Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Last night, we cleared Naxxramas in record time and even pulled in a few new achievements. First up was the Arachnid Quarter, and even though the majority of us had already completed Arachnophobia, we did it again without an issue. We then moved on, completed Momma Said Knock You Out and then cleared the rest of the instance, including achieving The Hundred Club without an issue. Next up, we'll either start trying to have some fun 8-manning Naxx or going for some of the more difficult achievements.

We did have some interesting drops though. For the most part, leather, mail and plate dropped. Caster drops were few and far between. However, the Gown of Blaumeux, Cowl of Sheet Lightning, and Heroes' Frostfire Circlet dropped, leading me to have to run some numbers this morning. In the end, I won the Cowl of Sheet Lightning, the Tier 7 head piece went to our wonderful healy druid, Vetarra, and the Gown went to Matnocuido.

I knew the Gown was a slight upgrade, but it was a large upgrade for Matnocuido, so I passed my roll to him, especially after I had already gotten the Cowl of Sheet Lightning and I didn't know if I wanted to break my four piece Tier 7 bonus for the Gown. Which led me to wonder, if the Gown is better than the Tier 7 piece, and the Cowl is better than the Tier 7 piece, but I want to keep my Tier 7 four piece bonus, how do I do it? And that's where the numbers come in.

If you compare the Heroes' Frostfire Circlet and the Gown of Blaumeux to the Cowl of Sheet Lightning paired with the Heroes' Frostfire Robe, the Circlet and Gown come out ahead:

Circlet + Gown = +20 STA, +4 INT, +39 HIT, +11 HST, +11 DMG, -15 MP5, -2 Yellow Sockets.

Assigning values of 1.3 to Spellpower, 0.89 to Crit & Hit, and 0.95 to Haste via the Theorycraft-O-Matic (Hit actually receives a value of 0, but since I can swap Hit and Crit gems equally, I assign the same value to both), the Circlet + Gown give me 25 extra "points."

But in the mean time, the Cowl was a huge upgrade over the Hat of Wintry Doom, giving me 12 "points" though the Gown would have given me 30 "points" over my frostfire robe, but then I'd lose my 5% extra damage on crits via the 4 piece set bonus.

Given that I crit 48% of the time on bosses (from last night's full Naxxramas clear) and my average crit is 8,345, that means that my average four piece tier 7 bonus results in extra damage of 397. I crit 386 times last night, which equals 153,390 extra damage from frostfire bolts alone. Factoring in all my other offensive spells, my 5% extra crit gave me increased damage of 233,464. Considering I did 10,381,794 damage last night, overall, the 5% increased crit damage bonus increases my total damage output by 2.25%. The question now is, what additional combination of spellpower, crit, haste, and hit would allow me to up my damage by 2.25%?

In the end, upgrading to the Cowl of Sheet Lightning and the Gown of Blaumeux delivers: +46 STA, +12 INT, -120 SPI, -94 CRIT, +45 HIT, +107 HST, +16 DMG, +15 MP5, and 2 fewer yellow gems. Using TCOM point values, it's a gain of 35 "points." But is it 2.25% damage? I'm not sure. Throw out stamina, intellect, spirit and mp5. And I lose 94 crit for 45 hit, 107 haste and 16 damage. Given that 107 haste equals 3.2% faster casting, I'm inclined to say that the tradeoff is worth it. If you can cast 3.2% faster, you can do 3.2% more damage - right? Losing the 94 crit though really hurts, but at 1:1 with hit, it's really a loss of 49 crit. With crit at 0.89 and damage at 1.3, the gain of 16 damage offsets 21 crit, so I lose 28 crit total. Now obviously, 107 haste is better than 28 crit. But if 28 crit equates to 26 haste, we have a net gain of 80 haste, or 2.45% faster casting. So running the numbers, it looks as if the Gown + Cowl is better than the pieces of Tier 7.

So now that I have that information in the back of my head, next week when we run Naxx, if the Gown drops, I'm needing it and I'll be set. I'll take the Tier 7 head piece just to have the full set, but I won't use it, so it'd be a purely cosmetic roll, coming after any need or greed rolls.

Next up, tonight we have Malygos. Last night I was lucky enough to win the Key to the Focusing Iris which will turn into the Chain of the Frost Wyrm after completing the quest tonight. I didn't initially think the Chain was that much better than the Necklace, but it's about 28 "points" better with the following stats:

-1 STA, +7 INT, -41 CRIT, +30 HIT, +37 HST, +7 DMG, Blue instead of Red Gem (Boo), +Spellpower instead of +Intellect socket bonus (yay!). However, I'll probably throw a +19 damage red gem in it since the +5 spellpower bonus is outweighed by the +10 you get over a blue gem which only has +9 damage. So in the end, it's just a 4 intellect loss on the socket from the bonus.

But I'm hoping that the new Chain tonight, paired with my Cowl from last night will up my DPS a bit. Also, I haven't been casting Mirror Image at all while raiding. I thought it was a spell in the Arcane tree that I never spec'ed into. But all the time, it's just been sitting there, extra damage for the low cost of a global cooldown. It has now been added to my uber-damage macro and will be cast every time it is up during a boss fight (every 3 minutes).

2 Days, 2 Titles

On Thursday, our rag-tag bunch of adventurers stepped into Naxxramas looking to clear as much as possible, little did we know, a full clear was within our grasp. Taking about four hours, we cleared the whole place in one night, leaving Friday night open for Sartharion and Malygos. We quickly down Sartharion (after a couple of attempts with one drake up) and then made our way to Malygos.

We had seen Malygos one week before, but only got to the final stage a couple of times. But this week, we had over 3 hours to work on him, and we would not leave without him going down! So after about 5 or 6 wipes, including a couple of tries at his last phase, we realized, we didn't have the stacks working for the last phase and we'd never get him down. So we took a break, stepped outside, and went to practice on the daily quest, Aces High. After a bit of practice there, we stepped back in, revitalized, and ready to go. We had a couple of missteps, but in the end, Maylgos was defeated! And there were quite a few people in our raid who obtained the awesome title, Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

Skip ahead a day and the Lunar Festival had returned to Azeroth. I awoke at 7, ready to go get my coins. After collecting about 40 coins, Aravic and Eleazarjr awoke from their slumber and we set out to rescue the elders in the Northrend dungeons. After four heroic dungeons, I was left to go back to coin collecting. I quickly snapped up the rest of the coins throughout Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms and then looked for a group for some other instances. I found a pick up group going to Nexus and we quickly found the elder in there and I was left with just a couple of elders left. I took a quick side trip to Moonglade where I defeated Omen and bought a nice pant suit. I ported back to Dalaran and quickly found a group for my remaining coins in my wonderful guild. We got the coins, and in just under 12 hours, I was Elder Tiddlywinks.



The next morning, I woke up, started fishing for a sewer rat, and was waiting on the last book I need for Higher Learning to spawn when Rylara asked me if I wanted to go kill C'Thun. Heck yeah, I wanted to kill C'Thun! So I ported to Theramore, flew to Cenarion Hold, and made my way into the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. We quickly dispatched of C'Thun (even though I died in his stomach), and I was finally able to complete my Classic Raider achievement!



In all, it's been a crazy couple days. Two titles received, Malygos and C'Thun down, and over 230 achievement points. I'm hoping my book spawns soon so I can receive another pet and my weekend will be complete!

Chef Tiddlywinks...Finally

So last night, after finishing up my daily cooking quest, I went to buy the Worg Tartare and Fish Feast recipes thinking each would cost 3 dalaran cooking awards. Worg Tartare down, one recipe to go. What's this!? Fish Feast is 5 cooking awards? And it requires 450 cooking? Oh noes. I'm only at 437.

So off I went to hunt rhinos. After amassing 52 rhino meat (I had 24 Northern Spices, so I wanted to make 24 small feasts to hopefully earn those last 13 points, and I wanted 4 rhino meat left over for the cooking dailies), I then quickly fished up as many Nettlefish as I could in 30 minutes on three hooks. It was quite a few more than the 48 required which is perfectly fine with me since my raid food of choice is Nettlefish. Then to find some Arctic Salmon - not a problem. Fished up 48 of them and hurried back to the Ledgermain Lounge to look for the last book I need for Higher Learning. I quickly started cooking small feasts and earned the 13 points I needed in just 17 feasts. So there I sat - at 450 with 4 Dalaran Cooking Awards...

To prepare the the fish feast cooking in the morning, I then had to venture back out to catch some Mussleback Sculpins (luckily it uses Arctic Salmon and Nettlefish too, and I had those left over). I fished up the requisite amount, killed a couple of worgs for my Worg Tartare and went to sleep, waiting for the daily the next morning.

So early this morning I awoke to Infused Mushroom Meatloaf and luckily had just 2 chilled meats left, I gathered the mushrooms quickly, got my 5th dalaran cooking award, bought the recipe and was rewarded with Chef de Cuisine, and then cooked up 4 fish feasts for The Northrend Gourmet and, of course, Hail to the Chef!

Here I stand on the shore of a peaceful lake in Crystalsong forest with my latest pet, the adorable fawn (reward from Lil' Game Hunter achievement for 75 pets).


Yesterday I mentioned my trip to Tempest Keep, and not only did I win the Robes of Tirisfal, but I also won the Ethereum Life-Staff which you can see in the picture of me below:


As an additional bonus last night, while briefly perusing the lists of achievements, I found two new ones! Pest Control requires you to go around all over the world to slay pests such as maggots, beetles, spiders, and roaches which was quite time-consuming, especially since I couldn't find a larva for the life of me. I went into Naxxramas, but couldn't find one without going past some enemies, so I went back to the Ghostlands, where after about 10-15 minutes of running around searching for them, I finally found one.

The other achievement is a follow-up to To All The Squirrels I've Loved Before entltied, To All The Squirrels Who Shared My Life. Similar to the "loved before" achievement, you have to go around and /love a bunch of critters - most of them scattered through Northrend, but a couple in some more obscure places. After a quick loop of Northrend, I went over to the Swamp of Sorrows to find a toad and got the achievement. With the Chef achievements this morning, I hit 4,700 points exactly!

Random Thoughts

• The past few days, I've been hanging out in a channel on our server called Bookclub. With their help, I've been able to gather 7 of the 8 books required for Higher Learning. I even took lead of the channel for a while on Saturday night and Sunday as I kept the timers updated and coordinated camping of books by people in the channel. Suffice to say, I really haven't had as much fun outside of raiding for a while. The thrill of the hunt, the camaraderie, it was quite a fun experience. Hopefully tonight I can get my last book and my newest pet and while it'll be sad to leave the channel, I hope my contributions made over the past few days were helpful to the community.
  
• Today is patch day. And with it, I will be getting my Hail to the Chef and Chef de Cuisine achievements. Lately I haven't been sporting any title as they all seem to be pretty commonplace and boring these days. I'm hoping to get Champion of the Frozen Wastes this week if we can down Malygos, but if we don't, or at least until that point, I'll be Chef Tiddlywinks.
  
• Speaking of achievements, leading up to last weekend, I went 6 days without an achievement! SIX! I was stuck at 4,500 achievement points for the longest time. Luckily I've gotten back on track with some heroic achievements, some reputation achievements, some battleground achievements, and even some old school achievements. So now I'm up to 4,620 achievement points and with the Lunar Festival coming Saturday, I should blow by 4,800 with the holiday and profession achievements.
  
• Speaking of Old School raiding...last night we went into Tempest Keep for the achievement. I joined a little late, getting there just in time for High Astromancer Solarian and we easily blew through her and the trash up to Kael'thas before running into trouble. One of the main issues we ran into was our Death Knight tank and off tank. Neither can use a shield so the fireballs and pyroblasts were eating us up. Luckily we were able to make it through a couple times, but then he'd start throwing us around and just doing too much damage to the tanks. So we called in reinforcements. We added another 10 people to our group and with 21, we downed him (a mix of levels from 70-80). In the end, just 6 of us were standing and my heart was pounding like none other. Sitting there, trying my damnedest to nuke him down and get those last few points off his health...it's a shame my damage meter and timers broke during an update right before I logged in - it would have been interesting to see what my damage was like on that fight - I certainly love seeing strings of 10k+ crits. In the end, it was me and 5 others left alive that defeated him. And with that, I earned my acheivement, got Kael's Vial Remnant for The Vials of Eternity, and I should still have a shot at my Hand of A'dal title since I've been carrying around the quest for ages. I also screwed up the rolls at the end which I felt horrible for, but I did walk away with my first and only tier 5 piece, the Robes of Tirisfal.
  
• I'm a bit miffed with one of the changes in the patch today. They're going to be awarding full reputation gains for grey mobs. So what does this mean? Well, I've spent countless hours killing furlbogs, trolls, and undead to get my 32 exalted reputations. Now, anyone and everyone can go back to these old rep grinds and level them 5 times faster than I was able to. It will make all my hard work completely worthless. Even though I know I did the grinds before the patch, no one else will, and we'll suddenly start seeing a lot more people exalted with a lot more factions. On the bright side, I could probably finish up my Zandalar rep a bit quicker now with fewer gold invested in coins and bijous, but that's the only place it benefits me while everyone else will have easy grinds for the Argent Dawn, Bloodsail Buccaneers, Timbermaw, Zandalar, Kurenai, Sporeggar, etc.

Cooking - Complete!

So, here I sit, with one Dalaran Cooking Award to my name and not a recipe to use it on (when I get 3). As we already knew, the Chef achievement is broken as it is impossible to complete The Northrend Gourmet. But I have done as much as possible right now and I look forward to the vendors having a couple new recipes for me in the near future.

To be prepared for those recipes, I'll just have to visit a vendor to make my Kungaloosh and I'll have to do some fishing tonight to be ready for the Fish Feast. I'll also need to kill some worg and gather some meat for the upcoming Worg Tartare recipe. The Kungaloosh recipe will be available from a vendor if you have completed The Taste Test (which I have) and the Fish Feast and Worg Tartare will be available for Dalaran Cooking Awards. So in 5 or fewer days, I'll have the requisite Awards ready for purchasing the recipes and I will be able to hit exactly 45 recipes for the Northrend Gourmet (I sit at 42/46 right now). I'm also at 157/160 for the Chef de Cuisine, so these three recipes will also get me that achievement. And as I sit at 66/100 Dalaran Cooking Awards, it will take me approximately 24 or so days to achieve 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards to completely finish the Cooking Achievements.

Hello, my name is Tiddlywinks...

...and I'm an Achievement Junkie. Yes, that's right. I'm addicted to those little achievement points and I passed a nice milestone this weekend. It all started Saturday morning as I forced some guildmates to go to Drak'Tharon so I could finish up my Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement. And, it was done...


And while we were fighting the second boss (attempting an achievement), this nice little achievement popped up for me:


So that was a nice run. We continued on to the Halls of Stone so Phosphorex could get his Northrend Dungeon Hero (also obtained Northrend Dungeonmaster at the same time) and on the last boss we completed Abuse the Ooze, so we spammed guild chat with a LOT of achievements after that dungeon clear.

The next day, as I realized last week how close I was to 1,000 daily quests, I put in the time both Saturday and Sunday to do 20+ quests and I was able to achieve my 4,500th point with 1,000 daily quests.


So here I sit, with 4,500 achievement points. And tons to go. I started to work on some Arathi Basin achievements, but got frustrated and hardly made it through one game as the Horde were stomping us. It's just too hard to have fun in there unless you have a pre-made or get lucky and join a group who is semi-competent.

Naxx Quick (Almost) Clear

Last night, the Silver Team went back into Naxxramas with a goal of clearing all four quarters in our allotted time. And we accomplished our goal. And even got in two shots on Sapphiron before having to call it for the night. We had a couple of new people with us, so it was awesome to see so many one shots on the night where we gave just the shortest description of each fight. I'm confident tonight we'll quickly clear the Sanctum, Sapph and Kel'Thuzad, and then we'll have some fun on Malygos (a fight I have not yet seen).

Last night, out of the few upgrades available to me in Naxxramas, I got two! First, the Tier 7 shoulderpads dropped from Loatheb (leaving just two upgrades in the game, one drops from Malygos (Heroic) and the other are the Tier 7.5). I also found the amazing Blade of Dormant Memories from Patchwerk. After quickly enchanting the weapon with +50 spellpower, my shoulderpads with the exalted Hodir enchant, and throwing a +16 hit rating gem in, I still dropped due to losing 34 hit on my weapon. Hopefully The Soulblade doesn't drop from Kel'Thuzad tonight because it'd be tough for me to take it over someone else who didn't get the Blade last night. Plus, the Soulblade is a bit more healy with the spirit, but +461 damage is a huge upgrade.

Speaking of damage, after killing 13 bosses, tons of trash, and two tries on Sapphiron last night, I basically tied with the ret Paladin in our group. I output 16.2m damage whereas he had 16.1m. It's pretty funny to see how close we got after all the bosses. For the full run, I averaged 2426 DPS, our Ret Pally 2394 DPS, our Death Knight 2276 DPS and our Hunter output 2241 DPS. We absolutely tore the place apart. Including achieving Arachnophobia without really trying that hard. Though we did have some big AOE pulls, we could have done it quicker.

Naxxramas (10) Clear!

In just three short weeks (5 days entering Naxxramas), the Silver/Gold Team has cleared Naxxramas. Last night, after quickly clearing the Military Quarter, we hit up Sapphiron for the first time and took him down in 4 attempts. The first couple were us learning the fight, the third was a freak accident where Sapphiron cleaved/swiped just as we engaged and took out our healers, and on the fourth, he was down. Quite an accomplishment as we had heard of other groups of good players from other guilds taking up to 20 tries to learn him in his entirety and take him out.

After that, we quickly hit up Kel'Thuzad and had him under 5% before a freak accident where our tank got frozen which ended up in a wipe as he also had the three Anub'Rekhan looking beetles on him and they couldn't be controlled in time. The second time around though, he posed no issue as we disposed of him very quickly.

Our raid leader/main tank now has the Malygos key and I'm looking forward to the Eye of Eternity. Before Naxx last night, we quickly took out Sartharion with 9 players (just 2 healers) and I'm thinking with a third healer we could tackle one or two drakes up for the fight. The encouraging thing about last night is we have found a good healer replacement for a priest that had to leave for her guild runs, so we're set there and also, during Sartharion, I didn't see anyone get hit by the lava waves, so our coordination is doing quite well (as we could also see with only 3 (real) tries at Sapphiron).

With the recent addition of my Plush Sash of Guzbah, I felt my DPS increase a little last night as I averaged 2400 DPS on Sartharion, 2900 on Instructor Razuvious (I believe this is from the Living Bombs detonating on the two mind controlled mobs), 2460 DPS on the Four Horsemen, and 2730 DPS on Kel'Thuzad (again, probably from Living Bomb detonating on the three beetles that were within range).

With regards to loot, nothing really dropped for me last night. We saw a lot of healy plate items, and there was the T7 gloves which went to the lovely healy tree, Vetarra. Right now, the two piece Tier 7 bonus is doing quite well for me as I usually don't have mana issues, so I can use my mana gems as an extra damage boost (I just have to watch out though because my trinket shares the same cool down, so while I could use the mana gem while my trinket is used, I can't get the spell damage bonus from it while the trinket is in use). So right now I'm not looking for huge Tier 7 upgrades, but I'm looking to get another piece so if I replace my chest piece (hopefully I can get the Gown of Blaumeux off the Four Horsemen at some point), I can retain my 2 piece bonus. Though, from my spreadsheet, the Tier 7 helm, shoulders, and gloves are all better than what I'm currently using, so if I could piece together two more pieces for the 4 piece bonus, I'd be more than happy to have 5% extra crit damage.