Big Red Devilsaur: Back to Arms!

C wut I did thar?

A majority of the weekend was spent reformatting Laeyla’s computer and getting everything back to normal with the help of Kwata and Lennore who were nice enough to come over around midnight and hang around until about 3am.

You can read her latest blog post over at Blog of Light to learn all about the aftermath and what has been fixed so far, so I won’t re-write what has already been written about.

We took a little bit of a break last night and went out for sushi with Lennore and Cristibelle, hopped online and chatted with some guildmates to keep them updated on the situation and I played around on my Warrior and Hunter a little bit.

Did anyone else notice the change to the BoA shoulders? They now also give 10% more XP for quest turn-ins too! That’s awesome and thankfully I have about every set of them >.>

I had left my Warrior alone for a bit because I’m at the dreaded level 30+ gap and despise STV so to make things go faster I went back to Arms and hit 34 last night. One more level and I can head over to Duskwallow Marsh until about 40 or so and then it’s a fairly easy grind to 58.

I only logged on to my Hunter to see how close I was to 61 (not even close) but someone advertised in Hellfire’s general chat that they were looking for a DPS for Ramparts so I went. The tank HATED my Devilsaur because it’s “too big and noisy” but hey.. I’m BM.. and I love my Devilsaur.

I dinged 61 inside and then a fellow guildie/blogger logged on to her 62 Priest to run Ramparts and invited me along. We did Ramparts and Blood Furnace and I’m about 2 bubbles from 62 at the moment.

Hopefully Laeyla starts to get some of her gear back this week and we can go back to raiding this weekend. Given the circumstances, I’d feel like a complete douche raiding while her characters are naked and she’s bored out of her mind so until her account is back to normal I suppose I’m on “raid break”.

To Life Tap or Not to Life Tap – The Destruction Warlock Dilemma.

If you’ve been following Elitist Jerks or Warlock’s Den, you’ve probably noticed that the latest 3.1.2 simulations have 0-13-58 at the top of the DPS heap. You might have also noticed that the recommended glyphs do NOT include Glyph of Life Tap.

According to recent simulations and theorycrafting, Destruction Warlocks that invest points in to Improved Soul Leech do not Life Tap nearly as often as any other Warlock spec, making Glyph of Life Tap less appealing.

The misconception about the glyph is that it should be refreshed every 20 seconds to have a 100% uptime on the additional spellpower but that is actually NOT the way to do it at all. Life Tapping every 20 seconds is actually a DPS loss, even with 4T7.

You Life Tap when you need mana and benefit from the buff but no more, no less.

This is where we hit a wall as a Destruction Warlock. Having Improved Soul Leech means we will be Life Tapping a hell of a lot less than any other Warlock spec, thus getting less of a benefit from the Life Tap glyph.

Making sense?

When 3.1.2 hits and you Destruction Warlocks (myself included) rejoice in being at the top of the heap, take a look at your glyphs and consider using Glyph of Conflagrate, Glyph of Immolate and Glyph of Incinerate over Glyph of Life Tap.

The debate right now is between Glyph of Immolate and Glyph of Life Tap. Some Warlocks feel that Immolate or Incinerate glyphs lose their viability to Life Tap because you get no benefit from them while mobile.. which is a valid concern if you were a Warlock NOT specced in to Improved Soul Leech because you’ll be Life Tapping much more frequently, thus getting more benefit from the Life Tap glyph.

Keep in mind that simluations run using the best gear & enchants but are usually pretty accurate predicting the highest DPS specs and so far 0-13-58 w/ Improved Soul Leech using Glyphs of Immolate, Incinerate & Conflagrate is king. We’ll see, though.

Original source for this information can be found here.

Blog of Light was hacked..

She lost everything she’s worked for over the last 3 years..

Our guild bank was robbed..

——————

After getting a tiny bit of sleep (emphasis on tiny bit), I wanted to elaborate on last nights fiasco.

Around 230am Laeyla and I drifted away from our computers and talked about the guild merger and other things WoW-related for a little bit. Around 3am she went back to her computer and realized that she had been disconnected from the server and attempted to log back in.

At the same time, I was out in the living room letting our dog outside before bed when I heard her muffled yelling coming from the other side of the apartment but had no idea what it was about. This isn’t something out of the ordinary since our PC’s are in seperate rooms and it’s something I normally hear while she’s on vent with her friends laughing and causing a ruckus.

Earlier in the night I had asked her to set an alarm on her cell phone for 730am to wake me up for work in case I passed out on the couch watching TV and I went in to her room to make sure she did it. This is around when she told me that her password was no longer working and explained the same thing to her friends on vent.

*Let’s do the time warp agaaaaiiiin*

Rewind a few weeks back. To my recommendation, she had downloaded Deadly Boss Mods from WoW Matrix and her computer started acting a little abnormal. Brutal lag, disconnects, crashes, pop-ups, the whole 9-yards. We thought it was just a virus contracted through a music lyrics website since those are notorious for containing them, so we downloaded Malwarebytes from their website and ran a quick scan.

On the first quick scan it picked up 58 infected files all over her computer and the problems slowed down a lot.. but 2 days later they started picking back up. Every time she scanned her PC it would find more stuff even after deleting and quarentining the infected files and running full system scans combined with running CC Cleaner and Ad-Aware’s most recent updates.

We still just figured it was a virus because it had been going on about 2 weeks and nothing was compromised but all of a sudden her password had been changed for WoW. We started to put 2 and 2 together and we’re assuming the version of DBM she picked up from WoW Matrix must have been infected with a keylogger.

Sorry for the trip in the “way back machine”, but I’m in the writing mood and wanted to explain the events in detail.

The first thing I did was go to Worldofwarcraft.com and try to change her password but received an error that her password had been reset too many times recently and that she needed to contact their Billing Dept. I logged in to her registered email and discovered 2 emails, 1 at 2:09am and another around 2:30am confirming password changes.

It boggles me how easy it is to changed your password with a multi-billion dollar company like Blizzard. You log in, click change password, provide the old password and you’re done. No email saying “are you sure?”, no security question, nothing.. just “thanks for paying us $15 per month!”

I don’t blame Blizzard for her catching a keylogger. It’s not their fault. I’m just bitter and unhappy with their lack of account security.. but anyway, I digress.

After changing her passwords on my computer, I logged in to my WoW account to notice her characters logging in and out.. in.. back out.. back in and it made my stomach cringe a bit. If you played with us you would know that Laeyla is a packrat and VERY good with money so I could only imagine what they had taken.

I mounted up and headed over to the Vae Victus guild bank to notice that everything from Silk Cloth and Tigerseye to WOTLK enchanting mats, meats, eternals and gems had been taken out. Outside of myself, the limit for gold withdraws is set to 10g and they had managed to take out 10g on her Hunter and Mage before Telkire (the author of Only One in Color) removed all of Laey’s toons from the guild.

Over vent I could hear her friend Hid saying that he was standing next to her Paladin in Dalaran and that she was only wearing half of her gear and a badge-reward shield from Burning Crusade before they logged her out and logged on to her bank that was in Undercity, which is where I was at the time.

I rode back up to the mailbox to see her level 5 Warlock bank toon most likely mailing all of stolen goods to a gold farm character before logging out again. They repeated logging in and out of her various characters for about 45 minutes before it stopped for a bit and it crossed my mind that maybe they had logged over to her old Alliance characters back on Silvermoon.

I logged out and back in to my Human Shadow Priest who was docked in Shattrath and noticed that they were logged in to her old main, her Draenei Mage. This was her old raiding toon and she busted her ass gearing it up. I noticed they were in Stormwind so I ported over and stood next to her toon while they vended her gear, piece by piece in the Inn before heading to the mailbox and logging out. They logged back in to her Alliance bank toon and I’d had enough so I logged out.

I woke up for work around 745am and she told me she got an email from Blizzard saying they believe her account had been compromised and that she’d receive an email with more information but as of now she hasn’t gotten it (checked spam folders, etc.).

My plan after work is to pick up a copy of Windows XP Professional and reformat her computer and do what I can to help her get her stuff back but I’m pretty sure our options are limited without talking to Billing, etc., so we’ll see how things turn out.

Most people that get hacked usually get their stuff replaced within a week or two so I guess all we can do is wait.. and wait some more, hoping Blizzard will replace all of her stuff on all of her toons, not just a few items here and there.

Wish her luck!

Longest Naxx-10 Run EV4R!!1!

So I stuck to my guns last night..

I went home, logged in, did the Dalaran fishing daily and all of the Hodir quests, dropped Herbalism and picked up Enchanting.

…

The market on Sisters of Elune sucks so bad for lowbie mats!

20g per stack of Strange Dust? Seriously? Eff that noise! I plowed through Ragefire Chasm, DE’ing the greens and using the cloth to craft as many Brown Linen Robes as possible and ended up with enough mats to hit 100+ Enchanting. The odd part was that the higher I got, the cheaper the mats got. 2g for 20 Vision Dust and 40s for a stack of Astral Essence? Yes pls!

With the help of a guildie and some old mats in the Vae Victus guild bank, I leveled up to 200 Enchanting and called it a night. I still have mats left to level but I was getting pretty tired and 200 seemed like a good place to stop.

I got a whisper from someone asking if I wanted to DPS Naxx-10 since I had gone with them last week. I responded back “Is everyones gear up to par so we can get a full clear done?” because I didn’t want to blow my save for just a few bosses. They assured me that everyone was in 25-man gear and that they just needed 1 DPS to get in and out. Last weeks clear went smooth and fairly fast so I agreed to go, even though it was rounding 1am EST.

I showed up and noticed that 3 or 4 people weren’t in the guild and inspected their gear, much to my dismay. An undergeared Mage who is barely geared enough to do Heroics though somehow has his T7 helm.. A Holy Pally with a mix-matched group of cloth, leather, mail and plate ranging from 75+ with NOTHING gemmed. He had at least 5 pieces of gear with gem slots and NOTHING was gemmed or enchanted or anything. Someone in the raid offered to give him some green quality gems and he wanted MP5. I bit my tongue but wanted to say something since my wife is a Holy Paladin and I know that was not the ideal gem choice.

Every boss fight the Holy Pally would ask in raid “Want me to DPS???”, which got annoying pretty fast and I could tell the raid leader was annoyed as well once the CAPS came in to play. Thankfully the Druid healer was stellar and could have solo-healed the place so we still did OK. Grobbulus was a nightmare because we couldn’t get the Paladin to stop cleansing Mutation so the poison rings were all over the place, making the floor look like the friggin olympics rings.

The group was also plagued by a few other things, namely disconnects and one of the Mages actually got booted during a pull for running out paid game time (lol!!). That was actually pretty hilarious so I let it slide.. but the DCs.. THE DCs!! Someone was ALWAYS AFK or disconnected every single pull and every single boss fight. If someone wasn’t DC’ed or AFK then we really weren’t doing ANYTHING! People were standing there like deer in headlights chit-chatting over vent about off-specs or showing off their tanking gear, etc.. F&%$ING MOVE IT!!

4 hours later we down Razuvious.. 4 hours. We haven’t had a single wipe but we’ve only done 2 wings + Razuvious. This is how slow these people were moving. Eventually my internet dropped and I was getting an error everytime I tried to log back in to my Warlock so I told them over vent that I was having issues and to replace me.

The funny part about the entire situation is that the Resto Druid must have had my wife on his friends list or something because we both lost internet but only she logged back on. She got a whisper from him accusing her of “ninja logging” because he was convinced that she was me.. el oh el. I logged on to my Hunter and whispered him, telling him it was a legit issue that I couldn’t get back on my Warlock and he felt stupid I think, but thats life I guess.

Overall, yeah, the run sucked, but I picked up the hit/spellpower bracers from Heigan which was a decent upgrade and slapped +30 spellpower on there, hit 200 Enchanting and stuck with doing the Hodir dailies so it was a pretty productive day.. some parts were just slower than others.

Changing Professions & Daily Laziness.

I’m going through this dilemma where I want to start min/maxing my gear on Nevariah but I’m still debating on dropping Herbalism for Enchanting for the +19 spellpower ring enchant. It was either that or Blacksmithing for the extra bracers and gloves sockets but Enchanting gives the same amount of additional spellpower with less hassle to level.

The herb market on Sisters of Elune kind of sucks right now and I have enough Lichbloom and Icethorn to last me awhile (as well as 21 flasks of the frost wyrm in the bank).. but the only thing holding me back is the money and time-sink involved in leveling Enchanting from step 1. That’s just me being lazy, but tonight I’m going to start leveling it.

I also need to suck it up and get exalted with Sons of Hodir for the best shoulder enchant available to non-Inscribers. I’m revered with them right now but stopped doing my dailies over there to level fishing and, to be honest, do nothing.

Lastly, this doesn’t really have anything to do with min/maxing but I need to finish up the Argent Tourny crap. I did it the first day and haven’t gone back since. I’ve never been a fan of mounted combat so the entire event has no appeal to me at all.. but dailies do.

I’m hovering around the 2k gold mark but I’ve gotten really lazy lately and only do the polar bear daily in Brunnhildar Village and the fishing daily in Dalaran unless it’s the Wintergrasp one. I stopped doing the Oracles dailies once Laeyla and I hit revered for the egg (which our first egg hatches tomorrow!) and we still do the Kalu’ak dailies once in a blue moon.

I used to live on the Isle doing those SSO dailies every day on 3 or 4 different 70s for money and really miss having a lot of gold to play around with.. and with Relentless still in the learning stages of Ulduar, there are plenty of repair bills to be had and I need to fund it somehow.

To help make things a little easier, I should go back to doing the Jewelcrafting dailies on Abigore and farming Saronite Ore to sell or prospect for gems. I don’t know about your servers but Scarlet Rubies are going for 80g uncut and about 100g for the spellpower cuts. Ouch!

There are still a few gem cuts that drop in heroics as well that I might need to go farm for. Not for me, of course, but to help out where I can. I haven’t given up on Abi at all, really, and have ran a few heroics with him lately just to stay polished on Shadow DPS and Discipline Healing. Last night I picked up the “Gotta Go!” achievement in heroic Azjol’Nerub and a new useless (+AP/MP5) gem cut.

My goal is to have both Nevariah and Abigore doing all available dailies as often as possible while having 1 other toon as a farmer for herbs and leather if the need arises but the latter is the least of my worries. I’m still wanting a tanking alt so chances are whoever I pick up there will be on farm duty but I’m also leaning towards leveling my Hunter for that instead since they godlike farmers. She’s 60 at the moment but Outlands is like a 3-day affair before heading in the Northrend and most likely less time on a BM Huntard.

Decisions, decisions!

Woops!

Just a quick “sorry” for the missing Demonology Spotlight post today. Usually I write them up a week in advance with a scheduled posting date but I didn’t have one set for this week. With the guild merger (amongst other things) on my mind, I hadn’t had time to come up with a post but I’ll go back to updating this regularly starting next Tuesday.

If anyone has any ideas for future topics, feel free to leave them in the comments. It might be easier to write about something that people have questions on rather than coming up with a post full of information that everyone is already pretty clear on.

Help me help you!

Heroic Ulduar, Respecs & Achievements, Oh My!

We ran Heroic Naxx on Saturday as our first raid as official Relentless members. It was a very smooth run with very few snags but they had recent switched over to an EP/GP loot system that kind of confused the Vae Victus members that merged over. I had bid on about 4 items (one of them being my T7.5 helm token) and lost them all to people who had already won something (some being alts) so I spoke with the guild/raid leader on vent to clear up my concerns. He was very understanding and after explaining that I was still wearing Hat of Wintry Doom and how the token was a massive upgrade for me but it had gone to an alt that had already won stuff, he talked to them and we agreed to file a ticket to get the token over to me. This was something they didn’t have to do at all but were understanding enough to follow through with it, and I appreciate that the person who had originally won the item agreed to do so to better help the raid group progress.

Today we were scheduled to run Heroic Ulduar at 6 server but it was bumped back an hour to wait for more people to log in.. and thankfully during this hour the token arrived in my mailbox. This gives me the infamous 4-set bonus, causing me to drop Glyph of Imp for Glyph of Lifetap and consider trying out the top 2 DPS specs that rely on Glyph of Life Tap + the 4T7 bonus – 0-40-31 (Decimation/Conflag) and Deep Affliction.

I hit up Elitist Jerks and found a simulationcraft thread about 3.1 Warlock raiding, copied the specs and hit up the dummies after reglyphing.

Decimation/Conflag
This is the highest DPS spec according to the simulation but the rotation is a bit of a bitch once you hit the 35% mark. Weaving Soul Fire with Decimation procs, managing Conflag every cooldown while watching the timers on 3 DoTs AND trying to keep Glyph of Life Tap going every 20 seconds was a bit much for me. I peaked around 3500 DPS on the dummy but my palms were sweating. Good dps but very unforgiving and brutal rotation.

Deep Affliction
This is the 2nd highest DPS spec on the simulation and the recent “gutting” of the Affliction spec makes the rotation a hell of a lot more manageable than it used to be. This spec was also a lot easier to weave Life Tap in to. I peaked around 4800 on a training dummy but the only requirement was that I was casting every single chance I got. This spec seems really good on tank and spank encounters with little movement (i.e. the training dummy) but I went to heroic OS tonight to get the 20-player achievement and only pulled about 3100 DPS. Part of the reason was that my pet died to a flame wall (that still seem to disappear and respawn) and the other due in part to Power Auras not popping up my Drain Soul Execute aura at 25%. By the time I realized he was that low he was at 11%. Woops =X. I’d still like to play around with it some more as an offspec but I can put up 3700 DPS on a dummy as Chaos Bolt with half the hassle and a more forgiving rotation. I still had a lot of fun in OS though with the spec so I’ll probably keep it around awhile.

“But Abi! Why did you drop Demonology, you dick?!“
Well that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I’ve always been pro-Demonology and I still am but I still find it far too situational of a spec that only has great damage in demon form and during the Decimation phase. Without being in one of those two situations, the DPS isn’t as competitive as I’d like and there is little reason for me to not go Destruction instead. I still love Meta/Ruin and it’s still a fun spec but I go to raids to put out as much damage as possible.. and at this point, until I can stay in demon form the entire time or a boss is always at 35% or less, I’ll stick with Destruction.

At the moment, after some testing, I still prefer a Chaos Bolt build over anything available right now. It’s my comfort zone and I know when to use what.. the damage is just THAT much better with the 4T7 set bonus and Glyph of Life Tap that I can’t even consider anything else right now. Affliction seems like a great candidate for spec #2 since it did put out more damage, I just have to be able to have that tunnel vision moment to never peal my eyes off the timers or move to clip my damage. This is what I’ve wanted since 3.1 hit.. a massive burst damage spec with a forgiving rotation on mobile fights (Destruction) and a very high damage spec for tank and spank bosses, and I think I’ve found it.

As for 20-man OS?

We really wanted to get Flame Leviathan down on hard mode with 1 tower up so we left up the Storms Tower.. the one that increases his health by 50% and his damage output by 25%.. and also leaves storm pillars that move around the room and cause shitloads of damage. We actually got him to about 4% but decided to just down the tower, get our free loot and move on to XT-002. We only had about 20 minutes left of raid time to kill 2 packs of trash, explain the fight and give a go but we only had 2 solid attempts before people had to call it a night. They’re going back in Thursday, which I can’t attend, but hopefully they can get hard mode down. I’d like to be there but still would like to see them do it.

This weekend we’re going for Heroic Maly, Heroic OS with 2 Drakes, Heroic Emalon and Heroic Naxx so I’m gonna be a busy Warlock on Saturday and Sunday but I’m stoked to hop in to all of them.

Money Well Spent!

..well, not MY money.. but still money well spent! Grats to Laeyla on her new Mechano-Hog! I celebrated with her by touring all of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor in the sidecart while emote /littering and whatnot and had a lot of fun. She’s been wanting one for awhile so it was cool to see her FINALLY break down and drop the gold to do it.

Outside of the awesome Hog-ride, I didn’t do a damn thing today but the Fishing daily and cut 2 gems for a friends Shaman.

The official forums were updated YET AGAIN with Warlock changes to Glyph of Conflagrate and Fire & Brimstone on the current PTR.

• Glyph of Conflagrate – Back to not consuming Immolate. (Unknown if it keeps the new change as well to boost the damage of the next 3 Destruction spells if Conflag is used while Immolate has 5 or less seconds remaining but we’ll see. They didn’t quite clarify that.)
• Fire and Brimstone – Increases the critical strike chance of Conflagrate by 25%. Also increases the damage of Chaos Bolt and Incinerate by 15%. (The addition of Chaos Bolt is new, which is great IMO since it should be our strongest direct damage spell as a 51-point talent. Apparently the wording caused confusion before and Incinerate was only to get an increase in the amount of bonus spellpower it receives, not a boost in damage but this is now a flat boost in damage to both spells. Much better, IMO.)

Achievement Update (5-3-09)

I went to Naxx-10 in a group comprised of mostly the top guild on the server with 1 or 2 PuGs (myself included). Everyone had over 3k dps and Patch dropped in about 2m 45s without Heroism/Bloodlust. I never got this achievement on Abi which makes me kind of sad but it was still cool to get it.

Afterwards, I headed in to Naxx-25 with Relentless and picked up..

I had never would have in a million years thought it would be possible for 25 people to not die during Heigan but I suppose this is the calibar of guild Relentless is. Hopefully this gave them a good impression of the Vae Victus merger as well.

And lastly, while waiting on a GM ticket, I hopped in another group formed by a mix of the top 2 guilds on the server that were going in to TK: The Eye for the achievement. Could 14 80’s down Kael’thas? You bet your sweet Orc ass they can!

I’d still like to get all of the raid achievements from TBC and vanilla WoW because outside of Kara, this is the only TBC raid achievement I have on Nevariah.

Upcoming Warlock Changes (3.1.2) Part 2

It looks like Demonology and hybrid specs are taking a little hit with a change to Decimation but Fire & Brimstone looks to be a lot more appealing. Everything else is the same that I posted yesterday though.

• Decimation – Decimation procs will now occur when the target is at or below 30% (down from 35%).
• Fire and Brimstone – Increases damage done by Incinerate on targets effected by Immolate by 6/12/18/24/30%. Also increases the critical strike chance of Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25% if Immolate has 5 seconds or less remaining (this is the new part).
• Death Coil – Will now heal the Warlock for 300% of the damage done.

Not a lengthy update but I wanted to keep everyone informed on the PTR changes. My assumption is that Blizzard wants Warlocks to steer away from just blowing Conflagrate every cooldown after the change coming to Glyph of Conflagrate and the increased crit chance from Fire and Brimstone.