I’ve been mostly playing Zerg.  I did a little bit of the campaign as a Terran, and then started doing games as a Protoss… but once I tried Zerg I haven’t looked back!  Right now I’m doing lots of 1v1 and 2v2 stuff but it would be awesome to eventually get a 3v3 and 4v4 team going!  I’m actually really excited about it all as I’m sure you can tell from all the exclamation points!!!  I’m not even very good, but defiantly improving and that pleases me.   It’s been a long time since WoW was hard for me, so having to relearn a game and actually be challenged is awesome.

Here is the short summary: Account got hacked and subsequently banned, waited a week and a half, got items back and got unbanned.  Raided one day.  Account got re-banned “Exploiting the economy”  and I put in a new trouble ticket.

Well tonight I got the reply to the new ticket:

Greetings,

Thank you for your follow-up email regarding the account ASHTARTE. This account was closed after a Blizzard Entertainment investigation produced evidence indicating the account was associated to multiple accounts that participated in exploitative activities. Upon further review, we have determined that our original findings were accurate and the action was in line with our current policies.

Please take a moment to review the World of Warcraft Terms of Use (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html). The reoccurring exploitative trends present on accounts associated to the account listed above have led to the closure of all related accounts.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and hope we have addressed any concerns you may have had. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance to you.

As a reminder, only the Account Administration department can address disputes or questions about this account action. To learn more about how we are able to assist you, please visit us at http://us.blizzard.com/support/article/21505.

Sincerely,

Game Master Syntharous
Customer Services
Blizzard Entertainment
www.blizzard.com/support

Um… I associate with exploitive accounts? Yeah, I’m sure after my account was hacked and all my items were sold they probably did give my gold to one of their stock gold selling accounts.  From what I understand that’s how it works.  BUT you knew I was hacked, and you restored me!!  Only to re-ban me a day later.  I didn’t do anything different from what I have for the last five years.  WTF?!?!

If they’re really permanently banning me over this, I’m done with WoW.  I’m not starting over now.  I just feel so annoyed that I would be treated this way.  Don’t I contribute to the WoW community?  Before I was hacked was there ever any problem with my behavior or my account?  Does anyone even care?

Sorry to vent I just am boggled at it all.

After getting everything in order I went raiding with my baby-alt druid and her guild downed LK25 for the first time, and later that night downed Heroic Sindragosa 10 man for the first time.  I was happy to be restored in time to be a part of that, congratulations Pandemic  Plus, you’ve been waiting a long time for a heroic Sindy video.  I know… my original ten man fall apart after getting drakes, the ten mans in my new guild were almost non-existent, and then I got hacked.  Who’d have though that the video would finally come in the form of my alt-druid?

So anyway… before I give you the video let’s get back to my tragic story.  I got an email today reading this:

Account Name: XXXXXXXX

Reason for Closure: Terms of Use Violation — Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy

This account was closed because one or more characters were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for “real-world” currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy.

Even if this behavior is the result of a third party accessing the account instead of the registered user (for example, a friend, family member, or leveling service) then the account can still be held responsible for the penalty because of the impact it had on the game environment.

We’ve found the above behavior is many times directly related to groups responsible for compromising World of Warcraft accounts; we take these issues very seriously. To better understand our position against exploitative activity and the risks involved, please review this article:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

The exploitative activity that took place on this account violates the World of Warcraft Terms of Use. We ask you take a moment to review these terms at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html. Any recurring subscriptions on this account have been suspended to prevent further monetary charges.

For any disputes of this action, please visit the Exploitative Activity FAQ and Contact page here: http://us.blizzard.com/support/article/exploitfaq

Regards,

Blizzard Entertainment
www.worldofwarcraft.com

Well… my-oh-my am I surprised.  I am aware that it is possible to hack an authenticator, but that is really really really uncommon.  Also, I armoried myself and my characters still have all their gear.  They haven’t been stripped like they were when I was hacked.  I didn’t do anything weird last night.  I didn’t send or receive any gold, and I only listed about 5 gems on the AH.  I have absolutely no idea what I could have done to trigger this…. *shrug* So, naturally I sent in a mail and got the standard “We received your mail and will get back to you” reply.  I guess we’ll see huh?  It’s like they want me to quite WoW

Heroic Sindragosa Instructional Video

Well the good news is that in the one day I did have my account back I got this video, so here it is

To summarize:

When you have unchained magic, get 20 yards away from everyone to explode, run back, and DON’T cast.

Be pro at LoS in the air phase or you’ll get one shot

In the second phase, fight the temptation to cast while you have unchained magic!!

And on a personal note, I hope this account thing gets resolved sooner rather than later.  It makes me a very sad tree.

Now I’m in the process of gearing up this new tree.  Actually it’s not going too badly considering I don’t have the endurance to really badge grind, and with all the raiding on my main I don’t get to raid much on the new tree.

Anyway, to the subject.  If you’re a new tree and you want to put out numbers, dear god don’t stack spell power.  Please, just don’t.  What you need to focus on is hate and regen.  Gem spirit, gem haste… spellpower is absolutely useless when you’re OOM.

Rule #1 of being a good tree: Always be casting!  From the 10 seconds before the pull till the boss dies, you should never stop casting in any fight.  Now, if you aren’t able to do that because of mana, then you need to fix your problem. SPIRIT my friends. Its great when you’re geared, but its godly when you’re not.

LoL Min Maxing:  I have an issue with this term being used for healers… more spell power does not = more healing.  Yes, for damage that may be true, but it’s not true for us.  Hell half of it is just going to over healing anyway.  Healers have to be more balanced than that.  Regen, haste, mana pool, spell power… all important.  I understand if you DPS on your main it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of having balanced stats.  I know that in a lot of fights when things go your way, you can do fine will all SP.  But on the really hard fights or  when things mess up and you are recovering, that sort of thing… trust me on this one, you don’t wanna be THAT tree who is now useless. I’d Brez but I don’t have mana, can I borrow someone else’s innervate? If you’re that tree, I don’t like you.

LoL Gear score:  The same person playing the same character on the same fights in the same raid will do better with better gear.  As someone who started ICC with a 3500 GS and still out healed the others, I rather think GS is retarded.  They probably sucked.  But hey, you can’t tell they suck from GS, nor can you tell I don’t.  Please, don’t be a GS Nazi, I don’t like them either.  You can always kick people later muhahaha.  In my experience an under-geared alt of a good player will pwn an geared main of a bad player any day, be it in dps, healing or tanking.

/endrant

Happy Tree-ing

Wow… you go unguided for less than one week and you feel like you’ve fallen so far behind!  Yikes!  Well… I found a new home and am raiding again, so all is well on that front.  Even did some hard mode 10 mans last night with the new guild, and remembered to take some videos… more on that later in the post

First, I wanted to say thank you to a few people: Youki, Cerenitee, Martos, Contrite, Dierdrea and Piptooth.  You guys were awesome to raid with, and to hang out with.  My time in LoD was not wasted because it gave me the opportunity to meet all of you.  I know we aren’t all going in the same direction now, but I wish you all the best of luck in game and out, and I hope we’ll all continue to stay in touch.  And I’m incredibly happy that my favoritest, bestest, awesomest priest in the whole world has gone to the same guild as me, Hi Youki!  Of course he has a new name and a sexy new blood elf body… and I’m stuck being a… cow.  Moo?

Hard Mode Blood Queen Lana’thel

Well it seems that, at least on 10 man, heroic Blood Queen Lana’thel isn’t all that… heroic.  Ok, she does more damage to the tanks and to the raid.  And yep, at the end that damage got to be… well… a lot.  But we very nearly one shot it, and that just sits a bit wrong with me.  I’m linking a video below, however the basic strategy is the same as before.  This is just a kill video:  watch regular mode strategy video instead.

Hard Mode Festergut

This fight is a pain in the ass for one reason… Malleable Goo!  Yep, that fun stuff from Professor Putricde is back!  Basically the professor stands on the balcony and throws goo down the entire fight at you.  It has the same effect as it does when you fight putricide.  It does a lot of damage, and slows your attack/casting speed by 200%.  You have to get quite far away from it too, if you watch the video you’ll see I run away but still get hit by it  Despite my failure, the video might be helpful to give you a look at this ability!  Other than that, the same basic principals of the fight apply, including stacking the inoculation and the damage changing between mostly raid wide and mostly tank damage.

So I took it for a test run Tuesday night in our 10 man group.  We killed the first four bosses, and cleared the blood wing, so there was a variety of different types of boss fight and some trash mixed in.  Since our awesome (although sadly, Gnomish) rogue Tinwhisker is nice enough to always do logs, I was able to take a look at how the bonus was effecting my healing.

Over the course of the 10 man run, I cast rejuvenation 557 times, and my set bonus cast rejuvenation 76 times.  Unless I’m mistaken, that means for ever 7 rejuvenations I cast, the set cast another for me (at some point before the original wore off.)  Not that bad!  It ended up accounting for 3.7% of my healing (regular rejuvenation made up 34.3%).  I think this number will be higher in 25 mans… my reason being that I do more rejuv-spam and less tank healing in 25 mans.  I am also trying to roll HoTs on a lot more people so my rejuvenations (cast by me or the set) are more likely to run their full duration in 25s and not be overwritten early.

Looking at my numbers for just Blood Queen 10 man, it actually seems to have gone off a lot less.  Obviously this is the opposite of what I would have expected, since I cast rejuvenation a lot more on that fight than some others.  I think that perhaps it only jumps to people who don’t have my rejuvenation already… because it seems to have jumped like 50% less often, and jumped more to the pets.  Since I almost always have rejuvenation on everyone in 10 man on this fight, it wouldn’t have as much of a chance to jump.  Mind you it’s all speculation and could just be chance!!  Twenty-five man will be the true test for this!  I also *hope* I have healbot setup to now show where it’s jumped, so I’m not overwriting it if it does!

UPDATE: I used the set Wednesday night in 25 man stuff.  All we had left was Blood Queen and Putricde.  These are both very rejuvenation-spam friendly fights… Blood Queen even more so than Putricide.  Here are the numbers:

In the Blood Queen kill, I cast rejuvenation 199 times and the set bonus cast it 26 times.  So it cast a spell once for ever ever 7.7 times I cast... it ended up making up 7.9% of my total healing (regular rejuvenation did 70%.)  In the Professor Putricide kill I cast rejuvenation 236 times, and the set cast it 29 times.  It cast it once for every 8 casts I did… it ended up making up 8.1% of my healing on the fight compared to the 51% of the rejuvenation that I actually cast.

So the numbers are defiantly better in 25 man… I realize that these are both rejuvenation heavy fights, but this is where druid’s really shine and the set bonus just puts that extra polish on our raid-healing dominance.

T10 Conclusion:

So…  my opinion of the 4-piece set bonus is:  Defiantly worth it for 25 man raiding.  Druids dominate AOE type fights anyway, but if the bonus is doing around 8% of the healing on these intense fights, then it’s really getting quite a bit of extra heals out to those in need. It really just takes what we are already good at, and makes it that much better

My, My, My…

On a more personal note, I’m a lucky tree to have gotten this achievement already.  Us trees aren’t exactly on the top of the “to bite” list, so I was rather pleased to have this the first week possible.  I feel sorta bad for some of the top DPS who we really don’t have the option to not-bite yet.  Oh well, scew ‘em, I got mine!!  JK… really

And finally…. we did Nausea, Heartburn Indigestion achievement tonight… and I only got half of it frapsed!  I was kinda expecting it to take more tries… I shoulda started filming earlier  I guess I’ll post more about that tomorrow or the next day, I haven’t decided if the half-kill video is worth showing yet!

I have to say, I was a little disappointed that I ended up exchanging a lot of haste for crit by upgrading from my t9 to t10.  As you know, right now haste is really important, and crit is sorta… well sorta blah I guess.

That being said, I still wanted four piece so my first four purchases were/are/will be:

Lasherweave Legplates
Lasherweave Pauldrons
Lasherweave Helmet
Lasherweave Gauntlets

Now this is where things get… shall we say… not thrilling. Going from 258 gear to 264 gear is well… technically an upgrade… but it’s such a trivial one it just seems not so worth getting excited about. I know I know, all the little upgrades add up, and you should do it, etc etc… it’s just… you know… not exciting. Plus, where I go from here is also dependent on drops. Regardless of drops I want four piece, but the rest is up in the air.

I’ll end up getting Vestments of Spruce and Fir over the Lasherweave Robes for the haste. Not that I probably wont pickup the t10 robe too eventually, cuz… well.. I collect sets!

I think that the cloth belt Circle of Ossus completely pwns the leather belt Belt of Petrified Ivy, so I’ll be getting the cloth one.

I’ll probably pickup Idol of the Black Willow too, but as its 256 spell power (32×8) and my current Idol of Flaring Growth is 234 and is always up… its not an amazing upgrade either.

Trinkets… hum… Purified Lunar Dust… seems a lot like my Solace of the Defeated only with *less* spell power… something is wrong here!

The cloaks don’t interest me at all…. you can ether go with spirt + crit on the Volde’s Cloak of the Night Sky, or go with mp5 and haste on Drape of the Violet Tower… No Thanks! I’ll stick with my better itemized Shawl of the Refreshing Winds for the time being.

So yeah… badges… not thrilled

Fishing Fun!

In other news, I am now SALTY ANGELA Yep, I won the Northrend fishing contest yesterday! It was my third week of trying, so not so bad. I’ve had all of those other fishing achievements for ages, I dono why I didn’t try the tourney sooner… oh well!  I picked up a Dread Pirate Ring that I sent to an alt for that nifty 5% to experience.

Link Exchange

Finally… you may or may not have noticed that I now have a significantly shorter blogroll.  This site has been around for awhile now, and gets a fair amount of traffic, I think it’s only fair that links should be reciprocal.  That being said I removed sites that didn’t want to link back.  If your site is linking to mine, and I missed it, please let me know and I’ll add you to my blog roll!  Or if you have a related site and want to exchange links, thats cool, visit my link exchange page!

Observed, Again
In other news related to my personal characters, my little alt shaman killed Algalon on 25 last week, so she got her “The Astral Walker” title. Bit of an upgrade from “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” which was her only non-holiday title before. She’s been…. neglected, but she’s getting a lot more love now that I server transfered her

TRICK -or- TREAT!
My little cow is dressed up as a Draeni Priest for Halloween! And she finally hit 70. But you know what sucks? To choose a specialization in alchemy you still have to run Black Morass. Yeah… I ran it at 66, I really don’t want to have to find another group for that now when it was so hard the first time and the XP will be so lame compares to Northrend. I’m thinking we’ll just get a couple more levels and 2 man it, it might be faster than trying to find a group.