Small steps to dungeon mastery

Yesterday i made the decision to spec holy as it's becomeing difficult to get into a group as DPS and as i have more gear for healing then DPS, it becomes more apparant when your healing to how well geared your tank is as i found myself running heroic Violet Hold with a very well geared death knight without too much problems.
i also ran utgarde pinnacle with a nicely geared paladin, i had a few problems in the oculas as the paladin tank for that diden't have a lot of defense rating and it realy shows.
If i'm casting greater heal more then once every pull in a normal instance then usually the tank is undergeared, where as if i'm not casting greater heal at all then the tank is over geared.

my current spec is 30/41/0 the reason for this is that i don't have enouth crit rating to make good use of Holy Concentration and Surge of Light, so i decided to make my spec baised on my strengths which is currently white stats.
I have a lot of stamina, intelect and spirit with a small amount of haste, i also have quite a lot of spell power.

My gear is still needing a lot of upgrading and i don't intend to start raiding naxx until i've at least got the Superior Acheivement.
my plans right now involve saving up moonshroud for my gloves and chest piece and running instances to grab as many other slots as possible.

I'm also 1 CoT: Strat run away from getting the my tailoring recipe and dungeon master acheivement.

A Months Worth of Posts

I've been very busy this month and have been putting off writing a blog post because of several differant things.

1, Wrath of the Lich King
2, My Wireless Keyboard Sucks
3, if i put it off a few more days i could make it a full month before updating :p

Currently i'm writting this post using my new keyboard which is wired (thank god), theres nothing more annoying then a keyboard that decides it's going to become unresponseive at the worst possible moment especial when you play a healing class.
Needless to say the frustration of having an unresponseive keyboard whilst mid-quest with yet another alliance ganker became too much for me and i broke my key board be whacking it agianst the wall realy hard multiple times (i don't normally do this, honest :p).

Well with that out of the way (long post ahead) i can get started with my lich king review.
Northrend is an awesome place to level in and have had no problems ripping through the content (koushirou is currently 78), my overall goal seems to be doing as many quests in the zone as possible before moving on eventually this will lead to the Loremaster of Northrend Achievement and i'll be level 80 before i even set foot in storm peaks or icecrown.

Every Zone has at least one quest chain which can be described as Epically Awesome, although the 2 starting zones don't perticularly have the best impressions they do have quite a few peaks of whats to come.
I've met the lich king at least once in every zone usually he appears before me to empower or take away an extremely strong future adversary (sort of a "hi, your the hero - see this guy, well he's going to kill you in an extremely horrible way - have fun ^^).

My best experiance in Wrath so far has got to be the wrath gate quest chain, in dragonblight there is a long quest chain which leads to the alliance and the horde commencing a double attack on the wrath gate leading to icecrown.
#spoilers# a small faction of the forsaken lead by the dreadlord in UC attacks the lich king with a new plague designed to destroy the undead aswell as the living, they do this during the attack killing both alliance and horde members aswell as (presumably) weakening the lich king.
This leads to an Epic Raid on the Undercity led by Thrall and Sylvanas which is realy awesome (just don't go too far away from them or elites will own you).

Another good quest for me has been riding the king of the storm giants to lay waste to the undead, this is in zul'drak (the troll zone) and is realy quite nice to play through.
I've tried to run every instance avaliable up to now which is becomeing increaseingly more difficult as i'm starting to outlevel my zones.

I have made a lot of progress with my healing skills by running almost all 5-mans so far as a healer (even though i'm in shadow spec), when the Dual-Spec feature has been added i'll be quite competant in both my roles as a healer and as DPS.
My biggest problem at 80 will be finding Hit rating as most of my skills benefit from Spirit and Crit i can gear myself as if i was the healer and still provide great DPS.

I like messing around with my class a lot and have found that the shadow priest now plays almost like a warlock (albeit with no pet and more defensive options) which is quite interesting, i like dotting several opponents at once then throwing Dispersion up while the DoTs tick away.
I even managed to use Mind Sear to take out several opponents at once although thats was too much trouble to use reliably.

Mind Sear is a brilliant AoE spell it ticks very fast for a fair amount of damage and costs very little mana to use (compared to normal AoE spells anyway), There is one small flaw in the spell it dosent damage your current target only the ones around it.
This could be a useful flaw in specialised fights for example if blizzard make a fight where theres a large number of adds but one of them needs to be kept alive for some reason or another mind sear could be used there perfectly.

I'm also finding that we can now make specialised AoE teams for instances, teaming up a shadow Priest and a unholy Death Knight is evil.

Pick a target Dump diseases on it (Devouring Plague and all DK Diseases) Pestilance, Blood Boil and Mind Sear, I can see quite a few arena teams using a strategy similar to this in the near future as it is incredibly difficult to defend against.
I could also expand upon this by adding a warlock into the mix to throw in Seed of Corruption as well as curses and Fears.
I should start a 3v3 Team with this set up, we can call ourselfs the Axis of Evil, Mwuahahaha.

I've been staying away from Nanoha as i concentrate on getting Koushirou to 80 but might get back to her an a later date.

Yay Advancement

I Just finished a Gruuls Lair PUG in which we wiped the floor with him, i came out of it with a new belt off the High King and my T4 Leg piece off gruul.
now i'm in full epic gear, i should try my hand at SSC and TK at some point, albeit that the're both nerfed.

when doing gruul i was realy confused at what i was doing, because it was my first time in a 25 man raid i dident know exactly what was going on all i did was read the kill order and fight.
I'm sure that if i had been in a guild i could have had the fight explianed better, i ended up DPSing Krosh followed by kingler (he was the only one alive when we finished), when that was done the High King fell like a sack of bricks.
embarassingly i died very quickly into the gruul fight i think i might have just been unlucky though, i got thrown across the room and died to a shatter that was happening where i landed.
all in all it was a good day, i rolled like a monster though both rolls i made where mid-90 numbers.

Cloth Trinity

Well i've had a fun day today, i got a surprise boost through SM:GY and Lib from a 64 shammy and i managed to run RFK making a good amount of exp and items (i have the Illousionary Rod already ^^) and finally hit level 30 yay mount.

During the RFK run i was using quite a bit of AoEas the tank was a paladin and we always ended up pulling 2 groups at once (the drood was trying to do the tuber quest and accidently pulled 8 mobs!), whenever these big group pulls happend the tank was usualy at risk of dying because of the number of mobs hitting her of course as i was doing some insane amount of AoE i usualy ended up pulling a small group of mobs of her.
Whenever i ended up pulling aggro i found it quite easy to stall the mobs until either the tank regained aggro or the shammy killed them, whenever i was in trouble i would frost nova the mobs and blink away (Glyph of Blinking was so useful here) and if nova was on cooldown cone of cold seemed to work well too.
The highlight of the run was when the tank died while AoEing a large group of bats, luckily this was near a small cliff so i hit them with cone of cold blinked away and waited at the top of the cliff for them, when they got there i jumped down and healed myself with lifeblood (the healer was healing me too at this point) by the time the bats got to the bottom of the cliff i could blink again so i used frost nova and blinked away.
I ended up repeating this until all 5 of them where dead, this was a lot of fun and i was rather impressed that i'm starting to figure mage stratagy out better.

My mage Nanoha is what i hope will be my second charecter to 80 and will be the third cloth charecter that i've gotten to a decent level (Koushirou and Haneko being the others), i intend to be an arcane type mage as it goes with the charecter i'm trying to become and as i honestly prefer it over an elemental tree (probably because it's like mindflay).
I've taken Herbalism and Inscription as professions mainly because they were both new to me and ended up making a killing in the AH (300 G from selling glyphs at my level range), i'm still building up my list of minor glyphs as i havent got the ones i realy want yet (glyph of slow fall, glyph of levitation and glyph of polymorph: polar bear are the ones i want the most)

All in all a very fun day has been had, i'm aiming to be 40 by the time wrath comes out but we'll see how it goes.

Random Spontanious Disconection

Patch day today was crazy, my server dident come online until much later then other servers and i kept getting constantly disconnected every 30 mins or so.
my mage nanoha started inscription and is just above journeyman level, luckily for me i was quick on the ball and had my glyphs in the AH before everyone else.
This has left my mage with a nice tidy profit from the day as my money has tripled at least, this will die down pretty quickly though as it becomes more mainplace.

Other then that my UI has been totally destroyed with this patch and i'll have to start hunting 3.0.2 compatible addons in order to get a better feel for my display, i managed to get my main into a kara run which can be described as nothing less then a complete and total joke.
Every class has been buffed to some extent as well as raids being nurfed but that still dosent prepare you for how fast kara is to run now.

Attumen was downed in under a minite, moroes in under a minite,maiden in under a minite, opera (oz) was just over a minite, curator was downed in around about a minite dispite being ninja pulled before the hallway was cleared (he never even got to his first evocation), illhoof downed in under a minite (no chains), aran was downed in under minute, nightbane took around 2 minutes, netherspite was down in under a minute too (i was in the blue beam :D) and prince was downed in just 0ver a minute - average boss kill time 60 seconds, god knows what a T6 geared raid could do.

I'm very pleased with all my class changes and found dispersion surpriseingly more useful then i thought it would be (i used it while running between pulls to refill mana), devouring plague is a god send for priests in dangerous encouters it can keep you topped off nicely and in normal ones it allows you to use shadow word: death liberaly.
Vampiric touch should be treated as a DoT now and should be timed well to go with mind blast, the replenish machanic i easy to keep going and meshes well with all the new weapons we have now.
dispite massive boost to mindflay DPS i find myself not casting it as much mainly due to the other spells i have now, improved shadow forms anti-pushback mechanic works briliantly and now stops my casts being cut off completely when enemy AoEs going crazy.

Well long post is long, all in all i can't wait to see what unknown calamity awaits me further in to the pre-wrath patch these next few weeks should be quite fun :D.

PS: we actually failed chess the first time round because the person who took the king dident know what he was doing :p

Patch Day

yay patch day, theres ging to be a lot of changes coming when the servers finally come back up later.
of the things i need to do one of them is to test ot my new casting rotation on a silvermoon dummy and see how i do with the new stuff, if all goes well i'll try and have a go at running kara with my new shadow priest changes.

Other then that my plans invove changeing my addons (updating old ones ect) and reworking my macros and casting bar, most of my alts will be having small spec changes (for some reason i can't stand the frost mage tree, i guess i just like big hits).

My mage will be picking up Inscription and my alts and main should be able to pick up some low level Glyphs (of dubious use).
I'll try and get round to posting my mage plans at some point, not sure if people will be too botherd though.

PS. Out of all the glyphs avaliable which one do you want the most?

Backlists

I decided i'd do my regular download session today and foud a huge back log of stuff i need to download, i left it waytoo long during season changes and now it looks like i'll have to spend a day or 2 cathing up.

well i've been planing a music download session aswell as i want to update my libary (i've got a bigger hard drive now so i can have a lo more musicon it :p), it'll take awhile for me to find the time for this though i'll get round to it at some point.

Hopefully wesday will see the release of patch 3.0.2 on WoW, i'l finall be able to start my inscription leveling and i'll be changeing my mages spec from frost to arcane (with 5 points in fire for faster fireballs).
on my main i'll mostly be organising my stuff and teting out te new changes to my class, it should be a very fun week.

Lag and Goals

I've been hapily leveling my mage and to a lesser extent rogue though there 20's and keep haveing problems with my internet connection.
Every now and then my internet will decide to fuck itself and spend 2 minutes in a state of perpetual lag, upon the end of which i've been killed by whatever mob i was fighting or a respawn of a mob i already killed.

This is pissing me off quite a bit especialy since it seems to happen randomly, well enouth about my internets crashing.
i have a small list of things to accomplish before wotlk which is only a month away now:

Obtain an Epic Flying Mount for my main - This will be hard, i saved up 2000 gold so 3000 more to go.
Level Inscription on one of my alts - it will probably be my mage, i already have a bank full of herbs literally (see the image at the end)
Get my mage up to level 60 - this could be difficult but not impossible.

Hopefully if all goes well i should be able to manage this in the space of a month, oh and heres a pic of my alts bank:
:p

Utility Skills

As a hybrid class i'm taken to raids because of the utility i bring which can sometimes be seen as more important then the damage i deal, as a shadow priest i have quite a few spells that can easily be used to the advantage of the raid group.

In Wotlk we lose a bit of our overall utility in favour of more DPS but that still dosent make us a pure damage class as we can bring a lot of benefits to our group such as:

Shackle Undead - this spell can be considered extremely useful when wotlk hits as our biggest enemies in the expansion are the scrouge which is a faction lead by the lich king and is almost entirely made of Undead type monsters, this is a very reliable form of CC and will prove invaluble to the team during fights where control is needed.

Vampiric Embrace - this spell turns a percentage of the damage i deal into Health for my party although during Tbc i dident use this much due to aggro problems, in wotlk we have more threat mitagation and tanks have more threat generation so i should be useing this more often

Vampiric Touch - our biggest utility spell in Tbc although it has been toned down a bit it will still see a strong use in wotlk as a way of restoring mana to our raid group.

Mind Control - this spell can be used as a way of CC humanoid type enemies although it can prove to be very unreliable at times, the biggest problem with this spell is that it breaks prematurely (quite often) and we can only do damage though the MC enemy (although this can sometimes be better then out overall damage such as MGT Heroic mobs)
This spell has a good use in PvP where you can throw someone off a cliff or into lava with it.

The Discipline Talent Spec has a few more utility skills including:

Power Infusion - increases casting speed and lowers spell mana cost, can be used 2 or 3 times in a fight and generally will be applied to a high damage dealer such as a Destro lock or a Mage when ever it seems apropiate.

Pain Suppression - this spell lowers the damage a person takes be a good percentage and can be used to counter incoming heavy hits or as a way to help someone who needs to buy some time before a heal is cast on them, probably best to use it on a tank before they get in trouble or as an O'SHI~ button.

A good priest needs to be able to use all his utility while still providing competative DPS (or healing in the Discipline spec case) in order to be able to fight effectively and help his raid group.

PS: i feel like my grammer is perticularly bad in this post although it is always going to be bad, i honestly don't think i word'd the opening paragraph well.

New Rotation Ideas

With the changes to priest racials and shadow tree talents i will have to take a good look at my current cast rotation and figure out how to improve my DPS.

Thanks to Pain and Suffering i no longer have to keep casting Shadow Word: Pain, which is a pain in the ass to refresh as it's very expensive this also allows us to keep misery up indefinately which gives us a good amount of damage as well as a spell hit bonus.

Vampiric touch needs to be up at all times so that replenishment can be used, mind blast should be used whenever the cooldown is over so that replenish can be refreshed regularly.

Devouring Plague is another DoT to our arsenal which i can use liberaly but should be careful with as even with the mana cost lowered it's still more expensive then SW:P, because DP heals you for the damage it does it has good synergy with Shadow Word: Death which should be used very cautiously as a badly timed SW:D can easily kill you (Prince's Feeble being the biggest case of bad timing for me) especial now that our crits do twice as much damage.

Vampiric Embrace should see more use now that we have more threat mitagation from shadow form, however this spell should be used cautiously as it can generate a lot of aggro very quickly and we don't have a real aggro drop.

And last but not least Mind Flay which is easily our most mana efficent spell and now that it can crit it's become considerably more dangerous i use this spell between Mind Blast cooldowns and should cast it at least once every 20 seconds or so in order to refresh SW:P (shouldent be a problem :p)

So my basic cast rotation should look like this:

VT > SW:P (once only) > MB > MF

With DP, SW:D and VE being weaved in as i see fit

Priest Racial Changes

WoW beta gives a lot of good chances to express opinions, whether they be choice discussions on how to play the new class designs or random QQ.
As most priests already know there are changes to the priests racials where as all race specific priests spells have been stripped down to the most useful ones and spread amoungest everyone.

All Priests can now use:

Devouring Plague - a DoT spell that heals us for a percentage of the damage done, Previously Undead Only

Hymn of Hope - a channeled spell that restores a percentage of mana to all party members - Previously called Symbol of Hope and was Draenai only

Desperate Prayer - an instant cast self heal, now a 11 point talent in the holy tree replaceing holy nova (now a base line skill) previously a Human and Dwarf skill

All other race spells have been dropped meaning my Blood Elf Priest loses:

Consume Magic - consumes a random priest buff and restores a small amount of mana, i never used this spell anyway the mana restored was too little to compensate for losing a good buff

Touch of Weakness - a Meager spell at best but i used this a lot as a little help against mobs, the biggest reason that i'll miss this spell is because it sometimes proc'd blackout which was hilarious when a rogue trys to gank me and gets stunned :p

Overall i think the trade off is well met and i will make far better use of the new spells then the old ones (except hymn of hope as it's a holy spell that dosent give as much mana as it's previous carnation).

New Header

Yay i finally got round to making a Header for my blog, the images where obtained through google, it's not bad for something thrown together in 30 mins especialy in microsoft paint :p.

I also added a Blog roll which i'll get round to expanding at some point, just goes to show how good boredom is as a motivator. ^^

I might be able to make it look quite nice one i get round to realy messing with the features.

My Band of Merry Alts

I have a tendancy to roll new alts whenever i'm bored and although a lot of them never make it past level 20 i enjoy most of the time i spend on them, it gives me a broader perspective when grouping with certain classes as i know there core gameplay mechanics and abilities.

I've played every class except druids (I truely hate them and wouldent hesitate to attacking any flagged NE drood i come across), I play almost completely on the horde side now although i originally started out on the alliance i switched because all my freinds played horde and i wanted to play with them.

My first charecter (or at least the oldest non-deleted charecter i still have) is a human paladin at level 32, she's called Koushirou and resides on the Eonar EU server.
This was back when i first started playing WoW so she brings back a lot of nostalgia, everything i learned about Grouping, WoW lingro and Stat placement i learned on this toon.
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Eonar&n=Koushirou

From there i moved on to my second charecter and so far my only 70 who's a Blood Elf Priest also called Koushirou who's on Sunstrider EU, i refined my WoW knowledge on this charecter and learned a lot about Talent placement and Professions (i leveled as Disc spec until level 63 when i switched to shadow, don't ask me how i did it i honestly don't know).
This is on a PvP server so naturally i got my first taste of being ganked where i generaed enouth rage to put a warrior to shame. :p
She is currently my main and will probably be the first charecter i level to 80.
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sunstrider&n=Koushirou

Other then that i have me small army of low level alts, who i like to mess around with which include:

Erio - my 26 Blood Elf Rogue (i rolled her with the intention of doing PvP and being a general asshole to alliance members :p, assumeing i get round to leveling her)
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sunstrider&n=Erio

Procela - my 11 Tauren Shaman (rolled so i could go Wind Fury spec, probably has the lowest chance of ever reaching 70)
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sunstrider&n=Procela

Teana - my 13 Blood Elf Hunter (rolled for the lulz probably will never make it past 20)
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sunstrider&n=Teana

and finally Nanoha - my Blood Elf Mage (rolled with the name of an anime charecter i like and will be leveled as an arcane mage, has the highest chance of reaching 70 as i like the idea of emulating the charecter :D)
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sunstrider&n=Nanoha

I also have a dropped charecter who i rolled in order to play with a freind but he has since moved servers shes called Haneko and ironically was not far off 70 as a level 64 undead warlock.
Armoury Link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Eonar&n=Haneko

I'll probably make a lot more alts, i intend to make a Death Knight when the next expansion hits (big surprise :p) and also intend to level a warrior at some point.

Wotlk Thoughts

It's been a long time since my last post, i actually stopped blogging when one of my friends also stopped but now i'm bored so i'll try my hand at blogging again.

I've been following the Wotlk beta news for awhile now as i try and decide whether i should stick to playing my priest or else re-roll to a differant class, i started some new classes to mess around with which ironically are both classes i claimed to be unable to play well.

The priest seems to be doing OK with all the changes and messing around to the overall class structure, interestingly with the changes to spell power you can now gear a shadow priest as if it was a healer and get some nice results, which would turn out to be excellant news if they impliment the "Dual Talent Specs" that they are rumored to be working on.

The changes to shadow priest DPS makes it so we are a lot more powerful then before and should new be doing the competitive damage along with the rest of the hybrid classes, although i'm rather annoyed by the changes to Vampiric Touch.

I actually like the changes made with the replenishment buff as it releases the limiter placed on the shadow priest but i don't like how 2 other classes now have the ability to use the replenishment buff, i guess it's just me being angry at losing the niche catagory that i've always occupied.

Giving replenishment to survival hunters dosent bother me too much as you don't see too many survival specced hunters outside of battle grounds or arenas (not sure whether that will change in wotlk or not), but since ret paladins have been speculated to be slightly OP in the next patch then most people will probably take them along to raids and dungeons instead of shadow priests.

Overall though i'm quite please with all the buffs we've been getting and hope that by level 80 i can be doing DPS compareable to the rest of my raid group.

Alt Awesomeness

i Just finished what could quite possibly the best SM Lib runs ever, i entered the dungeon after finishing with a SM GY run with the same group:

Me Warlock 31
Kindabad Warlock 30
Shadow Druid 28
Enrage Shaman 29
Din Priest 33 (Later replaced by Hanesamme Shaman 30)

The whole group was barely leveld enouth to enter SM Lib never mind finish it, but due to sheer awesomeness of me and everyone else we ended up downing Doan.
Several of us gained levels though out the run, the druid tank got lockeys staff, i got doans robe and Kin got his staff, this run was so awesome that if i ever run with these people agian i will be very happy about it.

Of course the run wasent without it's problems, a bad pull before Doan got us killed quickly because of sheer number of enemies.
But the biggest problem thoughout the run was actually me, whenever i DoTed the enemy without giving the tank a few seconds headstart i always pulled aggro.
i was the groups aggro whore thoughout most of the run, of course it was very amusing watching me kite doan round the room because of excessive aggro, i appologise to the people that healed me thoughout the doan fight.
I got him down to 20% before dying, then the other lock picked up aggro, he went down fast after that. Awesome run, ^^.

Chain Fear Syndrome

Been awhile since i last posted but oh well, good news everyone i finally obtained my Eight of Blessings, this is a glorious day for me as i'll finally have a good DPS trinket.
All i ned now is timbals focusing crystal and my trinkets will be made of Win.

In other news i have been playing my warlock alt a bit more recently andi think it's reflecting on my mains playing style, while i did my daily quests today i found myself Dot Dot Fearing mobs to death, in a word Fun :D

Of course i've noticed the same problem with my paladin tank, i'd always let a mob run off and pull the next group for fun, the only way to get through BFD faster is with a 70.
I find it amusing and fun, when Fear is done right it looks awesome, but when it's done wrong oh boy is it done wrong.

I tried leveling a mage alt but i rememberd why i dident like them much, they have no defense especaily at low levels, if i accidently pull 2 mobs i'm in for a lot of trouble unlike my priest, paladin and warlock which can handle multiple mobs easily.
So my mage alt was short lived, oh well back to the warlock on my never ending grind to have a second charecter at 70 ^^.

Mild Happy-go-lucky

I had a very enjoyable karazhan run today, a little success is something i needed a lot because i was getting depressed with multiple failures when it came to pugging.

It was a very rough run, we had 3 wipes on attumen to start with, 3 wipes on maide and made it all the way to prince albeit that we dident kill him.
The biggest issue that we had during the runs was that the tank kept dying faster then he should have been, i'm not sure whether this was the tanks fault or the healers but the tank dying was the reason for almost all of the wipes.

Although i had a lot of success in running kara i also had a mjor problem in that no caster loot was dropping, everything was healer or tank loot, it was getting quite annoying.
Well even without any good caster loot dropping i still managed to get an upgrade by buying the witch doctors stick with the badges of justice that i got from the run.

All in all a very good day, i just need a few more pieces of good loot and half my gear will be epic ^^.

The Shits hit the Fan

I'm relatively pissed right now as i was off my priest for 2 days while i played an alt and when i come back my guild disbands.
this annoys me greatly as the reason i was trying to gear so hard was becuase of my guild and now their gone.

Although this could also be good news, this may be a chance to jion a differant guild and finally advance further than karazhan.
The biggest issue with this is that i'm not geared enouth to jion a kara guild as most guilds running kara don't let you in unless your seriousley overgeared for it.
I was considering changeing my tailoring skill to Shadoweave and making the full set there, this will take sometime to make but will push me from slightly undergeared for kara to very overgeared.

Well either way i still need to find better gear from various sources, i've been advised to start running heroics.
Some of the things i'm looking to obtain include the epic gloves off of Kael in MGT and the eight of blessings.

Of course since i'm now leveling a new alt on a differant server in order to play with a friend this will probably not happen for a long time, my new alts called Haneko and she's a undead warlock on Eonar, i'm haveing a lot of fun especialy on the scarlet crusade where i can chain pull them until i run out of mana.
My basic thought line when playing her is "i'm sorry i can't hear you over the sound of how awesome i am" still leveling a undead charecter is surprisingly hard, most of the gear i get from missions is white and has no real stats on it meaning i need to make sure that my playing style is more professional.
A perticularly bad pull can result in a very quick death, especially if i accidently chain pull a son of arugal while leveling.

Well wish my warlock some luck, i intend to have her at 70 before WotLK ^^.

Small Advancements

I Finaly managed to run part of the botanica, the second part to be exact which mean i'll have to run it agian at some point for the item that i need off the first boss.
This small progress makes me very happy as the last time i completed an instance was over a week ago, so a small boost of morale goes a long way.

On another point all together my enchanting finally reached 375 (technically 376 but no one cares about the 10 bonus points that i get for being a blood elf).

A small tanking experiance

I've spent a bit of time recently leveling up a new alt and had my first experiance tanking an instance in SFK.

Since this is a secret alt i will not be saying the name or class however i have thoughroughly enjoyed my experiance tanking, this opened up a new perspective on wow aswell.
I can now say how annoying it is to have some of the DPS pull the next group while others are drinking mana, although i found it quite easy to snatch aggro back off them (i read up on how to tank with my class before hand) it still bugs me greatly.
luckily for me i managed to grab the butchers slicer and the commanders shield which improved effiecently greatly thoughout the run, i was hoping that the rare mob would be there so i could grab the phantom armour which would have made half my equipment blues and wiould have lasted me for quite awhile.
overall there were few probelms during the run which made me quite pleased although i could definately have improved, i'll be attempting to run BFD next as i have missions there.

i'm intending to be full prot spec and level through instances, this may be hard and time consuming but should allow me to know what i'm doing when i finally hit 70.
i'm actually leveling this alt to OT for my guild, i will annonce this charecter on my blog and introduce her to my guild when she has hit 70, more posts like this may happen in the future enjoy :D.

Macro Mania

one of my most recent ways to waste time on wow is to make macros, i even posted about it in my guilds forums, macros can be very fun to use especialy if your good at it.
Since i'm a lazy bugger i'm going to copy paste my forum post to here, these are the macros that i made just after starting kara and will probably use for awhile:

Shackleing Focus macro:

#showtooltip Shackle Undead
/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,help][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Shackle Undead
/raid Shackling %f

This macro allows me to recast Shackle Undead on a target without losing my selected target.

Hurt and heal macros:

/cast [help] Greater Heal
/cast [harm] Vampiric Embrace

This macro is a brilliant space saver as it allows you to put your healing and damage spells on the same button.

Modifier macro:
This macro has a lot of specific use's which make it ideal for saveing space or adding utility to an attack for example:

/use [modifier:alt] 13
/use [modifier:alt] 14
/cast mind flay

This macro allows me to use mindflay like normal but if i hold alt down i will use both my trinkets just before hand.

Enjoy the macros, i might make another post similar to this sometime in the future ^^

Stop harasing my orphan

My guild had another attmept at makeing a kara run, this run was seriousley hectic.
I've learned something new about our guild, not also are we undergeared but some of our players need to learn to play (seriousley).

We managed to down attumen again (i'm under the conclusion that he was never a problem for anyone), however he did'nt go down as fast this week as he did last week.
During the fight i actually found myself haveing to dig out my wand for DPS (it's been gone from my actionbar since i made my shackle macro) because my mana had ran out and this was after i had used shadow fiend.
now the idea of a Shadow priest whose job it is to make sure the people in his party don't run OOM running out of mana is completely ludicrous, i checked with one of the rogues in the party as i don't have a damage meter and apparantly i was 3rd highest on the meter.
This kind of rating might make it seem nice but the problem was that the mages were ranked lower then me.
everyones equipment is mostly blues and i was actually doing more DPS than the mages, a class that is designed almost solely for DPS.
the rogues of our guild are easily doing more damage than me but the mages actively struggle to even match my DPS output.
and to make matters worse i only did my damage on attumen and the mobs leading up to him, during the ballroom area where the whole damage system is basically the tank pulls the mages do AoE, i only actually bubbled the mages and did little to no DPS otherwise.
This is one of the many problems our guild needs to sort out before we'll be able to pass the curator, i've never actually heard of guild desperately needed DPS, most guilds need healers and tanks but no our guild needs DPS (we need healers too but the DPS is the probelm area now).
If any of my guilds mages are reading this then improvement needs to be made ( i apologise to the few that are good at there class, if any).

in case people are wondering about the title it was becasue during the kara run i brought my orphan along for good luck (it's childrens week) and had to say it to Gad, Turn and Death as they were seriousley harasing my orphan, if it were real i would have killed them perverts.

Brick Wall

After failing to kill the curator on sunday it's come to my attention that the guild is undergeared, now i know this would be a problem before but the problem has realy set in now.
we can't DPS the flares fast enouth so we have started a gear race between the members, unfortunately some members seem to think that being in PvP gear will suffice but due to lack of Hit rating they will lose usefulness at bosses.

In order to combat my own lack of sufficent gear i will start running heroics as much as possible, if i can replace my neck piece and obtain enouth Badges to get my wand then i should be ok for a bit.

Future Scryings

Since i won my kara belt today and i bought my Scryer's bloodgem (+32 spell hit) i'm in serious mode on getting better gear, i could quite easily use a new wrist, boots and hand equipment.

My current plans are to make the battlecast hood, i got the recipe for it out of sheer luck and know that once it's been made it will last me for a long time (probably well into TK and SSC assumeing i make it that far).
i also am trying to obtain the last 3 blessing cards that i need, i'm keeping a hawks eye over the AH in an effort to get them for a reasonable price (the trinket darkmoon card: crusade should also lat me for a long time to come.
I desperately need a new wand and necklace given even the slight chance at an improvement over those 2 and i will jump on it.
one solution for the wand is to complete the HC shattered hand instance as there is an improved wand given out as a reward for a quest, however the odds of this happening are slim to none.
i'll probably have better luck with trying to get the wand from a drop in the botanica (i need to go there for quests too), where theres also a slim chance at getting the battlecast pants recipe (nothing like a complete set ^^).

Well either way i'll be busy for a bit, i also need to get enchanting up to 375 (currently at 371) but i can put that off for now.
Also no my ability to name blog posts will not get better any time soon same thing for my grammer.

Elaborate Consecration

I mentioned earlier that my guild was going totry an take down moroes today and well all i can realy see is we took him on. and left him face down while we were 5 floors above :D.

My guild has progressed geatly and despite being under geared and under experianced i can happily say i am pround of them, we went as far as curator and almost took him down before our time ran out (we wiped at 12% not bad for our first run ^^).
It's only a matter of time bfore we take him (opera event was romeo and juliet for those that want to know).

Still all things considered there is a lot of thanks needed to be spread around, our 2 tanks avenge and graf (remembered his name^^) of course graf got every tank drop from this run as avenge already had them which was a stagering 3 drops (+1 from attumen on the test run) which by the opera event we had all started making jokes about (seriousley though Gdz graf)
And a special thanks has to go to the 2 healers we borowed from the "village idiots" guild, realy and truely thank you guys we couldent have done it without you :D.

I managed to get away from the kara trip with 7 badges of justice and a shiny new belt (from moroes "http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28565" ^^)

Great run guys hope we do as well on the next reset (attunmen went down like a sack of bricks, some of us may have actually got out of that encounter better then we were when we started it (specialy chaz our hunter who won the Steelhawk Crossbow)

Tailoring 375!

News flash.
I finally finished upgradeing my tailoring skill to 375 ^^.
I feel this is i huge step forward compared to before and i am very happy about it.

delayed

Moroes encounter delayed due to lack of tanks, actually day tommorow.

n other news i got round to doing some nethertorm group quests, got some decent gold out of it and a new cape (it's an improvement only because my previous one was so bad).
i'm sure many people were annoyed by my semi constant general messages when looking for groups sorry to you people.
Also thanks greatly to the frost mage who helped me out (have to start remembering names) and the alliance members who helped us kill nebrudis (after 2 weeks on the sunwell isle meeting freindly alliance is a great pleasure)

Speaking of which the sunwell isle is absoultely crawling with ganking alliance bastards (most of which are rogues and druids), today one of my more annoying encounters was a gnome frost mage who made it on top of the ship he delayed me from starting my flight quests (dident manage to kill me).
Seriousley though anybody who does Shatered Sun dailys has long since known that you have to do them in PvP gear or else your takeing a huge risk, this is annoying for me as i have no decent PvP gear and have to make do with the Satin battlegear set (blue honered buys from various places).

As a small note i should mention that my hatred for druids is a very big passion of mine, they are the most obnoixes, annoying class in the game, i actually like rogues more (seriousley).
due to my passive nature i have a tendancy to leave the alliance alone unless provoked (except for that time where i attacked southshore, each side kept retaliating and it ended up with the horde attacking ironforge :p) but i may make an exception for druids in future.

well i'll post the moroes conclusion after it happens tomorow (with pic this time ^^)

Hit the ground running

Our guild entered karazhan for the first time today :D
I'm completely extactic about this, for a start this meansthat sooner or later i'll finally be running around with an epic'd out shadow priest ^^
Though that will probably be later because no caster DPS loot dropped.
This raid started out as a joke in the guild chat and then 15 mins later we took down attumen (forgot to take the picture but i'll post one up next time he goes down).
I accepted that this fight would be a learning curve for me with it being my first raid ( i died ;;).

Credit for this kill goes quite easily to avenge our super tank (his gear is better then ours), with an honourable mention going to the off tank for his great show at takeing on nightmare (he died too).

We've made all sorts of plans for future raid devolpment, included in the list is:

A DKP system
A Addons list
A teamspeak server

Well either way when we go to take on moroes tommorow we will be more confidnet and organised and i can quite happily say He's Going Down!

In unrelated news i've started to make new goals to become a brilliant Shadow Priest as it seems that my idea of raiding holy has flown out the window, which is just great because now i'm stuck with an unsuitable blog name (i still like it though).

The current list is as follows:

Obtain any kara gear possible.
Upgrade all items whenever possible
Become revered with the scryers ( the trinkets worth a 3rd of my spell hit + enchants)
Collect Blessings card set ( i have 4 of them already, might be getting a 5th tommorow)
Save up badges to obtain new badge gear

This next week is going to be very fun, and since kara resets on wensday i'll get another chance to obtain some good loot (currently hopeing moroes drops the mongoose enchant, although i have got a lot of competition for it)

I'll post an update on how the moroes battle went tommorow. ^

New Guild and New PvP Start

Well i'm in a good mood, i just jioned a new guild called "gentleman of leisure" and with some of my guildies i ran TK Botanica and then Mech in a row.
With no wipes and some nice drops (i'm now a decently geared shadow priest) i've had a very good day.
I would like to appologise to the members of the party for my bad internet connection during the runs, turns out there was an IP clash or something like that (at one point my ping was over 9000!!!)

In other news i got round to getting some proper pvp gear and decided to start off small by buying the Satin Blue Honour'd gear from the various places, still need the satin mantle because i wasent honour'd with shat'ar yet but another run in TK should solve that problem.
Eventually i'll start buying the vindicator stuff from PvP vendors but it's going to take a long time.

Good news Everyone

Realy happy right now thanks to a small acheivement, it's easier to explain with a picture so:

I GOT MY MOUNT! ^^

With this latest acheivement under my belt it's time to challenge tempest keep although i'll save that for later since i'm now broke

The Thin Line

I've learned a lot about the differance in skill between players and class's during 2 runs through The Dark Portal (BM).

*rant warning (yay first rant ^^)*

During the first run the team was composed of:
Paladin Tank
Rogue DPS
Warlock DPS
Mage DPS
Priest Healer

The run went quite well, the mage pulled aggro a bit too much while clearing all the excess monsters lying around (before we started the event) but calmed down afterwards.
The rogue was able to keep the hard hitting dragons from nailing the tank and the tank was able to hold his aggro, the warlock also knew what he was doing.

The problem occured just before the last boss, i was out of mana and the tank ran straight at the final boss, his death was quite quick, we were waiting for him to corpse run when disaster struck, someone aggroed the boss and pulled him within range of the rest of the party.
We wiped and although we made a mad dash to get back inside before the shield went down we got there a second too late.

The party then disbanded because the rogue and mage had to leave, so the 3 that were remaining (Me, the tank and the warlock) got 2 new people to come and have another go with.
Enter the Hunter and Another warlock, we all charged into the instance ready to take it down but well it went realy bad, we wiped on the second portal resulting in the party disbanding.

What went wrong?
Well in my opinion the hunter was to blame, said hunter decided that instead of attacking one target he would instead pull an add off the tank and try to take it with his pet.
needless to say the hunter get badly nailed because i did not heal him, you may turn round and say that i should have healed him and if i was a holy priest i would have accepted your point but i wasent.

I was healing the run in shadow spec with my holy gear on, and considering that i made it through the first run all the way to the last boss i would presume that i was doing well.
I priest can still heal a normal instance in there level range without being holy spec, however due to the decreased efficency of not being in holy spec they can only heal one target without going OOM in less then a minute.

So as an overall lesson from this run i'd like to say that priests or any other healer for that matter are not all Babysitter Spec, if you pull aggro off the tank then deal with it, we can only afford to keep the tank alive (unless we're in a raid and are on raid healing duty).

*scrolls up* well that was a long post

Very busy lately

I've been very busy as of late due to real life issues ECT, either way i probably should have posted earlier.
i have a lot of things planed over april, i need to:

Gear my priest (both shadow and holy specs)
Download new anime (spring season just started)
and watch old anime (i have a huge back log)


i expect to be posting more frequantly now that my PC is up and running and now that i have remember'd my blogger password (forgot it for a bit).

The curtain calling

Tommorow i will get my new Desktop PC, it's going to be very powerful compared to the laptop i'm currently using for pretty much everything, but i'm feeling a little sadness inside.

I've been with my laptop for 4 years now and i've enjoyed every minute of it even though it was slightly slow and wasent designed for playing games i still had a lot of fun.
So i'm now feeling sad that i will have to see it go, maybe someday i will get it out for a few hours and relish in the nostalga of many years gone by but until then i will be saying goodbye to my freind.

Progress and Regress

After making the list in the previous post i'm hapy to announce that obtaining my flying mount wil be easier then i thought, my initial idea of training cost had me set to grind 2000 Gold.
It turns out that i had overestimated and it'll only take me 700 Gold to obain my flying mount (i bought the Epic mount training already).

I've also come across a perticular problem with my internet in the form of constantly being disconected from WoW on a regular baisis.
It's reached the stage where i am almost completely Feral about it as my last run of the Shadow Labarinth had me miss looting 2 bosses because i DC'd shortly before they where killed.
Luckily for me nothing droped that was of any use to me, although it is still annoying.

Hopefully some of these problems will be sloved when i get my new PC, this will also come with the added benefit of being able to get me through the shattah at more then 0.4 fps.

On farming and such

Well haveing reached 70 on my Priest around about 2 days ago i've now been thrown into end game content, currently i can only realy run normal instances as apparantly my gear is not imba enouth for heroic, this is partly to do with me tryng to get healing gear whle keeping my shadow spec for grinding.

well either way my to do list looks something like this:

Obtain primal mooncloth set (geting the belt on wensday)
attune myself for karazhan (i don't give a damn about 2.4 i still want kara attunement)
Obain Flying mount (i took enchanting)
Obtain Epic Mount (This is how much enchanting sets you back)

As you can see its not an incredibly hard list but it will still take some time to finish, luckily i can work towards my flying mount while grinding mats. ^^

First Post

Yay my first blog post.

Although i may be negligant in my posting, i will try and blog as frequantly as possible in whatever subject is on my mind at the time.

My main subjects will be WoW, Anime and Whatever else comes to mind.