main character.

Why?

Here’s what I think.

I consider your main character as the toon that you use to help your Guild progress through whatever it is that they do. Your Guild could be a PvP Guild or a PvE one. But the character you choose to play with when they’re going through content is what I think is the main. Of course, you could always base your main on time played (/played). But then you just might ditch a character that you have invested a lot of time into for an alt which is better suited for the Guild that you’re in.

For example, one of the Priests in my Guild converted to a Resto Shaman because we had 4 Priests at the time. We had no Resto Shamans. It only made sense that he switch to Resto to take advantage of gear drops and further help progress the Guild gearwise instead of having our Priests dogfight over gear.

What if you’re not in a Guild? The answer’s still the same. It’s the toon that you want to progress the most with.

In any case, the reason I ask is for a little demographic reasons. I’m interested in knowing what kind of classes read my blog. Maybe I can tailor some of my content accordingly. *shrug*

Minimum Zul’Aman requirements will be coming up later on tonight or tomorrow morning. Definitely will be a work in progress and it’s based off of my observations.

Addition:

Phaelia mentioned that some players might have a PvE main and a PvP main. She suggests going with the one that’s your primary focus. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

WoW Struggles: The Undergeared

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Picture this.

You’re sitting in Ironforge with a half filled raid that’s pumped to do Zul’Aman after pulling consecutive 3 hour clears of Karazhan.

You spam your Guild looking for that extra DPS or extra healer.

“I’ll come!”

It’s that new Paladin your Guild recruited. His status says ‘Trial Member’ in the Guild window.

You fill out the rest of the raid with power DPS and dependable tanks and then you’re on your way to Zul’Aman. You clear up to the Bear boss no problem because your Pally tank is so damn awesome that mages beg YOU to come because their sheeps aren’t needed. You, the Priest, start nodding off because the trash pulls were so lax and simple. The bear boss looms before you. A quick glance upward at the clock shows 8 minutes left before hostages are executed. Raid mana and raid health are both at 100% and you give the ready signal. Your raid’s been brought up to speed on what needs to be accomplished.
“Tanks, on your go!”

The tanks rush in and engage. There is not a single problem on the initial transitions. You and the other healers are doing an excellent job.

Until you look at your healing meters and see this:

Recount Healing Done

You blink wondering why the Paladin’s heals are low. Then you inspect him. Your jaws drop. He’s got barely +1300 healing.

Congratulations! You just invited an undergeared Paladin to a place where he has absolutely NO business being in!

And he’s a new trial member in your Guild!

I vow to never take an undergeared person into ZA ever again. My standards? Having at most 1 blue. You must need nothing else out of Karazhan if you want to go on a ZA run. I’m sick and tired of players who think that just because they ran Karazhan on their alt, they’re able to do ZA on their alt. It’s two different levels of play! I can’t believe how many “oh &#$%” spells and cooldowns I had to blow just to keep the MT alive ON TRASH.

When I was in the LFG channels and in Ironforge looking for players to fill out raids, my Pally tank said he got tells from people who wanted to come. A quick inspection showed that their equipment wasn’t quite up to snuff. He explained that to them. You know the answer he got?

We’re in this AWESOME Guild that’s doing Hyjal and BT. We’re so good we want to bring our alts in. No, you’re not! I don’t care if you’re a Death & Taxes Paladin alt with 1200+ healing! Your guild tag does not determine your suckiness. Skill can only carry you so far. It was a miracle we even got to and downed the Lynx boss.

People decked in dungeons blues and a sprinkling of epics have no purpose in Zul’Aman!

I’m going to do some quick research and survey my friends, guildmates, and even some of my blogging colleagues on their opinion.

You know your class. What would you deem are the minimum requirements go even go into Zul’Aman? If you’re a healer, I want to know what you think your health, mana pool, mana regen, and healing should be at. For tanks and DPS, I’m asking you for the relevant stats that are needed. Take a look at my Karazhan minimum requirements for an idea.

Matt’s Three Stars: Week Ending November 16

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Akil’zon’s Gauntlet, EZ Mode: First star honors, GMW. First star. You are officially my hero(ine). This one gauntlet section alone took 40 gold off me. So what is her awesome tip that vaulted her past everyone else into first place? You’ll just have to click the link and find out yourself. It’s one of those forehead smacking “Oh duh” kind of things.

The Pointless Debate Around Warden: Gwaendar has an excellent post displaying arguments about the futility of complaining over ‘lack of privacy’ issues in WoW. I agree with you wholeheartedly, sir! Blizzard is a gaming company. They don’t need to break into your computer to blackmail you with your porn stash. It’s unnecessary for them to look up your credit card billing statement (because most of it is involved with WoW in some way or other). If players don’t like programs that add cheat detection to their games, they can simply go play something else. I hear CS 1.6 still has rampant cheaters around. People think they’re so important in this game. They think that the world centers around them and that everyone cares what they have on their computer. They don’t want to be embarrassed or humiliated. Blizz has WAY more important things to do then to snoop through people’s computers. Unless you do something SUPER stupid (like form a plan to blow up Sears tower), there isn’t much that would justify them having to call the FBI. I’m pretty sure you’ll find a clause in the TOS that says they’ll cooperate with authorities if they have to, but it’s like that with any social networking website or service (Facebook especially). They don’t do it because they want to. They do it so they can cover their respective legal ass. You get the number two star in my book, buddy!

What Karazhan Taught Us: Here’s a rather humorous list brought to us by Rohan. These are the important lessons that’ve been taught to us by the various bosses in Karazhan. I think I’ll even expand on it:

  • Attumen taught us gear is important
  • Moroes taught us to have a plan B
  • Maiden taught us perseverance (three weeks on this boss before the nerf, I spent learning)
  • Opera taught us how to learn things on the fly
  • Curator taught us Curse of Doom (an inside joke with a certain warlock who did not realize they had curse of doom)
  • Nightbane taught us synchronized moving
  • Shade of Aran taught us awareness of our surroundings
  • Chess was recess in the school of Karazhan
  • Netherspite taught us the value of strategic withdrawal to strike another day
  • Prince taught us tactical positioning

Third star honors go to you, Rohan! =)

A Tuesday Story and Trash Blows

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I stumbled upon this touching story today. Everyone needs to go read it. Sometimes we all need a reminder to slow down just a little bit even in WoW.

Fate wrote a nice piece the other day about the hassles of trash mobs. One of his Guildies complained about them and Fate took it upon his hands to write about why trash is good and not bad. His main argument? Trash helps to build up the suspense and the pleasure when the boss in charge of them gets taken down. Otherwise, you’d be blowing through Karazhan, SSC, and TK within time frames of an hour.

Personally, I’d love to see more instances akin to Mag and Gruul (Ony style). We’re on a limited raiding schedule. Every wipe, every trash kill, every rebuff eats into the precious time we have. Our 25 mans are capped at exactly 11 hours of raiding per week. Let me first say that I’m proud of the Guild that I’m in and the discipline that they show during crunch time. We may fool around and crack jokes, but when we get down to business we do whatever it takes to get the job done. The clutch Al’ar kill is a testament to that (5 hours of sunday wiping, one more respawn kill, followed by an Al’ar first down). Sometimes, I just wish we had more time to do it.

Trash is nice to have sometimes. I do agree with Fate that it’s something to do in between bosses. Players need to have a little bit of a downtime. It’s not possible to ask 25 players to maintain a 110% focus and concentration. They would burn out too quickly. I know I can’t remain that tense for such a period of time.

But on the other hand, I don’t want to spend time to reclear trash repeatedly. Nothing kills momentum faster then getting a boss down to 10% and knowing you’re able to kill him only to get stopped by the Wall of Trash (0/*, Creature – Wall, Tap: Piss off target raid).

Ah M:TG. Sometimes I miss playing. But it’s either that or WoW.

Anyways, the trash respawns, you look at the time and you realize that your raid is over as people have to work or go to school on the east coast. Trash respawns just kills that level of energy and anticipation. With all the trash removed in SSC, we’d be able to one shot all the bosses and have time left over to do other things (Like Cartman says, now we can all enjoy the game)!

Fate’s point is excellent though. We DO need that trash. Where else are we going to get our Primal Nethers from? Or random BoE/BoP recipes?

Here’s a thought.

We’ve all sniggered at one point when our raid leader forgot to downgrade a raid instance from Heroic to Normal difficulty.

What if Blizzard implemented it and made Heroic raids? Give Raiders a choice in how they want to go through SSC. They can do it normally, or they can do it the Heroic way. Reduce trash by 80% but increase boss difficulty by 20%. Keep loot tables roughly the same and throw in some badges. Maybe the health of Hydross will increase a little bit so the raid needs to ice and poison dance for an extra minute. Think of it as an express raid. I’m not going to try and develop that concept any further. It would probably get defeated in a manner of minutes. But at least it’s something to think about. I sure as hell am not a game developer.

Sadly, I don’t get to go into Zul’Aman today. Our 25 schedules stay the same throughout. With the reset timer nearly twice as fast as Karazhan, it means we can do it any time we want. I’ll probably run through it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, snoozing through trash is the order of the day.