But, to the point.  Following the release of World of Warcraft Cataclysm in December I have been working on a side project.  If you’re not a World of Warcraft player I would recommend that stop reading now, or start playing and come back once you are familiar with the game!

I had been finding it increasingly difficult to keep track with what items enchants do what and consequently finding the right enchants for each item.  I trawled Google hoping to find a handy little tool to help me out but there was nothing, plenty of sites to explain what enchanting it but nothing that suited my needs, what I needed was something that would tell me “You can put these stats onto that slot” or “To improve stat X you can use these enchants for these slots“ .  So spotting a gap in the WoW fan site arena I took a break from levelling and decided to fill the gap, and so Warcraft Enchants was born.

The site is very simple it allows you to filter all available enchants by stat and/or item slot and then shows you the details of each enchant and a link to the full details on Wowhead.  Currently only enchants created by the enchanting trade skill are covered but I am looking to add others in the future.

Now the title of this post is slightly inaccurate, strictly speaking I have raided three times previously.  Twice to spank Archavon the Stone Watcher as part of a sponta 10 man and once to join the end of a Naxx 25 man a week previously to take down Loatheb.  However at the point of joining on Tuesday I didn’t realise that I had already done part of the instance.

I crossed my fingers and turned on Teamspeak hoping that it would not kill my mouse and eventually crash my PC as it had done the previous week.  With a small feeling of trepidation I clicked on the button to accept the port and dashed upstairs to get a drink, determined that I would not make a fool of myself or do anything daft…

Of course just having those thought immediately cursed me for the rest of the raid Upon getting back to my desk I said Hi to everyone TS and the realised I was the only person from the guild still at the summoning stone, so silly question #1 “Which portal do I take to get to you”.  Thus began my comedy or errors which I’ll now recount boss by boss.

Noth the Plaguebringer

The door to my office open as the strats start to be given and my wife starts using the printer to copy some paperwork for school.  So for those of you that are unaware, the strats for Noth are “This bost has two phases… whirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz why isn’t this bloddy thing working… hirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz etc.”

So the fight starts and I try to translate the photocopier noises into a coherent plan, yeah fat chance.  So I asked a fellow mage what to do, “DPS boss AOE adds when called”, ah cool something I understand.  I then realise that as we’re all huddled in a corner that I can’t see anything other than a load of name tags and the area above but I assist the tank and start spamming my spell rotation, see what I think are adds and something that looks like Blizzard and start casting AOE myself.  Blah, blah rinse repeat dead boss… “There seemed to be an awful lot of AOE on the boss there…”  D’Oh /hide

Loot is called, I ask in TS what the loot rules are but my questions seem to fall on deaf ears, so I /w a friend to find out but by the time I find out the piece I was thinking of has gone.  No biggie, on to the next boss…

Heigan the Unclean

Ah the dance, the ready call comes, I press by talk button and ask for a strat run down as I haven’t done it before and the dialog disappears.

 ”Are you really AFK  Spangles?”

“No, I just asked about strats”

[Raid] Spangles?

/raid Bugger I think my mic is fubar, ready

My eyes fall to my headset controls… oh no all that time the mute switch had been on! Damn the kids!

Cast, cast, run, run, run, die, watch, res, cast, run, die… yeah the rest of the fight went on without incident as I watched from the floor.

/dustoff pride on to the next boss…

Loatheb

Hmm, this bridge looks familiar…

“Anyone not done this boss before?”

“Me”

“You got the achievement after the last boss, you have done it before”

“I did, oh is this where I can last week.”

Finally I know what I’m doing Fight goes well and Loatheb drops [item]Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher[/item] which, thanks to a couple of people passing at they notices that I was only wearing a blue item, I won

Conclusion

I must admit I had a great time and my [item]Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads[/item] are really nice. I have already signed up for next Tuesday’s run and have read the starts for the instance so I should be better prepared

The site I am refering to is Be IMBA! whose purpose, to use their words, is:

to guide World of Warcraft players to maximize their PvE effectiveness. The carefully selected checks and advisories help to identify common pitfalls and mistakes whether they are talent or gear related. We hope that our service presents a useful guidance for the casual and hardcore PvE player alike

The site queries the World of Warcraft Armory and wowhead.com for you character and gear information and makes recommendations accordingly.  You do not need to register with the site but if you choose to do so you can force character data to be refreshed directly from the Armory, if not a cached version is used

Does being IMBA really matter?

TBH the answer to this question all depends on you, IMHO being IMBA is not worth sqat.  So why am I posting about it then?  I regularly do HC instances with a group of friend from my guild and we normally breeze through them, however looking at my DPS in recount I noticed that I was lagging severly behind my friends.  No one had an issue with it but I don’t like to think that I’m not making a valid contribution or that people are carrying me.  Chatting with my friend about the issue brought Be IMBA to my attention, so off I went to have a look.

It’s now only 4 days down the line but using the information from Be IMBA I have managed to take my DPS from ~900/sec to ~1,400/sec on average and have even started to have to pay attention more ot Omen 3 as I am starting to gain more agro  This transformation has cost me roughly 500g most of whiich went on [item]Wispcloak[/item], I also got [item]Slithering Slippers[/item] and [item]Living Mojo Belt[/item] from HC Gundrak, [item]Prison Manifest[/item] form HC Violet Hold and [item]Sundial of the Exiled[/item] using Kirin’Tor rep.

Anyway don’t just take my word for it, check out the site and see for yourself

The day of release

The day of the release was a frustrating day for me, I had ordered my copy of WotLK from Amazon and had received notification that it had been shipped two days before the launch date.  I sat a home eagerly awaiting the arrival of the postman… and I waited… and waited…  Didn’t he realise how important today was, surely he could have delivered to me first and then gone about his day!  Eventually patience gave way to frustration and by lunchtime I was down right p’d off!!  So I jumped in the car and droving into Bolton to buy a copy from Game, I even found that I had £10 on my points card so I scored a copy for a mere £9.99.  Upon returning home I discovered that Postie had been waiting around the corner for me to leave before delivering our mail and more to the point there was no post from Amazon*

Anyway enough rambling… disk in… install… patch… here we go!!!

I teleported to Stormwind, mounted up, ran to the harbor.  As the harbor started to come into view I was feeling quite excited, so excited in fact that I forgot to turn right for the path and ran off the walls and crashed to the floor losing half my hit points, not a Good start!  Not letting this minor mishap put me off, I dusted myself off and boarded the boat to Northrend, zoned and the game crashed!  I could tell it was going to be one of those days, several crashes and one or two choice words later the game was stable and I was ready to go.

Borean Tundra

Upon arrival in Valiance Keep I was initially concern that it would be very difficult to get things done due to the vast amount of people there.  However this concern was short lived as it became apparent that all required mobs were spawning fast enough to allow everyone the change to complete their quest reasonably quickly.  The vast number of people in the zone also had another advantage, that being there is no shortage of people to help complete group quest with a group invite often getting sent as you arrive in the area where the required mob is.  I did find it very amusing when there was 3 or 4 groups both Alliance and Horde all huddled in a small cave frantically spamming their AoE spells to try tag the mob upon re-spawn   As I ran through the quests I was good to see that each quest chain has been given a good deal of thought and generally have good story lines, with one or two twists.

My First Instance

I have a group of friend who I have recently started going TBC instances with and they invited me over to do a run in The Nexus, Coldarra.  It was great to get away from the manic questing to be able to take the time to view a zone without it being cluttered with other players.  It was great to go into an instance without all the strats down to pat and have to work things out for ourselves, the first two bosses we fought Ormorok the Tree-Shaper and Anomalus were not too much of a challenge and were quickly dispatched.  The fun started with Grand Magus Telestra who likes to throw you around the room, thus forcing you only to use instant cast spells, this caused us some healing problems which all came to a head when she played her next trick.  Half was through the fight she split into three aspects, one fire, one frost and one arcane, after our first wipe we put a mage on the fire and frost aspects (yes, we have two mages in our group) to sheep them and then tried to DPS down the arcane, again we wiped as sheep kept breaking quickly.  Third time lucky, we played this exactly the same as the second time but this time the mages just constantly sheeped their target until the arcane mob was down, then we killed the other two in turn.

On to the final boss a red dragon call Keristrasza, I love dragons to be honest they are one of the reasons I played games like wow, I want to see dragons… and kill them  Keristrasza casts a a debuff that slows you casting and attack speed, so yet another fight where we were having to rely on instant cast spells most of the time, as we started to wipe I Ice blocked and then when everyone else was down proceeded to kite Keri around the outside of her room.  Unfortunately she caught up with me before anyone else managed to get back in and get some agro so she re-set  Second attempt we did the same thing except this time I kited while everyone else rezzed and buffed then we finished her off, but not before she killed me and unfortunately the she went down before I got back into the instance so I didn’t get the achievement but I did get a nice new pair of boots [item]Attuned Crystalline Boots[/item] 

All in all I really enjoyed my first day in the new expansion and think it will bring many more hours of fun, more about some of my favorite quest lines and most hated areas in furture posts.

*FYI the copy of WotLK eventually arrived two days after launch, well worth pay for First Class delivery… NOT!