Lately I’ve been trying to figure out ways to improve my gaming experience. In particular, I’ve been wanting to optimize my user interface setup. To that end, I’ve been looking at a variety of gaming-specific input devices. I’ve long been a user of the Logitech G15 keyboard, and I highly recommend it. However, while its macro capabilities are certainly useful, they aren’t always applicable to the problem at hand.

One device which has intrigued me for awhile is the WoW: Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse, by Steelseries. I’ve usually been skeptical about the utility of “gaming” mice, because of the additional complexity that comes along with all of those buttons. However, I’d heard good things about this particular model from other players in WoW, so I thought I’d give it a try.

My first impression of this device is that it’s BIG. The wireless Microsoft mouse I’ve been using the last few years is not at all small, but the Steelseries mouse takes it up a notch or two. It’s just about as big as I would feel comfortable with, so I’m thinking that people with smaller hands may find it to be too big. It’s also a bit heavier than most mice. Not really enough so as to be a problem, but it’s certainly noticeable.

I’ve been using mostly wireless mice for the last few years, so I found myself wishing that this one was wireless. The braided cord is on the stiff side and it’s occasionally getting snagged on something as I move it around.

I imagine the main reason it’s not wireless is because Steelseries was worried that some ultra hardcore gamers would think it introduced a millisecond of latency in response times. Personally I think you would be hardpressed to prove that such latency even exists, let alone that it could affect your gaming, but there are those people that think it matters, and in large part they are the primary market for a product like this.

One cool but purely cosmetic feature is that the mouse has a set of colored LEDs built-in, which can be set to just about any color you want. The lights pulse back and forth between dim and bright. You can use the configuration software to set the color and the frequency of the pulsing.

Buttons, Buttons, And, Oh Yes, More Buttons

One thing I didn’t like about many of the other gaming mice I’ve tried in the past is that they have a big block of tiny buttons which are all the same size and shape. I’ve always thought that would make it hard to distinguish buttons by touch alone. Or else they have buttons placed seemingly at random, with some placed where they could only reasonably be accessed by your palm rather than via your digits.

By contrast, the buttons here come in a variety of different sizes and shapes, and and they are positioned so that it’s very easy to locate the specific one you want. I found that it didn’t take me long before I was easily able to find whichever button I wanted at any given time.

There are a total of 14 buttons on this monster of a mouse. You got the basic three that most mice have, your basic left and right buttons on top, plus one in the scroll wheel. There’s one extra button by itself on the right side, down on the side near the bottom. (On the far side out of sight in the picture shown here.)

There are five “extra’ buttons on top, with two on each side of the basic left and right buttons, and one in the center behind the scroll wheel. Another five extra buttons are found on the left side where they can be easily reached with your thumb if you’re right handed.

And by the way, if you’re using this mouse you’re almost certainly right-handed. I can’t see how you could comfortably reach the five-button cluster on the left side using a digit other than your thumb. Maybe if you don’t mind limiting yourself to the other buttons, it would be OK but for the most part, sorry lefties, but once again you’re left out. (Pun not intended.)

The Software

The software for this mouse features WoW-themed artwork and has all of the expected options for assigning keystrokes and macros to each button. Despite the emphasis on World Of Warcraft, the mouse can be used with any game or desktop application.

As it turns out, the software isn’t really needed for WoW, because this particular gaming mouse is recognized directly by the game. If you go to the MOUSE section of the game’s interface options, you’ll find a checkbox for “Detect World of Warcraft Gaming Mouse”. Select it, then exit and relaunch the game. Now you can go into the Key Bindings window and directly assign the various buttons to whatever game commands you want. And since the game can track a separate set of key bindings for each character, it makes it that much easier to customize the mouse button setup for each one.

So How Does It Work?

I decided to get used to using all the extra buttons one toon at a time, starting with my hunter, Starchaser. My focus has been on optimizing combat, so functions like bringing up the world map or guild roster aren’t something I need mapped to a dedicated mouse button. So far I’ve not used all of the buttons, because I thought it would be easier to get used to using them a few at a time. Currently I’ve got something like this:

Button 4 – Pet Attack
Button 5 – Multi-Shot
Button 7 – Serpent Sting
Button 10 – Steady Shot
Button 11 – Aimed Shot
Button 12 – Chimera Shot

This setup gets me though most solo fights without having to use the keyboard at all. I’ll admit I’m still getting used to it, and still working on finding the comfortable split between using the mouse buttons and using the keyboard. But I’ve got a long list of different setups I want to try. My next step will probably be to figure out a couple of buttons for setting traps and abilities which are used mainly in boss fights.

There is a minor glitch I’ve seen but the blame doesn’t belong to the mouse. It’s actually the game’s fault. If you have the mouse pointer over an icon in one of your action bars when you click one of the extra buttons, it’s treated like a regular mouse click. This is a bit annoying because you’ll find yourself occasionally clicking and not gettting the desired result until you realize that the mouse pointer needs to be moved.

In Conclusion

If you’re looking for more precise control, want quicker access to game commands, and don’t think you’d get lost trying to figure out all the extra buttons, this mouse may be the device you’re looking for. However, if you have small hands, I’d recommend that you try it out first, or at least make sure you buy from some place with a decent return policy.

Disclosure: I purchased this device at Fry’s Electronics. No materials were provided by the manufacturer.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fighting Ragnaros in the Firelands. This is for a non-heroic, 10-man raid.

After you kill Majordomo Staghelm, a passageway opens up behind his original position. This leads to a long corridor filled with Ragnaros at the opposite end. There are a few large mobs along the corridor that have to be taken care of, but once you get to Ragnaros himself, you’re done with trash. The northern side of the room has a large circular lava pool with Ragnaros sitting at the southern edge.

The raid needs two tanks, and probably three healers. It might be possible to get by with two healers if they’re both very awesome, but I’m not sure such awesomeness exists quite yet.

You’ll want to put up Shaman totems or other buffs for fire resistance, since most of the damage in this fight is fire-based. However, it’s not like the original version of the Ragnaros fight in Molten Core where you have to wear a certain amount of special fire-resistance gear.

Stage 1

The two tanks engage Ragnaros at the southern side of the lava pool. Getting and holding aggro isn’t a major concern, and there aren’t any interrupts to worry about. Just get up there and start hitting him.

The exact positioning of the tanks isn’t important but generally they’ll want to be in the middle, at least 6 yards apart from each other. Any other melee will also want to maintain at least 6 yards spacing from the tanks and each other. This spacing is to avoid having multiple players hit by the Wrath Of Ragnaros, which does about 60000 damage to the target and anybody else within 6 yards. It also has a knockback effect.

Roughly every 5-8 seconds, Ragnaros will throw Burning Wound at the tank which currently has aggro. This is a fire damage DoT which does about 6000 damage every two seconds for 20 seconds. It stacks and the timer resets with each new application. Once it hits 3 or 4 stacks on the current tank, the other tank needs to taunt and take control, or it starts to be a challenge for the healers to keep up. This repeats, with the two tanks switching off as their stacks of Burning Wound drop off.

Related to Burning Wound is Burning Blast, which gives the tank a buff of about +2000 fire damage for each stack of Burning Wound they currently have. This gives the tank a chance to make a significant contribution damage-wise.

Ragnaros will periodically do the Hand of Ragnaros, which does about 30000 damage, to any player within 55 yards. It also has a knockback of about 20 yards.

Whenever there is any sort of knockback, tanks need to get back into melee range quickly or they may get hit with Magma Blast, which hits for roughly 75000 damage and gives you a 6 second debuff for 50% increased damage from fire. This is also the bonus prize for any ranged DPS which steals aggro from the tank!

Speaking of ranged DPS, the rest of the raid will be spread out along the bottom side of the perimeter, with the healers in the middle. Try to stay at least 10 yards apart.

It’s not a major concern for tanks, but during stage 1, other players must take care to avoid the Sulfuras Smash. Ragnaros will occasionally face a random player and call it out. A few seconds later, the smash will hit the player’s original location. This is always somewhere about 15 yards out from the perimeter of the lava pool. Anybody within 5 yards of that original location will get hit for over half a million damage. The Sulfuras Smash also creates several lava waves which move out from the point of impact. Anybody hit by one of these will get 100000 damage and a 30000 dps dot for 5 sec. Avoid the Lava Wave.

Avoiding Sulfuras Smash isn’t hard. All you gotta do is move at least 5 yards from the original position. Just pay attention. Getting hit directly by it is not a factor for players at close melee range, but you can still get hit by the Lava Wave, so my preference while tanking is to play it safe and move off to the side when the targeted area is nearby.

Ragnaros will also occasionally launch a Magma Trap at a random player. When placed, it will do 60000 damage to anybody within 8 yards, and also a knockback. Triggering one causes a Magma Trap Eruption, which damages everybody in the raid for about 80000, and throws the trigger man high into the air.

The Magma Trap is a basic fire trap, except it never goes away unless triggered. Therefore, you need to assign people to trigger them on purpose, or else everybody will have to be avoiding them constantly and sooner or later you’ll be triggering them accidentally. Better to do it on purpose when everybody in the raid has sufficient health to handle it. The trigger man simply has to wait for everybody’s health to be reasonably close to full, then they can trigger the trap. You’ll want the trigger man to be someone who can slow-fall, or you’ll want someone else to cast slow-fall on them, or else they’ll take a lot of damage when they land. Because yes, they really do get thrown that high.

The last thing about the Magma Trap is that you’ll want to avoid standing between one and Ragnaros, since any random knockback might throw you into the trap, triggering it in an uncontrolled, possibly deadly moment.

That’s pretty much it for stage 1. There are no interrupts to worry about, no special boss placement, since Ragnaros is pretty much stuck in the one spot.

Intermission 1 – The Sons Of Flame

The first “intermission” starts when Ragnaros is down to 70% health. He casts Splitting Blow, dropping his hammer Sulfuras down. Then he submerges and the Sons of Flame come out. You’ve got 45 seconds to destroy them before Rag pops back up. I’ve noticed a lot of strategies for this fight tend to give little detail about how to handle the Sons of Flame, but I think they’re worth some attention.

The Sons of Flame appear spread out evenly around the outside of the perimeter of the platform, in individual summoning circles. Once they materialize completely, they will head directly for Ragnaros’ hammer, Sulfuras, which can be anywhere between the 5 o’clock and 7 o’clock positions.

Initially, when they are at full health, the Sons move quite quickly — faster than players can run, in fact. This is thanks to their Burning Speed effect. Fortunately, as they take damage, the Burning Speed effect drops off and they slow down. At around 50% they are slowed to a crawl.

If a Son reaches Sulfuras, Ragnaros creates a Supernova. As you might guess that’s a BAD thing. It will inflict 125000 damage to everybody in the raid, which is likely instant death for at least half the players. Because the Sons have to be brought down very quickly, everybody in the raid has to pitch in, even healers.

The most effective strategy for handling the Sons seems to be something like this: First of all, make sure you have everybody assigned to a particular spawn point in advance. Each of your DPS players and your tanks should have one Son each, and your healers should be ganged together on one. Beyond that, it’s a matter of assigning the right people to the right spawn points.

I’ve seen strategies that recommend assigning your tanks to the Sons closest to the hammer, and in fact that’s what we were doing on our own first attempts. However, we were having trouble with mobs from the farthest spawn points sometimes escaping their attackers. While the tanks generally don’t have any problem getting their own mobs down quickly enough, their lack of ranged DPS means they’re of limited usefulness as backup for those mobs that might escape players further out. Keep in mind that the speed of the Sons means it’s very hard to chase them down on foot unless they’re already significantly damaged.

It may be that our earlier attempts could have been improved by making spawn point assignments more specific, because we didn’t specifically assign each spawn point. However, in the end what worked for us was this: Place your high-burst ranged DPS people closest to Sulfuras. They can quickly take out their own mob and then help with Sons further out. Send your melee players out to the furthest spawn points. Their lack of ranged damage makes them less suited to chasing down any Sons that get loose, and on the outer spawn points if they don’t manage to kill their Son they will at least have slowed them down so they can be finished off by the ranged DPS players closer to the hammer. The healers should gang up together on a Son at medium range. If they get their mob down quickly, then they can also serve as backup for any mobs that come in from further out. The image below illustrates how players are assigned to each of the 8 spawn points.

The Sons are not tauntable, and are immune to most slowing abilities like ice traps, but they are susceptible to stuns. Melee toons will probably want to do that first thing.

Also, be aware that the outer-most Sons will go into the lava pool in a straight line towards Sulfuras, not around the perimeter. If you don’t pick them up immediately, you’ll lose them unless you’re a Death Knight who can use Death Grip on them.

Also during the intermission there are Lava Bolts hitting random players every 4 seconds. These are unavoidable and damage the target for 45000. They shouldn’t be a big problem unless someone enters this phase with low health.

After the Sons of Flame are all dead, or 45 seconds pass, we enter stage 2. By the way, that makes it sound like you’ve really got 45 seconds to kill the Sons, but realistically, unless you slow the outer ones but don’t kill them immediately, there’s no way it will take more than 10 or 15 seconds for at least one of them to get to the hammer

Stage 2

Stage 2 is pretty much the same as stage 1 in many respects. The biggest difference is that Ragnaros no longer throws out Magma Traps, Wrath of Ragnaros, or Hand of Ragnaros. For tanks, it’s exactly the same, except for having to watch out for Engulfing Flame.

Ragnaros will occasionally cast Engulfing Flame, which covers roughly 1/3 of the platform with fire that damages players for about 80k per second and lasts for 8 seconds. The area effected is dependant on the distance from Ragnaros, and as illustrated in the image below, is either the melee zone (blue), the middle zone (green), or the furthest-out ranged zone (pink) . All players must move forward or backwards to avoid the flame, including the tank.

Once per minute, Ragnaros will toss out Molten Seed, which does about 55000 damage to anybody within 6 yards of where it hits. It also plants a Molten Seed at each player’s position, which will explode after awhile in a Molten Inferno, doing up to 100000 fire damage to everybody in the raid, decreasing with distance. Each Molten Inferno explosion spawns a Molten Elemental. This mob will fixate on a random member of the raid and cannot be tanked. Fortunately they do not have a huge health pool and can be burned down fairly quickly.

When there are no Molten Seeds down, the entire raid needs to be evenly spread out around one side of the platform. Which side does not matter, but everybody has to be on the same side. When the Molten Seeds are placed, the entire raid, including the tanks, needs to move to the opposite position in order to minimize the damage taken from the Molten Inferno explosions. You also want to stack up for AoE healing and damage to the Molten Elementals. Once all of the Molten Elementals are down, everybody spreads out again until the next Molten Seed.

Note that Engulfing Flame can sometimes happen during Molten Seed. When that happens, the raid may need to stack up further away from Ragnaros to avoid it.

Intermission 2

The next intermission starts when Ragnaros is down to 40% health, and is the same as phase 2, except that he also creates two Lava Scions. These are pretty standard fire mobs except they inflict a debuff called Blazing Heat, which causes a player to leave a trail of fire that inflicts 50000 dps to anybody standing in it, as well as healing Sons of Flame and other Lava Scions 10% per second.

The Lava Scions should be picked up by tanks as soon as possible. Hunters can redirect to a tank if needed. After killing their assigned Sons, other players need to turn their attention to killing the Lava Scions. If all of the Sons of Flame are killed before the Lava Scions, the Lava Scions will stay up after Ragnaros rises again, and will need to be killed ASAP.

Stage 3

Stage 3 is similar to stages 1 & 2. We still have Engulfing Flame, but now Molten Seed is gone. Added to the fun we have Living Meteors. When they spawn, these mobs will fixate on a random player other than the tank. They need to be kited by ranged DPS and healers. Melee needs to stay away as getting within 4 yards results in huge damage and is usually instant death unless you’re near full health and have some sort of damage absorbsion active.

Whenever you damage the meteors, they bounce backwards from you. The player kiting them needs to make sure that nobody is behind them, because they will do their big damage even while bouncing back, if they cross someone’s path. Likewise, other players need to make sure they stay clear!

So, to sum it up, in stage 3 you need to avoid the Sulfuras Smash, the lava waves it creates, make sure you’re out of the Engulfing Flame when it comes, watch for the Molten Seed and move quickly to stack up on the opposite side when it appears, and avoid and/or kite the Living Meteors. Easy Peasy! That’s all you gotta do for the last 40%, there are no more intermissions. Burn him down!

Watch The Video

The guys at Fatboss TV have put together a pretty decent video that covers the fight. It’s required viewing for anybody planning to take on Ragnaros!

I’ve been spending a little time on the Public Test Realm (PTR) checking out the new changes for patch 4.3.  I’ve copied over versions of both my mage Romy and my paladin Alfred so that I could check out DPS, tanking, and healing situations.

One of the latest bits of news is that there are a variety of new epic gems and a bunch of new Jewelcrafting recipes to go along with them. The raw epic gems are Queen’s Garnet, Lightstone, Deepholm Iolite, Lava Coral, Shadow Spinel, and Elven Periot.  There are several recipes for each gem.  As with the current setup, the pure-colored gems (Red, Yellow, Blue) provide a big boost to a single stat.  The Stamina gem is +75, while everything else is +50, up from the +60 stamina and +40 everything else that we get from our current gems.  The mixed-color gems (Orange, Green, Purple) continue to provide a boost to two different stats, giving +25 boost to two stats (+37 for stamina), up from +20 (+30 for stamina) with the current gems.

Each of the new recipes costs 5 jewelcrafting tokens, up from the 3 tokens required for most of the non-meta gem cuts we have now.  There’s also a new Tome of Burning Jewels, which teaches a random epic gem recipe, and which only costs 4 tokens instead of 5.  It’s a cheaper way to get all of the recipes, as long as you don’t mind which recipe you get at any given time.

All in all, there are 51 new recipes, plus the Tome of Burning Jewels.  Assuming you go with the Tome of Burning Jewels, it will take you 204 days doing the jewelcrafting daily quest to earn enough tokens to get them all.  If you buy specific recipes instead of the tome, it will take you 255 days to learn everything.

I don’t know why these new recipes required new jewelcrafting vendors, but apparently they do, so we’ve got a new one for each faction. For the Alliance, Farrah Facet is found in Stormwind City, right next to her identical twin Isabel Jones, who still has all the older recipies. For the Horde, the new vendor Taryssa Lazuria can be found in Orgrimmar, in the jewelcrafting hut.

An Aside About Advancement In Jewelcrafting

Of course, if you’re a Jewelcrafter, this grind is nothing new.  It takes 271 tokens to get all of the first batch of Cataclysm recipes.  Meaning that if you did the daily quest every day since Cataclysm came out, then it took you until early last month to get them all.  More likely, you’ve missed days here and there, and you’re STILL working on it.

This grind also affects how quickly you can skill up in Jewelecrafting.  Once you hit skill level 450, your ability to advance further is tied directly to how quickly you can get the next higher recipe.  And at an average of one new recipe every 3 days, it will end up taking you a few weeks, at the fastest.  Compare this with every other crafting profession, where you can go from zero to maximum in just a few hours if you’re willing to spend the money on materials. No other profession has such a bottleneck for something as basic as getting the recipes.  The high-end recipes for blacksmithing, tailoring, enchanting, etc., merely require spending regular crafting materials which you can acquire fairly quickly if you’re willing to put in the effort.  But no other profession has players doing daily quests just to get patterns.

Maybe it was an experiment.  We all know people who have decided to switch professions at some point, and who throw money at materials like crazy to get the new skill maxxed out as quickly as possible.  Maybe Blizzard feels this is a bad thing?

This past week or so has been pretty exciting for Alfred, my paladin. It’s essentially been his coming of age as a tank.

First was a Firelands run to kill trash mobs for Avengers of Hyjal reputation.  I was doing daily quests on Alfred when the guild leader starts organizing the night’s raid.  He’s asking if there are any tanks available, because they only had 1 tank for the raid so far.  I whispered him and said that I wasn’t sure if Alfred was geared up enough for that yet, but if he couldn’t find anybody else I was willing to give it a try.

I think Alfred’s item level at the time, in his tank set, was maybe about 340 or so.  Not quite so epic as one would like for a raid like this, but a moment later the guild leader whispered me back and said “OK let’s try it”.

The run went quite well, and in fact Alfred got some gear upgrades from drops and also from hitting “friendly” status and being able to buy stuff from the faction vendors.  A few days later we did it again, and once more things went pretty well.

Alfred Goes A’ Raidin’

About a week ago, a night or two after the previous Firelands run, Alfred was invited to another raid.  At first I thought it was going to be another Firelands trash mob run, but then it turned out we were going to Blackwing Descent.  Also in the raid was one of the guild’s über paladin tanks, so I figured I was there just as backup.  So imagine my surprise when I’m told that I’m gonna be the main tank for the Magmaw fight!

It took us two tries to get Magmaw down, which is better than most of the times I’d done that fight with Romy.  We did the next four bosses in one fight each, with Alfred as main tank each time.  We saved Nefarion for another night because it was getting late and some of the East Coast people had to go.

We went back the next evening for Nefarion and although we didn’t get him down, we came awfully close.  We’re pretty confident that the next trip into BWD will do it.

Last night was Bastion of Twilight, and Alfred was once again asked to tank.  I’d done this instance once before on Alfred, as a healer, but this raid was farther into the run than I’d been before, even on Romy.  First up was the Twilight Ascendant Council.  We one-shot them.  Next stop, the final boss in the run, Cho’Gall.

We had a good long explanation of the fight before we started, and at first I was a little concerned about remembering all the details.  However, it turned out that tanking it was somewhat easier than it sounded at first.  Cho’Gall took us a few tries, but about 90 minutes after the raid started, he was dead.  They were dead… er… whatever.

I didn’t know this in advance, but apparently this was the guild’s first Cho’Gall kill.  It’s probably just as well I didn’t know that until afterwards… no need for extra pressure.

The Transition To Tank

When I changed one of Alfred’s talent specs from retribution to protection awhile back, the main reason was that I figured he would have a better chance at getting into runs. I still considered his main specification to be healing, but this way I’d be able to go on runs when another healer was already in the group.

The results were not what I expected. I knew the game was currently somewhat understaffed with regards to tanks, despite the fact that it’s a viable option for more classes than ever before. But I didn’t fully understand how bad the problem really was until I realized that over the course of the first few weeks after changing talents, I’d taken Alfred into a group as tank at least a dozen times, but only healed once.

After awhile I decided maybe I should just go with the flow and cultivate Alfred’s tanking side and concentrate more on building up his set of tanking gear.  I’m enjoying it so far, but I’m wondering if this move might not ultimately leave Sunny, my L85 warrior who is also a tank, out in the cold.  Yah, yah, yah, I could play Sunny as a DPS toon, but melee DPS has simply never appealed to me that much.

Tanking Is A Hard Knock Life

Why is there such a shortage of tanks? I have some ideas about that.

First of all, tanking is not easy.  The tank is generally expected to also be the leader of the run, in most respects.  They’re expected to know all of the fight mechanics and the proper tactics.  They’re expected to know which mobs to mark, which mobs need to be (and CAN be) crowd-controlled, and so forth.

Healers have an important job that isn’t always easy to execute, but in principle it’s pretty straightforward.  Heal and/or cleanse the tank and other players as needed.  Maybe fear or shackle something.  Don’t stand in the swirly, fiery, gooey crap on the floor.

DPS toons are also generally pretty straightforward.  Damage the mobs.  Don’t stand in the swirly, fiery, gooey crap on the floor.  Maybe once in awhile you polymorph, trap, or banish something.  Try not to pull aggro from the tank.  And frankly, we all know that most DPS toons don’t pay much attention to that last one.

Tanks are the most complicated job all.  They have to pull the mobs, making sure they don’t accidentally get other mobs patrolling nearby.  They have to aggro the mobs, maybe as many as 5 or 6 at a time, sometimes even more, depending on the fight and the options you have for crowd control.  They have to keep an eye out for the silly DPS players who are shooting at the wrong target at the wrong time, so they can pull back the mobs that go after them.  They have to avoid the same crap on the floor everybody else does.  Sometimes they have to position the mob in a certain place, even when it doesn’t always want to move.

Another issue is that tanking is very gear dependant, and with Paladins, Warriors, and Death Knights all competing for plate armor, it can take awhile to get yourself properly equipped. Until then, your lower health and defensive stats make you into a bigger drain on your healer’s mana, which in turn impacts their ability to keep up the rest of the group as well.

Another problem with tanks and gear is the fact that many players are either unaware of what gear they should be looking for, or they simply don’t care if an item makes more sense for a different player. Often a DPS toon will roll on a tank item just because it’s a higher item level than whatever they already have. And there’s plenty of gear which works equally well for a tank or for a DPS toon where it’s reasonable for either to roll.

Tanks also frequently have to worry about player aggro as well as mobs.  In Alfred’s first runs as an L85 tank, when grouped with people I didn’t know, I found that they tended to be incredibly unforgiving about any mistakes or shortcomings.  This can be very discouraging to a newbie tank just starting out.

Even worse, many of these players will essentially blame the tank for failing to compenstate for THEIR mistakes. I can’t tell you how many times I have marked targets with a Skull or an “X” to indicate the kill order, and then have the DPS ignore the marks and attack whatever mob they want.   When I’d remind them they should be attacking the skull first, I’d hear some variation of “STFU and tank the mobs” more often than I’d hear, “Oh yeah, sorry about that.”

Case In Point: General Umbriss in Grim Batol

Tanks almost always get the blame when things go bad because people don’t know the fight, or when they fail to execute their part correctly. My favorite variation on that idea is the General Umbriss fight in Grim Batol, on heroic mode. This is not an extremely complicated fight, really. The main thing the tank really has to do is move Umbriss to the front of the area, off to one side, in order to give the group room to deal with his Blitz attack and with the adds.

When Umbriss targets someone for his Blitz attack, that person and anybody standing next to them have to move about 10-15 yards out of the way or they’ll take some major damage.  The other thing is that Umbriss will periodically summon a group of non-elite Troggs from the back of the room.  These need to be burned down by ranged DPS as soon as they appear, especially the purple-tinged one(s), or they’ll kill everybody in the group fairly quickly, starting with the healer.

Simple fight, really, but I’ve seen group after group where people didn’t move for the Blitz attack and where the DPS ignored the Troggs until the healer was dead and they were under attack themselves.  And at the end of it, after the group wipes… who gets the blame?  That’s right, it’s the tank’s fault.

Crowd Control?  We don’t need no stinkin’ crowd control!

And then there’s those people who think they know better than the tank about when crowd control is needed. I could never understand this, because if a newbie tank suggests it might be a good idea to have only three mobs pounding on him at once instead of five, it seems like people ought to listen. Yet, on several occasions I’ve had people insist that crowd control was unnecessary even AFTER the group has wiped on trash mobs.  Or even worse, your hunter does throw down an ice trap, or your mage polymorphs, or whatever, and there’s some other DPS toon that simply doesn’t care, or notice, and breaks the crowd control three seconds into the fight.

Job Training

Another thing to consider is that the tank really has no option other than on the job training.   Soloing mobs on a tank is much easier than tanking in a group because you’re generally not worried about what other players might be doing, and if you lose aggro on a mob it’s usually a GOOD thing in that context.

DPS toons don’t do things much differently in a group situation than when they’re soloing.  In fact in most respects they have it easier than when soloing, because they generally don’t have to worry about being attacked.

Healers can practice their spell rotations on any friendly toons.  The main thing being in a group does is add some randomness and pressure to succeed.

In Conclusion

I haven’t given up on Alfred as a healer.  One advantage of the various tanking activities is the opportunity to pick up pieces of healing gear that isn’t needed by anybody else in the run.  Alfred’s healing set is coming along nicely, even if not as fast as his tanking set or DPS set.  And it helps that the various Firelands vendors usually have items for all three of Alfred’s gear sets.

Well, that’s all for now… gotta go do my daily quests before it’s time for tonight’s raid!  Nefarion WILL die!

Recently, Pixidragon, a fellow guild member, commented in guild chat about the problem she was having completing a particular quest chain.  I wasn’t working on anything in particular at the moment, so I offered my assistance.  However, she told me that it was a special mini-game quest that you had to solo, in the quest chain to get the Brazie’s Sunflower Seeds quest reward, which gives you the Sunflower companion.

I’d seen players with the Sunflower pet, but hadn’t really worried about getting one for myself as yet.  However, once my fellow guildie described what she was doing, I was intrigued.

The quest series is set at a small farm in the western part of Hillsbrad, in the Eastern Kingdoms.  The quest can be done by players of any level, but since there are no Alliance-side towns in this zone any more, it may be difficult to reach with a lower-level toon who is still unmounted.

If you’ve ever played the popular Plants -Vs- Zombies, from Pop-Cap Games, you have a pretty good idea what’s going on here.  Once you accept the first quest, you’re popped into mini-game mode where you have to protect a farmer’s field from zombies.

The first quest is fairly easy with just a few zombies.  It’s basically just an introduction of what’s to come.  When you turn it in, you’ll be offered the second quest where there are more zombies and more defensive units.  There are a total of five stages.  Step 3 may take you a few times to get through, but it’s step 4 where the crap really hits the fan.

My first time doing the quest series on Romy, my mage, step 3 took me a few tries, but step 4 took me well over an hour and probably at least 10 attempts.

During those attempts, there was a point at which I became aware of what strategy was required, but where it still took me a bit of practice to successfully implement it.  But once I was sure that I was on the right path, I started taking screen shots so that I could show Pixidragon how I did it.

When I did the quest a second time on my paladin, Alfred, I whizzed straight through to step 4, and that took me 4-5 tries again.  Better than the previous attempt but still room for improvement.

After finishing the quest series on Alfred, I discovered that Pixidragon was still having problems getting past step 4.  She had seen the screen capture I’d posted, and it helped a bit, but she was still having trouble.  I told her that I’d do it again on another toon and this time I’d do a video capture.

So, I switched over to my warrior, Sunny, and headed to Hillsbrad. Thanks to the practice I’d gotten on Romy and Alfred, she aced each step on the first try!

Brazie’s Sunflower Seeds Step 4

Brazie’s Sunflower Seeds Step 5

It’s been several months since I hit level 85 on my main character, mage Romy, but until the last few weeks I really hadn’t worked on other characters that much since Cataclysm had been released.  But a few days ago, I finally hit level 85 on my paladin, Alfred.

Decision Time

Back in the vanilla days when we only had one talent specification per toon, Alfred was always retribution-spec while leveling up, and holy-spec the rest of the time.  Since we’ve been allowed to have dual talent specifications, I’ve had one set up for retribution and one for holy.

However, now that he’s gotten to 85, I am considering changing from retribution to protection.  Alfred’s primary role at level 85 is being a healer, but I’m sure there will be times when I’ll want to run something and someone else will already have the healer’s role covered.  I don’t have any great interest in trying to make Alfred into a DPS toon, so I’m thinking maybe tank is the way to go with the secondary spec.  That would give me a lot of options, and it will be interesting to tank on a paladin again.  I’ve done it before, but it was a long time ago…

Paladins in the Early Days

Back in the very early days before any expansion packs had been released, paladins as a class were generally something of a hybrid role.  They had great buffs, so they were very desired in raids, but they didn’t ideally fit any of the other roles.

Paladins weren’t usually the best healers, compared to Priests or Druids.  They would generally do OK in a regular dungeon instance, but in raids paladins would not be main tank healers, for the most part.  They might be assigned to an off-tank or as backup, but mainly they’d be keeping an eye out on the rests of the group.

Unless they were insanely geared, Paladins didn’t have great DPS, so they would normally get a DPS slot in a raid only if the group was otherwise good on DPS or if it was understood that they’d be healing people occasionally as well.

As tanks, Paladins were sort of unfinished back in those days.  It seemed clear that tanking had been somewhere in the original plan for paladins, but many of the basic tools that a tank requires were simply missing.  There wasn’t even a Taunt equivalent in the earliest days!  This meant that paladins were suitable for tanking only in very specific situations.  In a raid, a pally might off-tank a mob until another mob was killed.  This would usually build up enough aggro that when the rest of the group attacked the pally’s target, it would still stay focused on the pally.  And if it didn’t, then it was likely the main tank could take over since the first mob was now dead.

In 5-man instances, pally tanking was generally not a good idea unless the DPS players were fairly disciplined about target selection and careful to give the paladin time to establish aggro.

Alfred was my second toon to hit level 60.  My warrior, Sunny, would ultimately be the tank in the family, but until she hit level 60, Alfred was pressed into tanking every now and then.  It was always an interesting run, but given the shortcomings it was clear that this wasn’t going to be an everyday thing.  By the time later patches would give Paladins better tools for tanking, Sunny had hit level 60 and was the go-to toon for tanking.

Alfred’s First Level 85 Instance Run

I hadn’t really played him much during the Wrath Of The Lich King days, so Alfred was still just level 71 when Cataclysm was released.  I hadn’t done any instance runs or raiding with him since level 70 and Karazhan or Gruul’s Lair.

When I did start playing on Alfred again, I tried to get in at least a couple of instances per level as a healer.  However, I generally avoided the Random Dungeon Finder tool.  I either queued for specific dungeons that I needed for quests, or went on runs with at least a couple of guildies.  I had been a fairly decent healer in the past, and after a couple of runs to get back in the groove, I seemed to be doing OK.

I didn’t immediately jump into an instance run upon hitting level 85, but a day or two later, I decided to queue up.  I first asked if anybody in guild chat was interested in doing a run, but everybody was busy with something else so I switched over to my healing gear and talent spec and queued up solo.

I wasn’t really worried too much about that first run in most respects.  Alfred’s gear was fairly decent for a brand new level 85 toon, with an average item level of 326, just a few points off the minimum requirement for doing heroic dungeons.  It was better than Romy’s gear had been right after hitting 85.

However, things did not go as I hoped they would.  The instance we got was Halls Of Origination, which is not one of the easier ones out there.  I’d hoped for something easier my first time out, but didn’t want to queue for specific dungeons.

The very first group of mobs, I noticed two things.  First, the tank was taking bigger chunks of damage than seemed reasonable.  Then all three of the DPS toons started taking damage too, and it got harder to keep everybody up.  Nobody died, but by the end of the fight I was down to under 20% on mana.

I sat down to drink, but I’d only gotten back to about 60% when the tank and the rest of the group ran up and attacked another group.  This fight went a little better at first, mainly in that the DPS didn’t take quite as much damage, but at the end I was coming up empty on mana and one of the DPS started taking damage again and died.

At this point, I noticed that the tank was at the top of the damage meters, so I took a look and discovered he was wearing DPS gear instead of tanking gear.  The DPS toons weren’t doing anything great damage-wise, but it was more than sufficient for a normal difficulty dungeon, so there was no reason at all for the tank to think he needed to compensate.  And this was right at the very beginning of the instance anyway!

No doubt his gear choice was contributing to the tank taking bigger chunks of damage than he should, but the bigger problem was that the DPS was taking too much damage.  Even the ranged guys were getting knocked down below 50% in just a few seconds sometimes.  Sure, a lot of fights have a bit of incidental damage you simply can’t avoid.  But I wasn’t taking any great amount of damage and I was right there next to everybody else, so that doesn’t explain it.  I said something in party chat to the effect of “DPS is taking unnecessary damage… watch your targets” and one guy said something about the tank needing to hold the mobs better.

The next group of mobs went a little better, but I was still drinking to recover mana and was only at about 50% when the tank rushed up and attacked the first boss, Temple Guardian Anhuur.  I had to run up just to get in range to heal.  Despite this, the fight started out relatively OK and we got through the first time the boss did the Shield Of Light thing OK, except that the DPS weren’t really taking out the Pit Viper adds and for the first time I had to worry about keeping myself alive as well as everybody else.

At that point, I was coming up empty on mana, so I took a Runic Mana Potion, even though it doesn’t give me enough mana back for even one healing spell.  That raises a question: Why did Blizzard decide not to add new high-level mana and health potions in Cataclysm?

Anyway, as a result of my mana situation, two of the DPS died at this point.  This actually made it a bit better for me, because I was able to get ahead of the mana situation.  However, the second time that the boss did the Shield Of Light thing, the remaining DPS totally ignored the Pit Viper adds and I got swarmed and died myself.  Fortunately, the boss was close to dead and the tank and remaining DPS finished him off.

I was really not a happy camper by the end of the fight.  The big problem is, if you’re not paying enough attention to know your healer’s not ready when you start the fight, then you’re just going to blame them when things go wrong.

I’m not giving up… but I think Alfred’s next few dungeon runs will be be with guildies if that’s at all possible.

Activision held their annual earnings conference call today, and one of the more significant tidbits of news was that the World Of Warcraft subscription base was down about 600k, from 12 million just before the Cataclysm expansion was released down to about 11.4 million this past March.

Now, the subscription base tends to fluctuate in general, and this is a drop of about only about 2%, so it’s not really a huge problem for Blizzard/Activision. On the other hand, it’s also not to be ignored.

Blizzard’s president, Michael Morhaime, had this to say: “As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content. And so I think with Cataclysm they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions, but that is why we are working on developing more content. We need to be faster at delivering content to players. And so that’s one of the reasons that we’re looking to decrease the amount of time in-between expansions.”

Why Have Some People Left the Game?

Blizzard didn’t really address the idea that competing games might be a factor in the loss of subscribers.  While new MMO games like Aion or The Rift may not have caught on like wildfire, they still have a respectible following and it’s not unreasonable to think that a certain small percentage of WoW players may have decided to give something new a try.

It’s also possible that some people have gotten rid of secondary or tertiary accounts. I don’t use my own secondary account any more.

If new content is really the problem, then the return of Zul’Gurub & Zul’Amun in the 4.1 patch will probably bump up the numbers a bit. However, while it’s undoubtedly a factor, I’m not completely convinced that new content is really the only issue.

First of all, if new content were the primary factor, we should have seen an increase in the subscription base once Cataclysm was released, followed by a decline back to where things were before.   Blizzard hasn’t released numbers for January or February, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

Aside from people finishing the available content, there are a variety of other factors in the 4.0 version of the game that could have also affected the subscription base.

WTB: Portal To Stormwind City

In some ways, with the Cataclysm expansion, the game took a step backwards towards being tedious. I refer specifically to the removal of the transportation portals in Shattrath and Dalaran. The motivation seems to have been to nudge players back towards using Stormwind City or Orgrimmar as their central hubs.  It’s true that those cities have portals to the various zones in the Cataclysm expansion, but anybody playing in other zones has gotten screwed by the change.  It’s added long travel times back into the equation for anybody playing in Outland or Northrend.

Since a big feature of the Cataclysm expansion was the introduction of the Worgen and Goblin races, many players were leveling up toons from scratch.  Blizzard added a variety of things to speed up that process, including lowering the cost and level requirements for mounts.  This really does help the 1-60 leveling, but once you hit level 60 it was essentially not that different than it used to be, except now there was no longer any quick way to get from Shattrath or Dalaran back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar.

It’s been great for mages, who are once again making money selling portals, but not so great for everybody else.

Long travel times contribute to player burnout, which in turn contributes to a drop in the subscription base.

Guilds Aren’t What They Used To Be

The new guild advancement features have been something of a mixed bag. It’s harder to get a new guild off the ground now than it used to be, since a new level 1 guild will have a much harder time recruiting than a level 25 guild which has all the various guild rewards. It’s also more painful for players to leave a guild now, since they will lose their guild reputation in the process. It seems to me that this has to have SOME impact on player burnout, although it’s hard to quantify.

WTB: Tank or Healer

It’s historically always been the case that it can be hard getting a tank or healer for a run, but in Cataclysm it’s just gotten worse.  Solo-queuing up for a dungeon as a DPS toon typically means a wait time of at least a half hour, even during hours when there’s a lot of people online.  Tanks and healers, on the other hand, rarely have to wait more than a few minutes even during late night hours.

I really do think the random dungeon finder is a good thing overall, but it really also emphasizes the problem here.  Blizzard is certainly aware of the problem, and the new reward system in the 4.1 patch shows that they’re trying to address it, but I think they’re treating the symptoms instead of the underlying cause.

In my opinion, the core of the problem is that for most people, playing a tank or a healer just isn’t as fun as playing a DPS toon. You just don’t get the same sense of accomplishment from healing the tank as you do from scoring a 60k Arcane Blast hit on a raid boss.  I don’t know what sort of changes would make healing or tanking more fun, but I think that’s where Blizzard should really be concentrating its creative effort.

Out With The Old?  Oh, Hell No!

One of the biggest problems in the game has always been that many players are effectively left out of experiencing the high-end raid content.  I’ve done a fair amount of raiding, but there’s a lot of content that I never saw.  I think it’s a huge mistake on Blizzard’s part not to make a bigger attempt to integrate the game’s historic content into the present.  However, there’s evidence to suggest that they’re working on improving this.

The Cataclysm expansion featured a new heroic, high-level version of the Deadmines instance, and a new heroic version of the Shadowfang Keep instance, which are steps in the right direction.  And patch 4.1 features new level 85 heroic 5-man versions of the old Zul’Amun and Zul’Gurub raid instances.

I say, this is a big step in the right direction… keep going!

Seriously, we should be seeing new 5-man heroic Blackwing Lair, Black Temple, Serpentshrine Caverns, etc., or maybe new 10-man raid versions, scaled for level 85.  And while the other retro dungeons were re-tuned for their new debut, I’m not convinced that’s absolutely necessary for all of the old content.  Certainly, there are particular fights in some of those old raids that would need to be updated to work with a smaller party, but I think much of the old content would be fine if you simply scaled up everything to the appropriate level.

This would be good for players who’ve never seen that old content… my first run on the new Zul’Gurub included a player who’d never done the original version.  And it would be good for Blizzard, because it would allow them to get a lot of new content out the door with much less effort than creating a new raid/instance from scratch.

Historically, new patches for World Of Warcraft have always come out on Tuesday morning, following the weekly system maintenance period. Today, Blizzard released the patch for version 4.1.0.13914 of the game client. In addition to a variety of bug fixes and balance tweaks, there are four big additions to the game with this version.

The Guild Finder Tool

There’s a new GUILD FINDER tool, designed to help match up people looking for a new guild with guilds looking for new people. It’s sort of like a little guild application where players can specify what they’re looking for in a guild and provide some idea of what they have to offer.

Once you specify a few attributes like your class role and availability, you can browse through a list of guilds that match your criteria. If you find one you like, you can submit a request to join. The guild leader will receive your request and act on it as they deem appropriate. They may want to interview you, or visit their own guild website to fill out an extended application, or they may just shoot you an invitation directly.

Dungeon Finder: Call To Arms

The Dungeon Finder tool was a great addition to the game, but it help demonstrate the fact that most players are playing DPS-oriented characters, and relatively fewer play healers or tanks.  A single DPS player who queues up for a random dungeon can easily wait for half an hour or more, because there aren’t enough tanks or healers in the queue to form complete groups.

The new Call To Arms feature is designed to lower those long queue times by offering rewards to players to join the queue and complete the assigned instance.  Strictly speaking, the rewards might be offered to any class, but as a practical matter it’s going to be healers and tanks in most cases.

Upon completing the instance, players who were so enticed will receive a goodie bag that contains some combination of gold, gems, potions, pets, and even mounts.

This sounds like a great idea, but I do note that it seems to depend on the idea that the required players are actually available, but just not queuing up for dungeons.  I’m sure that’s true to a certain degree, but it remains to be seen if it’s true enough that this new feature will really make a difference.  In fact, I’m thinking that some players may hold off on entering the queue until they are offered the reward, which would really negate the purpose of the feature to a large degree.

Guild Challenges

The next new feature is Guild Challenges.  This is basically a sort of random guild achievement for completing a particular dungeon, raid, or PvP battleground with a guild group.  Completing one of the current challenges will result in a gold reward to the guild vault.

Anything that puts gold into the coffers isn’t really a bad feature, but I can’t see most guilds getting too excited about this.

The Return Of Zul’Gurub & Zul’Aman

One of the big changes in the initial release of the Cataclysm expansion was that the Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman raid instances both went away.   With patch 4.1 they return as high-end, heroic only, 5-player dungeons.  Both require a minimum average item level of 346 and they contain a wide variety of new epic gear, mounts, pets and other goodies.

Things start off with a new series of level 85 solo quests in Stranglethorn Vale that give you a preview of the various Zul’Gurub bosses.  Once you complete the solo quests, you’ll be ready to hit the instances.  The new version of Zul’Gurub has 5 bosses that you’ll encounter every time, plus one more from a choice of 4 additional bosses that you’ll see only if your group includes someone whose Archaeology skill is high enough.

In the far-away Ghostlands, the Zul’Aman instance makes its return as well.  Compared to the major overhaul of Zul’Gurub, there are fewer changes here from the original, but the mechanics of the fights have been updated to make sense for a 5-player group instead of a 10-player raid.

Both of these new and improved instances require a minimum average item level of 346 and offer rewards that are item level 353.  So they fit right in between the original Cataclysm heroic instances and the original Cataclysm raids.  There are also a variety of mounts available.

Happy Hunting!

Here’s the official Blizzard video for the new patch:

I haven’t yet done a lot of raiding on Romy at level 85. She’s geared well enough for it but my play hours just haven’t lined up with my guild’s raid times that often. Today, however, I did not one but two raids with the guild.

First up was Baradin Hold. Shortly after I had logged in on my paladin Alfred, the GM whispered me to say that “BH is up, switch to Romy“. So I did.

Baradin Hold is a relatively simple raid instance that currently has just one boss, Argaloth. One might think of it as the level 85 version of the Burning Crusade raid Magtheridon’s Lair, or the original version of Onyxia’s Lair. Unlike those older raids, BH has room built-in for future expansion.

I had done a few BH runs before but hadn’t gotten any gear as yet. Tonight was no different. We got Argaloth down, finally after a few tries including two where he was down to like 0.0001%, but I got no love on the loot side of things. I didn’t really mind though, because along the way I had figured out something very important regarding my primary talent tree.

Like most toons these days, Romy has dual talent specifications. One for Arcane and the other for Frost. The Arcane spec was nominally intended for raiding while frost was for instances and soloing. However, I’d never really been able to figure out how to maximize my DPS with the Arcane spec, so I was using frost for everything MOST of the time.  I was occasionally trying out the Arcane spec, but like I said I hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Until tonight.

The Mastery aspect to the Arcane spec is known as Mana Mastery, and it provides a mana boost to the mage’s damage output that is proportional to the amount of remaining mana. The more mana you have, the more damage is done.  However, Romy was not really benefitting from this much because in a big boss fight, I seemed to always be running low on mana.  I would use mana gems and Evocation to try to stay topped-off, but that didn’t quite do the trick and it took time away from doing damage.

It turned out the trick was to use Mage Armor instead of Molten Armor, as I had been doing before. I hadn’t really used Mage Armor for quite awhile but I was looking over the tooltips and noticed that Mage Armor includes really nice mana regeneration.  That’s something that Blizzard has added at some point since the last time I had used Mage Armor, and I hadn’t ever noticed it before. 

By switching from Molten Armor, you give up 3% crit chance, but the mana regeneration keeps your mana nearly full throughout an entire raid boss fight, thus maximizing your Mana Mastery damage bonus, and that more than makes up for the loss in crit chance.

I know it will seem obvious to many, but the choice of Mage Armor was never mentioned any of the times I discussed the arcane tree with other mages. And if it was ever mentioned on any of the various websites I’ve looked at, they must not have explained WHY they were using Mage Armor. After I figured this out, I noticed a noticeable boost in my DPS. I still have a ways to go, but I think I can now manage to be at least in the upper portion of the damage meter most of the time.

Later that evening I was back on Alfred again when the GM whispered me again, this time about killing trash mobs in a Bastion of Twilight raid.

As with Baradin Hold, I had done Bastion of Twilight a few times but had won no upgrades. However, this time around my luck was better and one of the first mobs dropped a lovely pair of bracers that found their way onto Romy’s wrists.

The first character I created in WoW was my warrior, Sunny. Normally when playing fantasy role playing games before WoW came around, I tended towards magic users of various types, but I decided to try something different. I enjoyed Sunny just fine, but after investing several hours and getting her up to level 10 or so, I decided it was time to revert to my old habits and so I created my second toon Romy, a mage.

I’m not sure if it was because I was back in familiar territory with a magic user or if it was because I was hitting the point where I more or less understood the basics of the game, but Romy quickly became my “main” character. It was weeks before I switched back to pay Sunny again.

When the Christmas after launch rolled around, I was sufficiently into the game that I had installed it on my laptop so I could play while visiting at my mom & sister’s house. I also wanted to show the game to my sister, as she had always enjoyed computer games. In fact, that year’s gift from me to her was a copy of Doom 3, which had recently hit stores.

After she ripped through Doom 3 in record time, she needed something new to play and so she picked up WoW. Romy was already almost level 40 and Sunny was around level 20, so I created a new paladin, Alfred, to use when playing together with my sister’s new toon. My sister and I played the game together often enough that before long, Alfred was my secondary toon and Sunny got stuck in third place.

Things stayed that way until all three toons had hit level 60. After that, I wasn’t sure which direction to go with Alfred. At that time, the Paladin class was much different than today. Paladin DPS was horrible, they were the least effective healing class, and they could only tank if the damage classes were VERY careful about their aggro. They were somewhat in demand but in most cases, their raiding role was to be a utility healer, group buffer, and maybe occasional off-tank. The real problem for Alfred was that there were usually plenty of main-character paladins waiting to take a raid slot.

Tanks, on the other hand, were always in demand and in those days a damage-oriented Warrior was the exception. I discovered that Sunny was often in demand to tank guild instance runs, and when other sufficient DPS classes were available, to serve as backup tank on raids. Before long she had jumped back into being my second place toon. Ok, maybe tied for second.

At least through the Burning Crusade content, I was reasonably diligent about keeping Sunny and Alfred reasonably close to Romy’s level. Romy always reached the level cap first and started raiding, but Alfred and Sunny would hit the same point reasonably soon afterwards and then would do instance runs and do whatever raid content was open to them.

When the Wrath Of The Lich King expansion came out, things were different. My long-time guild Cry Havoc had more or less started to implode, and many of the more hardcore players had left, and many others had either stopped playing altogether or had moved to the Horde side or even to other servers. When the expansion hit, there was no concerted guild-wide effort to level up and start working on the new raid content together as there had been for the Burning Crusade expansion. Those of us still playing mostly did it solo.

Romy was level 75 and I was still playing through the new content when other things going on in my life demanded my attention and I cut back on how much I was playing. For roughly 6 months or so, I played the game much, much less than I had been. I played for perhaps just a hour or two every 2 or 3 weeks instead of a few hours almost every day. Also, when I did play, I often worked at leveling some of my lower-level toons instead of working on getting Romy up to level 80.

When I started playing more regularly again, months later, Romy was still at level 75 and my main focus was hitting level 80. At that point, Sunny and Alfred were both still at level 70 and hadn’t been played for more than a few minutes since WOTLK had come out.

Almost immediately after getting Romy to level 80, I was asked to join a new guild called Overcome, by the GM, a former member of Cry Havoc. At that point, I was in catch-up mode since most players had hit 80 months earlier. As a result, it was quite awhile before I worried about any other toon besides Romy.

Eventually, I did work on Sunny and Alfred a bit, getting them to level 72 and 73, respectively, but then I more or less just concentrated on Romy and didn’t play the other toons at all.

Until a few weeks ago, that is. Romy had been at level 85 for a few months and was reasonably geared, so I decided to get Sunny and Alfred up to speed as well.

First to get some attention was Sunny, then at level 72. After getting her up to level 81 and started on Cataclysm content, I realized Sunny was a bit undergeared. She had only done a few instances since level 72 and had never done any raiding at level 80 so she was still in a mix of green and blue items, along with a few level 70 epics that still hadn’t been replaced. The obvious solution would normally be to do some dungeon grinding for better gear, but Sunny’s gear wasn’t even good enough to allow her to queue for random dungeons!

A trip to the auction house helped upgrade a few slots, but as I was contemplating how much I would have to spend to make further upgrades, I decided that I would work on Alfred for awhile. Alfred is a blacksmith and the thought was that he could make some gear that Sunny could use until she started getting some dungeon upgrades. But first i had to level him up enough to get some useful blacksmithing patterns. Like Sunny, I had not really played Alfred since the first month or two of the WOTLK era and at level 73 his blacksmithing had a ways to go.

Currently the plan is to take Alfred up to 80 or 81 and then go back to Sunny. From that point I’ll alternate between them every level or so in order to take best advantage of their “Rested” status. After that, who knows? I may work on my hunter, Starchaser, or maybe on my baby Worgen warlock Ailsandre.