Icecrown Baby!

I'm back! Well sorta.

I've not been away, busy doing irl stuff or raiding or whatever. I simply had nothing to tell so decided not to waste your time :)

When I left you guys I was complaining about the difficulty of raids and that healers seemed to get the biggsest challenge on most encounters. Although I am pretty sure that I don't have game developers checking my blog on a daily basis it seems my prayers have been heard :) ICC10 is great. Although the normal mode - as expected - was very easy I have

a good feeling about how the heroic version will turn out. Gunship Battle is a great fight, and Saurfang has the mechanics needed to actually be a pain if tuned up a bit. I for one can't wait!

Moving on to the other big feature in 3.3 - The LFG tool. Although I was a bit held up with school the past couple days I've managed to put this tool to good use and I have to say, It's great! Acording to my achievements I have grouped with 55 different players and amongst all of those, only one of my groups was a mess. So either I'm very lucky or this tool is managing to couple me with a bunch of great players consistently. I am having so much fun!

Glyphs. I'm still not making much on them. The modification I've been using to my QA2 addon obviously broke at 3.3 release so I've been stuck using my old deep undercutting strategy for a couple days. I'm cancelling/relisting once a day at best.

As some of you probably remember I had been stocking heavilly

up on Borean Lea

ther for the patch, and ended up with roughly 1200x Heavy Borean Leather. Wednesday and Thu

rsday I sold only 4 or 5 furs a day but this evening was something entirely different. I woke up after a nap, logged onto my LW seller(Banklite) and saw my mailbox filled with succesful auction. Before 3.3 I had around 600g on him and substracting posting fees(About 600g total) this is where Im at right now:

As you can see Banklite is 4664g which is quite decent considering I spent roughly 2040g on stocking up on leather.

Still have another couple thousand to cash in that I am counting on having gotten rid of by the end of this week.

On another note my flask sales have exploded. At the time of writing I have ~50 incoming succesful auctions - All of which are Flask of the Frost Wyrm/Endless Rage. I'm loving it!

All of this has also ment that I'm running low on materials in my

bank. Having said that I will not be stocking up on everything for a while. The market is very unstable at the moment and everything feels like it could plummet at any moment.

I spent 800g on an Ice Mammoth yesterday along with ~2500g on Pets(Yea, I'm an

achievement whore above all else) bringing my

total Income this week up to: 16.420g.

Give me a challenge!

I'm bored...

Yea, being stuck with a poorly designed dungeon for months at a time has taken its toll on me. Because let's face it. As a caster we have one of the easiest jobs in the world. To sum it up here's a guide to being a succesful casting raider in Trial of the (G)Crusader:

1. Learn your rotation

2. Dont stand in x/stand in x

3. Know your kill priority.

Granted, some casters are easier off than others. Arcane Mages have one of the most mindless rotations I've ever laid my eyes upon while affliction warlocks do require a bit of timing and practice if you want to squeeze everything out of your abilities. But my point is that even a tunnelvisioning idiot can be a somewhat succesful player in this place, hell he might even do pretty good.

Ulduar stands as a shining example of what I expect from Blizzard. Fights varying massively in

difficulty, the choice to turn it up a notch by going with a keeper less or pressing that shiny red button all adds up to an instance where both the idiots and the great players will find themselves

amused for countless hours.

Oh, how I loved Ulduar. 2 fights in particular stand out as far as me being a caster goes. Yogg+1 and Firefighter. Both fights required for me to constantly think on my feet - Controlling the fire, managing your distance to the rest of the raid all the while maintaining your maxDPS. And Yogg Saron simply has enough special abilities for it to remain one of the 2 greatest fights in wotlk history.

If there's one thing I believe should be a main concern of the developing team it's the fact that in

pretty much every single encounter, healers are the ones that are "worst" off.

To show you guys what I mean I chose to use my legendary paint skills to visualize the process from the first time you meet a boss 'till the attempt where it falls to the ground!

As clearly shown on the graph to the left, tanks

and DPS reach the point where they're "ready" to kill the boss way sooner than our beloved healers.

It shows my estimate of the progress of each team on average while fighting a boss of x difficulty.

The perfect encounter in my eyes is when f(x) = g(x) = q(x). When each of the roles are - more or less - equal in difficulty to each other.

Every once in a blue moon Blizzard really manages to hit the spot and create an encounter that, in my eyes, is perfect. And it's the moments where my team mate and I overcome these challenges that keeps me from deleting this game.