Honor's Code

This post will cover Gruul, Oregorger, Hans'gor and Franz'gar, Beast Lord Darmac, and Flamebender Kagraz. I'll do another on the other bosses once I get some more experience with them. This is based upon my experiences in Normal Blackrock Foundry. If there's stuff on higher difficulties that would alter the choices I've made here let me know in the comments and I'll edit the entry (and credit you). If you think there are better choices, let me know and we can discuss it. I'm always ready to learn. I also wanted to address the idea of 'its Normal mode, do whatever you want.' We all have our own experiences and its easy to think that our experience is the typical one. It leads to comments like the one I saw on Twitter recently "Oh the ilvl 645 and lower things? Do they even matter?" Yes, they do matter. Plenty of people are still LFR 640 geared or worse and the 645 tokens represent a small or maybe even a large upgrade. In the same way, the

We decided to continue our efforts in Blackrock Foundry. Our officers want everyone to hit the threshold of 15 bosses so that when the new Blackrock Foundry Garrison missions come out, we will be able to get Heroic gear from them. I'm not sure if its 15 or 21. Highmaul had 14 bosses and that's where people are getting the 15. I don't know if its higher because BRF has more bosses. When I got invited to the raid, the game labeled me as a Tank since I was in my Prot spec. I typically run around with my Prot spec on. It's my favorite spec and if I'm not in a raid or heading out to do a daily or something, it doesn't matter what spec I'm in. In addition, having the shield on my back gives me one more open bag space. I wonder how it works with Gladiator Warriors. I guess it is smart enough to know they are in Gladiator stance and label them correctly. I saw that both of our regular tanks, who I will call Mr. G and Mr. S, were on and in the raid so as soon a

Update: Dr. Theck has published his " How to Prot in 6.1 ". It's fantastic and well worth the read. I'll do a summary post on it tomorrow. When I logged on Tuesday night, I got a Facebook notification from the guild. Our guild communicates mostly through a closed Facebook group. We do have public facing website with forums but they aren't used nearly to the extent the Facebook group is. While I resisted the idea at first, I really like the Facebook group as a way of communicating within the guild especially one like ours that spans many games. You see people's real names, real faces and often their profile pictures contain family members. It helps translate our fellow guild mates from pixels to people. The only problem is learning to connect the real person to their in game persona. I usually tag my posts with 'Honors' so people know who I am. Its also great for those times when players change their focus. One of our DPS Warriors really got into Se

I noticed that one of our regular tanks wasn't online yet. When we reached start time, he was still no where to be seen. We had our full group ready to go except for this one player. I thought about how I should handle it. I feel like I handled myself poorly in Dominion and I wanted to be more mature and generally handle myself better this time around. The night of my interview with the Dirty Casuals, I didn't know voices yet and since I was multitasking in game I didn't have Team Speak up to see who was talking, I didn't know if our raid leader had been part of that interview where they asked me what I wanted to do for an offset and I got to express my preference for Prot over Holy (or Ret to be honest). I decided to whisper the raid leader what my Tanking gear iLevel was (655) and told him I was ready if they needed me. I figured that was the best way of making myself available without it seemingly like I was politicking for a tank spot. He could opt to use me or de

Blackrock Foundry design is counter intuitive and caused many guilds to bang their head on harder bosses than they should have been attempting. Most raids you expect the difficulty to raise on an even curve as you move through the instance. The expectation from the player in a winged raid like BRF is that each wing will increase in difficulty. The last boss of the 1st wing (Blast Furnance in the Slagworks) should be easier than the first boss in the second wing (Hanz and Franz in the Black Forge). That’s not the way Blackrock Foundry works. Each wing has its own curve. The first boss in each wing (Gruul, Hanz and Franz, and Beastlord) are all about the same difficulty. The second bosses (Oregorger, Flamebender, and Thorgar) are all a step up from that. The final bosses in each wing (Blast Furnance, Kromog, Iron Maidens) are all more difficult. The developers assume more gear has been won from the instance and even figure on some 2 piece and a couple of 4 piece set bonuses being in pl

New content is like oxygen for an online game like WoW and you could tell the excitement levels were up as raid o'clock neared. The last time I ran new content the night it opened was Mogu’shan Vaults. I figured since I was going to be facing down Gruul again, I should dress for the occasion so after I logged on I headed straight to the Transmog vendor and mogged my gear to Tier 4 with a Hammer of the Naaru. The only thing I was missing was boots but those aren't all that noticeable on a Tauren so I picked the closest thing I had. Now that I was dressed for the occasion, I flew over to Khad’gar’s place to buy my Timeless Solium Band of Brutality . Thanks to commentator, kevsmart, on my last post, I found out I could have a 680 Timeless Band for all three specs if I wanted to. I limited myself to only the Ret and Prot ones for now. I made sure I was ready to raid with Flasks, potions and tonics and flew out. We formed up at the entrance to Blackrock Foundry and started

I had transferred Honors from Shadow Council to Hyjal Monday night. I had learned my lesson about trying to transfer on patch day from Warlords launch. I wasn't going to try that again. Hyjal is a bigger realm than Shadow Council (SC) so while I was able to pad the old bank account going from Zul'jin to SC, there was not as much opportunity going from SC to Hyjal. As some of the more observant among you may have noticed, something went awry with the Goblin device that transferred me to my new home. Never did trust them little buggers. The story behind it is an item called  Transmorphic Tincture  that I got from Level 3 Alchemy Lab. The Transmorphic Tincture changes the gender of your toon and the first time I used it, I discovered I really liked the Femtaur model. It's smaller and feels more responsive than the male Tauren. I feel like I can react better. The Femtaur allows me to still be Tauren but I have a smaller model that I like better. I had actually debated

Hammer Log 29 January I learned that Tuesday night was sort of their farm night and Thursday was more about progression. I knew that meant there was a chance that I would be asked to sit out so I tried to mentally prepare myself for that. I still have blue 630 legs, cloak and trinkets. I could run LFR and see if I could pick up those pieces,but even with LFR pieces I'm not sure it would close the gap. In an effort to make Normal and Heroic raiders feel like they don't need to run LFR, the gear gap is pretty substantial. You get a 640 for LFR and you get a 670 for Heroic. If I didn't get an invite, I'd try to find a PuG running normal and make sure they were using Personal loot. I checked my Garrisons and I saw I had two missions for Trinkets, one 630 and one 645. Trinkets are some of my worse pieces. I was still using a blue from Nagrand that thankfully got upgraded to a 608 epic from the War Mill. I put my best team together (Olim, Lantesstor and Kaz) and gave them

Congratulations to New England for winning the Super Bowl. As a fan without a particular rooting interest I thought it was a great game. Hammer Log 27 January 2015 continued I was really starting to wonder if perhaps my situation no longer lent itself to raiding. Maybe it was time to become one of those solo/alts/old raids/pet battle players. I remembered hearing about a guild on Twitter called The Dirty Casuals . They were a multigaming group that played WoW, Wildstar, SWTOR and other games. I checked their raid schedule and not only do they only run two nights but their times are mostly workable for me. I contacted them through Twitter and got signed up on their site. They also have a closed Facebook group that is fairly active. They use Teamspeak. One thing I’ve done in searching for guilds and pickup groups is encounter about every VoIP service out there. I’ve used Vent, Mumble, Teamspeak and even something called RaidCall. I jumped on their Teamspeak to say hello but they

I see New England winning over Seattle in the Super Bowl. Seattle's defense only has one real weakness and that is stopping the Tight End. New England has the best Tight End in the business. Hammer Log 27 January 2015 At the end of the run, Café Soma announced they would cancel their normal Tuesday/Thursday run due to the leaders having to travel. They were going to run on Saturday afternoon but that was way too early for me. I looked around Open Raid for runs that week but I didn’t see anything that fit my schedule. When I logged on Tuesday, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. After taking care of my Garrisons, I pulled up the ingame Group Finder. My intention was to find a group to get some practice healing in a raid environment. I was still Prot/Holy. But as I scrolled down, I saw a group forming for a fresh Highmaul that didn’t have any tanks. I know I had planned on practicing healing but that's because I figured there wouldn't be any groups looking for tank