Not that there’s a great deal of people who read this, but just wanted to let you know that there have been some Real Life things happen over the past few months that are going to mean no freedom for Shasmo’s RL avatar at all. Thanks for reading, and maybe one day I will be back. I’ll leave things up in case people want a laugh/titter/vomit.

This is not a new idea by any means, but I put it into practice over the weekend and OMG! Whilst incredibly boring, I now can get a decent head-start on a new server with a new character. Money-wise.

How? It’s all thanks to Death Knights.

The trick is to make a bank alt and send it somewhere that there’s a mailbox. Anywhere will do, I made a troll alt and ran it out the back of the Valley of Trials and went to Booty Bay, but I could have stayed in Ratchet to do this.

Next step is to make a Death Knight. Go through all the questline up until meeting your faction leader and gaining the forgiveness of your faction. By this time you should have between 25-30 Gold. Sell your armour, everything you have, and mail it to this alt. Log out, delete the Death Knight, and either go onto your bank alt and collect the money, or go straight into making another Death Knight to do it all over again.

Now, when I said it’s boring, I meant UTTERLY BORING. I did the same quest lines about fifty times over the weekend, and the only thing I have to show for it is a bank alt on a new server who has a little over 1200 Gold to her name.

Now, you may argue that for a level 80, getting 1200G over a weekend is easy-peasy-lemon-squeasie, but I’m thinking about starting on a new server, and having a low level character who I want to gear up. One weekend’s worth of work and I could afford to make a twink without any higher-level character on that server. Not that I would make a twink, because I don’t like meeting up with them in PvP, but the option is there. Being able to level engineering and enchanting on the one character as they level will put a serious drain on these funds, but it’s doable.

If you are thinking about trying this, I have a tip for you: make your throwaway Death Knights have the same name. That way, you can get your addons set up how you like them the first time, and when you delete the Death Knight and make him/her again with the same name, the addons will already be configured. Makes things slightly quicker if you, like me, dislike the default UI over your custom one.

Oh yes. It happened. To Me.

A friend of mine has started a warlock in alternate universe where he is a Horde Warlock, a Blood Elf to be exact (yay for choosing an elf!). This universe is one where Horde and Alliance can fight nearly all the time, without having the restrictions that we do in this universe.

I wanted to play with my friend, so I began a Tauren Death Knight over there. Tauren because I totally love them, and a Death Knight because they are cool and I can help protect my friend until he is big enough to take care of himself.

I decided to try and make some money (thanks to the Greedy Goblin!) and so I made a little troll shaman, and ran him over the ‘Hidden path’, through the coastline to Ratchet, where he stood waiting for a boat to Booty Bay. He hopped on and went for a sail.

I have since found out that my troll shaman does not like the open seas, like me. *shudder*

He made it to Booty Bay in one piece, though, and ran to the Auction guy, who stands on some crates near the bank. Amidst the auctioneer’s shouts, he did a scan of the current auctions, and saw that yes, there looks to be not that many prarie dogs for sale to the Alliance. While he was standing there contemplating this, a draenie came up to him, with a red tag over his head. He /point-ed, /laugh-ed then poked my troll shaman in the face with his dagger, which caused my trolls head to blow up. The goblins took offense at this, but the draenie was able to escape their wrath, and he was waiting there when my troll got back inside his body.

Six. Times.

At least I got the scan out of the way

Welcome to PvP!

Ever since BC Raiding, there has been a website that people refer to constantly. Questions like ‘Am I ready for Kara’ or ‘What enchant should I get?’ have been met with the same response (and depending on how many times the person has asked the same question, with the same expletives). That site?

be.imba.hu

I’m sure you’ve heard of it, somewhere, from someone. This is the site that (when it isn’t banned from the Armory) trawls through your Armory page, casting it’s ever-judgmental eye over your talent spec and gear. This is the site that will display to you exactly what it doesn’t like about your character, although it does give some options on how to get into it’s good graces.

I have never, on any of my characters, been able to satisfy it.

Until now: http://be.imba.hu/?zone=US&realm=Saurfang&character=Shasmo

A little bit of enchant gloves here, and a little big of Wisdom-to-Cloak-style action there and presto! It likes me!

I feel … justified now. If someone asks me if I can heal something, I can now say ‘of course! wait … where?’

Of course, I have had no problems healing anything lately (although I always seem to die on the snake boss in Heroic Gundrak), and I have been pretty confident in healing OS with the guild, but now one of the popular stat-sites is there, getting my back.

And I also feel broke, lol. The mats for Wisdom alone took the money I had in my bags, and now I have only the gold on my bank alt to get me by. *sigh*

Note: the following is a rant that will most likely not make sense to anyone reading this. You will not miss much if you stop here.

On the subject of ‘the guild’ …

The guild I am in currently, FrostFire, is billed in the recruitment macro’s as: a levelling/social guild who raids. 65+ only. This is all well and good, they are great to talk to in /gchat, and the majority of people in the guild are in Northrend, levelling up. Us 80’s to tend to help when asked, and we also have a fair few guild-only Heroic runs.

But they want to get into raiding. And herein lies the problem.

I like raiding. I can’t think of a better WoW-time for an evening of banging our heads against a boss’s flanks in frustration as an encounter is learned. I willingly go wipe after wipe after wipe for weeks on end, it seems, just for the satisfaction of seeing that boss fall to the floor, all sparkly and shiny with our rewards for a job well done.

I raided in BC on a pure-DPS character, and Shasmo was able, before the pre-patch nerf, to tank Karazhan with her awesome guild on Dath’Remar, and post-nerf she was an OffTank in Mount Hyjal. I understand the pressures that come with raiding, with having 9/24 other people relying on you to do your job, just as they know that the others are relying on them to do theirs. I know how frustrating it can get when everyone does things as they should, only to have one little tiny mistake cause the boss to insta-gib everyone.

Raiding, itself, is stressful. Unless you are on farm content that you can do whilst half asleep and on the train, it’s stressful. You want to try and go into the actual raiding itself with a minimum of stress, so that you don’t reach your ‘peak’ too early and flip your lid.

What has this got to do with my guild? Well, there has been forum thread after forum thread about our expletive deleted loot system. People are up in arms about it, polls have been run and re-run and re-re-run over what system we should be using. And it’s spilling over into /gchat, where people are arguing and arguing over the difference between Suicide Kings and DKP.

It’s gotten so bad that people are refusing to raid with other guildies who support a different system. This issue has held up raids, and it’s causing stress levels to rise before people even go through the portal.

I believe that, for a guild who is beginning to raid, and has roughly the same team each week, that a simple Master Looter Need/Greed system is easiest. The Raid Leader assigns one trusted person to be ML, and when a shiny purp drops, then people who need it do a /roll. Highest roll wins. If no-one needs, then offspecs can roll, or people who can wear a higher armour class (ie Druids on cloth, Hunter/Shaman on leather, etc). Tier gear: just a /need roll if it’s for your class.

This is how we did it back on Dath, and it was amazing. It took the stressing out over how many points you had to bid, or where you were on the ladder over someone else. You showed up, you did the job, then you got to roll. if you lost, no biggie, do a /grats to the winner and hope it drops next week. With it being the same people each week, this worked wonders.

I can understand that SK/DKP is a better system for bigger raids, or where you have 18 people to pick a group of 10 for a raid, but we are not at that stage just yet. They have cleared only Spider Wing once, and as a result of that, declared it ‘on farm’ (I am not joking).

I don’t want to come across as having a holier-than-thou attitude, but these guys are going about things the wrong way for how I like. It’s gotten to the point that I have cancelled my forum account and refuse to sign up to raids with them. They seem to be total noobs at raiding, and I don’t want to get caught up in it. I don’t want to be stressing about it in Real Life, and I don’t want to take it out on my family when I get upset.

So, I believe that I will be looking for another guild soon. I like the social part of this guild, but when the raid crap gets bitched about in /gchat and makes everyone feel like crap (some people have been calling out the other 80’s for ‘not raiding and being morons and pikers’ (their actual words)), then it becomes a not-nice place to be.

If you don’t already read the thoughts and wackiness from le Temerity Jane, I suggest you go there now. Read this. Prepare to laugh, because I did, and now I’m in trouble for looking at blogs while at work.

Well worth it, imo.

Shasmo’s RL Avatar: So I keep promising and promising to provide screenshots, and never do. Here are a few I grabbed before I raced to work this morning (spent alot of time figuring out the new KDE window manager). Hope you enjoy.

We are nearly a forest!

My first 25-man in Wrath!

Sarth down, and some Recount e-peeing. This is where I got my Figurine, too.

Everyone’s favourite grumpy old bear, BBB, has put out a call to everyone who might not have seen his posts for awhile. Apparently, his RSS feed application hasn’t been working, and he’s wanting people who miss him terribly to update their feed settings, so he can entertain us all.

On a scale of 1 to 10 on a graph of awesomeness, BBB tends to rate over 9000! (sorry for the official wow forum spillover there)

Despite not having downed a boss personally in Naxxramas so far, I can boast a 2-0 with Sartharion in the Obsidion Sanctum. Yay!

I keep getting to the Naxx raids late (this week we had a hospital emergency) and my spot gets filled, which is no matter. I generally hang out in Wintergrasp in case they need me. I got pulled into a 25-man VoA run, but the tanks ragequit after a wipe. Like, ONE WIPE. In a PUG. *sigh*

We went into OS and wiped twice on the first drake. What was happening was:

• I would stay out of the portal and heal the Main Tank.
• Other healer would head inside the portal and heal the OT/raid
• Other other healer would stay out of the portal and try to heal the raid, despite frequent instructions to ‘click on the effin portal!’

We switched to me healing the OT/raid and the Other healer healing the MT and this worked better. We kept this way up for the rest of the raid, and I’m pleased to say that no other deaths were recorded at all during our time in there. Not even to the lava thingy.

I did a /love on the big dragon body when I won the roll on …  Majestic Dragon Figurine which is one of the top three trinkets for raiding Resto Druids, I believe. YAY!

Doing a H VH run on Sunday (after winning Wintergrasp yet again (currently about 23K Honor with only 386 HKS *sigh*)) I didn’t get any loot, but I did get the last Emblem of Honor which meant I was able to go and buy … The Egg of Mortal Essence. This sounds like it came out of Sunken Temple, but it’s pretty cool. 505 haste rating, coupled with my piddly little 43, helps out alot.

Now all I have to do is run Heroic Nexus over and over again for that blasted helm …

Happy (belated) Australia Day from my RL Avatar! (he was a little too inebriated to post yesterday)

I am now, officially, broke again.

The past week or two, I’ve been trying to play the market in Glyphs and Herbs and basic AH bargain hunting. My RL Avatar is no good at it in his Realm, but I haven’t been doing too bad. In the first week I started with 1100G and ended up (just before the patch) with just under 3000G.

Then the patch hit.

Suddenly, my Nobles cards, which were going out the door at 900-1000G each, were getting undercut to about 400-500G each. Silly Jessica lady-who-sells-Inks-for-pratically-nothing. I’ve decided to just keep making them when I can, and post up the completed Decks on the Auction House, since they seem to be holding their value.

With some of my gains, I purchased an 8-piece PVP crafted caster set, for 600G all up, his mats (a bargain, I believe). It’s funny, but since getting these, I haven’t been in a Battleground (lol). This week, though, I’ll put it to the test. I lose alot of Spellpower, but get a fair bit of resilience, so I will be trying out the PVP spec (0/37/34) that’s been floating around the Druid forums with this gear, and see how I go.

I also was able to purchase a [Titansteel Guardian], which looks SO COOL! I put a +50 spellpower enchant on it, because a) the +63 was too expensive (1100G vs 150G) and b) the +spirit one no-one admitted to having available for me to buy. It’s freaking sweet, and I had just the book to pair with it …

[Faces of Doom] I have been keeping an eye on this on the AH, and haven’t seen anything significant to say ’sell it!’. One guy has had one up for 2 weeks now, starting at 1100G and now he’s got it at 999G buyout. I’ve tried flogging it on /trade for 950G, but have had no takers, so when I was able to pick up the Guardian for a total cost to me of 800G, I thought ’stuff it, I’ll use it’.

I have made a bank alt just for my glyphs, and with an initial investment of 10G, she has so far made 700G just by selling off glyphs that Auctioneer hasn’t seen up there in great quantities. Some of them are only going for 70 Silver, but there are some that have sold quickly for 50G, and when I go to search for them, there are none, so BAM! she posts 3 at a time, for 5G higher than last time. Sometimes I get beaten at my own game, and people post just after me with a 5-10G undercut, but it works often enough to make it worthwhile.

The herb market is flooded at the moment, so I’m stockpiling my herbs and using just enough to be able to craft Cards and glyphs as needed. I have a large stockpile of Ink of the Sea’s from before the patch, so one of my bankers is stashing all my Icethorn and Lichbloom for when I get low. Frost Lotus’ are the only thing that I’m able to sell, and because I have so many (started out selling with 140 of them), I can undercut by a substantial amount and put them up in stacks of 5 (generally around the 35G mark). While yes, I could be making more off them, if I put my prices up to the 50G or so that everyone else has, they won’t sell as reliably. Sure, some people might be buying them to sell at 50G, and making a 15G profit or thereabouts, but to me, having a guaranteed 35G in my pocket, versus an iffy 50G, wins out everytime. Maybe the herb market will change, who knows. I just /kiss my Auctioneer mod and keep an eye on things.

Last night, the noobs in the guild wanted to run Gruuls and Mags, for some silly reason. I didn’t want to go, because it seems that with the legacy raids, people try deliberately to wipe the raids, assuming that, because they have some level 80s along, they are safe from dying.

Case in point was the retarded balance druid who keeps running ahead of the tanks in Karazhan, and when he pulls aggro, shadowmelds, spams his macro saying “Heal me!” and runs back to the group. Or dies when SM doesn’t work. Of course, if that happens then it’s the healers fault. (“Why didn’t you heal me? You suck as a healer!” “Well, buddy, with that attitude, you are guaranteed to not see a heal come from me to you.”)

I logged on to farm some herbs and check the AH to see if I had sold anything, and some of the level 80s were trying to get an Obsidian Sanctum run going. Since they have only downed 2 bosses in Naxx atm, I predicted our chances of success at zero, so I didn’t take up the call.

I did end up going, though. Sepai whispered me and said they needed only one more healer, so I shrugged and said ‘why not’.

I am so glad we did, because we mopped that place good and proper.

We had 3 healers, which might have been overkill, but I didn’t notice our DPS suffering because of it. We had 2 tanks, a DK and the Awesome-Sauce Sepai. I asked for healing assignments and was met with silence, so i said to myself “Fuck them, I’ll heal the Main Tank, Sepai”. We headed to our left, and took out all the drakes, one by one, no problems at all.

Well, one of the healers didn’t go into the portal with the rest of them, and didn’t even chuck a heal on Sepai while he tanked the drake. I stayed out, as all strategies suggest (one tank and one healer stay out, everyone goes in) but this person was just standing there, probably dumbstruck at why they couldn’t heal the party members without going through the portal. This happened on every drake.

We get to Sarth, and we wipe, because most people got caught in the flames, not knowing to look for the gaps.

Next try: we wipe at 35%, because some of the DPS stayed in the line of the fire in their excitement. No biggie, we’re still getting used to the fight. I remind myself again and again to not stand at her tail, or else put up with the stuns

Next try: downed! OMG we forgot to take a friggin’ photo! The fist weapon loot dropped, as well as the DK/Druid/etc token, which our DK Tank got. I nabbed the 22 slot bag, and decided to not roll on the Spoils bag, since I didn’t want to be a loot whore.

With the ease that we took her down, as well as her minions, I can safely say that we will be farming this boss. My idea (although I no longer hold any authority in the desicion making process) is to spend 4 resets getting used to her with no drakes, then progress to having one drake up, then two, then three. From what I can see, the only reason to have 3 drakes up is the achievement and the mount: the loot levels are the same with 2 drakes and 3 drakes. Wrong?

I don’t like meter spam in /raid, so I said to everyone that if they wanted to see meters, to join /frostmeters and I’d spam them. A few people joined and I told Recount to start spamming. I was surprised to see myself on the top of the healing meters, and not by a small amount either. Knowing Sepai as I do, I was able to keep him above 80% the entire fight (except for the 2 wipes of course) without running out of mana, but I left my raid healing to a few Wild Growths on the tank (to spread to the melee) or myself (the ranged guys). I think next time we might be able to try it with 2 healers, will have to see what happens. Can it be done with only 2 healers? Whatever the makeup, we will definately be sorting out healing assignments prior to pulling next time.

Afterwards, I got suckered into coming to Gruuls and Mags: fights I haven’t done yet on Shasmo. Mags was fine, but people were too cocky, and left 2 channelers up for too long when Mags appeared. I saw the DPS go for the boss and the channelers following them and did a /facepalm IRL. At least they got the clicking down in the end, the first blast got through (lowbie deaths, nothing to worry about).

Gruuls was much the same, Sep took HKM and I healed him, everyone else did some bullshit with the rest of the adds, and they went down faster than ball bearings in water. Gruuls was a pushover, although we had marked up the healers so people would stay away from us in a Shatter, but for some reason, they ran towards us. Luckily, I had a shitload of HP and was able to absorb the damage abit. The other healers weren’t so lucky

And why oh why do people not follow instructions? What part of ‘Rez the dead before looting’ don’t people understand? They see it spammed in /raidchat three times by the Raid Leader, then they go and loot the boss anyway. I called him out afterwards and he was like ‘I didn’t loot!’, yet when the roll window popped up on the screen, his was the first to receive his Badge of Justice.

It’s things like that, people not listening, people repeatedly asking stupid questions in /gchat, people not wanting to learn, just wanting to be carried, that is turning me off this guild. Their only redeeming factor is that /gchat can be fun, and that’s the only reason I’m still there.