Can't do it

There are some achievements you think how the heck are we going to get that? Scrolling through the list its not Firefighter that worries me, or Yogg with 3 keepers, its Kologarn's With Open Arms.

Asking a ret to not dps the arms is like asking you to stop jerking off. You can't stop it, its in your blood. Its one of the few fights that a ret is built for! A fight with three targets up is like a red rag to a bull, and my epeen is too big to take a dive like that.

The only way I'm going to get the achievement is if I die in glorious combat. I need to either get crushed by the right hand or fried by eye beams. My preferred way to go would be to get crushed by the hand because if I get scooped up by the hand my deeps is screwed anyway.

With Open Arms? Not on my watch!

Club Ret

So I notched up my 30th birthday yesterday, which definitely puts me into the older gamer category. How do I feel about it? Well I guess that's just a number, but I'm definitely not as high tech as the next generation coming through. Shit, I own a relatively up to date mobile phone but I still only use it to make phone calls and text. I'll be pretty much screwed when I update it to a touch phone and the lack of buttons will throw me off.

It explains the low tech spartan nature of my blog. I.e. I'm too dumb to work out how to make it look nicer, and too zoned after coming from home and then trying to raid. Doesn't leave too much time to actually post as much as I would like.

What does being 30 have to do with anything? Well not much but with age comes experience and wisdom. In turn that leads to MOAR DPS! Lemme explain. Currently, due to a lack of dks (sigh), we can end up in a situation where there are four ret pally's in raid. This can get up to FIVE in fights like Hodir and General V where our prot pally switches specs. That's right, we have a Club Ret.

With five raiding rets there's not much separating me and them at all. Three of us are near identical with Worldcarver, 4 piece T8.5, DMC: Greatness and the OMGWTFBSHAX Libram of Valiance. The other two are not far behind in gear either, so there is plenty of pride on the line. The only real difference between me and them is that I'm pure ret whereas the others enjoy their second spec of tanking or healing. When I lose a boss fight, I get Recount spammed to thy kingdom come but more often then not I tend to come out on top.

So whats the difference? After comparing five rets in raid there is a slight difference in technique, and I believe that it boils down to the timing of Avenging Wrath.

1) Don't be too eager to pop your wings!
This is the main thing that I notice. A few of the rets will charge in and just blow wings straight away. Not in 3.2 buddy! Now you need to build that five stack from Seal of Vengeance up first before popping your wings. Since the stack is only applied from autoswings it takes roughly 12 seconds to put the stack on.

If you pop AW straight away at the start of the fight, with the 20 second buff, you are really only maximising your dps from the final 8 seconds of AW since it takes the first 12 stacks to build up the stack.

2) For your second wings, watch the bosses health
As a general rule of thumb I check the bosses health for the timing of my second wings (e.g. Ignis, XT, Hodir, General etc). If my AW cd comes up for a second time and we're roughly 55-60% of the way through the bosses health or less, I'll use my wings again straight away and it should be available for use for a third time later. If however, the bosses health is below 55%, I hold off on using wings until the final 20% so I can start spamming Hammer of Wrath!

3) Popping a haste potion to build the 5 stack faster?
I dunno, I've read this idea in two separate places twice now and it just seems well, totally f*cked. Apparently if you pop the potion before you enter into combat you can get your stack up really fast (and I'm assuming this would free your haste potion for later use).

Well there you go, hope it was useful and my your deeps be epeen filled. I gotta admit though, rereading it I am intrigued by the haste potion idea. I will have to test it out on something like Ignis and see.

DIAF Rabi

Since the 3.2 patch hit, for some reason I've been inspired to finish my 'Glory to the Hero' achievement. I owe this to the change in vehicles in Oculus where your dragon scales with gear which gave me the heart to venture into Oculus once again (I think I'm still mentally scarred from that freaking place). So I've been knocking out the achievements left and right.

One of the achievements *cough* Less-Rabi is completely ridiculous. I must've spent about a dozen nights trying to knock it over that by the end of it, I just wanted to punch him in the head. I was getting so desperate for the achievement that I paid a shammy guildie 1k to spec into Reverberation to help get it done even though he had already done the achievement twice before and I could feel his relunctance in doing it again.

So when I finished the achievement, I just spammed gchat with PROGRESSION!!!

Damn, the drake is pretty cool though. Oh wait, no 310% flight speed? F*ck!

Rex out...

No need to res

Recently, our team finally... YES FINALLY pulled off our Undying run. Our weekly lazy Saturday afternoon soul crushing/abyss crystal farming event paid off. Interestingly though, you don't actually need the same team from start to finish to grab the title. Our holy pally subbed in for the resto druid half way through the run and was rewarded with the title, the resto druid unfortunately was not.

I've been doing this run for so long now, I'm actually pretty relaxed about the whole thing... right up until Sapphiron/KT fights. How do I feel about it now? Well I'm actually relieved as all heck, your brain just becomes focused on willing yourself to not be the that fails. Its never fun being the one that slips up that fails the whole run. The pressure of the Undying run gets to people and they end up doing all sorts of weird things that you know that they just normally don't do.

You know what though, getting Undying is kind of like a perfect holiday, nice but not really memorable. Come to think of it though, our DK tank was so stressed out with the thought of doing Heigan that he refused to do it so we simply left him outside while we nine manned it. I lol'd when he scored the 'Safety Dance' achievement!

Amyway, the best memories from holidays come about when things don't go according to plan like you lost your luggage, the food was crappy at the hotel or when you got ripped off by some dodgy souvenier merchant. In some sort of sick way I enjoyed the failures more than the clear as it's just plain light hearted fun to get stuck into the one that messed up.

Memorable failures

Even yours truly hasn't avoided the blame of a failed Undying run, I failed to make the jump on Thaddius (first time ever since doing Naxx) and then ran in before a charge was assigned. >.<

Here's a list of other random things that happened during various Undying runs. To try and capture the level of frustration, I have tried to rank the level of fail, with an acceptable rng type mistake being a low level of fail to the very high, WTF ARE U SERIOUS erage type fail.

Boss: Instructor
Cause: After clearing the trash up to Instructor, the tank takes a break and eats up on the ramp. Needless to say Instructor wasn't too impressed when he walked by and saw him just sitting there having a picnic.
Level of fail: Medium

Boss: Four Horseman
Cause: After clearing three wings, the Holy priest decides to go afk mid fight and parks himself on top of the platform after the pull. Dies due to no debuffs being up on him and losing LOS to the other healers. Comes back on later and asks 'how'd it go?'.
Level of fail: Very high

Boss: Sapphiron
Cause: Hero lock tries to squeeze off a couple more dots at the wyrm in the air instead of playing it safe behind the iceblock. After yelling on vent, realises too late that he's in trouble making it but gets there. Then decides to stand next to the iceblock instead of behind it...
Level of fail: High

Boss: Kel Thuzad
Cause: Off tank fails to see void zone while tanking only one of the scarabs. Causes wipe at 2% of KT's health (this one was soul crushing!).
Level of fail: High

I now pronounce you man and toon

The more I rack up achievement points, the more I realise I am wedded to Rexkicker the ret paladin til the end of my wow time. Gone are the days where I would switch off and muck about on an alt for the fear that the one time I do, I'm gonna knock over some achievement I won't have on my main.

So I am stuck. Is it just me? Well not really. This is apparent in the guild, where we actually have a shortage on full time dk's. Sometimes we have one, usually though we have none. This is despite almost everyone (including yours truly) having a dk alt. People simply don't want to make the switch and start their achievements all over again!

My brother though doesn't have this problem. He doesn't care about doing achievements and is free to split his time between his warrior tank/rogue dps/priest healer. So he's happy to swap from one character to another.

There is a definite split in game styles right there. Those that pursue achievements don't care for alts (they simply don't have the time to), and those that are altoholics don't give a damn about achievements. Unfortunately, I seem to have landed on the achievement whore half. It could be worse, I could have rolled a pure class and would be stuck doing dps all the time. At least this way if I ever get bored of ret I can switch it up (or at least temporarily).

Each to their own I guess. Now where is that dk?