D/G and WoW - two of my favorite topics!

[sarea]

The authors for the D/G ficathon have been revealed, so I can finally link you guys to my story (for those of you who weren't following along the ficathon): After All These Years, written for anja_foley, rated NC-17.

I want to thank applecede and inkpuddle for putting the ficathon together; it's always a massive undertaking to manage something like this, so major props to them. :-) You can check out all the stories here. Seriously, there were some great fics written.

I'm too lazy to make a separate post on this, so I'm just going to cut it for disinterested parties. It's been awhile since my last WoW update (or it feels like it anyway), and something HUGE has happened in the last couple of days. Well, huge to me, at least!

Me, Tabithe (akscully), and Tracey (jade_okelani) have joined a raiding guild! Eeeee! It's called Emerge, and the name is a pretty good one-word description for the guild. It's not one of those hardcore established raiding guilds (Temporary Insanity, Black Templars, Titans of Kilrogg), it's just kind of starting out, and it's far more casual, but it's up and coming. They raid ZG on weekdays and MC on weekends.

What happened was, my brother left Angry Fishermen a week or so ago because he had found Emerge's recruiting post and made an application. According to him, the whole process was extremely anticlimactic. He posted on the application forums, and they were like, "I think we can get you in." He didn't hear from them, and then he pinged one of the officers in game and was like, "...So should I raid with you guys?" And Kills (who I think is the guildmaster) was all, "Welcome to the guild!" LOL.

Then at some point my brother asked me whether I PvPed for gear or for fun, to which my response was, "Both." He said that PvP gear was a good alternative to Tier 0 gear, but that putting in the same amount of time raiding will get you even better gear. Which is undoubtedly true, except a) I do have fun PvPing; and b) I've been wibbling for awhile about raid guilds and how they all seemed hardcore and all their raids start at times that are too early for me to attend, etc. There's also the fact that I play the game for fun, and it's WAY MORE FUN to play with friends. So I'd want it to be a guild that could take me, Tabithe, and Tracey.

I asked my brother a few things about Emerge, and was pleasantly surprised by what I heard, that they were new to the big raids, kind of casual, started at a reasonable time, etc. Their recruitment post said that they needed 3 hunters, 3 mages, and 1 priest (among others), so he asked on the recruiting boards how they felt about the three of us joining as a bloc. There was a fairly enthusiastic response (which he was kind of bitter about, considering his own lukewarm reception haha), mostly because we're girls, and also because Tracey and I PvP with a few people from the guild. So, we're now in!

The weird thing is that if you read Emerge's recruitment post, they're looking for raiders, and their casual spots are filled. There's a small group that consists of the Raiding Team, and the rest of us are the Casual Team, who might occasionally get spots in raids. It'll be like that until these instances are on farming status. However, in reply to my brother's post, an officer said, and I paraphrase, "I'm good with this as long as they're nice people and understand that they won't necessarily be raiding all the time." Not sure about Tabithe, but that is *perfect* for me and Tracey. We don't want to raid all the time. It's just weird that they're supposedly recruiting raiders, and yet the reason we got in was on the grounds that we wouldn't be raiding. O.o I don't get it at all. But like I said, I don't mind. I'm still trying to get my goal rank (am 82% into rank 9, so it's sooooo close!). And by the time the instances are on farming status, their experience can make up for my n00bness, and I will probably have a better chance at the drops because everyone else will be outfitted already.

It's such a trippy and cool thing to be in a guild that a) has their own Vent; b) has an organized site in which raids are scheduled, and you sign up for them. (Each raid gets broken down into classes and how many of each they want.) So far I have signed up and gotten into: UBRS (this Sat.), Molten Core (this Sat. after UBRS), and Strat (this Sun.). I can't do the ZG runs on the weekdays because I don't get home in time.

Tabithe and I got attuned to Molten Core for the first time ever, the other night. We have NO CLUE what we're doing. I don't know what quests I need, or anything. I've never been to UBRS. So any and all advice would be welcome.

It's also such a catch-22: We have barely any fire resist gear. Tab has none, while I have my priest trinket from DM, and these bracers that dropped the other night during the attunement run. According to Byron priests don't need that much, but that's not the general consensus. Anyway, the catch is that doesn't a lot of FR gear drop in MC itself? Yet how can I survive it and kill stuff without wiping if I don't have any FR gear? Troubling. Very troubling. And it's like, don't I lose a bunch of other stats with FR gear? So which should I opt for, FR or intel/stam/whatever???

Meeting corianderstem tonight at Rikki Rikki for her second try at sushi. Yum!

Comments

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't be needing fire gear, being a priest. You'll want some for the Ragnaros fight, but I don't know how far Emerge is in MC. You'll be hanging in the back and healing and dispelling, mainly.

What you really want is a huge mana pool and a huge spirit pool. When you get to the big fights in MC, they can take time. Spirit is necessary to get mana back. BWL has fights that are scripted to last 10 minutes or so, so you can see that mana recovery and mana conservation is KEY there.

That said, Ruana's doing MC as a druid with a set of greens and blues mainly gotten from the little end-game instances (Strat, Scholo, Dire Maul, UBRS). I even have a cloth belt I may be equipping which is +42 to healing spells. (there is a lot of discussion as to whether or not +healing is better than +int. You'll have to decide what's right for you. If you can save mana by having over +500 healing and using lesser versions of spells, it may be worth it.)

If Emerge is up to Ragnaros, then find out from their main priest what he/she recommends, and then start getting groups together to go farm what is needed. FR gear is necessary for that fight - for everyone, even those hanging back and healing - and also for Onyxia.

Take screenshots! I want to see someone else's view other than mine!

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

THANKS for the advice. Whew! I have totally noticed that +healing makes a huge difference to me. So I'll have to play around with gear a little bit in PvP to see what works best. The thing is that I spend most of my time PvPing and not raiding, so I haven't even done the 'little' instances much. And hence don't have the gear that drops from those places. :/

I am not really all that familiar with MC or the bosses at all. From our news page, it says: "Congratulations to all! Lucifron and Magmadar are dead!" So how far is that?? Where's Ragnaros after those? We're also supposed to keep working on getting attuned to Onyxia. I think the first step there is Warlord's Command?

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

Re: Onyxia chain - yes, warlord's command is first. I can't give you advice about that, alas - the quest is still sitting in Ruana's quest log. Though Iron Circle has told me they'd help me out.

The first boss you fight in Molten Core is Lucifron. The second boss is Magmadar, and he's right by Luci. I don't know the specific order, but once Luci and Mags are down, you head next to Gehennas, Garr, Baron Geddon, Shazzrah, Golemagg, and Sulfuron Harbinger. Beyond them is Majordomo, and then Ragnaros. You can find out more about them here or by googling. :)

Also, any notes about OOC Rezzing in any of the guides you read are wrong. With the mini-patch in 1.9.3, they removed the possibility of OOC Rezzing during boss fights. Once someone in your party engages a boss, the entire ZONE is in combat. Even someone sitting just past the zone-in point, waiting for a summon, is in combat. Which means, amusingly enough, if the raid wipes, the boss will then come all the way to the beginning to kill the poor person waiting for the summons. heh

The main thing to do is ask, really. And listen, of course. :) Find out who your main healer is and ask him/her for advice. Make sure you have CTRA, aka CT_RaidAssist, as I'm sure that will be needed. They may also want you to have a mod called Decursive, or to have the decurse utility in CTRA configured. This will make sure that you can dispel the magics that get cast by bosses easily (Decursive lets you bind it to a key for one-button dispelling, though I've found it to not always work, even if people are within range). There are some fights where your main concern will be dispelling (Lucifron is one of those, he has a magic debuff that it's important to get removed right away. Mages will also be doing a lot of decursing during the Lucifron fight. Druids are usually main healers at that point, with the possible exception of one or two priests.), and since they raised the cost of dispelling/decursing, you need to really watch your mana during those fights.

Iron Circle's main tank is a woman - Uthilia, and her husband is their main priest, Blackrazzor. :) Uthi recently got her Quel'Serrar thanks to the big high-end raiding guild on our server and her IC friends who bought the Foror's Compendium. The raiding guild contains a former IC member who is still friendly with IC, and also contains the main shaman-healer's boyfriend, so they were nice enough to hook her up and bring her along on an Onyxia run to get it made.

Also, you probably will have a channel set up just for healers, so that they can talk to each other. We have ICHealer, and we use it to let folk know when healers are dead, oom, or when a healer's been silenced and needs to be dispelled to remove that. The main priest also has his macros telling us what to do.

Take a look at my pictures from our three trips, here, here, and here in chronological order. :)

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

They're going to do Luci and Mag tonight, which I am not scheduled to do, and then tomorrow they're tackling the rest. ATM I have a total of +20 FR. *facepalm* I have volunteered to give up my spot if a healer with better FR gear wants to go, however.

What's OOC Rezzing? (That's a term I haven't heard before, so of course what I'm thinking of is "Out of Character Rezzing" which makes no sense at all LOL.)

At least I do already have CTRA. Find it invaluable in the battlegrounds, as a priest.

I also had Decursive at one point, but after 1.9 it was hosed for awhile. I had heard rumors that they weren't going to fix it, but I just checked Curse Gaming and it looks like it was updated after all, so I'll be sure to get that again.

Iron Circle's main tank is a woman - Uthilia, and her husband is their main priest, Blackrazzor.

That is so cute! I could never be a tank, too much pressure. Though priests aren't exactly pressure-less, I guess.

Thanks again for all the advice/links/etc. It all sounds incredibly complicated. Do you guys use vent? We do, so possibly the whole communications thing will be solved from that? Of course, there will be so much going on that it might become more a jumble of nonsense, if the healers are talking and the DPSers are talking on top of them. :))

I wish some of your pics showed the ICHealer stuff, just to see what the raid chatter is like when there's a boss fight going on. :P

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

Out of Combat Rezzing. What people would do would be to have a pally or a priest stay far enough away from the boss that they'd not be pulled into combat, and close enough to rez people when they died. This allowed the fight to continue, with the newly rezzed people eating and drinking and then going into combat.

We use vent, but not everyone can use it, so we do a lot of typing in raid chat. Mainly vent is used for the raid leaders to talk to the rest of us, so we don't tend to talk in vent, just listen. The main people who talk in vent are our raid leader (a rogue), our raid puller (hunter), and occasionally the MT or the MH. We also have our lead shaman who's connections brought us to this vent server, and she occasionally pops in. The puller will use it to get everyone their targets for a multi-tank pull (like the corehound packs), and to let everyone know he's pulling, etc.

As for raid chat, the ICHealer channel during the boss fight is pretty quiet. We're very busy healing! *laugh* If you look at the luci-down pic, you can see the blue ICHealer chat on the left, where I say I'm dead and others say they're OOM. Also, the greeting Magmadar with a hearty hello has more ICHealer conversation, including macros from our MH.

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

Oh, and did I mention our MT in Emerge is a girl? Both char and in RL. I think that's pretty cool! ;)