A Busy Day

After spending most of the day running around various locations such as Tanaris, the Hinterlands, Winterspring, and Hellfire Peninsula, I had the ore and bars necessary I thought to power level engineering to 375. Unfortunately, I underestimated the materials necessary to build a couple of items I wanted, so I did end up spending about 150g on the auction house, but in the end, I got to 375 engineering and I have my Flying Machine and my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, mounts #78 and #79.


I then quickly ran into Gnomeregan, got the Pet Bombling schematic on my first kill and quickly made my very own Pet Bombling, for pet #103.

Not content to sit at 79 mounts, I made my way back up to the Argent Tournament, spent my last gold and 5 champions seals, and bought a Swift Brown Steed for mount #80! 20 to go. 8 more Argent Tourney mounts, 2 tailoring mounts (I'm taking up tailoring when I drop engineering), and 5 PvP mounts (who knows when I'll ever have time to get all those marks), and I'm still 5 mounts short of 100. 100 is still probably pretty unobtainable for me at the current time. Kudos to those that have their 100 mounts. That's quite an achievement.


Speaking of achievements, I got one last night during our 25 man Ulduar run. Even though we only took down three bosses (we were down a main tank, an off-tank, and healing was a bit on the weak side), I managed to sneak in Take Out Those Turrets. I was hoping to make it back to a demolisher to get Three Car Garage, but even though a chopper was there to pick me up, I was covered in siege engines and couldn't make the transition. Oh well, next week!

Another One Bites the Dust

Well, after a frustrating start to the night running into massive issues with Hodir, finally switching to four! healers on our tenth! attempt, we got him down. After Hodir, we quickly transitioned to Thorim and proceeded to take three attempts to learn his trash and take him down on the fourth try. I was actually a little disappointed with Thorim. Yes, it took us three attempts to learn his gauntlet and arena, but once you get that down, he's a pushover. Well, on to Mimiron next week! We'll get him.

P.S. Pushing the Mimiron button doesn't just activate a timer as we found out as we were about to leave Ulduar for the night. At least it provided a bit of levity as we all were annoyed with the repeated Hodir attempts (especially after we three-shotted him last week with three healers).

On a bright note, I am getting really good at picking up Hodir buffs as I earned Staying Buffed All Winter and as we took down Thorim, we all got I'll Take You All On. Last night, on the third of the Freya elders, I also earned (finally) Got My Mind on My Money (10,000). Just 15,000 more gold to go.

Concerning DPS

The wonderful gnome mage blog, Gnomeaggedon asked, When is your DPS too low? Now while I won't go into exact numbers, he brings up some questions in the article I'll take a stab at.

How/against whom do you measure it?

As a mage I measure my DPS against everyone in the raid. Traditionally, us mages have been at, or near the top of DPS meters. There's no reason why we shouldn't be above any other class. Recently, the developers have stated that the "pure DPS" classes, rogues, mages, hunters, and warlocks should all be about equal atop the damage meters. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case for quite a long time. I keep up on all the recent theorycrafting and I have the optimal spec with the right gems and the right amount of hit rating and all the best enchants and yet, there's little I can do against a rogue these days.

Similarly, feral druids can consistently out DPS me if they know what they're doing which is quite confusing since these "hybrid DPS" classes should not be able to out DPS any pure DPS class. At the present time, I'm pretty confused as to the state of mages in the game as there are many other classes with the ability to out DPS mages, though you always have to be careful as you go from fight to fight.

What fights are acceptable measuring posts?

I think what you're looking for here is the single target, limited movement, pure DPS races. Or, in other words, Patchwerk. There's no movement, there's no threat ceiling to worry about if you have competent tanks and you can go all out to the best of your ability. On our final few Naxx25 runs, I was always in the top 3 or 5 depending on RNG of crits, but still, it's quite disconcerting to see feral druids top you and know there's nothing you can do to top them because your gear just isn't dropping like you had hoped (again, it comes back to RNG).

Trash I throw out. Each pull is so vastly different that you can't ever measure DPS from trash. In Naxxramas, it was pure AOE, in Ulduar, you have sheeps, you have spell stealing, you have to bunch up and get interrupted, so trash is never a way to measure DPS in my opinion. Similarly, because there's trash in a full run, you can't measure it there either.

So what do you use as a measuring post? I'm finding in Ulduar, there is no answer. In the end, it comes down to raid utility. Are you properly decursing if necessary? Are you killing the trees on Freya or breaking the ice blocks on Thorim? Are you targeting the right mob and giving it your full DPS or are you AOE'ing when you shouldn't be or hitting Freya when she's healing each tick?

What can you do?

I pretty much agree with my fellow gnome here. Stay alive, burn every cooldown you have whenever you can (and if you're using a mana intensive spec, know when to use evocation (at the end of a heroism or icy veins)), and play around with dual specs.

If you're not alive, you can't do any damage. If you can't stay alive, you're leaving decursing to either another mage or a druid who should be healing. If you're dead, you might hope for a druid to pick you up, but it's not likely. If you're a Frostfire mage, you have multiple cooldowns to use. You've got your mana gems, icy veins, combustion (if talented), and mirror images (if they can stay alive, it's worth using the global cooldown). So you just need to essentially use them every time they're up, except under certain conditions. For example, I find that my mana gem and Icy Veins cooldowns are quite similar and it's optimal to use these two together. Why get hasted frostfire bolts if you can get hasted frostfire bolts with extra spellpower? If you just have to wait 10 seconds to line these two up, I think it's worth it (though I have no theorycraft to back that up). Similarly, if you have Molten Fury and your target is at 37% when Icy Veins is available, wait a couple seconds until you're under 35% and you can do 12% more hasted damage.

What do you do in the end?

When all is said and done, if your group takes the boss down, you've been successful. In the end, while I look at the DPS meters and sometimes some idiot (usually the person leading the meters) will link them for the raid to see, they're worthless. Congrats, you were able to stand on the boss and DPS longer than me. On XT-002, while you were there getting in your optimal rotation, I was AOE'ing the trash from the scrap piles down. Without me, you wouldn't have killed the boss. While you were sitting on Freya during her final phase doing insane DPS, I was switching to the trees to prevent her from healing and hitting the enrage timer. While you were sitting in one place on Kologarn DPSing the hand and torso at the same time, I was hitting only the hand, AOE'ing the rubble, AND running away from eye beams. In the end, meters mean nothing. As long as you contributed damage and the group took down the boss, you are a success.

The original post was "When is your DPS too low?" Well, while there definitely is a low end, as long as you continually work on improving your DPS, your raid shouldn't have an issue with you. If you're running heroics on off raid nights to get gear that will help your DPS and doing dailies to buy materials for the enchants needed to maximize your DPS and contributing to boss kills on a consistent basis, what do they have to complain about? Maybe your rotation could be tweaked, that's why it's always good to have someone else to bounce ideas off of. Maybe your gemming could be improved - ask your fellow raiders to take a look. While I always try and do the best DPS and/or damage on each and every fight, it's a sad fact these days that mages are not going to be at the top of the meters, but when you look at all the utility we bring to a raid, that's fine with me (well maybe it's not...but...).

So maybe I've been rambling about DPS, maybe my points aren't the most well laid out here, but essentially I just wish people would stop obsessing about DPS and stop trying to top the meters at the cost of others in the raid. If all you care about is DPS on a single target when you could have been better utilized on adds or could have been decursing or sapping or sleeping, then you're not giving it your all.

Quick Updates

Today I got my Murkimus the Gladiator. He is amazing. That makes 101 pets. I also bought a couple of mounts, including the Turbostrider, bringing my count to 77 mounts. Still a long way to go to 100. Including the 8 remaining Argent Tourney faction pets plus the Argent Hippogryph, I'm at 86. Still a bit tough to hit 100...

100 Pets and Hodir Down

Just a quick update...last night, I received word in game that there was a member of the horde who wished to trade Argent Tournament pets. In exchange for a low listing of the Mechanopeep on the neutral auction house, I would have a chance to buy the Sen'jin Fetish. And thus, I received my 100th "official" pet (I still like to count Don Carlos' Famous Hat and the Bloodsail Admiral's Hat as "pets"). Many thanks to Taranwayward for the trade!

After that was finished, I headed up to Ulduar for our run. The night before, we cleared Flame Leviathan with one tower up, XT-002, Kologarn, and Freya in an abbreviated two hour run time. I was lucky enough to outroll Brellis by just one point and won my T8 gloves, Valorous Kirin Tor Gauntlets, and now I have more hit rating than I know what to do with (I resocketed some gems and now have no +hit gems...).

So last night, we went straight to Hodir and had little trouble with him. He dropped a couple of tanking items and we received Cheese the Freeze and I Have the Coolest Friends. We then went back to our nemesis, Mimiron. We spent the next 2+ hours wiping on him. We consistently got him to phase 4, but ran into issues each time. Learning how the P3Wx2 Laser worked exactly, how his ranged attacks work, etc. The problem also was, while we could consistently get him to phase 4, we had issues in phases 1-3 occasionally which would end up forcing us to wipe the raid so we could start over and wasting more of our time. During our best attempt, we got each section to about 20%, which is good, but not that good. I know we can do better, but our massive amounts of melee DPS on this fight make it very tough to master. We forced Vetarra to go respec boomkin, but still, that left 5 melee players as we had 2 ranged and 3 healers. With the rockets, proximity mines, and AOE effects, that's a lot to heal and avoid. I'm pretty sure next week, we'll do the same - clear through Freya or Hodir on night one, then hit up Thorim and Hodir/Freya and finally Mimiron on the next night.

That stupid bot will go down!

Bunch o' Updates

After Wednesday's amazing run, we went back into Ulduar on Thursday to continue our domination. Unfortunately, the new bosses of the place put us in our rightful place. Though we were able to conquer Freya after taking over an hour on her trash and another few wipes learning her first stage, we decided to then venture back to Mimiron who had destroyed us the week before. Despite quite a few tired souls, we spent well over an hour on him, wiping over and over. Mostly in the first stage, sometimes in the second stage, and rarely in the third stage. Just as we were about to call it, we got one more attempt on him. And though I'd love to say we took him down, we did not. But, we did get our best attempt of the night, taking him to the fourth, and final stage and I'm quite confident we'll get him next week.

After concluding our Friday night 25-man runs in Naxxramas, the gold team moved on to Ulduar this week. I didn't have high expectations as I've heard of many great guilds running into walls after Flame Leviathan. However, our team is quite amazing. We quickly dispatched of the Flame Leviathan and then moved on to Razorscale. It took our team a while to learn the fight, since for a good chunk of the raid, it was their first time seeing these fights. After some trials and getting him to within 500k of dying while down two DPS slots, we picked up some extra players and promptly took him down with the full 25 man complement.

After Razorscale, we moved on to XT-002. He gave us some issues as we struggled with positioning early in our attempts, but it didn't take us long to destroy him and stop his play time. Where to next? Ignis of course! I was actually very pleasantly surprised at the speed which we dispatched Ignis with. Unfortunately, it was nearing the end of the night and we had to leave Ulduar with the first four bosses down. I truly believe next week we'll get Kologarn and the Iron Council down with this team.

Early the next morning, I awoke knowing that I had just one more day of dailies to go until I could earn my Crusader title. I quickly headed up to Icecrown and completed the dailies earning my title and amassing 6,500 achievement points exactly.


I then continued on my business, doing other daily quests, getting denied by Old Man Barlo on my hunt for crocolisks, and working towards 100 more cooking awards to buy a Chef Hat...

This morning, I woke up early, continued to advertise in Icecrown that I am buying Argent pets for 2,000g each and finally got some takers. So I now am the proud owner of all 5 Alliance-side Argent Tournament pets. It cost me 6,000g, but they're mine! And tomorrow I'll hit 40 more marks which I can purchase another Alliance pet with and hopefully work out a trade for a horde pet. 5 more of those pets to go. As it stands now though, I'm at 99 pets. So which ever horde pet I acquire first will be my 100th pet!

Another Crazy Night

It all started out innocently enough. I picked up my fishing and cooking daily quests in Dalaran and headed up to Icecrown for the Argent Tournament Dailies. They were quickly completed and I went back to Dalaran to fish in the sewers for some Corroded Jewelry. It wasn't fun as there's usually 10 to 20 other people fishing down there so you can't just listen for your own bobber. So after about 10 casts I was getting antsy and annoyed with the whole process when finally I fished up the jewelry. But what came along with the jewelry?? A Giant Sewer Rat! Finally. After spending countless hours fishing by myself down there in the sewers without any luck whatsoever, I get the rat after spending just a few minutes while looking for Jewelry! Old Ironjaw, I'm coming for you next!!

So that left me with just a cooking daily to do. I sent some cooked rhino dogs over from my banker, only to find out they were Mighty Rhino Dogs. But time had run out. It was time for Ulduar. Luckily, on the way up to the Ulduar entrance, there's quite a few rhinos out there so I quickly picked up my four rhino meat and got ready to start a new ten man raiding week.

The plan for the night was to attempt Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on hard modes. So we got assembled, got into our vehicles, and headed out. We left just one tower up and proceeded to one-shot the Flame Leviathan earning us some nice Emblems of Conquest along with some nice loot, including Firesoul for my nice new main hand weapon.

After the Flame Leviathan, it was time to start working on XT-002 in hard mode. We were able to break his heart each time when trying, but his resulting "Heartbroken" mode is quite taxing. First you have adds to finish off before you can focus on XT, then you also have to worry about void zones left by gravity bombs and light sparks left by light bombs. On top of this, his tantrum hits for more damage and he also has a short enrage timer. After a lot of attempts (probably 8-10), we were really getting the fight down - knowing when to use cooldowns, where to drop void zones, if we should kill the light sparks or not (I think you have to, but focusing DPS on them makes it tougher to get the XT-002 down before his hard enrage timer). Eventually, we abandoned the hard mode. We might not have the gear at the current time to do it or we just need a lot more practice healing through all of his various attacks. We did learn one important thing though. And welcome to Tiddly's first boss fight explanation with drawing...


So here we have XT-002's room. You enter from the south where it says "Entrance" and have four scrap piles around the room. He usually stays near the stairs at the north side of the room. What we found is that if you pull him over and tank him between two scrap piles on the side of the room, he will only spawn adds from the two scrap piles furthest away from him (denoted by the incoming red arrows). During our multiple attempts, he spawned various levels of trash. During one attempt, he spawned one group of small bots (easily killed with one Blizzard). During another attempt, all he spawned was one bomb bot. But then during one of our last attempts, he spawned 2 sets of small bots, one bomb bot, and one pummeler. So your spawns will vary from fight to fight, but he will only spawn them from the two scrap piles with arrows. Never from the two piles right next to him.

So with this information in hand, and knowing we could take the heart down to almost killing it, we set out to see if we could get Must Deconstruct Faster. And the short answer is, yes, yes you can. We killed him in 173 seconds, well under the 205 required by the achievement. With adds spawning from only two scrap piles, I was easily able to take them down on each pass with our offtank picking up the pummelers and since we were able to do so much damage to the heart, we basically chained heart spawns. If you manage to do enough damage to his heart, it will immediately take him from 75% to 50% and spawn the heart again. You can then take him from 50% to 25% and so on. So yeah, 173 seconds. Not too shabby. But unfortunately, not hard mode.

We continued on, one shot Kologarn, headed to the Iron Council and two-shot them and then went over to Auriaya where we quickly one shot her. We had about 30 minutes left so we decided against going for Mimiron's trash and went back to take on Razorscale and try and get A Quick Shave. So yeah, one shot that. Not a problem there. We got him down to 67% on his first landing and easily got him under 50% on the second landing and destroyed him after he landed. So that didn't take the 30 minutes we had left. So let's go over to Ignis.

The first time we killed Ignis we zerged him. It's not a quick zerg, but you can do it - ignore the adds and just focus fire Ignis down. This time though, we thought it'd be a good idea to kill him the correct way. And...one shot. So that pretty much ended a great Wednesday "pre-clear" night. Our Wednesday night group is new and the sole purpose is to clear out the early bosses in Ulduar so our Thursday night Gold Team run can work on new content. For example, we have everything down right now up to the Tier 8 bosses. So tonight we'll probably work on Freya and then Mimiron with Thorim or Hodir coming next week. But even though we were done in Ulduar, we weren't done for the night. Not with the Alliance controlling Wintergrasp.

Let's go get some Tier 8! So we headed over, lost one player, picked up a pug mage (drats! competition on Tier 8), and quickly one shot Emalon. Tier 8 dropped for our healy druid, Dylana and he becomes the first in the team with any pieces of Tier 8. We then played around with Archavon who is a joke these days, got an offspec piece of Tier 7 for our pug mage, and I got a PvP cloak (because you know how much I PvP...).

And thus ended our fun night of raiding. In the end, I got a few great achievements, including Three Car Garage on our Flame Leviathan Hard Mode take down and I'm sitting at 6,420 points. Tonight, Freya and Mimiron are on notice and tomorrow the 25 man Gold Team makes our first foray into Ulduar. And then Saturday, Crusader Tiddlywinks. A fun few days coming up.

4 Down, 1 To Go

Last night, I got my Exalted Champion of Darnassus title and luckily, for the fifth and final faction (Exodar - just because it's last in the row of NPCs), I will finish in 4 days. The key here is there are three random daily quests you can get from the factions - A Blade Fit for a Champion, A Worthy Weapon, and The Edge of Winter. Theoretically, you can earn 5 Valiant's Seals a day. However, when you turn in your 25 seals for The Valiant's Charge, you can then immediately pick which faction you are going to champion next. As long as that faction has a different quest of the three random daily quests, you can do it, allowing you to earn 2 extra seals on the day you switch factions.

The problem I ran into is that after finishing my first faction (the gnomes, of course!) I didn't get that extra quest, so I've been 2 behind people who got lucky that time. But just 2 seals back doesn't save you a day of quests. Luckily, when switching the next three times, I got the extra quest, so I'm 6 seals up right now and will be able to complete the last leg in just 4 days! So even if people got lucky each time they switched, they will be on the same timetable as me. All I know right now though is that I'm going to be up early Saturday morning to get my Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance achievement and become...Crusader Tiddlywinks!

((And when I do get that, think of the achievement spam in Guild chat...Champion of Exodar, Exalted Champion of Exodar, Champion of the Alliance, Exalted Champion of the Alliance, and Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance))

Also, this weekend, a grouping of the Gold Team and Group 2 went into 25 man Vault of Archavon and took down Emalon with ease. Unfortunately, no T8.5 for mages, but we had just one wipe due to a priest mistake within the first 15 seconds of the fight. We regrouped and essentially one-shot him.


In that Emalon fight, I was quite happy with my DPS. I've been experimenting with arcane and just haven't been able to figure out how to sustain high DPS with it. I ran arcane through the first half of our 25 man Naxx run last weekend and it just wasn't doing the damage I expected. I was using the right rotation and though it was tough to time my evocations properly, I did have minimal down time to regen mana. Yet each fight, my DPS seemed to be lower than what I could have gotten with Frostfire Bolt.

So I'm back to Frostfire Bolt because A) I think it does more DPS and B) I know the spec and rotations and know how to maximize my DPS with the spec. So here's where I ended on the Emalon fight.