Friday Fiction - Wounds and Healing, Part 3

Pix's Note: Yes, yes, I know it's Thursday. But with changes in my schedule at the office, I wasn't able to finish up the next installment of Uldu-Arms. So, today you get Friday Fiction, tomorrow you get the usual Thursday post. Enjoy.

Oh, if you missed them, here is Part 1 and Part 2. If you've missed the entire chain of stories at this point, go here and read from the bottom up.

---

“Worthless.”

The word rang hollow in her mind, answered with a scoff.

“Traitor.”

She answered with a growl of denial.

“You killed one of your blood… your own sister.”

“I had the right!” screamed Malyss, shouting down the disembodied voice that mocked her in her mind. Staggering and falling into a nearby chair, she sat, cradling her head in her hands, frustrated and angry and panicked. “Damn it, I had the right. She owed it to me!”

The voice was hers, the part of her controlled by demonic influence. Once, it caused her to doubt her sister, to let her hate grow and fester because of Lelissa’s “betrayal” so many years ago. Now that Lelissa was dead, the voice now sought to break her spirit, to weaken her so that the demon within would claim dominion over the body, and shove Malyss’ consciousness aside.

“So you say. Lelissa even told you she had searched for you everywhere. How was she to know you had landed in the Plaguelands, so far from where the Exodar crashed? The creatures there were powerful; you know as well as I do that she could not have survived there, as green as she was. You killed her for no reason.”

“She left me to die! It’s her fault that this is what I’ve become! It’s her fault that I am denied the light!” Malyss collapsed into sobs, shaking her head and weeping openly. “You told me it was her fault!”

“So I lied. You are denied the light because of what you are, but it is no one’s fault but your own. You accepted this. You told Arthas you would die for him. Maybe you should have.”

Malyss slipped from the chair to the floor, wracked with anger, hate, and grief. She lay there for a long time, unable to control her emotions as her will battled with the will of the demon within her.

And the demon was winning.

---

Resting against a tree, the Kaldorei, obviously a Priest by his garb, casually blew smoke rings into the air. The cheroot in his left hand was only recently lit, a sign that this was a recent break.

A large, black bear came sniffing about nearby, approaching the priest at the tree. Making a loud snuffling noise, like a sneeze, it looked at the Priest and growled, “For Elune’s sake, Myrlia, we’re already a week late to meet Valyra. Do you really have to stop for a smoke every ten minutes? Her message seemed pretty urgent, and we might want to get there sooner rather than later, don’t you think?”

Myrlia smiled a wry smile, running his hand through his hair. “You know I plan on quitting on my birthday, Kelarr. Let me enjoy it while I can.” He reached out, crushing the burning ashes on the base of the tree while Kelarr curled his muzzle in irritation at such a blatant disregard for nature. “You’re right, though. I guess we’d better get moving. I think we can make it there tonight, if we hurry… maybe catch a gryphon out of Stormwind?”

Kelarr nodded, an unusual action among bears, even Druidic ones. “Anything that will keep us from putting this off another week. Wait a minute, why am I talking to you? I’m still mad at you.”

“Oh, come on. How was I supposed to know she wouldn’t be a cat person?

---

The sound of hooves on the wooden floor caused Valyra to look up from her research. She found herself looking into Fierevere’s violet eyes as the succubus held her face just mere centimeters from her mistress’ nose. Valyra couldn’t see it, but Fierevere was grinning widely.

“About time you got back. We have work to do.” Valyra emphasized her irritation by slamming shut the book she was reading. “What took you so long, anyway?”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” Fierevere purred. “You never said I couldn’t take my time getting back.”

Valyra growled, eyes flashing at the demon’s defiance. She thrust her hand forward, clutching Fierevere about the throat, raw fury and speed catching the Eredar by surprise. Fierevere quailed in fear, quivering at what she saw behind Valyra’s eyes, only barely contained as the warlock’s arm bulged and shifted, corded muscles tightening as she began to change.

“You. Will. Not. Make light of this. I gave you a job to do!” Valyra roared the last few words, her physical form shifting rapidly into a worgen, fangs bared from within a short muzzle common to her gender. “And I expected you to return to me quickly!”

Fierevere shrieked as Valyra casually swept her arm behind her, tossing the wayward demon into a bookcase. Hooves scraped the wooden floor frantically as the succubus tried to back into a corner, truly fearful for the first time at what her mistress had become.

Gritting her teeth, Valyra tried to regain control of herself. In this form, she often felt little more than the animal she resembled, and right now her rage was driving her to rend and tear the demon into shreds. Quivering with the effort, she finally wrestled her fury under control, the pain of the earlier transformation dulling her senses as she slowly shifted back into a human form.

The change finally done, Valyra looked down at her robe, sighing at the tears and stretched hems. Using soft, measured words, she spoke to Fierevere without looking at her.

“Woggles hasn’t arrived. Kelarr and Myrlia are late. I can’t wait for them to get here before calling on the others I need for this like I wanted to. Find Siasha and Esmerellda. We don’t have much time left.” Without another word, Valyra turned and went into her bedroom to change.

Only when she had been gone for several minutes did Fierevere finally muster the courage to stand and rush out of her mistress’ house.

Time to Quit While I'm Ahead

The title might scare some people, but I'm not ending the blog. You can relax.

Something happened in my raid last night.

Chaos.

Let me break this down for you, and yes, this is probably going to sound rant-ish, but I'm still pissed about it.

See, in Fate's Legacy, we've got several people who step up and run raids: our Guild Leader, a few of the Guild Stewards (like myself), and one Paladin hopelessly obsessed with Holy Wrath, so from week to week, we don't necessarily have the same people leading each time. It prevents the raid leads from burning out, and gives everyone else a chance to work under different raid styles (mine probably being the least forgiving, but hey, people sign up, and I've never made any secret of the fact that I'm kind of a hard-ass when it comes to the game).

Anyway, the raid got off to a rocky start early on, because I had scheduled it for a time not normally run by the other guild raids - a half hour earlier than other leaders' raid times. People showed up late - almost by 20 minutes in some cases. One raider's suggestion was that I should have sent out a mail to all of the raiders saying that the raid time was earlier than other raids. But wait, isn't that the purpose of the calendar? To schedule a set start time, and then it is the responsibility of the people signing up to check it and make sure they can make it?

Aside from that, things started without a hitch. We got people in, and started clearing our way through ToC.

Northrend Beasts went down. Awesome.

Jarraxus went down. Awesome.

Faction Champions (our hardest encounter, usually resulting in a wipe or two) one-shot. Doubly awesome.

Val'kyr Twins.

Uh-oh.

In the first battle, I tend to expect that we're going to have a wipe while people transition into a new fight mechanic. Twins are always kind of shaky, because you never really know what you're going to get from ability to ability. In line with what I expected, we wiped, because we weren't burning through the shields as fast as we usually do. We cut one a little fine, and we ended up missing one completely and a heal got off. I wasn't disappointed - the guys on my raid had been working hard all night, and I tend to account for a few bumps and bruises along the way. Shit happens, you pick yourself up and try again.

Taking note of a few things about the raid I didn't think about at the beginning of the fight, I start talking up a different strategy, asking the tanks to keep the twins a little closer to the portals to allow melee to be able to switch essences before running to the other side to DPS a shield. I've been on more than enough raids to know that this strategy works, and made this announcement because of a few specific things about this raid (which I'll address later).

There's a little confusion, but people go along with the strategy. We start up the encounter again, and this time, we do worse. There's a little grumbling, but we pick up and try again.

And wipe.

Instantly, there was an uproar. "We've always beaten the encounter the other way." "We're losing too much DPS because the melee have to run farther." "We've never had to change essences to DPS a shield before." "This doesn't make any sense."

I'm listening to the complaints and comments, and right about then, I start having technical problems with my connection to the WoW server at the same time I start having issues with the Vent server. I can't communicate through raid channels, I can't communicate through my mic, and I'm constantly disconnecting from both. I don't know if anyone actually heard me or not, but at one point I said, "Why are we arguing about this? This is the raid I'm leading, and this is the strategy I want to use." I never got a chance to explain why, because I end up crashing out of both.

For the next fifteen minutes, I'm fighting a battle with WoW and Vent, I'm still hearing complaining that I can't respond to, and I'm steadily growing agitated. Finally, I get back in, and it seems like everything is fine enough to continue the raid, and now people are asking what strat we're using. I had given up. I finally said, "You know what? Do what you want. Obviously this isn't my raid anymore." Yeah, it was probably a little petty, but between the bitching and the technical issues, I was on a pretty slender thread by that point.

We end up calling the raid due to technical issues, but I ended up throwing it out there that if people aren't going to listen to me and give me the courtesy as their raid leader to follow the strategies I present, then someone else should take up the mantle and take over my series, at which point, I logged off.

So what exactly were we having trouble with?

It didn't really help that our raid was 32% healing. Yes, that's right, in a 25-man raid, eight of them weren't DPS or tanks. We had two tanks. Fifteen DPSers. More than a few people who were relatively green to raiding with us, or a little undergeared for being heavy hitters.

It also didn't help that one of the key elements to our wipes after the strategy change was that some of our melee DPS were missing the one crucial point of the strategy: change essences before you switch sides.

My effort in changing up the strategy was to allow some of our more hardcore melee DPS the chance to make up for what we lacked, to give them a way to increase their output even further than we had before. I never got a chance to explain this, because I was constantly being interrupted. When I finally gave up trying to explain, nobody even ever asked why we were doing it. They were just content to tell me that I was doing it wrong.

I've retired from raid leading before, and like Michael Jordan and basketball, I just keep coming right back into it.

I think it may be time to make it permanent; my raid doesn't respect my opinion enough to follow me when I make the request.

Uldu-Arms: An Arms Warrior's Guide to Ulduar - The Siege

Welcome to the first installment of Uldu-Arms!

For the newer Arms Warriors, there's a lot of unfamiliarity. Maybe you're a former Fury or Protection build, looking for a change of pace or changing because of the tremendous benefits of Tier 10 in favor of the Arms tree. Maybe you're playing a new character up through the ranks, or maybe just playing an alt for a change of pace. Whatever the reason, for some players, the mechanics of a fight and the abilities of an Arms Warrior doesn't really click right away, so the goal here is to get away from that and share my experience with the new crowd.

Before you expect too much out of this, you have to understand that there's little in the way of the mechanics that will make describing these fights exciting. That's unavoidable. What this will really end up being is ways to make the most of your abilities and keep your utility effects (read: Deep Wounds) on the boss encounters as much as possible.

I hope you find it useful.

Flame Leviathan

As most of us are aware by now, this fight has absolutely NOTHING to do with your class, so we're just gonna skip right on by this one.

Ignis

Ignis is pretty straightforward, but there are two possible scenarios that come to mind when taking this boss down.

In one scenario, Ignis is tanked in four positions throughout the entire fight, allowing an offtank to make use of the fire to heat up his guardian adds and then drag them to pools to be destroyed. In this case, your time is spent running from point to point as the boss is pulled to the next position.

In the other scenario (the one used by both of my guilds in 10-man) is where Ignis is tanked at the edge of a pool where the tank is standing, thus eliminating the fire patches when Ignis uses his flamethrower ability. This allows for Ignis to remain stationary, and the only person doing any moving is the offtank to pick up all of the adds and tank them off to the side somewhere.

In either case, your priority doesn't change. As always, keep Rend up, use Overpower when it triggers, Execute when it triggers, Mortal Strike, and fill with Slam.

Razorscale

For this fight, a Bladestorm build is great for the trash, but honestly, there are more classes in your raid who are probably better suited for AE damage, and in my opinion, you should leave it to them. Bladestorm is nice in PVP, but it has little use in boss fights. You could get a similar effect with Sweeping Strikes and Cleave, and still be able to use your other abilities as well.

Anyway, handle the trash in the way your raid lead instructs, and when Razorscale lands, immediately use Charge to cover the distance between your location and her location. This is important, but we'll get to that. Once on Razorscale, you'll stick with your priority list as usual, and keep up the damage until she performs Wing Buffet and knocks everyone back. While you are sailing through the air, Charge should have refreshed, and you can use it to immediately close distance on her before she takes off again, and get a couple swings in for good measure. The best part? You won't take any fall damage.

XT-002 Deconstructor

The Deconstructor is by far my favorite fight in the Siege, but that's probably because he makes me laugh, and because I have the U R Bad Toys Remix playing in the background. (What? I think it's hilarious.)

I consider this fight to be your real first hard mode encounter; I know that Flame Leviathan technically is, but you're relying on a vehicle for the duration of that fight. It's somewhat on its own and feels a little removed from the rest of Ulduar to me. Because of the nature of the hard mode, there are a few options that you have depending on your raid leader.

In normal mode, you will always have to move whenever you get hit with a light bomb or gravity bomb. With light bomb, unless everyone is spread out around XT's back, you should be able to strafe to one side or the other, maintain DPS, and still be out of the way of everyone else so they don't take residual damage from the bomb on you. With gravity bomb, however, you will have to run a fair distance away so that when the bomb explodes, you don't bring everyone else to your location (in hard mode, this could be potentially fatal to the raid). The benefit to being hit with gravity bomb, however, is that chances are your Charge is free - use it to close distance to XT once again.

For the Heartbreaker mode (hard mode), depending on your raid leader, you can probably just follow the same instructions as above. Typically, the rules don't really change, except for the life spark, but unless you're in a melee-heavy group, you won't care about it anyway. If your raid leader is asking you to get out of the way on light bombs, it's actually to your advantage in a way - you'll be able to use Charge not only to quickly return to XT when the bomb explodes, but it will get you away from the Life Spark and reduce your risk of being WTFPWNED by an angry little light ball.

Like I said, it's all pretty straightforward. Unless you're expected to swap a sword and board for emergency offtank duties, it's all about keeping your priority list running smooth, and using Charge to get back into melee range.

Told you the description wouldn't be exciting. Go fight in it instead.

See you next time!

Arms Warrior Elementary School, Q & A

Some folks have asked me a few questions through various mediums such as email and Twitter and whatnot, so I thought I'd go ahead and answer them here. That way, anyone else who has the same questions won't have to ask.

Why didn't you cover races and their racial benefits?

Because I encourage people to play the race that feels most comfortable to them. For instance, the first Lelissa was actually a Night Elf. I managed to get her to level 20 before deciding that I didn't really like the way the character played. Sure, it was just like every other Warrior in terms of abilities, but something never felt right. When Burning Crusade released, the Draenei seemed to fit a little better. I enjoyed the class more when I felt more attached to the character behind it. (Insert LOLRP jokes here.)

What professions should I take?

Honestly, you really can't go wrong with any of them, except maybe tailoring. Lelissa is a blacksmith and jewelcrafter, for the extra sockets and crafter-specific gems. It works out pretty well, especially when you consider her Belt of the Titan has three sockets (after an added buckle), and each one totes a +34 strength gem.

So what should I gem for?

That depends on your gear, and on you. If you're not hit-capped, you'll need hit gems until you are. If you're not expertise-capped, you'll need expertise until you are. If you're following the Elitist Jerks model of Arms DPS, you'll want Armor Penetration gems. If you're more like me, you'll go for strength. If you're not specialized for poleaxe, you might want enough crit to get you to 30% or so.

Will I lead the DPS meters?

Not likely.

But if I'm not leading the meter, why be Arms?

Arms DPS is about more than putting out huge numbers. I'm sure Lelissa (with a little bit better optimized gear) could crank out around 5k without too much trouble (she easily breaks 4k now), but her real value is in providing a damage boost to the physical damage dealers in the raid, improving their overall output.

On top of that, once a boss hits 20%, if your crit rate is good and you've got the same spec I do, you can Execute until it dies. I'd call that a win.

Will you ever talk about the Best-In-Slot items for Arms?

I doubt it. There's too much math and theorycrafting behind that sort of thing. My goal for this game is to make it fun, not a second job.

Sure, I've made posts in the past about DPS tests on Armor Penetration gems vs. Strength gems and about testing priority lists, and the benefits of Mortal Strike vs. Execute. The thing is, those are things that impact my class and spec choice consistently. Best In Slot isn't a necessary thing to play the game - it's only if you want to squeeze every last bit of DPS out of a spec that you can, and from what I've seen, it's never this huge margin of difference.

What else is on the list for what you're working on?

Well, I know it's a little far behind, but I'm planning on covering boss fights for both Ulduar and ToC. I'm also in the process of trying to transplant the blog to a self-host, but having a bit of trouble with the CSS, so it's delayed; on the other hand, the awesome Baenhoof will be gracing the new page with all kinds of kickass art (which I'm really looking forward to), so once I can get the CSS done (or better, find someone who can do it for cheap - I suck at CSS for WordPress), we'll be well underway.

I've also been talking with the Mighty Nibuca about another project to make an appearance on... it sounds pretty interesting, and I think I'm going to participate. Details are still kinda vague, but when I know what's up, you'll know what's up.

On a non-WoW note, I've started running a 4th Edition D&D game. I'll be writing a blog to track that game, and it will update once every other week. I'll make a post about it, so if you're interested in seeing the shenanigans of my friends, keep an eye out for it. It'll be fun.

Damn It All.

I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO!

Moving this week, so I apologize for lack of posts. Between trying to get everything set up for a seamless move, still maintain my raid schedule, bringing home projects for work, working on projects for the D&D game I'm getting ready to run in a week, making plans for The Great Blog Transition of '09, and a whole mess of other things, I have officially:

• Missed out on NaNoWriMo this month.
• Missed starting the Uldu-Arms series of posts.
• Missed Friday Fiction.
• Found a hundred other things to do before my mother comes to visit this weekend IN THE MIDDLE OF MY MOVE.
• Realized that there is no way to get my couch out of my apartment without killing myself and at least two good friends.
• Lost (what was left of) my sanity.

So, another hiatus, close on the heels of the other one. I promise it won't last as long.

On the bright side, I bought the Lil' KT and Pandaren Monk. They gave me something to smile about for a bit.