Raiding casually is NOT a myth

Lately I seem to keep reading in various blogs/forums people deploring the fact that there don't seem to be any raiding guilds that don't expect at least 3 nights raid attendance a week. It's starting to irritate me. I'm here to tell you that raiding successfully without a ridiculous schedule is possible.

I can only assume that the people bemoaning this fact are also the people who want to be downing Kil'jaeden now but only raid once a week. Wake up and smell the Dark Dwarven Lager people you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Our raid is currently 5/6 in SSC and 3/4 in TK with a Kael/Vashj downing getting ever closer. We raid once a week on Friday server for 5 hours. Yep. Once a week. We are also serious about our raiding. In a way because we only do have the one weekly raid this makes us want to really take advantage of our time. Therefore we do our homework, we discuss strategies and we come to the raid ready with the flasks, pots and etc that we'll need.

I'm not including the various Kara & ZA runs nor the random spontaneous Gruuls/Mags runs since we have this content on farm (maybe not so much with ZA) and are generally gearing alts mostly whereas our 25 man is our progression raiding.

So you might be thinking that our progression must be really slow. Well let's compare to a well known guild in blogging circles - the erstwhile Aetherial Circle. We entered SSC and TK after AC who raid I believe 2 or 3 nights a week and are currently on a par with them re progression. The only difference is - they have downed Vashj *cheers for AC* and Rage Winterchill in Mt Hyjal. The Badger raid could definitely go lay some smack down in MtH but we want to down Vashj and Kael first - because that's how we roll baby.

Anyway the point I am trying to make is not that my raid is uber but rather that it IS possible to raid casually. I had a brief email conversation with BRK about the definition of casual raiding and according to how he defined it our raiding can't even be considered casual since casual raiding guilds spend 2-3 hours on 2-3 nights a week raiding. So we are... I don't know... relaxed raiders? Hehe.

According to WoWjutsu we are ranked 56 out of 171 guilds on our realm and 5,314 world wide. That's pretty damn good for a group that raid once a week.

The message here: if there are that many people who all have the same issue surely they could find guilds that suit their playstyles. Or am I just incredibly lucky?

Clearing Sunwell Plateau before Wrath of the Lich King is highly unlikely for us, but I'm confident we'll be well into MtH and Black Temple before then. The amount of content I get to see given the amount of time I spend raiding seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Changing the default display size for post images for Blogger

Since tweaking my blog template to change the width I noticed that uploading images to display via the Blogger image tool no longer displayed them matching the width of my blog when uploaded as 'large'. This really bugged me as when I use the larger size image within a post I want the image to sit across the entire width of the post.

It took some google-fu but I did find the answer and thought it worthwhile sharing here so that there is one more place on the interwebs to find an answer. One option is to use an image hosting service for your images and link to them yourself, bypassing the controls used in the Blogger image upload tool. I didn't really want to have to do down this road so this solution suits me.

I'll use the example of my blog to explain how to get images to display at the full width of your post. When I tweaked my blog I changed the #main-wrapper width to 555 px (pixels) and including the .main padding-left of 20 px this gives me an effective post width of 535 px. Therefore when I prep images for use in my posts I crop them to 535 px wide in photoshop before uploading them (the height I crop to depends on the image).

When you use the Blogger tool to insert an image into your post if you look at the html view you get a messy bunch of code. You will notice that within this mess of html there are 2 references to your image:
href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yWKCK8sw_Xo/SDqDhfYb-lI
/AAAAAAAAAIk/TaCgypNzwYs/s1600-h/Firebug_Layout.png
and
src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yWKCK8sw_Xo/SDqDhfYb-lI
/AAAAAAAAAIk/TaCgypNzwYs/s200/Firebug_Layout.png
The first piece of html provides a link to the original image and the second piece is what tells the image to display in your post. You can see above that the only differences in these strings are that the second piece of html telling the image to display in your posts has S200 and the first one has S1600. I'm not 100% sure but I believe this to be the size setting in pixels for the width of your image. The example I've used above is for the image in this post. I selected the 'small' setting in the image tool and so the size setting for the image source html is 200, therefore the width of this image displayed in the post (edit: I checked using Firebug once I published and this is indeed the case). The S1600 used in the link html is as far as I know the maxiumum size in pixels for an image uploaded to Picasa.

So, to enable your image to display at full width you just need to change the size value for the image source html to 1600 as well. However it's important to note that if the image you uploaded is wider than the width of your #main-wrapper this could cause problems with your layout. Hence the reason I crop or resize my images in Photoshop first. I have read that you can change the value to the width you want but this hasn't worked for me where setting it to S1600 has.

Hope this info is of use to someone :)

Ps. The image from this post is a screenshot of the layout display from Firebug, a great Firefox add on that can help identify a lot of things to do with your template.

To macro or not to macro: redux

BRK has recently made a post on his testing of two different shot rotation macros based on his gear. In what is quite a change considering his vehemence not all that long ago BRK is looking more and more like he will move to using a shot rotation macro. Some of his readers are professing their disappointment in this change in BRK's attitude, for myself I think that you do what you want to do and it's not up to anyone else to judge. If using a shot rotation will result in more Kill Commands getting used and higher DPS for BRK then he should go for it. Fo'shizzle.

This post raised the spectre of shot rotations macros again for me. Some time ago I posted about how I don't use a rotation macro at all and prefer to manually fire my Kill Commands and get into the zen rhythm of shot rotation. Well that hasn't changed, but if there's a chance that using a macro could improve my DPS then I should try it since moar DPS is going to contribute to my raids ability to succeed.

I'm using the BoJ Crossbow of Relentless Strikes which has a 2.80 speed. This is only slightly different than Tuskbreaker at 2.90 and I have read that a 3:2 macro is best for slower weapons and specifically the bow I'm using. However according to some of the commenters on BRK's post 3:2 is the only way to roll since the changes to autoshot.

Reading a thread in the BRK forums has been elucidating... great googly moogly as Ratters would say.. there's a lot of mathimafications going on. Too much for this boingy eared elf. I always feel like I'm wading through molasses trying to understand all the hardcore theory craft stuff. A fellow called Manito has put together a couple of macros that you put on separate buttons with one macro triggering the other so designed to help get around the KC 'lock up' issue which is sometimes experienced by players and is a 'known issue'.

Apparently this macro also 'flexes' to a 1:1 rotation depending on various factors (such as lag, item procs etc) during use. I believe this relates to no longer using the /castsequence command.

I've also gathered from my reading that an attack speed of between 2.00 and 2.10 is considered optimal for the 3:2 rotation. There was a lot of talk about haste but since my weapon is slightly faster than the optimal I don't think this is an issue. I don't have any haste items at the moment, just the passive haste from things like my quiver and my attack speed is 2.03 so within the 'comfort zone'

There are two issues which concern me as regards using this new 'the' macro: latency and mana consumption. Actually make that three, I should include FPS as well.

Since the last time I tried using a rotation macro several things have changed:

1. The whole evolution from /castsequence


2. I am now using a utility that allows me to connect to WoW through a specific proxy via my ISP (all checked out and kosher with Blizz) which has seen me drop from an average of 6ooms too a more comfortable if less than perfect 260ish


3. Also one of the changes in 2.4 got rid of the need apparently to use /stopcasting in macros since your client will now let you fire off a new action without waiting for the 'action executed' notification for the previous action from the server. I think that's how it works now anyway...


4. The changes to mana regen post patch 2.4 and my subsequent speccing out of ImpAotH and into 5/5 efficiency


5. While my ping is improved ever since 2.4 my FPS has gone to sh1te. I even upgraded my rather old graphics card to try and improve matters - and while I'm fine most places - even seeing great numbers like 70+ fps in 'questing' mode my FPS during boss encounters in 25 mans is craptacular - sometimes as bad as 3-4 fps. I've turned down spell detail to the minimum and etc and am not really sure what else to do. This is probably a topic for another post anyway.

As can be seen there are some good things and some not so good things. I think ultimately I'm going to need to head over to Dr. Boom and try out the macro for myself. I happen to have Tuskbreaker sitting in my bank all scoped out and ready to rock so I might as well grab some ammo and do testing with both the gun and my currently equipped crossbow.

It will be interesting to see if I notice any difference from manually timing my shots. The other thing of course is that a raid is drastically different from being able to stand still and pewpew in a controlled situation so even if the results are an improvement when using the macro against Dr. Boom I'll still be reserving judgement until I see how I fare in a 25 man.

I also think it's important to take into account that your overall damage and DPS isn't just about your shot rotation. I review the wowwebstats from each of our weekly raids, and whilst I don't do any serious number crunching (not math literate remember) I do look at my performance compared to the other hunters in the raid. One thing I have noticed is that as long as my presence and DPS time is on par with the others we tend to have comparable damage, which tells me that I'm doing ok without a macro. Still it's worth checking out. I'll be sure to post my findings.

Once I get Seph to 70 though - currently 69 wooot!