When it rains, it pours

The past week has been a flurry of reforging, enchanting, gemming and juggling for +hit for me. Opening up a new GoH vendor, getting 4k Honour points back from Blizzard (when I hadn't expected to), having enough Valour points and having good luck with Firelands trash saw me pick up:

• Ranseur of Hatred
• Hide-Bound Chains
• Flamewalker's Tunic
• Lancer's Greaves
• 3 pieces of Honour gear

...all in the one week.

I'm pretty sure it must be because I gave up the PvP pants that dropped off Occu'thar to the correct hunter when the Master Looter mislooted them to me a couple of weeks ago.

Good karma FTW!

/petassist? More like /petconfuse

I hadn't really had too many problems with /petassist until recently, although I hadn't really liked the change to start with.

However, I've started to wonder if juggling your pet with /petassist might be possible new source of entertainment, because mine seems to do it a lot.

Seriously - has anyone managed to keep their pet bouncing between mobs but not actually hitting any of them for an entire raid trash pull? At least it'd make trash more interesting, if nothing else.

Casting Mis-HEAL-direct on ~Tank~

Has anyone else noticed that the current Misdirection animation sounds/looks like casting a heal?

I know it's a small thing, but I do play with game sounds and whilst it doesn't exactly put me off, it's still a little disconcerting.

Hope it's a bug and Blizzard changes it back; the old sound somehow seemed a lot more... decisive? More fitting, anyway - rather than the soothing sounds my druid makes when throwing a few HoTs up! :P

WoW's celebrity couple

I know his wife is dead, but seriously... why is it that the name "Mankrik" (or various spellings of it) must always appear somewhere in general chat?

Clearly, Hyjal is the new Barrens... but I suppose one positive thing is that Mankrik looks to have gotten over the death of his wife and moved on :P

(If you haven't seen why people keep asking for him in general chat, there's an Achievement)

Remember to Eagle Eye!

If you've been farming the new Firelands raid for rep - or even actually trying the bosses, if your guild is more organized than ours - remember that you can use:

/cast !Eagle Eye

...and you can chain cast Eagle Eye all the way down to the other end of the raid... meaning that merely standing at the start of the zone can get you pretty pics like this:

Now that's one cool-lookin' boss :)

Can't believe it's come to this

Naxxramas used to be the ultimate raiding experience.

40 people, top of the range computers to counteract the lag, split second timing, zero mistakes... if you weren't the most coordinated team, you weren't capable of doing it.

A few days ago, I joined an 8man PuG, supposedly to do Achievements.

We ended up failing (some people *really* can't handle Heigan or Thaddius), but a few of us continued on anyway. Someone DCed, someone left...

...and 6 of us ended up doing the entire of the Naxx military wing with no healer class.

No, not even a pally or druid tank - both tanks were warriors.

It's a little sad, killing the 4 horsemen without a healer. That encounter used to take 4 tanks and some epic timed swapping.

Then again... I suppose it's even sadder that we didn't manage to get any Achievements done with all 85s except Spore Loser, because someone (different!) failed each time. Seriously... who fails at Thaddius charges with only 7 people, Heigan dancing *before* the second phase, and controlling DPS on the 4 Horsemen?!

Catching up with old content

Among the list of things I've always meant to do and never got around to finishing are the Argent Tournament dailies for mounts and the Winterspring grind.

Yes, I do realize it's a lot less of a trial than it used to be, but anything that involves repetitive easy work in WoW doesn't tend to motivate me much.

With Firelands coming in soon however, any free time I'd usually have would be eaten up with Firelands content, so I thought I'd better do this stuff whilst I still can!

Can Haz Chromaggus

I went into Blackwing Lair recently with a guildie and came out with a new skin colour for Cerberus:

I have to say, duoing BWL with a boomkin is pretty easy - Razorgore gave us the most trouble, but the rest is pretty much a faceroll.

Some tips:

Razorgore: if your partner is controlling Razorgore, keep Mend Pet up to help grab aggro on all the mobs and stand just below the platform so that you can quickly pick up any mobs running towards the orb. I found using a tenacity pet in MM spec the most helpful; if you get low you can hit Chimera, but I mostly relied on traps. Staying in Aspect of the Fox helps to keep your Focus up - you don't really need the extra DPS Hawk provides.

Everything in between: Tank n spank. If you want to tame Chromaggus, just stand at max range and go for it; no tricks required.

Nefarian: Using an heirloom ranged weapon will completely negate Nef's hunter class call, so you won't have to worry about your bow breaking. In phase 1, it's easiest to let the mobs come to you and kill them all in a pile rather than picking them off quickly, so that in phase 3 they'll all rez in the one spot. Being in BM spec can be helpful for breaking you out of fears occasionally. Be mindful what each of your raid member's class calls are and act accordingly.

Now that's what I call a great raid

My guild, like many casual-friendly guilds that don't have a set 10 people for every raid, occasionally has trouble with consistency.

Even though we may have most bosses on farm status, we'll still wipe repeatedly to them some weeks, which seriously hampers our progression time.

Tonight, however, was the first time in awhile that I've felt we had a brilliant run - 5 bosses down in Blackwing Descent (including Atramedes, a new one for me because I missed our first kill), with most of those a one-shot.

I'm definitely looking forward to tomorrow night's raid - the Ascendant Council will hopefully go down, meaning we'd just have Cho'gall and Nefarian to go... and I'd really like to clear them before Firelands hits, just to say we did it before the nerfs kick in.

(And before anyone says "Sinestra", I think it'll be pretty difficult to get through an entire raid's worth of heroic mode progression to get to her before Firelands hits :P)

Achieving by AFK

I haven't been doing too much in WoW lately, because I've been busy IRL on non-raid nights.However, for the times I've been at home, I've managed to do work towards an Achievement even when I've been busy - Bloody Rare.

Basically, I park an alt in an appropriate location, occasionally coming back from being AFK to tap the keyboard so that I don't get kicked out of WoW... and with a little help from the NPCScan mod (yes, I've extended my addon list to a grand total of 3!), picked up the rares as they spawn.

I'm working on the Outland rares rather than the Northrend rares, because I think people are probably spending less time in Outland than Northrend at the moment, but I think when it gets to Loq I may have to park my hunter at the camp spot rather than an alt - that's one rare I'm pretty sure I won't have time to relog another character for!