Hotplate the Patient

Last night I only had time to run one dungeon. Really I didn't have time for even that, but the night before I didnt' even get to log in so I didn't want to lose out on yet another 2 Emblems of Frost and 3-4 Emblems of Triumph.

I hit the Dungeon Finder ( my new WoW best friend =) ), and within 5 seconds was transported to Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme. The group had already killed the first boss. Looking at the clock, and the fact that I've never tanked this dungeon ( and its been months since I DPS'd it), I knew the drake was out of the question. I did my best to catch up with them and start making the pull. First pull on trash and I'm facedown on the ground. Not a good start. I get a battlerez from the druid and slowly ( because I wasn't healed up yet) start gaining back aggro. We finish the pull and I ask the group what happened.

"Dunno, apparently you died" remarked the Paladin healer. Thanks sherlock. Trying to be nice I asked if I was just taking too much damage. "Yeah, when you rush in like that". At this point I'm about ready to drop group, but I figure I'm already in might as weel try to see how they handle a boss.

I continue to pull, keeping a closer eye on when my cooldowns are up and using them much more liberally. We're able to down the two bosses without incident. We get to the gauntlet and everything goes pear-shaped. Arthas dies halfway through so we have to fight our way back to them. Everyone dies at least once, but not at the same time so I guess its not a wipe.

Looking at the DPS meters, its showing that on trash I'm #1 DPS with 1.5k, followed closely by the feral druid, and the dps warrior. Lagging far behind at an embarassing 800dps is the hunter. A check of his gear reveals that he's in mostly blues and a few epics. He should be pulling atleast 1k dps, if not more. The amount of time its taking for mobs to go down seems to confirm that my meters aren't off by too much, if at all.

We get to the final boss, he goes down without too much effort, just longer than usual. As the loot is being handed out, the hunter asks if he can NEED on the epic mail leggings that drop. I say go for it, mainly cause I don't care. He says it won't let him, so I take a look. Its clearly a shaman casteer ( possibly healing ) mail piece. The hunter insisted that the piece was better than what he had. I pointed out that he was giving up 130AP for 80+ Spellpower that he couldn't utilize. At that point I left the group.

Rewind a bit, and when that boss went down, the dungeon was technically complete. At that point I earned the [Looking For Many] Achievement. This involves completing 10 random dungeons and also completing random dungeons with 50 random people. This earned me the title Hotplate the Patient. I feel that with that last pug, I truely earned it.

Tanking Fail

Tanking Fail

Last night was the first time I was called "Fail". Can't say I was too surprised, Anh'kahet: The Old Kingdom is quickly becoming the bane of my tanking-existance. I think its partly because I don't know the instance, only having run it a few times as DPS ( and probably once as healer), coupled with the natural tendency ( probably due to self-preservation instincts) to religously follow the tank wherever he/she may lead.

On a brighter note I was able to get my Tier 9 shoulders for Hotplate. She is now my first toon get Tier 9. Bob, my warlock has a piece of Tier 8 and Hooff the Pally has a complete 2pcT7 for both Retribution and Holy. While Hotplate has the highest piece of iLevel gear, I think that Hooff is still the best geared. Though if I keep running heroics that may change soon as well.

On a related note, because my gear score is steadily climbing, I'm noticing that I'm being paired with DPS and Healers that are more geared. While this may seem like a good thing, I've found that once in a while its a double-edged sword. It seems that for some people, their arrogance is directly proportionate to their gear score. The more geared the DPS, the less tolerant they are of mistakes.

Loving the Dungeon Finder Tool

So far Patch 3.3 has been a hit, specifically the new Dungeon Finder tool. Without hyperbole I can safely say it has revolutionized the how I think of, and do heroics. In a way, its changed how I play WoW completely.

Before the tool, PUG was a 3 letter, 4-letter word. Looking to run a heroic went something like this.

1. Find three heroics to join the LFG for.
2. Spam Trade and LookingForGroup channels.
If you're a DPS, expect to repeat this for the next hour before any finds you, or try to catch someone "LFM DPS", which I'm told happen but have never personally seen.
If you're a tank, expect to be invited within about 15-20 mins,then wait another 45 mins looking for a healer.
If you're a healer, expect to be invited within 10-15 mins, then wait another 45 mins looking for a tank.
3. If the stars align and 5 people are gathered, expect to wait another 10-15 minutes while everyone is running to the meeting stone. At least, this is what everyone is saying, in reality only 1 person is actually flying to the meeting stone, the rest are waiting for a summon.
4. After everyone is gathered and the instance is started. One of the following will happen, and contribute to the wipefest
a. Tank blames healer for not being geared enough for this heroic.
b. Healer blames Tank for not being geared enough for this heroic.
c. DPS not geared enough, healer OOMs.
d. DPS over-geared to the point where the tank can't hold aggro. "Slow down" dps request by tank met with "MOAR DOTS" reference.
e. One DPS comments on how "fail" the other DPS's spec/gear/sexual preference is and a 10 minute argument insues.
f. A male character starts flirting with a female character, finds its actually a male player, hilarity ensues. <-- this one is always fun.
g. A male character starts flirting with a female character, finds it really is a female character, and the rest of the dungeon is an assorment of posturing, flirtation, and requests for "boob shots".
h. A female character flirts with male character in order to get more gear. True gender of players involved make no difference.
5. If somehow you're really blessed, you finish the dungeon, collect your emblems and swear you'll never go through this crap again.

How it is now:

1. Queue up in Dungeon Finder, Random Heroic
a. If you're a DPS expect a 10 minue wait
b. If you're a tank expect a 10 second wait
c. If you're a healer, I haven't tried this but i'd assume about 10-seconds like a tank.
2. Once everyone has accepted, you get PORTED to the dungeon.
3. Everyone is pretty comparably geared, so if you're a new tank you'll have newish people as well. This seems like a bad idea but I've found that it actually helps with making runs smoother. People that are just starting out, gearing up, are more tolerant of mistakes. The DPS isn't as high so its easier to keep aggro. The healer doesn't have as big a mana pool so chain-pulling isn't as mandatory to keep everyone happy.
4. The people you meet are generally farming heroics for the new emblem gear and generally know the fights ( even the undergeared, alts probably).
5. Collect your emblems and gold, wave bye.

In the time that 3.3 has been out, I've been able to get enough triumph badges to get Hotplate the BiS tanking Sigil, and enough for the T9 shoulders ( have yet to buy).

All in all, i'm loving this new dungeon system.

PUG Fail

A week or so ago I got Hotplate up to 80. Since, I've been focusing on trying to get defense capped ( 540 +def) in order to start doing higher level regular dungeons, and some of the beginning heroics. Unfortunately defense capped != ready to tank.

Last night I queued up in LFG for the two starter heroics ( Utguarde Keep and Nexus) as tank/dps and also queued up for regular Trial of the Champion as a DPS. 10-15 mins later I got a whisper asking me to TANK Trial of the Champion, they said they just needed a tank. I said I'd give it a shot, hoping that their healer was up to the challenge of keeping a newb tank up. We got to the 3v5 fight, and got the Shaman, Rogue and Warrior. We did better than I expected, dropping the Shaman before I went down. Apparently the group had already wiped a few times, so they decided to reset and try for an easier group. That meant going through the jousting portion, which is the most boring part of the instance, and doesn't even drop loot. After resetting we ended up getting THE SAME three. We tried again, and wiped. At that point the group fizzled and I was left looking for another group.

About 10 more minutes later, I'm invited to tank Heroic: Ank'haet The Old Kingdom. For this I figured I would at least have a shot. I tanked Heroic Nexus a few days ago, and while I took quite a bit of damage, I finished it without too many wipes. After a long walk, I found that they were again, already halfway through the instance. I opted to accept being saved to the instance just to get the bad taste of ToC out of my mouth. On the first trash pull, I ask if everyone is ready. A few people said ready and I made the pull. Ten seconds later I was on the ground. Turns out the person that wasn't ready was... the healer. Another long walk, and an accidental aggro ( by said healer) and the group breaks up AGAIN. I'd like to say that I was upset that I was saved to a failed instance without even a single kill, but I wasn't. The night had gone so horribly wrong that it just seemed to fit.

The healer and a dps stayed in the group, and wanted to try to reform for another dungeon. I passed lead to the healer, mainly cause I was so sick of trying to find people. A well geared druid tank was found ( 37k health wow!), and I switched to DPS. Another two DPS were found, a hunter and another DK with much better gear. The run went smoothly enough after that, the DK was a bit trigger happy and died a lot. He had much higher dps than I did, at some points topping 3k to my 1.8k. But because he died so much, I was ahead in overall damage done. At the end I grabbed http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37167, even though they were plate. Slapped some cheapo +12str gems in them and logged off.

I'd like to think the failure was mostly due to my gear not being up to the job, but I'm sure that my complete ineptitude for popping cooldowns at appropriate times contributed to our failures.It feels like I'm behind the gear curve. There's that point where you have enough gear that you can get into the good instances, and acquire the better gear quite easily. It feels like I'm just behind that curve.

I think I have to rethink my strategy. I've been avoiding crafting the Titansteel epics to save money, thinking I should just be able to get some nice quick upgrades from ToC. Its much harder to get gear than I imagined. Its frustrating being on my healer and not being able to find a tank, then getting on my tank and not finding a healer. No wonder people dual-box!

I've started gathering the materials for a titansteel destroyer, mainly cause I can use it for both my DPS and Tanking sets ( Runeforging ftw). After that I will get a Tempered Titansteel Helm made, then maybe a Spiked Titansteel Helm made also. If i'm buying gear I might as well go full out.

DK Update ( level 77 )

Hotplate hit 77 this wekeend. A lot has happened to the intrepid Death

Knight in the past few days. When she hit 75 ( or was it 76? ) I got

her dual-spec to celebrate. Since then I have spruced up her tanking

gear and she now sits at 430 defense rating.

Tanking:

I spec'd her as Blood Tank. The biggest reason for this was the

similarity in spell rotation for Blood tanking as Blood DPS. The only

major difference I can see is that instead of favoring my Heart Strike

ability I now favor Death Strike ( to recoup some HP), that and hit

Blood Boil more for AOE threat.

My first tanking experience was Violet Hold. I went in at 75, with a

level 80 DPS and some other 76-78's. I might have lucked out because I

most just tank-n-spanked the bosses we got. I held aggro pretty well,

with just the level 80 pulling off me occasionally.

I also recently tanked a 4-man Amphitheatre of Anguish run, with 2

other level 80s and a 76-ish. That went well enough.

I haven't quite decided if Tanking or DPS will be the primary spec of

Hotplate. I already have a well geared Plate DPS character ( Hooff the

Ret Pally ), so having another Plate DPS wouldn't be that new. My only

tank is Waash, but he's stuck at 76 for the forseeable future.

If I do choose to primarily tank with Hotplate, I see myself getting

quite a bit of Titansteel tanking armor crafted. That should get me

most of the way there to be able to tank regular Trial of the Crusader

and with farming that ( and possibly other level 80 regular dungeons)

get me ready to tank Heroics. After that I'll be farming Heroic ToC

and whatever Heroics I can get into for Naxx-level gear.

After getting to that level gear, it's going to be heroic farming for

Tier 8 emblem gear. I would really love to start raiding again, but

that would require finding a guild that can raid during my

schedule. With paddling the way it is, I don't know how much free time

I will have.

Death Knight in Utgarde Keep

Last night I got a chance to run my DK ( Hotplate ) through Utgarde Keep regular. Instancing is quite a bit different than leveling and it took some adjustment.

Spec:

My current spec is actually a spec I googled. Its more of a leveling spec than a max-dps spec. It gives up some of the balls to the wall DPS talents for more health regeneration, for less downtime. In a dungeon, since you have a healer behind you, health regeneration is pretty low priority. I had to shift my rotation from favoring Death Strike, to favoring Heart Strike. Heart Strike is the DK cleave, does great DPS when you have Icy Touch and Plague Strike on the target. I did have to hit Death Strike a few times, mainly cause everything else was on CD.

My DPS was decent, at times topping 1k. For a level 72 ( ending 73 ) I think that's pretty good dps. I was #1 DPS, even out DPSing our 74 pally tank. The rest of the DPS was a 70 ret pally and a 72-ish Rogue, so I did have a bit of a level advantage.

So far I like Blood DPS, it gives a decently simple rotation, and good DPS. I would have liked to have tried Unholy, but it would feel a little too much like my Affliction lock, plus I've had enough of juggling DOTs.

I was thinking of dual-speccing and picking up a tanking off-spec. It would be nice to have another leveling toon that can tank, would certainly ease getting into groups. I guess I should do some more research on DK tanking. I wonder how close to the defense cap I need to get to do regular dungeons?

WoW: Recent Happenings

Occasionally I'm struck with an urge to chronicle the goings-on of a certain aspect of my time/space/etc. Today I had the urge to write about how my WoW (World of Warcraft) characters are doing. Since I've never done this before, it might be a good idea to mention all the characters, at least for this first time.

Quackingbob( 80 Human Warlock Destruction )

Bob was gearing up steadily. He got the Tier 8 chest piece, which really helped his DPS. He can get about 3k+ on heroic target dummies. Since Hallow's End started up he's been shelved a bit. He was able to Trick-or-Treat his way to getting the cloth helm but thats about all. He needs to run a bunch of Heroics for more Emblems of Conquest. Next up in line is the T8 head piece, some decent bracers and probably the spellslinger slippers.

On the AH side Bob's been buying cheap greens to DE and sell the mats on the AH. The money has been steady, so that's nice. The bag market is virtually dead, with netherweave cloth costing 104%+ PCT, its hard to get enough cloth to make bags in any substantial quantity. I try to do the Ebon/Spellweave and Mooncloth transmutes on every cooldown. They are also currently stocked up in the guild bank.

New development, took Bob back into Heroic: Trial of the Champion. The group was pretty good, Reminome the Gnome Mage ( who's DPS is about the same level as me in this dungeon), a blue-geared Pally tank and a decent druid healer and dps warrior. We had an early wipe, which was partly my fault for pulling aggro. We were able to finish the dungeon and I got my Boots of the Crackling Flame. Remi released right before the headless horseman went down and couldn't roll on the boots.

Hooff ( 80 Draenai Paladin Holy/Retribution )

After some random luck with the Hallow's End event, Hooff was able to get the two hardest parts of the achievement pretty easily. He got the Hallowed Helm and Sinister Squashling. Yesterday I finished the achievement up and now Hooff is known as Hooff the Hallowed. Fitting for a Paladin I think.

As for Hooff's gear, his DPS set is still much better than his healing. I want to get him the new t8 helm, but his current helm Spiked Titansteel Helm has so much hit that it would be hard to recoup that lost hit through gems. Maybe I'll wait until I can get both the t8 helm and chest, to make the re-gemming expense worth it.

His healing set still requires some work. He needs some new bracers, he's currently wearing some leather piece from Heroic Culling of Stratholme, and some a new ring ( current one is also from HCoS). Its much easier for me to chain heroics with Hooff as healing, since healers are much more in demand.

Waash ( 75 Night Elf Druid Bear/Cat )

Wash is 75, and has the Hallowed title. Him and Zoee were basically at the same point but Casey hasn't played in a while. In a single run he was able to get both the Hallowed Helm and Sinister Squashling.

I recently respec'd his Cat DPS tree to something more raid worthy. Some theorycrafting and EJ research got me a decent rotation. Its pretty complicated and takes some getting used to. I think its almost as complicated as the 3.0 Affliction Warlock "rotation" back when Affliction was the go-to raiding spec. At my best Waash can put out about 900 DPS on the Heroic target dummy. At 75 that's not terrible.

Waash's tanking spec and gear is mostly the same. A bit of EJ research shows that I should probably be using Maul more, which will be a pain. I'll probably have to respec his tanking tree again when we reach 80, whenever that is.

Waash has been steadily transmuting epic gems, I've got a proc here and there. I haven't been selling the gems lately. I'm trying to stock up so that I can get them cut and used for when my toons get some really good gear. His Alchemy is completely Maxed out while is Inscription is at 446/450. At this point the Major Inscription research is green and skill-ups are few and far between. I'm starting to try to get into the glyph business. Yesterday I spent about 400g on herbs, milled them for inks and made every glyph I could that required Ink of the Sea. I'll see how lucrative the glyph market really is for me. Looking at the prices they're anywhere from 30g to 4g a glyph. The epic Off-hands seem to sell pretty well, so I should be able to keep making those.

Hotplate ( 71 Human Death Knight Blood DPS )

Hotplate got some leveling time recently, and made it up to 71, almost 72. She's currently questing in Dragonblight, near Winterguarde Keep. I was able to get her Tidebreaker Trident from the Winterfin Murlocs, this replaced the venerable Axe of Frozen Death the Trident has slightly better stats and was super easy to acquire that it seemed worth it. Plus the animation speed of the Trident seems faster than the Axe so it gives her a more finessed effect.

Hotplate's mining is coming along nicely, she has a nice stockpile of Cobalt Ore. Her Jewelcrafting on the other hand has stagnated at 225. JC is just so expensive to level that I'm not sure its worth continuing. It would be nice to cut my own gems and have some Dragon's Tears for Hotplate but we'll see. Either way she has a nice stockpile of ore that can be prospected. Having the Tome of Cold Weather Flying has really helped to speed up leveling. I'm cutting my travel time by at least half in comparison to Waash. It also helps with being able to collect mining nodes as I go along.

I'm debating whether to get Hotplate dual-spec. If I bought dual-spec for her, her other spec would probably be tank. I'm not sure I like Death Knight tanking, of course I've never done death knight tanking either. One issue would be that Waash is supposed to be my tanking toon. But with the speed by which he's leveling I doubt he'd be 80 by the time the next expansion comes out. Also Waash has the advantage that he doesn't need to hit the defense cap. He's already un-crittable from his talents. Still, it would be a fun sight to see little Hotplate tanking a 10 foot monster.

Huntry ( 21 Draenei Hunter Beast Master )

Huntry has been converted into a glyph merchant lately. I use her to post my glyphs and run to/from the Ironforge bank. The main reason I haven't been leveling her is time, as in I don't have any. With two toons so close to 80, and two that are gearing up, I just don't have time to really level yet another toon. Though with Casey creating her Pally ( Zoeepal ), if she can get that to 21/22 then I might quest with her.

I did level Huntry to 21 so that she can get her mount, it makes it easier to get from the bank to the AH. Though with Aspect of the Cheetah, thats just fast enough for me not to bother with mounting up.

Lowbies/Assorted:
Quackbank ( 4 Human Rogue )

My banking alt, she's been with me from the very beginning. Nothing new with her, still at level 4 or 5. I did get her a spiffy Noble's Monocle and a Simple Dress. This fits in with the story that she's "retired" from her Rogue ways to live the simpler life of Banker/Merchant. That, plus I had an extra one lying around when I was leveling Bob's tailoring.

I did move her from her cozy home in Stormwind to the more exotic Ironforge, mainly because the AH and bank are a straight shot from each other.

Tempered ( 17 Orc Warrior )

Nothing new to report here, I've trick-or-treated on him once or twice, but nothing else.

Classy ( 17 Blood Elf Rogue )

Same here, nothing really to report. I do notice that people /flirt with this character way more than any other toon ( even the girls ).

CentOS and RHEL

This might be plainly obvious to some people but if you need a package for CentOS, if you can't find a specific CentOS package ( which you probably won't). Grab the corresponding RHEL package. For example if you need subversion 1.5.5 for CentOS 5.3, grab an rpm for RHEL 5.3.

Good thing about RHEL packages, the dependencies are usually in the same folder.

For example, I needed svn 1.5.5 for CentOS 5.3

Grabbed the subversion 1.5.5 package from:

http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/1.5.5/rhel5/i386/

Get the RHEL 5.3 package. Subversion also needs an updated neon package, which is nicely included in the link.

rpm -Uvh the neon package then the subversion package.

-U means upgrade.

Howto: Fix a 2 drive failure in a RAID 5 mdadm array

Problem:

Somehow 2 of your drives have been marked as "faulty" by mdadm at the same time. This happened to me because the SATA controller card they were both hooked up to got confused and stuttered. Output should look something like this:

$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/sda1

Update Time : Fri Feb 6 08:28:55 2009
State : clean
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 2
Spare Devices : 0
Checksum : 50c18fe4 - correct
Events : 0.487370

Layout : left-symmetric
Chunk Size : 64K

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
this 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1

0 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1
1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1
2 2 0 0 2 faulty removed
3 3 0 0 3 faulty removed

As you can the server thinks that raid device 2 and 3 were faulty and thus removed from the array. Since this is a RAID5, 2 faults is 1 fault too many and your data is in jeopardy.

At this point you need to be relatively sure that these at least one ( preferably both ) drives still have the valid data on it. If this is true then go ahead and issue this command:

sudo mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1

Note that the order of the drives must be exactly the same as they were when you first created the array. This information is available by issuing the command used to get the previous output.

Thats the best case scenario.

RAID5 Fun

After taking a very long haitus from writing this blog I've come back to relate my RAID5 expansion tale.

Background:

Last year ( June or July I think ). A few of us at (then) work were kicking around the idea of creating dedicated file servers. I have been wanting to create a dedicated NAS+RAID setup for some time. The feeling gets stronger every time I lose a crap-load of data when an HD blows up. We found a really good case on sale at newegg and the buying spree starts. The case, an Antec 300 would do well because of the huge 120MM fans in the front. These are required with the amount of drives I want to eventually have. Fast forward to the end, I turned my old 1.3Ghz Athlon media center into a file server. Current stats are:

1.3Ghz Athlon T-Bird
768MB SDRAM ( A lot for a computer of this age and RAM type ).
1.5TB of RAID5 space ( 3x750GB drives)

Current:

I filled up that 1.5TB pretty quickly. I finally broke down and bought a 4th 750GB drive this weekend. One of great things about software RAID is that you can add drives to it WITHOUT having to reformat ( or technically even unmount the filesystem). By adding a fourth drive, the space efficiency of RAID5 really starts to shine. From 4x750GB drives, I'll have 2.2TB of usable space. Adding the drive to the array was as simple as installing the drive, creating a LINUX RAID paritition ( 0xFD type), and adding it to the raid.

First you add the new drive as a spare drive:

sudo mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdd1

Then GROW the raid over the new drive

sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --raid-devices=4

This takes a LONG time, depending on the host computer, amount of data, etc.. My 95% full 1.5TB is currently at 1.4% with 9186mins left to go. Yes thats about 6.5 days. So my poor little computer is gonna chug for almost a solid week to grow this RAID.

I should probably explain that this is not typical and that quite a few factors are contributing to the long processing time.

1. Slow processor: While resync'ing the raid is not computationally difficult, because of the slow processor, other processes are backing up and is not helping the situation.
2. Huge amount of data: Because there is just sooo much data to move around, the sync is going to take a while.
3. Drive layout: The layout of my RAID is ... unique. Because this is a very old motherboard, with NO SATA slots ( and all 4d drives being SATA drives), SATA-PCI cards were used, 2 in fact. These two cards are both on the PCI bus, which makes intra-RAID communication slow. This quickly saturates the bus. In fact I'm only getting about 1322K/sec transfer between drives. Thats 1.5MB/s from drives that could theoretically handle 70-80MB/s easy.
4. PCI network card: As if the PCI bus was not saturated enough, this board did not come with on-board LAN. I had to put in a PCI NIC. This further slows the sync because now all network traffic is fighting for bandwidth with the hd transfers.

Edit: I forgot to mention that after the restructuring of the computer, its now called downy. Yes, there is an uppy, its the P2 300MHz laptop that Mike gave me. I was using it as a spare terminal at Space Micro. Since I've changed jobs, and Sony gave me plenty of monitors, uppy is sitting in its dock, waiting to be used again.