Ring of Blood and Gorefiend

As I've mentioned, the raid on Thursday was cancelled with a lot of notice. So because we had a fair amount of raiders hanging around, we hit the Ring Of Blood quests. This was mainly for gold; each quest paid almost 11 gold, but I also had my eye on the Mag'hari Fury Brand to add to my Enhancement set.

Total chaos is all I can say; total and utter chaos. There were 2 other groups at the ring trying to do their quests. I was in a group with a Bear tank, hunter, dps warrior and ret paladin. If you've not done this quest line, it's a lot of fun. You rock up to Gurgthock the goblin, who stands next to the ring, and accept a quest to fight a certain boss; this triggers the boss to appear in the ring and off you go. Once you kill the boss, you hand in to the troll standing next to the goblin, then you're ready to talk to Gurgthock again to fight the next boss. If someone else is fighting the boss you can't talk to Gurgthock. Once you can talk to him... its a bun fight to be the first so you get a crack at a boss.

So each tank from 3 groups would try to talk to Gurgthock first to get their boss in the ring; when the boss appeared he'd find himself being attacked by all 3 groups, and we'd have random by standing Ogres to deal with too. When I was too slow with handing in the quest, a member of my party would start the next boss before I was on that part, so I didn't get credit and we'd have to do it all again. Total chaos. The hunter would also periodically pull aggro and then have to feign death; sometimes he would get away with it and sometimes he would get hit and would need a heal. Hunters - if you have a threat meter, feign death before you pull aggro!

Eventually we prevailed and the offhand was mine. Looking to cause more trouble in Outlands, we hopped on over to Shadowmoon Valley to help out an Ancient Shadowmoon Spirit divine the location of one Teron Gorefiend. The mission: recover Gorefiend's armour. The method: kill Vhel'kur. The madness: Rather than wear my Spectrecles, I kept my healing helm on instead so I couldn't see the dragon attacking anyone. Luckily I could still heal and even more luckily once we'd finished him off I could equip the Spectrecles and then loot the corpse. Unfortunately because I couldn't see Vhel'kur's health, I popped Bloodlust just as he died. Oops. I learnt in this fight that Earth Shielding a mad mage who is bound to pull aggro is a very good idea indeed. Once I'd handed in the quest and made a colossal mistake (damn you Gorefiend!), I was left with some helm choices. I'll probably take the Shamanistic Helmet of Second Sight because I've somehow signed up to Karazhan as DPS so I'll be needing some socketed items to put spell hit gems in. The Spectracles quest line is a really fun one, full of some cool lore. It's just a pity I won't be able to kill Gorefiend, but Chief Apothecary Hildagard did say "Should you ever find Teron Gorefiend". Gorefiend's exact wareabouts are unknown to me, I suspect he is in the Black Temple but I'm not going to verify that any time soon.

I am finding that having the ability to heal groups for 5 mans and quests is very useful; we can put together a group if a tank is around because there are usually a lot of DPSers online, and therefore I can get all those annoying group quests done without too much trouble.

Obligatory BRK-style post

3 AV wins and Kam has an Olympic pet!

If I could have a Shaman flying mount it would be...

What with the Death Knights possibly getting their own custom flying mount and the Druids having the cool chicken form, I got to thinking, what would a Shaman use if we were to somehow be blessed with our own class-specific flying mount?

Shaman worship the spirits through the four elements and are the conduits through which their power flows. Shaman borrow power from the elements, requesting the elements come to their aid, in such a way shaman have agreement from the elements to hear the shaman's call.

So a good flying mount, lore-wise, would be if a Shaman could call upon the power of the Wind to help them get from place to place. This could actually be in the form of some sort of large wind elemental which the shaman rides upon, perhaps looking like a chimera but made out of clouds.

Our Shaman could have a series of exciting challenges to go through to learn of and tame the power behind such a mount, cumulating in getting the mount itself. In other words, a honking big quest line. I love big quest lines; the lore, the sense of being on a journey, the endless pestering of guildies to come help.

If you want to ignore lore, game-wise something like a frikkin' great big dragon made out lightning and smoke would be awesomely cool, but I'm not even going to attempt to draw one of those. Or even more graphic-card intensive, a smoke monster such as that on Lost which actually shifts forms between dragon, giant snake, etc as you are flying. Not going to happen, I know Blizzard's graphics design department would have a migraine with that one.

As I have hunter and warlock alts, I could also dream up some mounts for them too, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. So come on...

Raid cancelled due to low turn out

Oh dear. I was signed for the Karazhan raid on Thursday which was due to start at Attumen, as healer-specced, but because we only had 9 signups, the raid was cancelled. The Bear, our venerated raid leader, has made the ruling that if we don't have enough sign ups by the time the raid list goes up, the raid gets cancelled. This is to avoid pestering people in guild chat to fill slots; we aren't a raiding guild so we don't pressure anyone to raid and it was felt that such pestering was causing pressure and potentially problems. That and the Bear was pestered solidly during work to cancel raids and finally relented and made such a rule.

Only having 9 sign ups on the first night of Karazhan is an unusual situation. A few months ago we would have 12-14 people signed up and the headache would be fitting them all in across the week. However, the summer has hit and although we don't have many students in the guild, we do have a lot of parents.

Because children don't need to get up early to go to school, during the summer holidays their bed times tend to slip later and later; no parent would pass up the chance to have a bit of a lie in after all. This means that a previously-attainable raid start time of 8:30 suddenly is slap bang in the middle of putting the kids to bed. The result is parents can't sign up for raids any more and have to log in later and do dailies and other grindy stuff.

So it's school holidays which seem to be having an impact on our raiding schedule; people have a load of alts they want to take into Karazhan so we are not short of signups, just those critical last few. For me, it may be some time before I can get into Karazhan healing, so I've signed up for the end-of-kara tuesday run as DPS. I'll find out tuesday lunchtime whether I'm successful or not.

Most Outrageous Guild Applications

This is a Blog Azeroth shared topic suggested by Cathmor. Well ok maybe these apps are not outrageous but amusing. Here are a couple of the strangest ones we've had in the sleepy world of our little guild.

My pet is revolting

This first application appeared shortly after we did a run with another guild where a Ravager pet managed to out DPS one of their rogues.

Application Fluffykins - class ravager - melee dps

Can't see a pro forma to fill out so a little info about myself. I have limited experience raiding Karazhan, SSC and wiped on Tempest Keep. I am 1 month old and accept I need to work on my stamina. Happy to respec as needed.

I believe I can adequately compete with rogue dps based on my raiding experience.

Would love to join in my own right instead of my hunter master taking all the credit for my dps. Happy to accompany you on heroics as a trial member if that is as you wish. Unfortunately due to Blizzard's oversight for my class I am unable to earn my own rep for factions, but as a side effect do not seem to suffer from not being keyed for instances, so I guess there are some good aspects to it.

Hope to here from you in game, Your sincerely, Fluffykins

Hiding in the system

This application came from someone who wanted to remain as anonymous as they could:

CHARACTER NAME:<Removed>
CLASS:paladin
CHARACTER LEVEL:35
TALENT SPEC:ret
KEYS: (Heroic keys/Kara)none on this char (yet) lol

Personal info:
...

IS THIS YOUR MAIN?:No this isn't my main. I would rather not mention my mains at the moment in case <main guild> have spies checking on applications to other guilds, but if you wish to know who they are, you could whisper me or ask <members name removed>, who incidentally I have been levelling my pally with his pally.

However both our guild and <main guild> are using Guild Portal, so when he posted using his guild portal account, GP helpfully put a link on the post to see his account details. Which lists all of his characters. In all guilds. It didn't take too long to figure out who his mains were. Let's hope <main guild> don't have spies checking.

DPSing The Black Morass

Because our raid leader has dictated that we must be Karazhan keyed in order to raid, I have been on the key chain for a month or so. Having got key fragments 2 and 3, wednesday was the big push to get through The Black Morass and get the Master's Key. Unfortunately we had a Resto Druid along for the keying, so I strapped on my rusty Elemental DPS gear and tried to keep up with the Hunter and Mage, while Medrare tanked.

I've seen Elemental Shaman do this thing before, so a quick rewrite of my totem macro later, I'm running Wrath Of Air, Strength Of Earth and Mana Spring Totem, for the spell damage, extra mana and, erm, well the Earth totem school is somewhat underwhelming so extra strength for the druid. Occasionally Tremor Totem for the fearing adds. From what I've read on Elitist Jerks, Lightning Bolt spam with a Chain Lightning thrown in when its off cooldown is the way to go, so that was my spell rotation. Finally, because we were not crowd controlling anything, I liberally sprinkled the swamp with some Searing Totems.

The result was indeed a dead Black Morass, Medivh was saved and ... the Orcs invaded enabling them to raze much of Azeroth. Although apparently this causes the unification of the humans into the Alliance, enabling Azeroth to withstand the Burning Legion invasion. So that's ok then. In a strangely Brannon-Bragga-esque twist, I gave Khadgar's key to Medivh who kept it to give to Khadgar in the future, whereas I was given Medivh's personal key.

Unfortunately a Resto Shaman masquerading as an Enhancement Shaman with some reasonable gear did less damage than the tank. Oops. Oh well, now Kam is keyed for Karazhan and can get started healing in some of the lower (and easier) parts.

What you need to know about Shaman

This is a response to a Blog Azeroth shared topic suggested by Aos. Which is quite late, but there you go.

• Stick together team. Chain Heal is the most awesome of spells I have. When the party all takes damage together I would much prefer to fire off a couple of CHs rather than have to single-target heal every one of you. But CH has a limited range, 5 yards according to WoWWiki, so ideally the melee would be stood next to the tank and the ranged DPS would be stood together. This isn't always possible in some fights though (Curator springs to mind) which may make them a total pain to heal.
  
• Earth Shield is ace, so ask for it. Earth Shield is also an awesome spell, providing enough healing to keep a tank topped off on most 5 man trash. I do use the Earth Shield Tracker mod, but sometimes I might forget. So tanks, if it's not up before a pull, please ask.
  
• Totems have a range. I do have Totemic Mastery so the range of my totems is 30 yards. But that's still 30 yards, so please don't run off out of their range if you want to benefit from their lovely buffs. Without this talent it can even be 20 yards. Which leads to...
  
• Totems need to be taken up and put down. Because totems have limited range and they don't move, generally in an instance I'll need to take them up and put them back down. Even tho I have a super-nifty macro to drop totems, it still needs 3-4 seconds to get all 3 totems down, so please wait for your totems before pulling.
  
• Shocks have a 6 second shared cooldown. Shocks are on a 6 second cooldown, shared across Earth, Frost and Flame Shock. So if you want one... ask and don't be surprised if the others are missing. If I have to Earth Shock the shadow priest on Moroes, she won't also be getting a Frost Shock to slow her movement. Elemental shaman with 5 points in Reverberation will have a 5 second cooldown.
  
• Nature's Swiftness. I have one emergency heal every 2 minutes. So if you hear I've used Nature's Swiftness, try to be careful out there for the next 2 minutes.