Auriaya Down!

Something that I did not see happening when I went into Ulduar last night happened....we got Auriaya down on 25 now!

Me spanking my friend at healing

The picture above was our second attempt last night on her. We got her to 3% before she killed us all. I think the funniest part is that Frostblade (my irl friend) and I both forgot to re-equip our weapons after our previous attempt....lol

To be fair to him though, he is a pally healing a fight where the MT doesn't take that much damage (after the initial pull heh).

Actual kill shot.
Notice I'm still beating Frostblade :D

Right after that we got her down. And yes, I remembered to put my weapon back on this time. My total healing was less this attempt though. Which is not a problem of course. We went in much better prepared to make sure that we called out when the add she spawns is almost dead (so people can get a head start of moving out of the void zone), and making sure that she AoE shadow damage dealie was interupted. We had minimal deaths this time (previous attempt we had a few dps die early due to standing in void zone).

It was good times. We moved onto Hodir after that to get some attempts in....too many people failing. I got rooted once at the same time two small runes appeared under my feet (roots?), so by the time I could move again (shapeshift in + out) they both did damage to me, 1 shotting me q_q . That was our last attempt for the evening though, and I was brezed a while later, but I was dead for a good amount of the fight. Here's a shot of how that attempted ended.

Notice: Bear balls in Frostblade's mouth

Normally when we are all dieing Frostblade will DI me if its up and, of course, I'm still alive. This time he decided to spite me and DI our priest Sofi (damn you Sofi!). I decided to take this opportunity to give a little payback to Frostblade :) .


Maybe I'll type up a "how I heal Auriaya" post in a few days or something...

Meet the Druid!

Alright, so I may not have a cool intro video like Valve does for its classe updates, but still, this is a post about my main character in WoW...Fermi from Dragonblight, the resto druid!

Yes, I forgot to take a screenshot of my talents. Stats are completely unbuffed.

A few common questions people have for me after they find out that I play that character are, where is your character's name from? Why do you play a female character? Alliance...whaaaa? Well, here's some answers for you folks.

• My character is named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. He's famous for his work on the first nuclear reactor, and did a ton of work in various nuclear, quantum, and stat mech fields. For more information see here his wikipedia article.
• Why do I play a female character? Well, since I'm an alliance player now, and since I wanted to be a resto druid, it was either male or female night elf. Since the male night elves look...well...silly, I rolled female. Plus, I didn't want to spend days looking at what is suppose to represent the back side of a male...lol
• Yes...I'm playing alliance these days. Although I'll always be a horde at heart (my first characters were horde, and I miss my 70 tankadin), I decided that if I was going to come back to WoW, I was going to play with my friend that I live with (when I'm at university). Since he's always played alliance in pretty much the same guild since vanilla, I figured that I would join him. This isn't my first time playing alliance however....my first max level toon was my mage during BC....and that was a human!

Now that we've got that part out of the way, I'm going to talk about Fermi's history.

As soon as her level was high enough to enter deadmines, she stopped doing quests in favour of instance runs. My friend and I had everything worked out so that we would have multiple lvl (approx) 60s through instance runs. I demanded that Fermi was the first so that I could start my outland questing while we worked on getting our other alts through the instances.

Eventually, I hit 80 and started to gear up. Over the course of 1 weekend I pretty much got everything I needed for my guild's "raid level 1" clearance. I was still missing just a few things at that time however. That week was also the guild's first time battling Malygos. They needed another healer since someone didn't show up, so I said that I would help out.

And boy oh boy, that was fun.

It was the first time that I would be healing alongside my friend in a raid situation. Of course, he's an awesomesauce pally healer, so it was good times. So even though I had terrible gear, I came out in the top few of the healing done, beating the other better geared resto druids. How did I do that? I'm better than them, that's how :P.

We ended up downing him the second night we went in. A bunch of us (spearheaded by me) on the forums came up with a strat that would work for our guild's skills. I was then lucky enough to get the leather healy belt from Maly that night; my first raid epic. Woot!

Now when ever I do maly (which isn't that often these days because everyone is on ulduar), I decimate the charts. I use a combination of grid+clique and mouseover macros to heal. During vortex I'll mash my LB button and move my mouse over people's icons in grid to apply a single LB to them. In maly, LB can be upwards of 50% of my healing.

I *still* need the cape from KT, as it's looking to be the BiS still for resto druids even with ulduar out. Never did get the OH from maxxena either. If I can find some time to do the during-the-week ulduar runs (work keeps me from staying up too late during the week) then maybe I can get The Ironmender from heroic-kologarn.

I wants it naow!
(especially seeing as its going to be ages before I get 4pT8 q_q )

I've got some Life/Computer stuff I'll post about later, but this one was dedicated to ma drood.

Until next time!

Back into the Swing of Things

Yes. I know. I fail at posting. Blah blah blah.

First off, how about a school update? I finished by second year of undergrad at UW. Woot! How about a summary of how the courses went?

• Classical Mechanics & Special Relativity: WOW this course ended up being pretty intense. It started off ez-mode (summary of basic calculus and mechanics) but then turned to WTF mode. Assignments took us upwards of 14+ hours to complete...in groups. Yeah. Was a fun course though. Prof was awesome; he tried his best to connect with the class. Not sure if that worked for everyone, but it worked for me. I did end up getting killed on the final though :(.
• Optics: That was one boring class. Not sure what else to say. The content was easy, but just SO BORING. Actually, it was more the professor's ability to make it interesting that was lacking. Useful course? Yes. Good prof? No.
• Thermal: Nice course, fairly easy throughout most of it, much more difficult at the end. That's about it.
• Stats: Wow what a joke. I would not have taken that course if it wasn't a prereq for a 4th year course that I would like to take (applied crypto). Take it if you have to, other wise skip it.
• Intro to Combinatorics: Hands down, best math course I have taken to date. I now understand power series stuff (unlike my inability to grasp the concepts during DE in 2A), and graph theory was a lot of fun. I'm take the 3rd year Graph Theory course this fall (3A term). Most people complain about this course for its difficulty, and they are right, it isn't easy, but once again, best math course I have taken to date.

Now about a social life update? Lets see here....hmmm....yeah. lol

In the fall I'm moving off campus (finally) to live just north of campus with my 2 good friends. We're living in a small 3 person townhouse, so that should be fun. I've been working my ass off this summer so far trying to figure everything out that I need for the networking side of things for our house. Which reminds me....

I HATE ROGERS. That is all.

Started my summer work since I'm back at home now. Working at the same place as last summer, doing more or the less the same stuff. Today I managed to get version 2 of the intranet website rolled out, which was much fun. I'll type more about work another time.

I've also completely moved to Ubuntu 9.04 on my personal computers for everything that I do other than video games. Its just so much better than XP. There is no doubt in my mind about it. While I was typing this I was working on installing 9.04 on my laptop. It did have 8.10 on it, but I wanted to do a "minimal" install, and of course, use ext4 as my filesystem. Seems to be working much better now.

But what about video games Steven? Yes yes, I have been playing a bit. And by a bit I mean a decent amount. And yes the game is WoW. I'm back!

So during my 2B I got WoW up and running again with a new account for 3x experience goodness. With that bonus experience I managed to get myself a lvl 58 druid, rogue, shaman, and paladin. Since then my druid has gone resto and hit 80, my shaman 72, and the other characters are awaiting me to play them :).

My resto druid is clearly my main. And for the first time ever in my WoW, I am very VERY well geared. Although I didn't have full BiS pre3.1, I was still full epics with my lovely Torch. These days when I heal Ulduar I'm either the top healer or what feels like the only healer (aka completely blowing the other healers out of the water) in both 10 and 25 man. Although I don't like the LB changes from 3.1, it has made me an even better healer. I just can't wait until I get 4pT8... /drool.

In case you were wondering my main's name is Fermi on Dragonblight. My shaman's name is Lorentz on the same server.


I'm going to spend some more time posting this summer. I enjoy being able to share my thoughts with anyone interested. I have a feeling that there will be a good amount of WoW healing information coming this summer so you all you trees out there can be awesome-sauce healers in your raids like myself.

Until next time!

And now for the 2B term....

Yes, I failed at posting, I know. Basically I went home after my exams, and didn't feel like typing anything long there with the small screen and stuff. Blah. I'm going to do my best now to recount what has happened in the past month and do a better job at not failing at keeping up so I can recount details better.

After my CS exam, I went home the following day. Home was meh. Actually, it was slightly better than I was expecting thanks to my dad's ability to keep me at least slightly entertained throughout the week. And of course, no one pressured me about school. Which believe me, helps a lot.

During the break one of things that I did was indoor Go-Karting, and it was AMAZING. My father and I had the entire tract to our selves for our run, and I had a blast. It was clear though that I am far too light for those machines because around every corner, regardless as to if I was on the accelerator at the time or not, could feel the back end sliding. Of course, being on the accelerator made the sliding more profound, but still.

Over the course of the Christmas break I aquired the following (that I can remember at the time of writting this of course :P ). Some sweaters, a dress shirt, scarf, gloves, a Canon 'PnS' camera (which I still have to install the CHDK on :/ ), bunch of money in cash and gift cards, the new Sonicare toothbrush, new watch, 640GB WD HDD, Vantec Nexstar 3 HDD enclosure, and my Introduction to Quantum Computing book. I ended up spending my $50 Futureshop card on another gig of (the now dead format) DDR1 RAM and the WoW Battle Chest for 3x experience goodness.


I'm trying to find a job for this summer that doesn't completely suck. Well, by that I mean a job that is actually even mildly related to what I'm studying here at UW. Andrew is asking a few PhD physics students that he knows if they have any need for me, and I have a few professors in mind that I would like to ask. I only just a few minutes ago find out where they're actual offices are (due to UW having inconsistent and old information scattered across everywhere).

Classes I'm taking this term are the following:

• Phys 256(L) Intro to Optics and the lab component
  
• Phys 263 Classical Mechanics and Special Relativity
• Phys 258 Thermal Physics
• Math 239 Introduction to Combinatorics
• Stat 230 Probability

OH! I just remembered! Andrew was kind enough to buy me TF2 for Christmas when it was on sale for only $10. I good number of hours of that this week; its quite a fun game. I enjoying playing as Medic, but I'm getting better at Sniper to.

There were some other things that I was going to type about, but now its getting late and because of that I have forgotten what I was going to type about. Well, there's a few things that I can think of, but I don't feel like getting into that at the moment.

Anyways, here's to me not failing as much at posting. Now that I'm back at UW I should fail less.

Hurry up CS!

Gwahh why does my CS exam have to be on the last day of exams?! If it was a difficult course I wouldn't mind that, but it is my easiest course this term!

Hmm lets see here, what I have done since last post in my bored haze...

• Installed Slackware 12.2! I've made a good deal of progress into making it fully working to my liking. Got the proprietary nvidia drivers working, 4 out of 5 of the buttons on my mouse working, the scroll wheel operational, and have started to cut down on the number of installed apps. When I was installing, I didn't know that selecting full install would install several programs that all serve the same purpose for everything I would want to do on my computer. I think I had 4 IRC clients after installation...I think I may just reinstall once I figure out how to make all my hardware work the way I want it.
• Caught up on the Bleach manga. I read all the manga between where the anime currently is to the end. Took me about 5 hours yesterday o_o . It was awesome!
• Picked up some books for next term. Well, one of them is for next term (Intro to Thermal Physics for, you guessed it, my thermal class) and the other is for a course I plan on taking in 4th year called Introduction to Quantum Information Processing. The book is called "An Introduction to Quantum Computing" written by some of the professors here one of whom is the professor for that course.

Yeah that's really about it. Blah.

I'm trying to figure out what I should do today, but I'm awefully short on ideas. I plan on reading my book a bit, and doing a bit of studying, but other than that I have no idea! Its times like this where I wish I had an active WoW account Q_Q or another game that could keep my attention for longer than 1h at a time. I would like to have TF2 right about now, but I wasn't told that it was only $10 this past weekend! Since its back up to $20 I haven't bought it because the entirety of the Orange Box is $30! But I'm pretty cheap....so yeah.

Oh well, time to burn time somehow...