Tree-doodle

Heroic Yorsahj: Oozes (the wordy version)

The strat that worked for us this evening:

Yellow, Blue,Purple,Green -- spread a bit, 4 yds. Easiest.

Purple, Yellow, Black, Red -- stand ON boss, two add spawns, Healing CDs

Green, Yellow, Black, Red -- stand ON boss, two add spawns, Healing CDs

Green, Blue, Purple, Black -- stack, adds (alternative: kill black and spread)

Yellow, Blue, Purple, Black -- stack, adds

Green, Blue, Black, Red-- stand ON boss, adds

Addon used for convenience:

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/yorsahjpriority

RED:

EVERYONE stand as close as possible on TOP of the boss. Not near him, ON HIM. The further away you are, the more damage you will take. When paired with Yellow/Black, be ready for healing armageddon. Healers and DPS with cooldowns, vocalize them and chain them to get through this. I would pop tranq, and once it was down, pally popped his. If we needed more, warrior popped rallying cry or feral popped tranq.

Adds will be beating on people, including healers or the DPS. If you have a DPSer continuously dieing, they may want to consider using a resist trinket such as Mirror of Broken Images (TB Trinket).

BLUE:
When you get your first blue, use mana cooldowns and slowly whittle the blue down to about 15%. Then, when the next oozes spawn, determine if:

• a) your healers are low on mana
• b) you have a blue in the next ooze spawn

If there is a blue in the next ooze spawn, WAIT on popping the current, low-health void until AFTER the new mana void has been created and is DONE draining mana--this will take a few seconds. Then, slowly whittle down the new mana void in time to renew your decision for the next set of oozes.

However, if you have a red coming and your healers don't need the mana yet, ignore the void. Trying to position yourself to be in range of a drifting void with red forcing everyone to stand on the boss will spell a wipe. If red is coming and you DO need mana, pop it ASAP and either hope you can get it down during the ooze-killing phase, or that your healers are in range to get the mana.

PURPLE:

If you've been prioritizing killing purple on normal, then this is going to be a "new mechanic" for your raid. Make sure all of your healers understand what this ooze does: it is ENTIRELY on them!

Use healing assignments and add the debuff "Deep Corruption" to your raid frames, making certain you can track the stacks. Do NOT stack up to 5 on any given person: stop at 4 stacks. Every heal you cast on a person (that you TARGET and CAST upon that person) will give them a stack. Additional HoT ticks, efflorescence, and similar will not add a stack count.

• Refreshing lifebloom counts as one stack, whether refreshed by LB or regrowth. Keep lifebloom rolling on the tank if you can; if not assigned to the tank's party, then I've heard a suggestion to roll it on a pet instead for replenishment purposes
• Personally, I avoided WG on this because I was worried it would add a stack to everyone, so I don't know how it is handled for certain, but I was quite able to heal my party without it.
• A single rejuv on a dps is very powerful; a swiftmend on them after, especially when they are stacked on the tank, provides additional healing to everyone.
  
• Swiftmend counts as its own stack; efflorescence does NOT cause a stack.
  

I think of Purple like it turns every raider into a water balloon. A water balloon filled with acid. Every heal I cast on them adds water to the balloon. Five fills, and it explodes in a shower of painful face-melting doom across the whole raid.

...blame my resto shaman alt, I've been casting too much riptide lately.

Good luck!

On Fangirls

As a female gamer, I am accustomed to being the odd one. I don't expect others to all like the same things I like, or be excited about the same things I am, or agree that something is as awesome as I think it is. Most people who don't follow the mainstream or pop culture are used to this concept. When we stop by a Burger King while still dressed up and on the way home from a medieval reenactment event (think Ren-Faire garb), we expect a few weird looks. When we talk Warcraft with some non-MMO friends, we don't expect all the others to be interested in how we pwned Deathwing last night.

This is why I've been a bit amused and baffled at my mother in law, recently.

She's a grandmother. A teacher. An all around warm and good woman. Enjoys historical fiction. Greatly disliked that my husband and I lived together before we were married. Had a few wary things to say about Harry Potter due to the "witchcraft," years ago. Very conservative.

When she became a fangirl to a pop-culture band, I was surprised: I certainly hadn't expected this out of her.

Trust me, when I say fangirl, I mean fangirl. This is an obsession, and she is way out of the targeted market but she's had an opportunity to meet them and write to them and be active on their facebook group and show very vocal support for them. It's certainly not the first time that fans have existed outside of a targeted demographic, but I certainly hadn't expected this one.

I don't think it's a bad thing. She's happy, she has something to be excited about and look forward to when getting home, and it's honestly helping fight depression. With economy as it is and socialization flowing more and more to an online setting (and she lives in a rural area), she has embraced a very positive way to have an interest.

Her choice isn't my personal cup of tea, but I am happy for her.

The problem?

She has not yet learned that it's okay for others to not be excited and infatuated about the same thing. That it's okay and quite normal for not everyone else to be waiting with bated breath for a movie release, or think that the movie is the best thing that has happened to the world.

All those years of her sons being excited over a new comic book or video game release, that perhaps she didn't want to hear about endlessly? The connection doesn't seem to have clicked. Whether it is us, as her family, or the strangers that she was approaching across the town to promote a release and beg they all come and see and agree with her and become huge fans themselves. She was crushed when some came, saw the movie, and said they didn't really think it was that great. As fandom does, some did agree, of course. But others didn't. And it is confusing her.

It's interesting.

I don't intend to post the actual topic she is fangirling, as that is irrelevant. It could be ponies or singing vegetables or a rap group and it wouldn't make a difference. I'd still have to be explaining to her over facebook how to take a screenshot on her computer and upload it :D

I support her being a fangirl for the joy that it is bringing to her life, even if I myself am not a fan. I just hope that she will make the connection that it's okay that we're not all as excited on the topic as she is, and that she'll learn the methods that the rest of us do when talking about our obsession with disinterested people: generally keeping in short and to the point, and understanding that they don't HAVE to like what we like, or understand WTF l334 5p34k is.

I do, however, find it infinitely amusing that my mother-in-law is an obsessive fangirl.

It's suddenly a whole lot easier to shop for her for Christmas ;)


(as a random note, I heard someone's grandparent was told that WTF stood for "Welcome to Facebook." I'm sorry, but that's just cruel and going to result in a LOT of confusion!)

Warning: H-Morchok bug

If you kill Korchom, Morchok does not immediately die. He still requires some killing.

And if you wipe...

You are counted as getting Morchok without getting loot or an achievement or valor points or anything. The instance leaves an empty Korchom corpse and just saves you to a Morchok kill.

....

Ticket time.

Flowchart: Yorsahj LFR

The LFR version of Yor'sahj the Unsleeping.

Ooze priority on it is the favored P > Y > Black, though some raids may opt for Y > P > Black if they think their healers will behave with a Blue/Purple combination :)



Seemed like the most important one to get up, and quickly. >_>

Yorsahj Ooze Priorities

When my guild ran through Dragonsoul last week, our warlock--known to us as Bob even though it's neither his name nor his character's name (mostly because we didn't feel like calling him Damorons, and it stuck even after he changed his character name)--had spent a lot of time on the PTR and had put together a quick guide for us on each boss. He then, essentially, lead the raid as we went through, as the one with experience on it.

Out of all the bosses, the one that truly baffled me even after having downed it was Yorsajh. Oozes, oozes everywhere, all colorful and complicated! AHHHH!

When I went and ran three LFR raids following our normal raid, I tried to get a better grasp of what those oozes do and their priorities, but it was still a bit of a foreign concept to me that I was struggling to comprehend. So, when we started talking heroic modes and that we'd be seeing FOUR at once (3 simultaneous buffs), and I was already feeling a flowchart was needed, I sat down in google docs and made one.

This involved a ton of research and comparison of comments and suggestions. Here are some places I studied:

• Icy Veins' guide
  
• Sumanhi's slightly different version of Icy Veins' guide (had more details on alternative combinations and strats to deal with them)
  
• Wowhead, mostly via the comments due to limited strat details on main page
  
• Wowpedia

(I saw Beru posted something too, using one of the priorities, but didn't get a chance to read that in detail because I was doing resto shammy research at the time. Will edit this with hers as well. As a side tangent, my shaman alt went resto for the first time ever yesterday, and... well, it's a work in progress :) )

So. Multiple suggestions on ooze priorities. Icy Veins even appears to have altered their original to reflect a different priority. And, it seems, no hint of what combinations to expect on heroic mode.

....

---

That said, here are the results of my search:

LFR
There are two different recommendations on ooze priorities here.

• Y > P > Black
  This priority avoids the combination of blue/yellow, instead resulting in a blue/purple. What this means is that the dps kills the void while there is little raid damage going out, and healers shouldn't need to be healing much. However, the healers need to understand not to spam fast heals on the tank during this phase; a single, slow-cast healer should be adequate.
• P > Y > Black
  This priority is for when you just don't want to risk the healers exploding everyone. In the case of Blue/Yellow, things will get nasty and your tanks need to swap quickly as their debuffs will build fast from the yellow buff, and healers will be OoM or low mana. Risk is loosing a tank.

Normal
Normal mode makes green pretty scary. You will want to get rid of it. Again, there are two different suggested priority systems here.

• G > Y > P
  This avoids a blue/yellow and a blue/green scenario, replacing both with a blue/purple scenario where, although the healers need to not be casting 5 heals on any one player, there is little damage going out. The healers need to understand not to spam fast heals on the tank during this phase; a single, slow-cast healer should be adequate.
• P > G > Y
  This completely removes purple (shadow) from the equation, but will have higher healing requirements due to the blue/yellow and blue/green situations.

Heroic
Where in normal and LFR it appears that there are only six possible combinations that will spawn together, I haven't found a list of possible combinations for heroic mode's spawns to be able to analyze the priority system. A tentatively suggested system is P > G > Y > Black > Red. Any further information on this would be very much appreciated :)

EDIT: Heroic version


Flowchart graphics are in the works, that include strategy to be used.

How kind of the Darkmoon Faire!

They provided us a litter-box!

Druid Chorus: "Lip Sync" Video

We didn't start the fire.

I greatly enjoyed this video for some reason. I think it's a cute idea :)



I found myself mouthing along at the chorus with the druid trio. So you can sing along too, lyrics:


Druid Chorus:
We didn't start the fire
It was always burnin'
Since the world's been turnin'
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Transmog: My Chosen Fashioncraft

I'm really enjoying the transmogrification feature of 4.3. While the "showing off" factor of sporting heroic t12 made me smirk when puggers dropped their jaws at their healer's gear, I didn't really like the look of it, and most of your time is spent in a mashup of mixed-color gear anyway while you work through bosses.

Now, I can at least match my gear to look like I am not a kindergartner who has insisted on dressing all by herself (the kind that wants to wear rain galoshes and a football helmet)... or completely forego the tier model and avoid looking like I'm decaying (t13 mushrooms). Instead... I am dressing as sailor moon with bird wings!

There have been elements of previous tier gear that I really liked, and revisiting their appearance, even in a mashup of tiers and expansions, is fun!

• Hat: Conqueror's Nightsong Headpiece (Ulduar)
• Shoulders: Passive Resistor Spaulders (BWD heroic)
• Chest: Obsidian Arborweave Raiment (Firelands normal)
• Gloves: Obsidian Arborweave Handwraps (Firelands normal)
• Belt: Firescar Sash (Firelands vendor)
• Legs: Kilt of Immortal Nature (Black Temple)
• Staff: Staff of the Plague Beast (WotLK Naxx) - I like the bit of Celtic design to it
  

Haven't decided yet what I will do when I pick up the spellpower dagger and offhand, but I like this look :) My alts, alas, don't have near as much gear to pick and choose between.