Every single week when someone pugs to zerg Sartharion for the drake mount I try to make sure I join in. It’s a fun mount that I wouldn’t mind having. Both the black drake from 10-man and the Twilight drake from 25-man. Sadly, the First 25-man version I did ended with the raid leader ninjaing the mount.

But yesterday night I did another zerg. Not only was I amongst the top 3 in dps, I was also the only one who survived! As I’ve made it through the exit and rolled on the drake and whatnot I cheer in raid chat “I survived! Woot!” a couple of the others point out “And you got the drake, you lucky bastard!” I hadn’t even noticed. I just naturally assumed I lost the roll. But I didn’t. I really did win.

I flew around circling Dalaran for at least 30 minutes playing with it. Even though I already have the red and bronze drake mount, and the albino drake on my tank, I still thought this particular one was better then all of them. Go figure.

Furthermore I joined an ICC 25-man pug. These pugs usually ends at the first wing since people tend to drop or ninjalog by the time we finish Deathbringer Saurfang. The resto shield of Lord Marrowgar -finally- dropped and I won the roll against another resto shaman with only SEVEN points. I was so excited, finally I didn’t have to farm for a new shield anymore.

I’ve been farming ToC 10 and 25-man every week to see if it would drop. Unfortunately, either the groups were so shitty they never made it to the bosses that drops the shield, or it didn’t drop at all. Frustrating to say the least. Especially since it’s one of the very few lower item levels I had that were starting to become obsolete compared to the content I was running. I had already been chatting about it on vent while the group was forming, so when I won the shield several people were almost as excited as I was, and one guy enchanted it for me on the spot.

And later today.. I’m healing the Lich King in 10-man. I’m hoping we’ll get him down, cause it’s an achievement I’ve been wanting to have ever since it got out, and this is one of my few opportunities before I go on vacation.

Wish me luck!

I’ve noticed a very peculiar coincidence. And I’m quite convinced it’s a pure coincidence.

I have 3 WoW accounts. One is on EU servers that I created back in 2006 when I first started playing. My Enhancement/Restoration Shaman has still not reached level 80 for a variety of reasons. One of which being that I didn’t reactivate that account until just recently after closing it down in 2007. It’s currently hovering at level 65 as I have yet to bother levelling it or.. buy Wrath of the Lich King for that account…

My two other accounts are on US servers. My main account there is with my toons in specific, obviously. The other account is with M’s toons that he levelled. He sadly got massively burned out and started playing Age of Conan instead. The traitor…

The coincidence I’ve noticed are as following, because of these three accounts I have three different emails attached to them obviously. NONE of these three emails receives any kind of “Blizz Spam”. And by “Blizz Spam” I mean those fake emails regarding upcoming expansion, betas, account suspensions and whatnot. My OTHER email account however, that is not signed up for any of that stuff just recently over the past week received no less then 15 emails telling me that

1) My account has been banned for 3 hours for buying digital gold, please click link to appeal.
2) A Faction change on a character is pending, please click link to confirm.
3) Blizzard has chosen YOU to participate in the Cataclysm Closed Beta, click link to confirm.
4) Blizzard has picked YOU to receive a new shiny pet no one else wants, click link to retrieve pet.
5) You have been banned for 72 hours from Aion (wtf, I don’t play Aion) for buying digital gold, click link to appeal.

It should be mentioned I found all of these emails in the one email account I have that does not have any wow accounts connected to it, and they were all located in my Spam-Folder were Gmail had been kind enough to automatically ditch them.

I did not click any links, I only hovered the mouse over to see which specific link it would REALLY take me to. And none of it belonged to World of Warcraft, Battle.net or Blizzard at all.

To never click any links should always be rule one when dealing with emails you’ve received. Even if Blizzard WERE to send you an email asking you to log in, you should always type in the address yourself in your web browser.

That being said, I bought an authenticator from the BlizzShop. I’ve attached it to both of my US accounts. It’s fully possible to have multiple accounts connected to the same authenticator. I remember this being something I was concerned about when I first purchased one. I didn’t really want to buy three seperate ones.
The further good news is that even if you’re in Europe playing on US servers you can still buy it from the EU-shop and use it for your US accounts and vice versa.

I’ve never been hacked though, and I’m quite happy for that. Not that my toons are superawesomely geared or anything. I’d just be very sad if something happened to my favourite hobby that I spend a lot of time on.

And to finish off, Magdeline is finally a Kingslayer. Congrats!

What used to be one of my greatest fears in World of Warcraft was pugging. Pugging is one of those fancy words that derives from MMO’s which means “Pick Up Group”. Basically, complete strangers are joining together to do something specific. One of the things you may notice with pugging is that you sometimes get the random people who somehow miraculously landed on level 80 with no clue on how the game works.

I still see multiple pug raiders every week who seems to think; “Standing in fire is good and will make me do more damage.”
Well, it’s not and it won’t.

Our guild didn’t do ICC 25-man because we had too few signups. As a result I ended up pugging it Monday afternoon just to make sure I got some additional badges and hopefully see more then just the first wing on the 25-man raids.

And you know it’s gonna be a bumpy ride when the raid leader who invites people asks for “furthest achievement” but doesn’t have one himself. You also know you’re gonna be carrying him because he has the lowest gearcomposition in there. On every single bossfight his damage was even lower than the tanks… that’s with the 30% buff.

I knew right from the start he had no clue what he was doing when I saw him on Lord Marrowgar. The strategy most commonly used is for dps and healers (unless you’re a hunter since they need space) to stay underneath the red hitbox of the boss to avoid the fire he creates and the two stacking tanks just goes left or right to step out of it. Thus minimizing the damage, but also making it very easy to to remove the “Bone Spike” that randomly happens to dps and healers. (Large spikes trapping 3 people. Needs to be destroyed so they’ll survive.) Our raid leader made sure to stand as far away from Lord Marrowgar as he could, only to complain that no one would break his Bone Spike when he got trapped. And he still wouldn’t move in with the rest of us even after I yelled “Move in, you retard!” twice in raidchat. I hate people who can’t take a simple message.

I had to sigh for myself when he came up with a ridiculous strategy for Lady Deathwhisper that made 24 other people point out “no, that’s not how you do it.” On Lady Deathwhisper you will have waves of smaller adds come out. Some needs to be taken out by melee as they are immune to magic, and some needs to be taken down by range as they are immune to melee. That sorta thing. Still, our clueless raid leader came up with the wonderful strategy of “Range on adds, melee on boss”. He was blatantly ignored after pointing out how wrong he was, and we managed to down the boss with just a few deaths.

Gunship Battle was a breeze. But that may also have something to do with it’s nickname “lootship”. A mage still felt the need to die for some reason. I have no idea why he jumped over to the other ship and started dpsing on the adds, but it sure enough killed him.

Deathbringer Saurfang.. ugh… There’s a fight I hate. The most important part of this fight is to make sure everyone gets in a good spot with a 12 yard range from eachother to decrease the “Blood Power” the boss will gain. Raid leader did a ready check as we were getting mana back up and then just out of the blue started the bossfight barely leaving us with time to get into position. We still downed the boss thanks to rather intensive healing since at least 10 of the people in that raid were frightfully allergic to their range- checker-box.

And for some reason, even though he was there as an elemental shaman, he felt the need to roll on Leather armor with agility on it. I checked what his off-spec was. It was restoration. And to be honest it really pissed people off he randomly rolled need on stuff that weren’t for the Mainspecc which he came in with. Not only that, but a really sweet healing trinket dropped. All five healers rolled on it of course, and then him. And then gave himself the trinket for whatever reason. Untill both I and several others pointed out that “hey, the resto shaman won that! And you don’t get to roll on healing stuff, you’re not a healer!”

I later sold the trinket to the other healing priest that was there. It was a really sweet trinket, but I don’t raid THAT much. And it’s not like I won’t do icc25 again. the priest was also the only one who was able to keep up on the healing charts next to me. The rest were just slacking off apparently since I was constantly around 20-25% overall healing at 4000-4500 hps. The holy priest was right next to me on the charts, and don’t get me started on how far below the overgeared druid and other restoration shaman was doing. Bloody slackers.

My friend asked me if he really had no idea what he was doing, to which I pointed out “I rarely meet good shaman players for some reason. It’s as if it’s too complicated for them to work it out.” Which is true, I don’t meet many shaman players who bothered understanding how the shaman works. And I find that really sad, because I worry other players will be given a bad impression of the class when infact it’s the player that’s the problem.