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Tradition to Skip

As completely charming as Christmas Eve ended up being…  yesterday ended up being very strange.  Granted the entire day wasn’t that odd, given that we got up super early to drive an hour to open presents with our great niece and nephew.  When trying to determine what we would get them for Christmas, my wife and I talked about our favorite parts of Christmas morning.  In both cases we remembered being super excited about what all had been crammed into our stockings.  I remember pulling out one magical thing after another that Santa had left for me.  So instead of a big gift, we opted to make them custom stockings jammed full of little treasures.  The funny thing is that the item that seemed the biggest hit was this little wall clinger octopus that we both remembered from our childhood.  You threw it up on a slick surface and it wriggled down slowly.  My nephew spent the better part of the morning throwing it up on the sliding glass door and watching as it jiggled its way down the door.

So I have to say that part of the morning was absolutely adorable, but from there we took a detour into strange land.  We went to Christmas lunch with a branch of the family that we don’t spend a ton of time with.  In part this was a good excuse to see the brand new child of our niece, and deliver our baby gift to them.  When we first accepted the invitation we had no really planned on doing the early morning thing, so we thought it might be the only time we would see my wife’s mother.  Honestly “our” family was kooky but just fine, it was when a bunch of people that must have been neighbors showed up that things cranked up to 11 on the strangeometer.  This large bear of a woman came in and upon seeing the baby asked the following question verbatim… “you feeding that baby titty milk?”.  My wife and I turned to look at each other… surely we did not actually hear what we thought we heard, but sure enough yup that is precisely what she said.

Moments later another woman came crawling in on the floor.   At first I had zero clue why this woman was butt scooting across the floor, but a bit later we found out that she had a wheel chair, but she just didn’t like to use it.  Thankfully at this point we had eaten, and we figured it was safe to slowly make our escape.  The new additions to the group all seemed exceedingly sauced, and reeked of booze.  I still don’t have a firm understanding in my head of who exactly they were, but in any case they made our normally insane family look normal for a moment or two.  So while this year has been a year of creating new traditions… I am not sure if that is one we will keep.  I really enjoyed the early morning with the kids, because Christmas needs kids to rekindle the magic each year, but I think we will skip the lunch.

Rejiggered Gladiator

Overall I have been pretty disappointed with my raid performance as a Gladiator, so over the last few days I have set about to tweak some things.  The largest change is that I am giving up on the Heavy Repercussions talent.  In order to make that talent work, you absolutely have to get 2 Shield Slams in during a Shield Charge buff.  I found it frustrating to try and cram them in, and often times fate conspired against me to only actually get one in.  In many ways it reminded me of just how unforgiving the Unholy Deathknight rotation was back during the Icecrown days, and if you missed the timing your dps went to shit.  Now I am moving to what seems to be the more reliable and more common Unyielding Strikes talent, and as such I have to rejigger my priorities a bit.  Additionally I fiddled with my glyphs and talents a bit after looking at some warriors that were parsing well in Highmaul.

Noxxic has been a bit wonky in the past with some of their guides, but based on the high parses I have seen they seem to match up pretty closely.  I seemed to be taking a lot of the “wrong” talents, the biggest of which was I was previously taking Bladestorm which seems to have limited use in raiding, but instead should have been taking Bloodbath which is a 1 minute cooldown damage cooldown, something that protection is sorely missing.  Even though I have already run LFR, I am more than likely going to run the first part today so I can see what my damage looks like against The Butcher fight.  My hope is that all of the tweaks I made will give me a more stable damage curve, and keep me from lagging behind the way I have been in overall raid damage.

Lodin Lives

Those who have been reading my blog awhile will know the tale of Lodin the Hunter, the character that I never actually intended to be my raiding main back in Vanilla.  Well with the recent round of hunter changes I have once again become interested in playing him, and quite honestly have been really enjoying it.  Last night I entered Draenor on Lodin and for the first time since Burning Crusade he is actually caught up and doing relevant content.  I never actually managed to level him to 70 back then, and during Pandaria managed to catch him up from 68 to 85, then finally with the launch of Draenor pushed him up to 90.  I used my spare engineering bits to knock him out a pretty sweet epic rifle that I am looking forward to him being able to use when he dings 91.  I’ve been spending quite a bit of time over this break hanging out on my laptop, and the hunter play style fits that perfectly.

Last night before the melatonin finally kicked in I managed to make it roughly halfway through the introduction sequence in Tanaan Jungle, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post and do my “Wizard Chores” as my guildies call the Garrison dailies… I am going to start working on him again.  I seriously would not mind him being my 3rd 100 of the expansion.  It feels fitting considering I am back playing Belghast, that I also dust off Lodin.  Since this is by nature a nostalgia ridden expansion, it only seems right to wallow in said nostalgia with some of my oldest characters.  I look forward to LFR with the Lone Wolf talent, but in the mean time I want to catch more awesome pets because lord knows Draenor has some awesome looking ones.  I am shocked an amazed that I am still having as much fun playing Warlords as I am, so hopefully it continues to last.

Brilliant Ideas

Last night my wife and I thought we had a great idea.  I was in Highmaul raiding until 10pm my time, and we thought after that we would pop out to Wal-mart to pick up the ingredients for all of the recipes we were going to fix today.  Normally speaking we avoid Wal-mart like the plague, but there were a few things we needed in addition to the normal grocery store fare.  Any store at this time of the year is sheer madness, but we thought surely by 10 pm the crowds would have lessened.  It seems like everyone had this same idea because Wal-mart was completely insane.  The entire time in the store there was this persistent “crowd” noise of hundreds of people chattering.  This was only perforated to the sounds of a wailing child… that went on for a good five minutes without stop.

The biggest frustration was the general state of disrepair the store was in.  We attempted to gather up the ingredients we needed but kept running into obstacles.  When I went to get crushed pineapple for example there were two women there fighting over the last few cans.  After listening to one of the workers it sounded like they were stocking the shelves and stuff was flying off before they could finish stocking.  The biggest problem was that nothing really made any sense as to where it would be located.  The two women fighting over the crushed pineapple… apparently missed the warzone that was the palette of various fruit fillings out in the main isle.  I had scrounged up four small cans hoping it would be enough…  when I stared down and saw an entire case of the big cans just sitting there out in the main isle.

Peaceful Oasis

Normally speaking the checkouts are the worst part of a trip to Wal-mart, but after having to navigate that obstacle course that was the store…  this time the check out line actually seemed rather peaceful.  We had quite literally just made a break for it, only having gathered up about half of the things on our shopping list.  The strangest thing about last night was the fact that so many people seemed to just be wandering around aimlessly in the store, without a basket or a purpose.  There was this pack of one adult and four teenage boys that didn’t seem to have any real mission other than always moving slowly in whatever isle we needed to go down.  My wife had to stifle several curses, so it was most definitely time to exit the building regardless of the results.  Reasors our local grocery store chain was also open 24/7 so we figured whatever we were missing we could hopefully get there.

Whereas Wal-mart looked like a chaotic post apocalyptic wasteland..  Reasors was a pinnacle of calm and order.  Every shelf was well stocked, there were no random cases of food blocking the isles, and the workers all seemed to have the grace of angels.  We should have come here first and completely ignored Wal-mart because they had quite literally everything we needed in large supply and with no land grabs in the canned fruit isle.  I have a feeling that as we go through the day today, we will need to make a trip out to get this or that thing we forgot… and in that case I am most definitely going to Reasors.  The biggest frustration last night seemed to be the death of common courtesy.  In Wal-mart there were a number of times where we would wait on someone to pass, or let them turn out of an isle into the main lanes.  Never once did anyone even acknowledge the fact that we existed…  let alone say “thank you”.  Sure we were just as stressed as anyone there, but we took the time to thank the people who showed us where something was or let us pass with our carts.

Highmaul Attempts

Last night was the only raid night we will have this week, with the holiday and such.  With that in mind we were hoping to at the very least clear all of the content we have been able to kill so far, and we managed to accomplish that.  In a single night we did Heroic Kargath, and then started in on Normal moe clearing Kargath, Butcher, Brackenspore, Tectus, and Twin Ogron.  We managed to clear all of this with plenty of time to put in a half dozen or so attempts on Ko’ragh.  The only fight we failed to oneshot was Tectus which still seems like a completely chaotic mess.  We are trying really hard to organize said chaos, but it feels like there is something we are either missing or that has not quite clicked yet on how best to move the melee group and the ranged group.  There were still several points where the melee could not engage the bosses because there was too much death swirling around on the ground.  We however pushed through and had a really good attempt allowing us to move on.

Ko’ragh on the other hand still feels confusing as hell.  We are starting to grasp the concepts, but have yet to quite figure out the best way to deal with the adds.  Last night we tried leaving the melee on the boss until the adds were gathered up on the tanks, but this seemed to be too much incoming damage for a single tank to manage.  I have a feeling that next week we will return to the melee wrecking the adds one by one as they come in.  In any case we keep getting further each time we work on it, so I have a feeling given a normal two night raid cycle we would have likely beaten him.  My biggest concern is that I feel like Gladiator dps is lagging behind what it should be.  The problem is I really don’t like the feel of fury this expansion, and I have a feeling that Arms is just as untenable as Gladiator seems to be.  Thankfully I have been leveling and gearing my Deathknight so if I have to switch characters to be viable for raiding… that is option as I am enjoying frost dps still.  Gladiator adds a lot of functionality that is nice to have, just fearing that there will be a point where it simply is not enough to make up for the lower dps.1