And after a long day of “studying for exams”…

Brajana – Level 80 Troll Hunter

• Skinning: 450
• Leatherworking: 424
• First Aid: 450
• Fishing: 392
• Cooking: 400

This Week in Raiding… Brought to you by Brajana’s Gorilla Delivery!

So, I didn’t do any instances or raids this week.  Not much I can say about that.  But what I can do is share this screenshot I took this morning on my journey out to Sholazar Basin!

Brajana's Gorilla Delivery: If we can't deliver your gorilla with aplomb, no one can!

I also finally picked up [Manual: Heavy Frostweave Bandage], so all that Frostweave I’ve saved up can be used to get me to 450 FIrst Aid!

This Week in Raiding… Karathress and Cronies eat some floor!

Monday and Friday were both Zul’Aman raids.  There was a little drama regarding Monday, since not enough people had signed up, and no one wanted to volunteer to fill them empty spots (including me, Monday is my night off to gather supplies).  And there was a LOT of drama on Friday night, when the raid group (again, I was online but not raiding) was having problems downing Bear, and decided to go to Karazhan instead, pretty much ruining our scheduled Monday night raid for next week.  But I don’t want to get into that here and now.

We hit up SSC on Tuesday night.  Lurker went down with few problems, as usualy.  We decided to make our way to Leo the Blind, of course passing Hydross on the way as he taunted me with his chest piece, shoulders and ring that I so desperately need.  Last time we took a visit to Leo, it was kind of messy.  I was hoping we wouldn’t encounter the same problem this time – and we didn’t!  The problem with stopping DPS was complete history.  But we had a different problem.  The Leo fight was pretty smooth for the first 85% of the fight.  But every time we reached the 15% split, something happened.  We panicked.  People were running this way and that, getting hit with whirlwinds, everything was a big ugly mess.  We made a number of attempts, but it wasn’t going to happen.  At least last week, we managed to down him eventually.

Back to Tempest Keep on Wednesday.  I must admit, I almost dreaded going in there… I’m so tired of wiping on A’lar.  It’s getting very tiring.  But when we got to the big bird’s room, we just went right past.  And Brajana let out a sigh of relief.  Void Reaver and Solarian!  That sounds at least different, if not better.  I think I’ve only done Solarian a couple of times, and it’s been many many months since then.  But I figured it’d be nice to see her again so I can thank her for the boots!

We had a strange composition for Void Reaver, only two and a half (off tank druid in cat form) melee DPS in our entire raid.  Heck, that’s a strange composition for ANY encounter.  But we made it through after one unfortunate wipe caused by aggro pull by a ranged DPS.  He dropped lots of pants, and many people were excited, and we moved on to Solarian.  And I’ve decided that I love the Solarian fight.  It has some quiddity that makes me very excited to be in that room – I’ll have to narrow it down further.  In fact, I think I will dedicate an entire post just to that fight next week!

THURSDAY NIGHT! What an amazing raid night!  We went back to SSC to do what we had not done on Tuesday, take Leo down.  And we did!  Even though one of our mages was having serious connection problems, we took him down in one attempt.  And I got a shiny trinket!

We still had lots of time to spare though, so on to Karathress we ventured!  Karathress was the only one keeping us from being 5/6 and 3/4.  /glare.

We’d had a few sad attempts there in the past, but we were really gunning for it this time.  First attempt:  just over 1 minute and one of our tanks goes down.  Second attempt:  The same thing.  Uh oh, this is looking like a wipe-fest   So we juggled the healers around a bit before the third attempt.  And then… BOOM!  Karathress and his henchmen are no more!  Screenshot!

But wait!  There’s more!  Unbeknownst to most of the guild, it was decided that since we were already done so early, we were going to take a little field trip to Mount Hyjal!

It was SOOO much fun!!  It’s really exciting to just have wave after wave coming, and even though we only made it to the 8th wave, we had a blast – I can’t wait to go back in!

Tsunami!

After having spent Tuesday night getting more and more frustrated by our inability to down Leotheras the Blind, Thursday night we got him in one swift attempt.  Almost the same group composition, but much less fail.  How do we do it?  That’s just the quiddity of Unemployed!  And the best part is…

Goodbye Bladefist’s Breadth!

Goodbye to my very last second to last Blue quality item! (Stupid Blackened Spear)

Hello trinket-I-don’t-have-to-activate!!

Unemployed had a VERY exciting raid week. Here’s a hint:

More details to follow on Saturday’s “This Week in Raiding” post!

Brajana’s Interface and Addons

Alright, it’s time to go into detail about how my UI is set up.  It’s not perfect, and I’m not completely happy with my unit frames mod… but it works for me for right now.  It’s taken me years from when I first downloaded Cosmos to get my UI to the state it is in now, which is pretty much how I like it, despite it’s quiddities.

I haven’t yet perfected the look of Ferguson’s UI, in fact, I spent a good amount of time between pulls in my last Karazhan run trying to get it set up how I like it.  I have decided I like to have my raid/party frames right in the middle of my screen, because otherwise I tend to not pay attention to what’s going on, just watching health bars, or the other way around.

First of all, I must recommend WoWMatrix.  This program will manage your addons for you, giving you a very easy way to install and uninstall addons, and most importantly, it will auto-update them all for you!  Just run it before you run WoW to make sure all your addons are always up to date!

WoWMatrix says I have 123 mods.  But that’s including all the modules and stuff… so here is the list, trimmed down to the major components.

Ace2 – AddOn development framework. I find that the Ace2 mods work smoothly together, I have switch a number of my addons to Ace2 versions of them.

AceProfit – Makes it easy to sell junk items to vendors. Necessary.  Goodbye grey items!

Atlas – Instance Map Browser. I don’t use it all that much anymore, but it’s handy for instances you don’t know.

AtlasLoot – Shows the possible loot from the bosses. I love Atlas Loot, you can find almost any item in there from crafted ones, to drops to rep items!

Auc-Advanced – AuctioneerAdvanced, An addon to help keep track of items values. I’m not that great at playing the auction house, but still, no one should be without this.  I only keep the whole thing enabled on my bank character, but it’s handy for figuring out which items to toss or sell.

Bagnon – Single window displays for the inventory and bank. I like how Bagnon works, my favourite feature is probably the search functionality, and being able to see what my other characters are carrying without switching over.

Bartender3 - Simple and Advanced combined. My action bar addon.  i’ve used a number of different ones, this one seems to do what I need right now.

BigWigs – Modular, lightweight, non-intrusive approach to boss encounter warnings. Required for raiding!

ChatMOD - General Purpose full featured Chat Enhancement Collection. Adds nice little features like moving my chatbox to the top of the chat window and highlighting names in class-colours and keeping a history of what you’ve typed.

CooldownTimers2 – Shows Status Bars that you can drag around and group up for your cooldowns. In the screenshot, this is the one on the left right above my action bars.  It’s handy for keeping track of how long til I can retrap or use my trinkets!  It pops up a message to inform me when cooldowns are finished as well!

Critline – Saves your high normal and critical damage records and flashes a message if you break the record. Can anyone say e-peen?

Decursive – Affliction display and cleaning for solo, group and raids with advanced filtering and priority system. I like having this on my priest, it really does help out for dispelling stuff.

DoubleWide – Make QuestLog a DoubleWide! Ahhh, so much easier to read.  It puts the list of quests and the quest text window side-by-side, so neither is squished.

EquipCompare – Compare items easily with ones you have equipped.

FuBar - A panel that modules can plug into. Used to use Titan, but I switched to FuBar.  These are the modules I have:

• FuBar_ClockFu
• FuBar_CritlineDmg
• Fubar_CritlineHeal
• Fubar_CritlinePet
• FuBar_DurabilityFu – Keeps track of durability and pops up a dialog to repair when you go to a vendor who can.
• FuBar_ExperienceFu
• FuBar_FactionsFu
• FuBar_LocationFu
• FuBar_MoneyFu – Keeps track of current money and all your characters on one realm.
• FuBar_PerformanceFu
• FuBar_XPerlFu

Gatherer – Displays stuff you gather in your minimap and world map. Also lets you get nodes from other players.

IHML – Switch macro depending on zones or BigWigs boss modules. “I Have Macro LOL” is what it stands for, if you were wondering.  As long as you have BigWigs installed, this will change to the appropriate macro depending on which boss you are fighting, like “/target Demon Chains”.  Also works for doing dailies and stuff!

KHunterTimers – Times hunter buffs/debuffs. This is the one above my action bars on the right.  Keeps track of things like how long my trap is going to last, how long Ferocious Inspiriation is lasting for, whether my pet has Frenzy up or whatnot.  It’s not a necessity but I find it helpful.

LittleWigs – Boss warnings for 5-man instances.

Ogri’Lazy – So easy a Dwarf could use it! Put away that pencil and paper and get this mod!  It does the same thing.  It doesn’t auto-track which colours are pinged, but you click on them to make a list.  It does help a lot.

Omen – A lightweight, flexible, multi-target threat meter. Handy for avoiding “OMGWTFFD!!” situations.

oRA2 - A CT_RaidAssist alternative. Assign maintanks and do raid checks and stuff.

Quartz – Modular casting bar. Shiny casting bar that has a swing cast bar and a global cool down indicator.

QuestLevel - Shows the quest’s level. Pretty simple.

RatingBuster - Item stat breakdown, analysis and comparation. Very handy, although sometimes I find myself relying on it too much.  It’s good for a quick comparison, but make sure you really look at the stats if you are deciding on whether you should need or greed!

Recount – Records Damage and Healing for Graph Based Display. <3

XPerl – Replaces the normal unit, party, target, pet frames and adds target-of-target. My current unit frames.  I’m not 100% happy with them, but they do what I need for now, so that’s what I’m using.  Maybe I’ll try out something else when I get a chance, if anyone has any recommendations, they are more than welcome!

My new friend!

Meet Sparkle:

She is my new pet.  I’ve never had a wind serpent before, but I’d heard great things about them… so I thought I’d give it a shot.  Took me a while to chose which skin to get, I do like the quiddity of the rare wind serpent from Feralas, but I am just too darn lazy to level something up that far.  I decided to go with this bluish one to match my troll,  Brajana’s skin is about the same colour, although you can’t tell because of the bucket on her head.

I tamed Sparkle in Netherstorm, and she’s level 69.  I took her out to the Bone Wastes to try her out while farming up some Netherweb Spider Silk, and so far, so good!  True enough, the mobs I was fighting are only level 64-65, but she was doing a pretty good job of killing them quickly and keeping them off of me, even without having the highest rank of Growl or any other trainable abilities.

Gonna have to figure out where to shove Lightning Breath into my macro though, I hear that is a good idea!

Oh, and one strange thing:  When I went to my stable to release Yoshii, my level 30-something raptor who was part of my Mario costume from last Halloween… he wasn’t there.  I had an empty stable slot.  I don’t remember releasing him, but I also know that if you never feed a pet, they can up and leave.  Can they do that from inside the stable?  I don’t think I EVER fed him.  Not once.  Anyone know if that’s possible?  Maybe Yoshii is back in Stranglethorn with his buddies.

I won the bid!

More adventures from the Unemployed Shoutbox…

I paid 400g for this, and I’m going to enjoy it!  Now, where is my steak knife?!

Now I’m just working on getting me the kidneys of the Hugger-mugger Agent Cat!  (See, I even managed to use it in a 3 line post!  Go me!)

Unemployed Does Onyxia!

Okay, so we are a couple years late to this one.  So what?  We had a blast anyway!

A group of us spent the afternoon finish up our attunements, which we had 3 weeks to do, but didn’t get a chance to get together until the day of.  The funniest part is that our attunement took us about 4-5 hours of running Upper Black Rock Spire and flying from this quest giver to that one… but the actual raid only took us about 30 minutes!

Eight enter the cave...

But both parts were a lot of fun.  Teiya, Guinesa, Pilsner, Boostah and myself did the attunement run… which would have been SO much easier if we had a mage for ports!  But we took advantage of our Hearthstones whenever we could (at least 3 times, since all of this took so much time).

"Pew pew!" says the space chicken!

All of this attunement got me thinking about how much I appreciate the simplicity (in comparison) of the Burning Crusade attunements.  Yes, I know they are extra simple now that they don’t exist – but even when they did, they were nothing like this one giant chain for such a short raid.

Anyway, we were almost 2 hours late getting started on the raid, but we had a good number of people who were around… a special thanks to Aeriola and Tigerfeet for being on the ball and getting their attunements ahead of time!

Victory!

We had 8 people present – Tigerfeet, Aeriola, Boostah (as his Warrior), Magazid, Teiya, Pilsner, Guinesa and myself.  It was a pretty good breakdown, considering it was just everyone we could pull together!  Couple of healers, a tank and an off tank/melee dps and some ranged.

When we did get her down – which took us a little less time than we generally get Gruul down, I’d say – she dropped a butt-load of stuff.  I’m not even going to list it all.  But the most important one… 20g each!  Man, why aren’t people farming Onyxia more often!?

Onyxia buff, courtesy of Unemployed!

I never got to raid Onyxia back in the old days, but I can barely imagine having 40 people in there working on her.  I’m so glad they did away with the 40-man concept! I went to a couple, but they were such a hugger-mugger that I just couldn’t do it!

This Week in Raiding… Tidewalker Down!

I think I like doing regularly recurring posts.  So, I’m starting another one.  Saturdays I will post a “This Week in Raiding”, and Sundays will be “WoW Word of the Week”.  Let’s hope it doesn’t become banal!

I’m going to use this as something to recap what Unemployed, and more specifically, I achieved and accomplished in raids.  I figure this is a good week to start because Wednesday…

WE DOWNED MOROGRIM TIDEWALKER!

Unemployed Downs Tidewalker!

But let’s start with Monday.  Monday night was Zul’Aman night this week, and although I wasn’t there, I hear it got pretty exciting.  Considering we didn’t even have enough people signed up to fill a 5-man, with some pulls from the guild, ZA was still accomplished.  Even if a good portion hadn’t even been in the raid before, they did an excellent job.  I wasn’t present for it (it was a holiday – I was sleeping and eating, remember?) you can check out Secret Agent Cat for an excellent recap of the night.

Tuesday night we pulled together and headed to Serpentshine Cavern.  Lurker and Tidewalker were our targets.  We’ve been trying Tidewalker for a few weeks now, and we’re all getting antsy waiting to get a new boss down, it’s been over a month since our last progression kill!  Well, we got to Lurker and for the first time in a while, we got him down in one try.  40 minutes from first trash pull to our first 2x[Badge of Justice], not a bad time at all!

Well, we got to Tidewalker, and although our spirits and our hopes were high, our luck was not.  We made 6 excellent attempts, any of which could have taken him down if it wasn’t for little things like half of our healers being Watery Graved at once!  We were taking down those Murlocs a lot better than we ever had… butwe only managed Morogrim to get to 20%.

Unfortunately I wasn’t present for Wednesday‘s raid.  But from what I’ve heard/seen/read, Tidewalker went down pretty smoothly on the third attempt!  Congratulations to everyone who was there… I look forward to heading in and taking him down with you next week! For a better recap of the evening, check out what our Guild Leader Pilsner has to say over at From Cow to Chicken!  We’re working on Karathress now, and that should be lots of fun.

Thursday night, our roster was a little lacking in the numbers and roles we needed (like Tanks and such), so we decided to call it a Gruul/Mag run.  Guess it was a bit of a reward for doing such a great job on Wednesday!  We sped through all of Gruul’s lair in about 45 minutes, and as usual, there was no [Dragonspine Trophy].  As much as I would love that trophy, the day it drops will be a day of guild drama indeed – especially if there are no rogues who need it present.  But that’s a whole other story!

We took a 10 minute break and everyone eventually rounded up at Magtheridon’s Lair.  First off, I must comment on how much the vent chatter was driving me UP THE WALL that night!  We have a guild policy on keeping vent clear of chatter, but it’s a little lax when we are doing something we know so well as the trash in Mag’s Lair.

However… As I’ve stated before, I’m not really “into” the whole theorycrafting my character for level 80.  That is so far in the future for me, I don’t care right now how I’m going to spend my extra 10 talent points or which herbs are going to be most valuable, that’s something I want to figure out for myself when I am ACTUALLY playing through the expansion.  I don’t want to have it all planned out before it even hits the shelves!

That being said, if I don’t care about this stuff for MY character, I sure as heck care even less about how you are going to spec your Death Knight.  A good 30 minutes of being subjected to this kind of discussion that really is only between 2-3 raid members and I’d just about had it.

If you want to talk about it, use whispers.  Use guild chat.  Heck, use the raid channel, because then I can at least avoid reading it.  I am not proud of it, but I eventually had to resort to turning my vent off until we finally reached the boss.

Anywaaaay, back from my little rant… we wiped on Mag.  Twice.  It was sad really, but it wasn’t a DPS or healing or tanking problem… it was a cube-clicking thing!  I don’t blame anyone specific, and I’ve never had to deal with the pressure of being a clicker, but I do think it may have been a mistake to make a clicker out of the only person in the raid who had never seen the encounter before.

We got him eventually.  No 20-slot bag for me. /sadface.

Friday – More ZA.  I wasn’t there, I have no idea what happened… but I am sure it went smoothly!

The view from above

First of all, sorry for the lack of post yesterday.  It was a holiday here, and I was busy doing holiday things (sleeping in, eating junk food, etc.)

Second of all, sorry for the lack of post today.  I’ve got a few in the works, but I just can’t seem to finish them up.  I’ll have one ready for tomorrow, and it’ll be useful!  I promise!

So instead, today I am going to post a favourite screenshot of mine.

Halaa is under attack!

I love Nagrand.  I don’t know what it is about the place, but I love the hills, the green grass, the strange topography, the little floaty islands… I love it all.  This is where the majority of my banal farming happens – Killing Clefthoofs or hunting elementals or extracting gas clouds or catching some fishes.  But still, I will never get sick of this place!