Druid of the Moon

I wanted to let everyone know about a great working gear tool for Feral Druid DPS.

Take a gander at Ask Mr. Robot.

This tool is similar to RAWR but available online in a web interface. You will need to install Microsoft Silverlight for it to work.

Let me start by saying why I am pimping this tool on my site.

You can run a simulated battle by pushing the simulate button and it will give you your theoretical DPS based on the latest and greatest Feral Kitty Theorycraft models.

In my particular case after importing in my gear the Simulation reported back my theoretical DPS of 10,419.6 +/- 56.8.

Now take a look at my Normal Mode Saurfang fight, which is a completely stationary fight and a good way to test your DPS max.

6 DPS off from the projection… WOW!

Now there is a trick to getting this to work correctly.

Instructions for using Ask Mr. Robot

1. Import Your Character from the armory in your raiding gear. You need to log out of WOW with the right gear on.
2. Settings button – enter your Latency and the length of the fight. Leave the rest at default.
3. Buffs buttons at the top – Select CUSTM and then use the fill boxes below to pick your food, flask, and the buffs you will get during the fight. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. If you don’t know all the buffs you will be getting use the MMO-Champion Raid Comp Calculator found HERE.
4. Leave the ROTATION set to Auto. It does the perfect kitty rotation which hopefully by now you know and understand. If you do not use the latest Feral By Night Addon from Curse or a custom Ovale script. (Ovale is like FBn but allows easy to understand user tweaks to the underlying IF(Then) code and works for all classes). IMHO, use FBn if you are new to kitty dps until you learn more about the fights and your particular style of play. You could theoretically create a custom Ovale script for EACH fight, I have a life so I don’t do that.
5. TALENTS – If your talents are not 00/55/16 or really close to it you are doing something wrong or you logged out in the wrong spec.
6. MAJOR GLYPHS – Shred, Rip, SRoar. If it’s anything else you aren’t doing it right. (Unless you glyph switch between fights, this is a pro strategy that I am not going to cover at this time… mainly because I can’t afford it)

For now this really looks like the best tool for gearing up your feral kitty. A new RAWR (Version 3) is on the horizon as well, when it is officially released I will announce it on the site and let people know.

So we ventured into some… ok a lot… of Heroic 10 man ICC fights this week.

Let me give a short recap and maybe some tips.

Heroic Deathwhisper and Gunship are not bad at all. We downed both, a couple tries on Deathwhisper which required working on the shield down timing a little, getting better at interrupting her casts in phase 2, knowing when to switch DPS on the add in phase 2 while the tanks handle the threat drop, and managing the mind controls through the whole fight.The big change in 10 hero is she MC’s like in 25 and adds continue to spawn in the 2nd phase but just 1 at a time… oh yeah, she is also untauntable.

Gunship we one shot and that took longer than it needed to because I forgot to equip my rocket shirt and was stuck on the wrong side the whole fight. The big change is that the mages have more health, the ship has more health, and the adds hit a lot harder.

Heroic Marrowgar is a cluster ^*%$ of Epic proportions. No pro tips yet. Fire everywhere, spikes are out when he is whirling, he hits harder… yadda, yadda.

Heroic Saurfang seemed doable with a little more practice. The beasts are a major concern as they have a lot more health, slow players they get close to, 1 shot just about anyone, and move very fast. No pro tips yet but hopefully soon.

Heroic Festergut seems doable with practice the only big change is PP tossing goo from above during the encounter that everyone needs to avoid… that and Pungent Blight hits a lot harder just about requiring 3 stacks of spore.

Heroic Rotface we didn’t try much so no news there. Big difference right off the bat is that PP drops bile gas bombs on the raid during the fight.

To sum up, all the bosses hit harder and have more health. Then on top of that there are added mechanics in each one as well… so basically Ulduar hard modes on crack.

Let me properly thank the guys that make my raid nights and successes possible.

The amount of work that goes into being successful at this level of play and in the timely manner we are defeating content does not go unappreciated. Our 10 man group spends at least some time researching fights and communicating about possible strategy and tweaks constantly. We communicate well and we don’t point fingers or lose our cool because we trust in one another that we will improve with each wipe and learn from our mistakes.

In our 10 man group we without a doubt have 2 of the best main healers on our server in Zabery and Tildäiner. Frathlight is our 3rd healer that switches roles as needed and is amazing in his own right as there is no drop in performance when he makes the switch. Needless to say if I had to heal anything we would not get very far. Keep in mind, the success we are having is without the benefit of having a healer with Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.

We have 2 of the best tanks on the server with Celliana and Jefferson. I never pull agro and mobs are controlled to the nth degree. They know the fights, the positions, and know a lot about all the classes and game play to make sure we are successful. I doubt there are 2 other tanks on our server that are as good at communicating during a fight and chaining cooldowns at the right times. Both are tanks are incredible at not only tanking but watching the entire raid at the same time trying to make sure the rest of us avoid silly mistakes as well… they are the den mothers of our raid.

Our ranged DPS is crazy good. Kiya, Frathlight, and Alpacaa all know how to stay out of the proverbial fire while keeping strong DPS on bosses and handling things like balls and adds when needed. Another thing to note is our caster DPS is without any ICC trinket drops and poor Frathlight is still rocking Abyssal Rune.

Lastly, our melee DPS (Justeroo, Thionia, and myself)  is constantly tweaking with gear and specs to try to get out that last ounce of DPS or utility. We use every trick in the book to not be a liability on melee unfriendly fights and we support the raid in a lot of ways completely irrelevant to doing DPS. A HUGE thanks goes out to Thionia who just a short time ago was a hunter before switching mains to the Shammy he is now. This change is what made it possible for our 10 man group to continue to have success as a previous member left the game and we had to shift things around. He has learned the class very quickly and is now doing large chucks of DPS.

Bottom line, I feel lucky to have found myself playing with gamers of this caliber that also have personalities that make playing the game so enjoyable.

Thanks a bunch guys, on to getting our Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher!

Gratz to my fellow 10 man players as tonight we finally downed the Lich King.

• Celliana – “Can you taunt this spirit off me now”
• Jefferson – “Argent Defender proc’d so I can keep him a little longer”
• Justeroo – “Let me tweak my spec to handle that”
• Jacemora – “Let me respec for a PvP/tanking talent just in case”
• Kiya – “Damn it, one of these specs will do the trick”
• Thionia – “Why when Arthas sneezes do I die”
• Tildainer – “I will rez Jace as soon as I get out”
• Frathlight – “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, repeat”
• Alpacaa – “You want me to bother tranc shotting that?”
• Zabery – “Jace, can you farm some Flame Cap I want to see something”

Not bad, all in all we had about 5 hours of work on him across 3 days. A couple keys to the kill…

1. Practice, Practice, Practice… we were able to get to phase 3 on every attempt once we got the first 2 down and it was from all the experience and practice.
2. Tweaking to get every last ounce of DPS… still had 1:30 on the enrage though so not too bad.
3. The Alpha update of DBM… a big help as less talking needed to go in vent about the cast timers which freed up for more important info.
4. Reading lots of strats… a big initial help from Vallen and then some tweaking from some other strats out there to handle phase 3

I still need to do a full on kitty post on the whole of ICC, will try to get to that this week in between starting our heroic modes campaign.

So every now and again I write a post about something unrelated to World of Warcraft, not as often as BRK used to with his coffee ramblings, but once in a blue moon… this is one of those posts.

I can’t tell you how excited I am that Windows will be releasing a competitor to the Apple IPhone. Take a look HERE.

Most people know that many years ago in the infancy of personal computing Windows was made popular by taking ideas from the Apple OS, just as Apple did from Xerox and since then it has gone on and on and back and forth.

My beef is with Apple making the absolute horrible choice to tie their product down to one phone carrier (a bad one at that). Many of us are tied to certain carriers through our jobs, multiple year agreements, or area availability. Apple has always relished in turning it’s nose up to the masses and I can fully appreciate how it is going to bite them in the rear once again.

Microsoft failed with Zune, no one can argue that but it was due to Apple putting the Ipod product out there in mass at all price points, colors, sizes, and with a wonderful software product to make using them easy (Itunes).

Make no doubt Microsoft is about to borrow another idea from Apple and do the same thing with the Windows phone they did with the Ipod… I can just hear all the nerd squeals as people think about the apps they are going to be able to make for the Windows phone using Silverlight (just a guess as dev’s don’t know yet how apps will be made.)

Check out THIS slick Silverlight App out there now for ferals (ok, I had to slip in a Warcraft reference somewhere in the post.)

Bottom line, since I have Verizon as my carrier and have been 100% satisfied with my service and coverage, I am praying that the Windows 7 phone does not let me down this Holiday season… I believe my wait for an IPhone will soon be ended… and I can just point and laugh at my Iphone buddies and their continuously dropped calls and bad reception… muhahahahaha.

Disclaimer – I am in no way getting a free early Windows phone for this post and I will still have the Iphone wordpress plugin for my readers… psssst, if you work for Microsoft I would take one though and write awesome things about it.