Where's my Frisbee?

31 Points of Unfinished Work

2010-07-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

After the new beta trees were released this morning I've been haveing a good play around with them trying to get a good feel for how they work and figureout any good tricks for my respective classes.

Admitedly I've been very excited about the prospect of a 31 talent tree and the implications for leveling alts is very nice indeed, however my current thoughts on what i've seen of the first draft leave quite a bit to be filled out properly.

Currently there are places in these trees where they completely screw over something that I rather enjoy doing which is filling in talents to full.
Nothing is more infuriateing to me then haveing to leave a 3 point talent at 2 points because I need the points elsewhere (I'm looking at you enduring winter) and with a few of the charecter builds that I've tried out I've managed to tag all of the interesting stuff to full leaveing me with exactly 1 talent point to spare which in the case of the frost tree on the current draft has to be taken somewhere in order to advance properly.

That 1 talent point barrier is annoying as hell to me especialy when I have no idea where to put it, I get the same problem with my priests builds.

I think the problem right now is that blizz have trimmed the fat a bit too far down so we now have too little talents to choose from, Perhaps balanceing out the tiers so that theres always exactly 5 points to spend in 3 and 2 point talents to get to the next level without any issues, in cases where theres an ability you can balance it out with either 2 2 point talents or 3 3 point talents either way they need a bit of balance adding to them in order to make them more appropiate.

Thankfully this is only a priliminary look at the whole escapade and they have specified that some classes have not had as much grooming as others have which means I can at least look forward to what I hope will be a significantly cleaner 2nd draft.

It's too early to tell how it's all going to work out in the end.

Playing with Styles

2010-07-05T04:42:00.000-07:00

Something that i'm realy getting into after looking over the current beta talents for cataclysm is the enhanced ability to spec in a prefered style, i've even managed to chalk up a good level 80 talent build for an easy solo grinding spec with large healing capabilities for grouping with.

This has also got me thinking about how I may be able to change my play style in cata to suit me better, one of the things I'm thinking about is changeing my currently abandoned DK or maybe even refiting my warrior in order to create a "Dodge Tank" charecter.

This would involve haveing lower effective health with the trade off of outright avoiding most melee damage, I'd like to try it out with a Blood Tanking spec as I could then include a heavy emphasis on Parry in order to obtain some assemblance of magic avoidence though spell deflection.

I'm sure some people can remember back in TBC when night elf rogues could spec in a specific way and take advantage of specific charecter buffs and debuffs in order to obtain a 100% dodge chance which effectively allowed them to tank anything which did not cast spells (which included some of the highest level bosses in the game at the time).

I'd be interesting in createing such a charecter set up when cataclysm comes round just so I could see how it would play out, I'm sure they will be people who will complian that I have low health for a tank but It's experiments like this that make the game interesting.

I'm even contemplating taking the recuperation talents in the Combat tree for my rogue to use so that I can become far more self-sufficent then I am now, which should make soloing far more interesting and also reduce the need for me to carry potato bread with me everywhere I go.

So my plans for cataclysm is to have my Healers DPS, my DPS heal and my Tanks to dance (Imagine someone with a long sword dodgeing and parrying blows in a chain sequence, it makes me feel like the person would be sword dancing).

A Handful of Side-grades

2010-07-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

Everyone keeping track of the Undergeared project on Gevlons blog has seen my current level of performance on Festurgut on my Priest, I managed to pull 4.4k DPS as shadow which was better then the 4.1k I pulled on the 2 tries previous but I'm not proud of the performance as most of the gear I was using was my healing set.

Fortunately for me I can use most of my gear in a double dip scenario but if i want to perform better in future combat situations I need to gather some more items to create a more apropiate shadow set.

2 items I've managed to replace are the MP5 ring from occulus with the spirit ring from drak'tharon keep, now there are still better rings out there as spirit is only good for a pittance of spell power and a bit of regen, I'm still hoping to obtain the crit ring from Violet Hold or possible the haste rings from VH or UP as they would provide me with better itemisation for the set.

I also managed to replace my wand from the Argent Crusade MP5 wand with the Spirit wand from gundrak, this is a huge upgrade as the previous wand had no intelect on it and less spell power then the wand i've got now making the new one better for both healing and DPS.

Perhaps best of all is that I managed to obtain the Forge Ember from HOS which replaced my MP5/on use SP trinket from HOL, which although it lowers my burst damage it gives me a higher sustained damage and better itemisation for DPSing with, I may even find it an upgrade for healing with as it gives more crit for my Disc set and a spell power burst.

On top of that I replaced a lot of my gems with more suitable ones which should help me out a bit during future raids.

I Still have a few items that i would like which include the DPS trinket from Occu, the Crit belt from Gun'drak and Another blue helmet so I can get a better DPS meta gem which can come from either Occu or Strat.

What Trade Chat Actually Means

2010-06-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

Boredom post here:

Statement: "5.6k gs required"
Translation: "Will wipe on trash and disband within 5 minutes, will also take at least 40 minutes to assemble the group"

Statement: "Need more for ICC25, aiming 7/12 link achieve"
Translation: "Might make it to saurfang if your lucky but will then wipe once and disband, Will take at least an hour to form the group and unfortunately for the group leader the item he's reserving will not drop"

Statement: "Need dk tank for VoA 10 cr"
Translation: "not you, never you, come back when you have 50k health unbuffed and when all items dropped within are useless to you, lololololol"

Statement: "Looking for a tank and healer for heroic farming"
Translation: "Looking for 2 people to run though heroic instances where the rest of us will afk and wait for you to finish, the group will eventually disband when either the tank or healer gets sick of boosting lazy people or when they get an ICC heroic which will then wipe them"

Statement "LFM Totc10 5.5k GS required"
Translation: "LFM to wait forever while i try and form a totc10 group to boost my 4k gs arse which even if it does form (highly unlikely) will disband on Faction Champs (if your lucky enouth to make it that far) and will likely have a ninja as a raid leader"

The last statement annoys me the most as if you have a gearscore that high odds are you'll never have to set foot in totc10 ever again, I find most of these statements to be true aswell.
Be perticularly weary of groups that are spamming trade again after pauseing for 20 minutes, it usualy means they have just wiped and anyone left is made of pure fail.

How a Tank is born

2010-06-11T04:16:00.000-07:00

Due to some recent luck i've managed to get my warrior in a guild as an off-tank and while the DPS certainly need to improve before we can start easy clearing hard raids i'm finding it fun to mess around on my new tanking class.

This recently lead to me wondering exactly how I choose to roll a tanking class in the first place, what made me leave the comfort zone of my mage, priest and rogue and play a class thats designed to go first in combat.

I think one of the key contributers to my new fondness of tanking is quite honestly haveing been a specialist tank on raid encounters on my other classes.

My priest and mage have both tanked mimirons head before and i've had quite a lot of fun working out exactly what spells that lie dormant in my spell book would help me furfil this roll better.

My mage has even tanken it one step further as i've actively tanked the zombie spawns on gluth in naxx before and this was a realy hard task for a arcane mage to do but i somehow managed to pull it off after a bit of practice.

From these specialist tanking roles these cloth casters have created a small seed inside me making me wonder why i havent choson to play the role of the tank.
Looking back at it the responsibility and high entry barrier certainly put me off in the past but haveing taken that responsibility in special cases it becomes a lot less scary.

I had a lot of spare time so I decided to play a plate class and do a bit of experimenting into the whole tanking aspect of wow, this led to a very poor choice in playing my DK up to 80 while leveling with friends, hitting the def cap was much harder back then especialy for a class with no shield slot and the squishy nature of DKs was a bad stigma to have.

Needless to say that this charecter was scrapped, it wasent so much because of the whole cap issue thing it was more that the class did not agree with me, the rotation while tanking felt clunky and badly done so i never managed to master it very well.

I'd tried tanking on my paladin too but that felt equaly misplaced as i ran out of mana incredibly quickly in low level dungeons and that essentialy put me off playing the class as a tank at all.

My warrior on the other hand seemed to agree with me from the get go, the aspects of the class seemed to just click with me and i found myself playing protection as if i was in a state of constant fury.

Everything was kept quite simple from the start and new tanking abilities were added at just the right pace to keep me learning, it's no wonder the warrior was considered the only tank back in vanila wow as it seems just so well suited to the roll.

So i managed to get the class evolved right up to the point that I could start seriousley considering raiding with him, i'd learned the encounters for most boss fights and have managed to aquire much experiance from running dungeons while gearing.

There seems to be a sense of nervousness that I get when i'm tanking using the warrior class which is quite scary for the first raid that i did but everything managed to work well.

So from humble beginnings of being a specialist tank in raid encounters a new tank can easily be formed with enouth time and effort.
I'd encourage most players who are experianced at playing the game to roll a tanking class as it's one of the best ways to experiance encounters and a very nice experiance to have.

I can almost envision me taking this class and role into cata with ease and manageing to play it properly as a main, but wether it can stand up to my love of healing is another matter.
At least it'll keep me a lot to do when i finally manage to get round to leveling alts to 85.

Undergeared Healing Experiance

2010-06-04T04:05:00.000-07:00

Haveing run with undergeared for awhile now i'm gradually strating to pick up the art of healing at low gear levels, because of the differance between the strength and regeneration healing becomes far more technical at low gear levels.

The main point that all our healers have to go on is quite simple, the correct use of cooldowns (both tank saving and mana restoring) at the correct time.
Even when i've been DPSing as shadow i've always payed attention to the mana of my fellow healers and have timed my hymn of hope and divine hymn spells when they needed it most.

A big example is on one of our saurfang wipes i managed to time my hymn of hope to restore the mana of both the shaman and paladin healers (and to lesser extent the Arcane mage) by a small bit which helped them plug along for another 30 seconds or so.
When the paladin healer went down at around 15% I immediantly brought out the big guns and hit Divine hymn to stabilise the raid then I started using Flash heal until i ran out of mana, in my atempt at a cluth healing situation we managed to get to 6% on that wipe.

Of course healing is a very complicated game and something I have to ask is what point does the game end?, one of the best experiances i've had healing for Undergeared has undoubtfully been jaraxus in totc10.
while the fight may have been one shot it was by no means an easy accomplishment as when our 3rd leg healer fell down at 25% things started getting hairy and then we ran out of mana just as the boss was at 10%.
Both of us (me and the shaman healer) had no mana and had to keep a group of 9 people alive for at least 30 seconds before the boss went down, in my opinion it is at this point that the healing game begins neither healer can just throw mana at a problem anymore as they don't have any to spare.

Basically what happens at this point is that you have to cast a heal every time you've generated enouth mana to cast one and you damn well better make sure you cast the right one or else it's basically over at that point.
Due to the lack of raid health healing spells like Circle of Healing become considerable more potent as they can hit multiple targets for the full amount, you can also throw any surge of light procs where they're needed immediantly as it won't effect your mana regen (5 second rule).

The tanks represent a completely differant problem as they will always need a steady flow of heals to live, needless to say that all of my surge of light procs went here and I also made sure that circle of healing would always hit him too.
Other then that I also hit the tank with Greater Heal (it heals the most and has a higher mana efficency then flash) whenever I had generated enouth mana to do so.
Sometime during the last 5% I managed to throw Guardian Spirit on the tank too which both of us simply let proc and then followed up with a few heals to keep the tank going when were realy hitting rock bottom.

The DPS were almost abandoned and left to their own devices, if they couldent live on the rare Circle of healing and Chain Heal spells we throw out maybe every 10 seconds at best then they would just have to die as we just couldent spare the mana for them.

I remember haveing a similar experiance in naxx25 at the very beginning of wrath and most veteran healers know what I mean when I say that healing dosent realy begin until your out of mana, because when you just come down to it these days healing involves wasting a lot of mana and being in a situation where it's just you, tirage and your most efficent healing spells can make you panic greatly.

Nothing is more exciting to me as a healer then pulling through what at first appears to be an enevitable wipe though nothing but serenity and the best application of your spells.

At Deaths Door

2010-05-22T16:52:00.001-07:00

As i'm sure you'll hear on gevlons blog sometime either monday or tuesday Undergeared has managed to claw it's way though to Deathbringer Saurfang by downing both Lady Deathwhisper and the Gunship Encounters.

Completeing these amazing feats in just blue gear is realy making me think at what is allowing us to get this far into high level territory with gear thats over a year old by now.
Although some people might claim it to be a great feat of skill and co-ordination i don't agree with that, maybe what we realy have over everyone else is just perseverance along with a little bit of invation.

For whatever reason i don't have a large ego or a great deal of self-confidence which i view as a personal advantage considering the alternative, the cynical side of me is somewhat worried that the only reason that i get to even come on such amazing expeditions is because i'm the only commonly appearing priest in the guild and they just need the buffs i bring (namely the improved stamina buff).

but even so i find that i can at the very least stick to the 2 aspects i mentioned above, i'm persistant in wanting to down the bosses and am willing to try even the little inovations that get brain stormed out of the rest of the group.
wether we will ever get to the lich king is a moot point, we're proving that even the hardest content in the game you can still make it though with just sheer perseverence.

A lot of what we do is baised completely on luck aswell, such as our atempts on saurfang tonight where 2 times we lost the fight to a very unlucky placement of the champions debuff, if one of those things lands on a DPS we can just let them die off and brute force our way though but when it happens to land on a healer to which we only have 2 of then we enevitably wipe due to not being able to heal the tanks though it.
We'll win the fight next week when we finally hit the lucky number and the debuff lands on the units that can effectively cleanse it, which makes things far easiser.

Wether we'll make it any further into ICC after this is still unclear especialy when some of the hardest fights in the place are the trash mobs but either way i'll still have a lot of fun dealing with it when the time comes and i hope the rest the guild will enjoy it just as much.

Facing Ones Elementality

2010-05-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

My mage has recently turned quite curious as far as talent specs go, i seem to have recently lost whatever made me a good arcane mage or maybe i never had it in the first place.
Either way i'm finding that i do the least amount of Damage as arcane compared to the elemental counter parts, in some cases i'm doing more damage as Frost then I am as Fire.

So currently i'm wracking my brian trying to find out whats making my mage tick in such a way, my frost damage on festurgut today was 5.1k DPS while I was only doing 4.3k as fire and i've realy got to wonder whats causeing such unusual Damage performance.
My arcane damage is down in the bucket too, i can't seem to keep very high figures of damage using it as I used to.

Of course i'm normally running with fire these days as setting up Living Bombs and Firestarter combos to go off together is a lot of fun.
But i've realy got to start wondering if it would be best for me to go frost for the remainder of my wrath career, if none of the other people bring replinishment then i'll have to start using Frost more often as there is not much differance between the 2 for me.

Chakra Co-ordination

2010-05-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sure anybody whos been keeping up to date with the cataclysm changes knows about the holy priests new defineing talent called chakra thats being added into the game, I figured it would be a good time to clarify my thoughs on it.

I've seen some bloggers being very cautious about this talent and with good reason as we may end up being balanced around it for the most part but i realy like the idea of a gear changeing talent.

Holys greatest strength has always been the ability to do pretty much all healing styles very well, if you want to HoT healing like a druid simply grab the renew talents and mental agility and start spamming them hots, if you want to take a more direct approach to healing then you can simply grab divine fury and serendipity and use flash and greater heal as your go to spells and if you want to pile on the AoE like a mad man then you grab the Circle and Prayer of healing talents and go wild.

I can envision chakra working as a way to shift gears between the 3 aforementioned healing styles, when your raid healing then spamming HoTs around will cause you to enter HoT mode where your renews become considerable improved and you can then stick to this mode of healing while ever the fight is going well.
Suddenly however the raid starts taking huge damage so you wind up a few prayer / circle of healing to get things sorted and as soon as you reach 3 casts you enter AoE healing mode (or the oh shit healing mode as it will probably only be used when the raids damage is in dire striaghts) bam your now an AoE healing machine and you should be able to stabilise the situation like that before switching back to the previous gear.
Or perhaps the tank suddenly starts getting heavily thrashed about and you need to focus heals on them, so you start throwing Greater heals out to keep him up and again bam things get kicked up a notch and suddenly your throwing out the raw healing power to keep the tank going.

The problem with the sheer level of versitility that a holy priest has is that if they were too good at everything then the other healing classes would get shunned to make more room for the wonder priests, so the idea behind chakra is that our healing styles will be a little less then the specialist healers out there at first then once we reach 3 casts we catch up and reach to an on par level of capability.

When we enter renew mode we can go toe to toe with the resto druid HoT masters, when we enter AoE mode we can go toe to toe with the shamans raid healing, when we enter Single healing mode we can then go toe to toe with the paladins tank healing capabilitys.

The three other healing classes don't get to choose their speciality so they will always be realy good at what they do and reasonable good at everything else whereas we get to occupy the unique position to jump between whichever mode we choose at the cost of a small ramp up time, this will allow us to fill in the gaps in raiding enviroments, if the raid needs stability gogo renew spam, if the raids getting hit hard then AoE kicks off and if the tank needs looking after then bring out the big heals.

In conclusion i'm hoping that chakra will end up being a talent that allows a priest to diversitise his healing capabilities and focus on his own play style while at the same time allowing him to fill in any gaps that enevitably open up in the middle of battle chaos, wether it will only time will tell but either way this talent will make priest healing interesting.

Alts, Mains and Role Complaints

2010-05-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

I'm getting the urge to make another alt again, this time as a shaman as it's one of the few classes I havent played to death already, i'll probably make it on the same server as my priest as I can pool more resources over there and get the full hierloom experiance.

Of course i've been putting a lot of thought into which class i want to champion going into cataclysm as right now i'm in a position to chose which class i want to main going into the next expansion.
Despite being quite fun to play i'm finding the pure classes to be realy cumbersome to play, although the play styles for my rogue and mage can vary wildly depending on spec the ques to do instances on them is catastrophic.
When a hybrid class wants to get into a dungeon group faster they just have to switch to thier other role whereas a pure class dosent get that flexibility and considering that most people who play a hybrid class don't want to do their other role, it creates a huge que system where the pure classes are shunted because they don't have a skip the que button.

Although to be perfectly honest some of the hybrid "I only DPS lolol" people should probably stay away from their other role as they're barely competent at DPS (sometimes they can't even do that) and haveing those kind of people in the que as tanks and healers would spell disaster for the competant people who happen to get in with them.

Now I have tried to do some tanking and do have fun doing it at low levels but at a certain point the randoms that I get grouped with just start to get pushy and annoying, let's face it tanks get the smallest margin of error and being even slightly undergeared for anything leads to ridicule from the masses of incompetant fools out there, god help the level 80 tank who only has 30k health as he will not enjoy the company of the rest of the group despite the fact that when wrath was first released haveing 20k health was considered good.

So I relagate myself to Healing as my other role option as I quite enjoy it and it gives me many options and ways to play without ever changeing my spec, of course then i have to eat the compliants of any group that wipes in an encounter cause god knows it isent the retarded DPS's fault even when he dosent know the first thing about CC or Target Priority.
Sometimes I can even get stuck with tanks who don't even bother pulling stray mobs off me and still expect me to keep them, myself and the retardin whos attacking the wrong target at full health.

So no matter which role you play your going to screw yourself over at least some of the time if not most of the time when you enter the dungeon finder, so pick your poison and prepare for the worst.

PS: for those of you that still care i'm almost definately playing my priest as my main charecter in the next expansion, i'm more experianced with her and have her skills in all roles and specs polished brilliantly.

Mooraghh...

2010-05-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

Well it finally happend, dispite my dislike of the tauren race I decided i'd finally roll a decent druid alt and mess around with him.
I'm leveling as feral as i already have the gear for it left over from my rogue and i've been saveing the huge ass mace for this scenario too.
This means i get to have another shot at rage tanking with a more simplified toon although i think i'll avoid doing feral as DPS if i ever reach max level as the kitty rotation is realy confusing.
With this new toon running i'm now only one class off haveing at least started on all of them, i can't seem to get myself to play a shaman for whatever reason.

Well i'm bringing this up right now because i had my first feral tanking experiance today and it was surprisingly fun, although there's very little substance to it right now.
Currently i just run in and attack to get rage and then funel it into either swipe for large numbers or maul for small groups.
With the glyph of maul going i can keep 2 mobs on me quite easily as that skill hit's like a truck, thank you savage fury.

Well we'll see how far my little cow can go as i'm sure things can only get better for me as i grab more tanking talents.

I Play on Rotaion

2010-04-28T10:07:00.001-07:00

Now that i've got a few 80s it's becoming a habbit to play them all in a rotation so that I can gear them all up equaly.
This is causeing me a bit of annoyance as without focusing on one charecter I'm not getting a good enouth level of gear to enter places like ICC.
Of course the biggest issue here is mostly the elitist attitude on my server which makes it impossible to get into a PuG unless you've got the kingslayer title, I wish I was joking about that too but I'm realy not.
I'm even haveing problems getting into places like TotC-10 without haveing a Gearscore of 5.4k, It seems I may have to just transfer to a server with more mature players as it's rediculous trying to get into a PuG on my server.

My Mage is the best geared of my charecters at 5.2k but she can't run any PuGs because nobody needs mages for places like VoA and as i said before guilds / PuGs have higher standards on my server.

My Rogue is at 5k with the only heroic upgrade being from HoR (Yeah i'm not getting that sword), which again is too low for any PuGs and the guild i managed to get her in seems to have fallen though.

My Priest on the other hand is at 4.9k and is off the main server as she's running with Gevlons Undergeared Project but is probably my best bet to do any raiding whatsoever but even then I don't have the achievements to get into groups with her.

Well sorry for making a post about me complianing but it's getting realy frustrating not being able to do anything, maybe I'll have better luck when i gear my Priest up a bit more.

Conservative Healing

2010-04-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

In an atempt to ease the transition into what i believe cataclysm healing will be like i decided to make another Priest alt so that i can practise precise healing in lowbie dungeons.
Trying to estimate how much a heal hits for and only casting it when it won't overheal is difficult as my main heal spell hits like a truck.

Currently i wait for a tank to fall under half health before casting as it would overheal otherwise, this creates a type of healing that seems to stress any tanks that don't trust me.
One of the paladins that i was healing with my efficent (albiet seat of your pants) style of healing kept starting a holy light cast around half a second before my heal hit.
It works better for druids and warriors as they tend to focus on their job and put blind faith into the healer of the group.

I'd encourage any healer to roll an alt of the same healing toon they currently play just to practise the difficult art of not overhealing as it's likely to be the differance between a good and great healer in cata.
It also helps with your mana pool a lot, in some cases i've managed to run an instance without my mana taking even a slight dip, where as in others i've had to cahin drink to get it done.

of course the worst thing for a healer in a low level dungeon is a warlock with a penchant for casting rain of fire and then life tapping his mana back, if i ever get into a dungeon where all 3 DPS are warlocks i think i'd probably break down and cry.

I've been haveing some thoughts to trying it in heroics at 80 but i don't think many tanks would appreciate it as most of them are annoyed at a healer who can't keep them at 100% health all the time, to paraphase ghost crawler "A healers job is to make sure everyones health dosent hit 0% not to keep everyone at 100%".

It's nice to play around with Ideas of a Greater Heal orientated Holy build, i might try it out for fun anyways ^^

First Blood

2010-04-06T02:58:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing happend to me yesturday while i was unlocking the Ebon Blade quatermaster on my new 80 Rogue Vivio.
I'd just finished a few heroics and thought it would be a good idea to unlock the Ebon Blades Arcanum of Torment for when i get a head piece worthy to put it on.

While there i came across a Human Paladin (level 77) and decided to play it safe and fly to a good altitude as i was at 1/3 of my health bar, as is usual with most paladins this guy was an asshole and imediantly says what i assume was an insult to my rogue and then divine storms her while jumping off his mount.

I survive and he almost dies from the fall, i decide to fly off in a differant direction out of his range but still able to target him to stop off and eat, when at full health and fly back and stealth where he can't see me.

At this point i assume that he was taking down the oculus eye at the top of the black watch as his health is going down and he's still on his mount, so i wait in an alcove next to the quest giver and lie in wait.

It wasent long before he lands at half health next to the quest giver at starts chargeing up a Holy Light on himself, I quickly move in behind him and cheap shot, mutilate and he drops dead just before I kidney shot him.

Considering that the asshole was prohibiting me questing i found my vengence perticularly sweet, but as an added insult to this idiot I got the ahievement for my first honor kill right in front of him, to add salt to the wound I /hugged him and got the Make love not Warcraft achievement and because I was in the mind set of evil I tea-bagged his corpse several times before he released.

of course while thats all fine and good the paladin had higher health then me and i'm not good enouth with my rogue in PvP to get a win agianst him in fair combat, i grab a few scourge essences for my quest then restealth for what I expected to be a second round that I would lose.

I go back to the alcove and watch as he respawns on top of the quest giver and consecrates / Divine storm the area before he flys off to fight a few scourge on an upper level, he comes back down drops another consecrate while i'm contemplating my next move when to my surprise he suddenly decides to bubble hearth.

I found this rediculously amusing he even goes at yelling the same insult he used to introduce himself to me earlier, I finsihed the quests there to unlock the quatermaster in complete safety and without worry.

I honestly never thought that ganking someone could so easily instill fear into them, as i said in fair combat the paladin can long outlast my offensive capabilities with his heals and Dps me down without too many problems, but with just one very humiliating gank i knocked all sense of safety out of him.

Either way this is the story of Vivios first blood, i'd like to see other bloggers rogue or otherwise to regail is in stories of their first world PvP kill or even their most interesting PvP kill as this memory will provide endless amusment to me.

Undergearing

2010-03-01T08:40:00.000-08:00

I've recently been taking part in Gevlons Undergeared project by completeing raids in Blue gear, i've found that this is quite fun to pull off and i've been amused at how easy it's been going so far.
I've also been quite annoyed by the fact that most of the raids have been going smoother then when i was in guilds with a higher level of gear.

We have a solid group of skilled people filling the raid roles with me being the 3rd healer / off-DPS.
I'm feeling that my performance in these raids has varied a lot but find that i'm performing only average.

I'm never realy very confident in my skills and i think the constant switching of roles makes more of an impact on the meters, which probably creates an illusion that i'm doing worse then i am.

Hopefully doing these raids will help me fine tune my priest to be a multi-talented charecter with skills for both of my roles.

I'm currently re-itemising my gear for Disc spec as we have more raid healing between the resto druid and the shaman then is completely nessacery, me being holy on top of that is overkill.
This should allow me to spend more time on the tanks giving them better survival rates as well as some new raid buffs to help out with.

Of course the biggest plus for gevlon is that i'll no longer be saying "the tank just died" when i make a lucky save with Guardian Spirit (happens more often then i'm comfortable with), of course this time if i'm not on top of it the tank actually will die so we'll see how this goes.

5 Point Barrier

2010-02-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

The next expansion for WoW, cataclysm is now in the part where it's far away but yet close enouth to be talked about.
The incoming changes slated by blizzerd seem to be a huge change to the gaming dynamic which should help curbe burst damage and dull healing enouth to make PvP interesting as well as making it easier to switch roles especialy with regards to tanking in PvE.

The main point of interest to me is the addition of 5 more talent points where our talent trees remain relatively unchanged.
I'm looking forward to seeing what these extra talent point actually bring to the table as far as specing goes.

However there is obviousley going to be some classes that benefit from five extra talent points a lot more then others, for example i can use the extra points to tag abilities i wouldent normaly have on my arcane spec mage such as Prismatic Cloak and Magic Resistence, which is good because i'd normally have to give up 6 yards of arcane reach and Incanters Absorbtion to tag these skills.

My frost spec on the other hand is relatively tight and in all honesty i don't think i'll get much benefit from the extra points, after putting the final point in Endless Winter i'd have nowhere else to put them (although i guess i'll tag Magic Resistence and Frost Warding).

Then there are specs where the 5 extra talent points open up a door you never even knew was there, from what i can tell the reason why Sword spec is good for rogues but not warriors is because they have 2 swords that hit faster then the arms warriors one sword thus procing more often.
Blizz tried to fix this by increasing the proc chance, now imagine warriors could dual wield big 2 handed Swords (Titans Grip), add in a talent that could increase swing speed to be closer to the rogues (Flurry) and suddenly warriors could see a sharp increase in sword spec procs.
The only thing stopping them from using this spec right now is that they can't take titans grip and a specialisation at the same time, even if you trim down the Fury tree points you'll still only get 20 points to spend in arms.
However as some may have notcied by now in cata they'll have 25 points spare, just enouth to tag a specialisation, i can imagine haste being a strong stat for a fury warrior useing swords as it would proc this a lot.

This is the one i've noticed though short skimming but i'm sure theres other specs where 5 more points allows them to tag stuff they wouldent normally have, or revolutionise a spec that wouldent even be good as it is now.
Of course there will always be specs like frost mages where the 5 extra points is going to be hard to find a strong use for.

So what will you do with your 5 extra points?.

Hubris is my Nemesis

2010-01-31T11:08:00.000-08:00

One of the tings that always pissed me off when i was in my guild was the massively overconfident people, they are ok if they keep their hubrism to themselfs but when they are the vocal majority of the guild then problems spring up.

There was always one guy who would always remind us how "easy" a progression fight was mid-raid and how pathetic we are at wiping on Faction Champions (on heroic), when the fights we were atempting were anything but easy.

I don't mind the encouraging types, as in the ones that say "that was unlucky we'll do it better next time", theres a big distinction between encouraging the raiding team and out right insulting them.

Perhaps the worst issue i had in the guild was that the hubristic people were also friends of the Guild Leader in real life so they had officer powers despite not keeping up with the responisbilities of them, we had maybe 1 or 2 good officers and everyone else there was just a hubristic ass.

The point of this post is:
"Don't be that asshole that belittles the raid groups effort by cliaming the fights are easier then they are and raging over how bad everyone else is"

Shadow after Dark

2010-01-29T08:04:00.000-08:00

Recently i had my guild disband on me when some of the more hubris members took their E-peen competition too far and pissed off the modest players of the guild (some were rediculously perverse too, i feel sorry for the girl that was in the guild for 1 day and they wouldent let the fact drop).

When one of my friends left the guild i decided to leave aswell because there was no point sticking round without someone i know being there, i never quite got the full story of what happend but it seems almost all the healers in the guild left leaveing a large hole that would be impossible to fill (the healers there were awesome).

While this has been very disapointing for me it has given me a lot of time to play some of my more neglected charecters and as such i have been playing my priest and rogue a lot, getting back into shadow after so long has been realy fun for me as the last time i was a serious shadow priest was back in karazhan.

Playing a support DPS role has always been my prefered style, if i played DnD i'd be either a bard or an Abduration specialised wizard.
being a shadow priest opens up a lot of support opertunitys such as dispeling and abolishing diseases which i have as a reflex action with the help of decurseive.
Replinishment from Vampiric touch and the healing from Vampiric embrace gives healers more room for thought during fights.
I could even drop Shadowform and pinch heal for a short amount of time, i even have Inner focus and Divine Hymn on a macro together exactly for this purpose
The ability to shield yourself and even disperse can allow you to get though a lot of tight situations without taking too much damage or adding additional stress to your healers.
Thanks to 3.3 changes mindflay now keeps it's snare on the mobs which can help out a lot when kiting or controlling mobs

All in all the shadow priest is probably the best support class in the game right now (with the possible exceptions of a good Shaman or Paladin), the only major thorn in our side is the inability to do large bursts of damage but coupled with Vampiric Embrace that might make us too strong a support class.

Small update

2010-01-28T09:58:00.000-08:00

Might start blogging again, i have been playing my mage Nanoha for most of last year and have a huge herd of alts that i like to mess with aswell, so i might not make as many priest posts anymore although i did get back into shadow a bit (I always did like playing a support DPS role).

Best EotS match ever

2009-01-18T12:42:00.001-08:00

I've never seen the horde kick arse so good without a pre-made, all of them were earned in one match, i'd have got the 3 flags achevement but i was alternating runs with a drood.
Don't forget to read my other 2 posts today, i might not update in awhile ^^

For The Bear!... i mean Horde!

2009-01-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

This event happend around a week or two ago on my main charecter koushirou, i was hanging around dalaran late at night running round the greater learning book places waiting for spawns when i got a whisper inviteing me to raid ironforge.

naturally as takeing down the alliance leaders had been on my to do list since i started playing WoW i was greatly interested so i jioned the almost full raid and set off for Ironforge.
after explaining everyones position and marking the people who knew the way we all charged directly into ironforge with the tanks in pole position.

with it being late night player resistance was little and whatever did show up got nailed hard by our player killing team, as part of our healer sect i was throwing heals around in my usual whack-a-mole fashion and before you know it BAM! down goes the king:

nice picture of me and some of the DPS standing by the throne (dident know which dwarf body was the kings :p)
of couse after that much excitement we soon found ourselfs chargeing straight to the deeprun tram in order to topple stormwind, making a small stop along the way to bitch slap the midget outside of the tram gates.
unfortunately some of our groups got stuck on the wrong side of the tunnel so we had to wait for them to get to Stormwind:
the mage to the right is sentient the tour operator nice enouth to show me around the aliance cities and all their hotspot (he was the raid leader ^^), after everyone got there we went and whooped SW kings arse unfortunately i forgot to take a picture of his death as it was rather packed insidethe palace and we had piles of bodies any of which could have been his.

happy about our kill we proceed to charge the SW docks in order to tag our last 2 objectives, of couse for that we needed a boat:
and so we hi-jacked a boat to aubergine and from aubergine:
we hi-jacked one to darnassus, after our long travel we start to charge into what can only be called a half abandoned city with neraly no one around, it was nearly no hassle at all to come up and slaughter our third major victim:down goes the night elf priestess :p, we were very deep into the night at this point and as such we were all tired but we still musterd enouth strenght to challenge our last traget, but before that it was another session of boat hi-jacking:
I'm pretty sure the aliance harbour hated us at this point, but either way we rode on to our final destination the fallen space ship exodar.
with the last valiant charge we enter the prophets room, this fight seemed to last longer then the others and as there were too many healers i was mostly DPSing at this point but after a long fight the old blueberry goes down:i think he's the corpse to the front left of the image but i can't be sure :p.

It was definately a very fun night, amuseingly the alliance dident even respond to the destruction as there were no counter raids for awhile after this, at the end of a long day i rode away on my brand new mount:
Good raid was good ^^

The Good and Bad of Outland

2009-01-18T11:51:00.001-08:00

after a long while of leveling my mage i have finally reached outland, this brings with it some good and some bad things.

The good things are the faster leveling, better quests and better gear.
the bad things are stronger mobs and the gear.

Some of you may be wondering why i put gear down as both good and bad, well no matter what happens quest greens are still going to end up better then whatever i've got equiped right now but as most people know they horrbily destroy a avatars apperance.

Here is my mage after having just reached outland, nice in apperance with gear being mostly purple and green gloves:
Here is the same mage after replaceing a few pieces of equipment in outland:

This is something that only happens to people when they hit outland, until you reached 70 and got some instance blues you basically looked like a whore for most of the leveling process.
now the after image dosent look that bad now as the blue tunic and trousers (can you call them that?) match well together but keep in mind that i have more upgrades coming and if all goes well, it will be a purple tunic and bright green pants which will look nasty.

There realy isen't much you can do about it either except make a bomb for northrend as soon as possible as leveling greens there don't look too bad.

well thats about it for my mage problems (apart from stupid OP Douche Knights who take any chance they get to attack any player questing in their greens while wearing their Blue gear)

coming up next the Black Wear Bear achievement (For The Horde!) and my guided tour of alliance cities ^^

Question of Choices

2009-01-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

my current spec for Disc PvP healing is 54/17/0 my question is:

How important is Power Infusion and is skipping it a bad thing?

I know it can be used in PvE for mana efficency and to increase healing speed but is it a talent that has use's in PvP.

I'm asking because a lot of Disc builds i see seem to promote it's use greatly to the extent that they include it in Disciplines 4 P's (3 in my case) Pain Suppresion, Penance, Power Word: Shield and Power Infusion.

I also want to know if anyone actually reads this blog and if so why? ( i know one of the blogs on my roll linked back to me, thanks meg ^^)

I'll add my E-mail address to the blog so that people can actually try and contact me if they want to, be warned i check my mail about as often as i post updates :p

New Post, what new post?

2009-01-01T17:05:00.000-08:00

In my continueing effort to delay posting new info i give you one month without posting ^^

Seriousley though a lot has happend since i last posted, i changed spec... again, incoming nerfbat for CoH, my PvP start, my new hatred for paladins (and i used to like them) and my everlasting hatred for rogues.

I'm currently saving honour for my Savage gladiator PvP set which judgeing from how fast i save up will be finished in april; farming honour has always been difficult for me and the price of honour items is nothing short of ridiculous especialy if i include non-set items aswell.

During my PvP experiance i learned several new things:

1, A normal Priest is often over looked where as a Shadow Priest is gunned down immediantly

2, Penance is the ultimate "Oh Shi-" button

3, Paladins and Rogues are OP... Very OP

4, Death Knights arent as offensively powerful as i thought

5, Most Death Knights are stupid enouth to carry the Ebon Blade's revered runeblade on them

6, It's more entertaining to spend 5 mins with a paladin in the middle of the enemy base without dying then it is to win the match

Whenever i played my Shadow Priest in PvP i was always almost instantly killed by every class and seemingly the number one target all the time, when i play my disc priest i'm overlooked until they realise that i'm the reason their target won't die.

A Druid Blog i read awhile ago makes more sense of this seemingly large virtual aggro by explaining that your targeted because of your unique apperance in his case they will always zerg the chicken because it's big, fat and ugly and in my case my shadow form is making them see me as a threat.

Penance's offensive capabilitys are a very nice tool when farming but the spell dosent truly become awesome until it is used to heal allies, it heals about as much as Greater Heal costs half the mana and casts almost twice as fast.

It also fully stacks grace on the target can crit a possible 3 times stacking a large Divine Aegis and only has a small window of opertuneity to stop it.
I've used this spell to heal an almost dead target to full health and when combined with the follow up PW:S it made them unkillable for about 5 seconds

My Biggest obsatcle in PvP so far is the massively OP paladins and rogues.
Rogues are well known to be able to stunlock an opponant to death but this has been taken to a rediculous level with any well geared rogue being able to kill me using only Cheap Shot and thats with my Shield up and if that dident kill me they just follow with kidney stone and then i'm completely screwed.

Paladins need a nerfbat to the face preferably a hard one that removes at least one of their CC abilities, too often have a been healing a target when a sudden Hammer of justice rains down on me like a sign from god telling me "your going to die", most paladins are capabale of killing me during the stun even with my shield up and unlike rogues their stun only lasts 7 seconds instead of 12.

No matter how good at PvP you are nothing short of a miracle will save you from a Hammer of Fuck and Avengeing Cheapness combo, in the worst scenario i've been in a had a paladin and a rogue keep me stunned for 15 seconds, this was when i made an atempt at a flag run in WSG and the only reason i survived long enouth to see the third stun was because i had prepared Pain Suppresion, Prayer of Mending, Renew and Power Word: Shield on myself before hand.

A lot of my hatred for DK died out now that i realise that offensively there not massively OP, most DK have problems killing me in anything less then 15 seconds, i can usualy survive long enouth for a freind to start beating on them.

Unfortunately though they are currently the most defensively OP class as they can withstand a lot of damage using their cooldown abilities and can come back as a ghoul even when you do kill them, i'd like to see what would happen if HoJ + AW met IBF + Bone Shield (odds are the pally would still win).

I have my own DK rolled and 1 level before Northrend content and as such have researched the class to understand their itemisation needs, which is why it annoys me when i see DK running round with the Ebon Blades Revered Rune Blade (i forget the name).

The runeblade has stats that are only marginally useful for a DK overall and is (or at least should) widely considered a Hunter Weapon (but then what isn't :p).

I had a lot of fun Healing a EotS game with a Paladin in my guild, we both hid inside the mage tower when there were around 5 alliance members outside, fortunately the came in small groups and i could manage healing myself and the paladin for around 5 mins before they sent in a big group to get us, it's quite amuseing when your death is only because you ran out of Mana not because your being completely overpowerd.

On the subject of the incoming Circle of Healing nerf i can only say it dosent bother me too much, i never used it a lot as it never realy healed as much as my other heals did, i accept that it has a lot of situational use's and i can usually be found spamming it when AoE based panic is happening.

Fortuneately unlike most people the majority of my AoE healing came from Prayer of healing instead of CoH as i never got into the habit of only using one spell for all my heals, although you could say that my respeccing to Disc is my responce to the nerf and that may be somewhat true as Disc healing is a hot topic among priests right now.

I estimate that maybe half of the current Holy Priest Bloggers will switch to Disc healing as the nerf will hit them like a sack of bricks and they will want to start fresh with a new rotation rather then accidently wipe because they keep hitting CoH when it's on cooldown.

Small steps to dungeon mastery

2008-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-24T07:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-14T08:17:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T05:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-31T16:38:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T16:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-28T02:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-15T12:08:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-10T04:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-10T04:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

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.