A Months Worth of Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay Advancement

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

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

Cloth Trinity

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

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

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

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

Random Spontanious Disconection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patch Day

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

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

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

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