Shadow Word: Blog!

Done and Done.

2008-07-07T05:37:00.001-04:00

I'm done with raiding and have gone back to the Horde side to play my Shadowpriest with some friends. I'll still do Kara once a week but thats about it on the Alliance side for now.

http://shadow-word-blog.blogspot.com/

This is my new blog about leveling my priest.

Slowly Crawling.

2008-07-05T13:26:00.004-04:00

Spent quite a bit of time on Serpentina last night and got her to 22. I'm trying to finish out the last few Ghostlands quests before making my way to Tarren Mill. I don't think I'm going to have a lot of play time tonight on her since Forsaken is wanting me to run Kara on Mutoh. Boo!

I'm quite enjoying my little Shadowpriest so far and the leveling spec I found online is working out nicely. I'm going through levels much faster than I ever did on Telura when I leveled fully Shadow specced. 5/5 Wand Specialization makes a huge difference but I had always laughed it off before I knew just how much wanding a low level priest does. I always want to go all in to Shadow to get Mind Flay at 20 since I'm a sucker for new spells but honestly the damage sucked and apparently continues to suck until the level 36 upgrade.

At the moment I have 5/5 Spirit Tap, 5/5 Wand Specialization, 2/2 Improved Shadow Word: Pain and 1/5 Shadow Focus. Apparently I should have put the 2 points from Imp SW:P in to Blackout because those extra 2 ticks never really occur since the mobs die so quick at my level. It should be included in my respec at 40 but not for a leveling build. DOH!

I can't wait to get her to 40 so I can respec for Shadowform and stop healing instances all the time. I'm sure healing instances is far from over for me but it's hard to convince a lowbie group that I can DPS for SFK just fine. I think having Shadowform truely defines to your group that you are not a healer and can hold your own in DPS.

I took a break from her for about 3 hours last night when my wife and her friends needed a DPS for normal SP and UB. I took my Fury Warrior, Adiar, and finished the quests I had inside. I haven't played Adi in quite awhile. I leveled her with an Elemental Shaman friend of mine but he stopped playing that toon to work on a Hunter alt. Soloing as a Warrior is quite possibly the most boring thing to do in WoW aside from leveling a healer so I benched her, hoping to someday come back and get her to 70.

Honestly, I can't stand melee classes. I'm a caster at heart and could easily level another caster or 2 to 70 with no problems but I just can't seem to get in to the melee classes. I leveled my Shaman as Enhancement because there wasn't any caster gear.. but once their was, I respecced him and kept him Elemental. I had a Horde Rogue at 27 for months and months until I finally deleted him. I gave the Rogue class a 2nd try but deleted him around level 12.

I've tried Hunters numerous times and even though they attack from afar it still feels too melee to me and I can't get in to them. I've deleted at least 6 around level 11. I even went as far as to go out of my way to get a pet that I think looked cool and sounded fun but it just didn't hold my interest. I don't think it was the micromanagement of the pets so much as the boring gameplay and looking at my wife's 65 Hunter, spamming a Stead Shot macro just doesn't seem appealing to me at all.

The only 2 casters left for me to level are Shadowpriests and Mages.. both of which I've tried a few times and gotten them between 35-40 but can't seem to finish them off. Not because I dislike the classes but usually due to WoW burnout phases. I'm determined to get Serpe to 70 before WOTLK but the Mage is going to have to wait. I have a 25 Blood Elf Mage that I'd consider transferring from Sisters of Elune over to Silvermoon just to save me about 3 days worth of replaying the same crap again but that won't happen anytime soon.

The bottom line is that I'll still do Kara once a week but my main priority at the moment is Serpentina. I've gotten a good welcome back on the Horde side from the friends I had that didn't reroll Alliance with us back in November so at least I'm not completely alone. Twysted has been tanking instances for me on Splendour, his Druid, and Nobs has a twink Warlock he took with us to SFK. It's been fun and it's holding my interest.. I just hope I don't burn out again too soon.

Oh yeah.. the blogs name will be changing.. to what, I don't know, but it'll be changing. Since I stopped raiding on Jandrae there will be a lot less focus on Moonkin blogging and more focus on my Shadowpriest.

10 Most Memorable WoW Moments?

2008-07-03T19:23:00.003-04:00

I saw this posted on Gnomeaggedon's page and thought the idea was awesome. I've had my fair share of good moments in WoW but these are the 10 that stick out with me the most.

Naked Tauren Dancing - An old friend of mine whom I don't communicate with anymore actually started my wife and I on WoW. He and his girlfriend were RL friends of ours and convinced us to finally start playing with them on the Horde side of Silvermoon. I had never seen a Tauren before but when he met up with my wife's Rogue and my Mage in Orgrimmar he was buck naked and dancing near a fire. Seeing a naked Tauren doing the "peanut butter jelly time" dance made me ROFL for a good solid 20 minutes. I still have the screen cap of the 3 of us dancing naked by an Orgimmar fire sitting around on my PC somewhere.

Downing Hakkar - Our guilds first raid was ZG. It was our 3rd week in there and we had already cleared the other bosses before but always had to call it due to people leaving. We subbed in a few people from another guild and managed to down Hakkar on the first shot. What stands out the most in my mind is that a hunter friend of ours, Xuda, was in charge of Hunter-pulling the Son of Hakkar's up the ramp to be killed so we could poison ourselves but was AFK during the entire explaination.. and the whole boss fight. Turns out another Hunter did this and we made short work of Hakkar but noticed in the screencap that Xuda was still AFK after the entire thing. It was an ongoing joke in Mente Conceptus for a very very long time.

Sisterfister - After shuffling around a few alts and not really finding my niche' in WoW, some guildies in Mente decided to reroll on a PVP server that a friend of ours roomate that played on. I wanted a character with a retarded name so when I killed people they would say "I just got ganked by XXXXX!!!". Sisterfister was absurd and offensive enough and I created an Orc Warlock with the name. I honestly loved the class and had a blast playing him that when we all left the PVP server (around level 26) I had made another Warlock back on Silvermoon that eventually became my first 60 (pre BC), Abigore. So Sisterfister, who was meant to be nothing more than an offensive name on a PVP server, is the entire reason I have 2 70 Warlocks to this day and still consider it my favorite class.

BoP the tank? - During a routine farming run of the first 4 bosses in SSC we pulled Tidewalker. The fight was going smoothly as always until about 4% when suddenly he starts going apeshit on the raid and picking people off one by one. Our vent channel starts going ballistic trying to figure out what had happened when eventually it came out. Turns out that one of my best in-game friends, Call, who was a Holy Pally in the raid, had still had the tank targetted when he went to BoP someone who was getting torn apart by murlocs and cast Blessing of Protection on him, wiping his aggro completely and causing Tidewalker to destroy the raid. Mass amounts of laughter ensued and it's still an ongoing joke today.

Axe of Directions - Drim and Call are brothers and usually play together. When I met them, Drim was an Orc Warrior and Call was a Tauren Druid Moonkin. They were trying to find something in-game and Call was going all sorts of the wrong way, blaming his Treants for giving him wrong directions. Drim claimed that his axe gives better directions but the way it was portrayed in guild chat was hilarious.

Pull over! - After the BC expansion came out and all the quest reward gear looked awful, Drim, my wife's Rogue Evissia and my Warlock Abigore all got outfits that made us look like park rangers. We pretended to be cops and would run around Undercity giving people tickets for riding their mounts indoors. We've done some stupid stuff over the years but this takes the cake. It only got worse once Drim gave Evissia a Riding Crop for her birthday and our Rogue friend Shadowslip gave her a club weapon that looked like a nightstick. COPS! Undercity: On Patrol.

We come from SPACE! - This was very similar to the above mentioned act except it was only Drim and my Warlock, Abigore. We both had the rocket helm quest reward from Netherstorm and got wore nothing BUT that in Undercity. We would find one person and constantly follow them around, claiming to be from space and looking for our spaceship. If they wouldn't give information we'd threaten to probe them. We eventually found one person who would NOT stop running from us so we would duck behind a corner, put all of our gear back on and step back out like nothing had happened, asking this person if they had seen 2 aliens running around. This went on for a good solid hour.

Rerolling as Alliance - After coming back from a 1 month break, my wife and I noticed that our Horde guild had dwindled down in numbers and that Call and Twysted (some of our closest friends in-game) had joined other guilds to raid. Shadowslip had mentioned that he was Alliance before Horde and raided pre-BC with a guild called La Femme Fatale and if we wanted to raid (which we all did) we could re-roll as Alliance and join their guild. We did so, but eventually left LFF due to conflicts but stayed Alliance and leveled all of our toons to 70. My wife, Shadow, Drim and Call all re-rolled with me and the most fun I've ever had in WoW was leveling as a group with the 5 of us. We had the perfect make up with a Hunter, Mage, Warlock, Prot Pally and Holy Priest and hit 70 in about a month.

Aulbeth - Aulbeth was my first alt in WoW that I created to play when my wife wasn't playing her Rogue. I played my Mage with her and we leveled together but there were times that I wanted to play and she wasn't on. I was already a caster and wanted to try something more confrontational so I picked a Warrior. Vevister was Undead already so I picked a Troll and named him Aulbeth, a play on Aulbath, the Japanese name for Rikuo from the Darkstalkers videogame. I had a blast with him and eventually passed up Vevister in levels. My wife joined a punk-rock band and quit WoW for awhile and thats when he became my main. I leveled him to 52 before getting sucked in to the Warlock class thanks to Sisterfister (see above). Sadly, my Alliance Warrior Adiar is 64 and Aulbeth has since been deleted.

The Burning Crusade - The day the BC expansion hit, our guild headed to Hellfire to check out the new zones and instances. The mass amount of people that were out there questing was INSANE and I had never seen that many people online at one time. Waiting for respawns sucked but 1,000+ horde mauling Fel Orcs and queing up for Ramparts groups was jawdropping. My Warlock Abigore, my RL friends Chikin (feral drood) and Burger (resto shaman), and my in-game friends Bulldren (enhancement shaman) and Twysted (mage) ran it for the first time and had a blast figuring out the new bosses and pulls. No one had ran the place before so no one knew what to do. It was totally a great experiance with good friends at the time.

I know I said Top 10 but there was 1 more thing worth noting.

My first BG - Bulldren was a really good friend of ours in-game who we had met in a PuG for SFK while leveling Vevister and Evissia. We needed a healer for Arugal and his roomate actually had a Troll Priest he brought in to finish the job. They wound up being really cool people and we ran instances with them nightly, farming SFK and BFD. His roomate played a T2 Mage in a raiding guild over on a PVP server and talked us in to running WSG. I had never done PVP before and neither had my wife so we were both a little nervous. We played 1 game but it wound up being pretty drawn out. It was tied up 2-2 and the server was about to restart. We snagged the Alliance flag and our carrier was getting beat on pretty badly. He made it to our tunnel, I Blinked over to him and Frost Nova'd the 3 attackers which allowed us to cap the flag and win the game with a few minutes left before server restarts. Before I logged, Bull whispered me and said "it was your Frost Nova that saved the day, man!" and I actually felt awesome for a minute lol.. that was until the next day when we got smoked by level 29 twink pre-mades and I learned to hate a few select Alliance players.

When PuGs attack!

2008-07-03T16:09:00.005-04:00

Last night I dinged 17 on Serpe but it was not without it's fair share of work.

I had some RFC quests left in my log and a group was looking for a DPS so I volunteered my services. The Mage in the group insisted on sheep pulling whenever they wanted to, regardless of who was AFK, and even pulled Taragaman. The only DPS they were doing was spamming Arcane Explosion even on one mob. The Rogue in the group seemed to know how to play but was overexaggerating quite a bit and cussing the Mage out for being stupid, for lack of a better term. It's RFC, not Kara, but yes.. it was very annoying having the Mage rush up in front of the tank, Fireblast something and then Sheep it while 2 other mobs chase after her. With her spamming AE until she was OOM it was pretty much impossible for our Concecration-less Pally tank to regain aggro.

To make matters worse, after we drop the first boss the group starts congratulating each other and starts to hearth out. Apparently they think this is the end of the instance.. all 4 of them.. all from different guilds. So that ended my first RFC run. Good times.

A T6 raider friend of mine ran me through RFC after he got out of Black Temple so I could finish my quests and then hopped on his 22 Druid to run SFK. He drug me along to heal (*GASP*) and everything went fine. I even got the Belt of Arugal to bank for 3 more levels. w00t!

That was the jest of my WoW evening. I hate lowbie pugs but they make for great stories. I'm sure I'll have a few more on my way up on Serpe!

I see Pally Tanking and Face Melting in My Future.

2008-07-02T16:19:00.005-04:00

I ran Kara last night for hopefully the last time on Jandrae. I'm just over the drops there lol. That is such a petty reason but I've been running Kara once a week for 2 months and haven't seen the staff from Curator or the dagger from Prince once. I've killed Ahune about 20 times and have never seen his staff once. I've ran heroic Magisters and haven't seen the dagger or mace once. I'm having horrible luck with weapons and I don't want to farm honor for the S2 staff. 27k honor is a bit much methinks.

There are talks within Forsaken of a possible ZA team forming and running it every 3 days. I'd be down for that.. but for the time being I'm just going to play my new Horde alts.

Serpentina is the Shadowpriest I mentioned earlier. Last night I got her close to 14 but it was getting late. I also sucked it up and picked up tailoring again and leveled that up a little.

Vahl is my new Blood Elf Paladin that I'll be leveling as Ret until about 50 and then respeccing Prot from there on out. I had a Paladin last year around 34 but I deleted him. I was leveling as Holy like a tard and just didn't care for him anymore. This will be a nice change to switch it up between a DPS class and a tank.

I need to invest a couple solid hours of questing to blow through some levels for Serpe (rhymes with herpe, yes) and to at least get Vahl in to the double digits.

They'll be moving up slowly but hopefully I'll enjoy the level grind ;)

Another One Bites the Dust?

2008-07-01T19:26:00.007-04:00

I made my post in the TD forums that I was going to discontinue raiding with them. Raiding until 530am is brutal. 330am is my limit, I think. I just don't get enough sleep with my current work schedule to consider raiding anymore.

Chalk up a 4th 70 that I've raided on and quit. Ouch. Usually it's guild politics and favoritism that makes me give up but that wasn't the case this time. There didn't seem to be ANY politics or favoritism going on in TD at all and I really admired that about them. They're a fish in a big pond of raiding guilds just trying to make a name for themselves and I wish them all the best.

Where does that leave me? Focusing on my new Horde toons and maybe doing Kara once a week on Jandrae or Mutoh.. I dunno.. What happened on the Horde side last November is happening on the Alliance side now. I WANT to do stuff but no one else does. Pugging a tank or healer for a heroic is a nightmare.

I R Face Melter?

2008-07-01T17:03:00.005-04:00

The move is FINALLY over. Finally I can get back to playing WoW regularly but I do plan on cutting back my play time. After taking time away from the game and actually DOING stuff thats productive IRL you slowly realize how time consuming WoW really is.

Most likely I will still raid 3 nights a week with Total Dominance on Jandrae but I've decided to do a total 180 and roll a Horde Shadowpriest to toy around with. I'm not unfamiliar with the Horde as I have a 70 Undead Warlock over there but I think it's best to go that way for now. I have some friends over there whom I haven't played with in a long time and I'd like to see the new zones when WOTLK comes out from a Horde perspective. Since I'll most likely level my Alliance Warlock to 80 I don't want to level Abigore as well.

This will also allow me to level at my own pace and knock out a few quests here and there in my free time without the hassle of having to commit to anything.

My wife and I had this talk to other day as we're both in the burnout phase of WoW. What we think that makes the game start to lose its luster is commitment. Video games are fun for people because it's something to do in your free time, but once you HAVE to be online at a certain time for a certain amount of time and HAVE to spend an hour or more per day doing dailies to fund repair costs and HAVE to farm for consumables it starts to feel more like a second job and less like a video game.

Some people strive for this but I'm starting to think it's not for me. The most fun I've had in WoW is playing with friends, either leveling alts or running dungeons but as soon as raiding came in to the picture and that dreaded "C word" became mandatory WoW slowly went downhill for me.

For my Shadowpriest I chose Horde for a change of scenery again and went with a female Undead toon. I love their casting animations and they look uber in Shadowform which is the whole reason to play a caster IMO. I started off doing the Undead quest hubs until about 11. At that point I ran around to all the capital cities and picked up the RFC quests & flight paths and headed off to Ghostlands to quest. At the moment I'm only level 12 but I haven't had to worry about being anywhere at any certain time at all so far and I'll admit it feels nice.

Do I plan on hitting 70 with the new Shadowpriest? Maybe. Am I in a hurry? Not at all. Do I HAVE to be online if I don't want to be? No sir.

RIP Steve Madry

2008-06-27T08:23:00.002-04:00

Rest in Piece Steve Madry, aka Stevi, aka Fubaryou, aka Tripodd. You will be greatly missed.

Stevi was a healer for us in Grand Theft Kodo, a hunter for us in Forsaken and PVPed as his Warlock Tripodd. He was a kind soul and always offered his Enchanting service to the guild in a moments notice. Sadly, on June 21st, Steve Madry passed away from a heart attack but his brother was kind enough to notify someone in-game about the incident.

Stevi, we'll miss you on vent with your southern draw and we'll miss having you in our Kara group. On behalf of the players that had the pleasure of being in your groups, you'll be missed.

/wrist

2008-06-25T15:45:00.003-04:00

7 more Ahune kills last night.. the same damn cloaks are dropping. Is the drop rate for the staff really THAT bad?

On a good note, I won 2 EOTS matches and gathered the rest of my tokens for the new S4 caster necklace and slapped a Veiled Noble Topaz in it.

Looks like Friday is going to be another Kael night. I'm not looking forward to wiping for 4 hours and I'm not confident we can down him but thats all part of raiding.. learning the fight.

I need to nail out some dailies for money since I'm too lazy and have too much to do at the moment to farm consumables. Blargh.

On another good note, a friend of ours that had quit WoW around February-ish came back to the game last night and we took him with us to heal for our Ahune attempts. He got one of the 3 healing cloaks that dropped. At least one went to good use.

If It Wasn't For Bad Luck..

2008-06-24T16:45:00.003-04:00

Got a solid group of friends to farm Ahune last night, swapping out for alts, etc., for a total of 9 summons. 7 of those attempts we downed him and every single one dropped a cloak.

The two wipes we had were due to the lack of AoE from our Lock on one attempt and our Mage on another. The fight is pretty fun and we had the easiest time with an Arms warrior handling adds. I actually got to Moonkin-tank one successful attempt which was pretty awesome.

I'm still after that damn staff..

Season 4 started today but S1 is nowhere to be found. Apparently the rumors were true that S1 can only be purchased with T4 tokens now.. it's not replacing the blue quality pvp gear from the rep vendor and can not be purchased for reduced honor costs. S2 can now be purchased which is nice. I need about 12k more honor for the staff which I think is my best option at this point.

I could go home and do 1 AV to get enough honor to buy the neck or hold off and get the staff.. weapons are apparently easier to come by but my luck is awful. We'll see.

Anetherowned + TD gets Supremed.

2008-06-23T16:30:00.003-04:00

I don't know how anyone else felt at last nights raid but something was off.

We started off going to Mount Hyjal and 1 shotted Rage Winterchill. Our main Shadowpriest and one of our Hunters got their bracers and we moved on to Anetheron. We dominated the trash flawlessly but Anetheron wiped us 4 times.

This is a boss that this guild has downed numerous times and we had a good setup.. but for some reason we couldn't even get him to 50% once. Healers mentioned having problems keeping our infernal tank up and reaching the rest of the raid and we had horrible luck with his Carrion Swarm hitting the same group that got the infernal spawn. Thats no bueno. Every so often the person getting the infernal spawn wouldn't run to the infernal tank fast enough and would take a huge beating.

After 4 wipes we decided to call it and go try Supremus. Saturday night, Total Dominance downed Najentus for the first time and had a try at Supremus. Their best attempt was 26%. Last night on our first shot we got him to 1% before wiping. Our 2nd attempt was haulted at about 40% with our tank dropping due to tanking him in the fire.

It was nice to finally experiance Hyjal beyond Rage Winterchill and to actually step foot in to Black Temple but it was a bit depressing only downing 1 boss in 4 hours. I was also really hoping for the trash mace to drop but, alas, it didn't and I'm STILL stuck using the Bringer of Death.. still.. in Hyjal & BT. Thats pathetic lol. Hopefully tonight Ahune drops that new epic staff (even though its poorly itemized).

Back in the Game!

2008-06-21T10:20:00.002-04:00

So the move is over.. well.. most of it.. but I've finally gotten time to get back to playing WoW. Sadly, after not playing for about a solid week, I'm not really motivated to continue playing.

I thought raiding on Jandrae would have filled the void but unfortunately it hasn't. I enjoy raiding with Total Dominance but I just can't raid on the weekends. Raiding at 1:15 am is never a problem except on Saturday morning when I have to be up for work at 9:00 am and don't get out of the raid until 5:30am.

So here I sit at work.. very VERY tired. Last night we downed Alar to finish up the TK trash bosses and worked on Kael for about 3 hours. We made great progress and consistantly make it to phase 3 before all hell breaks loose.

I'm not sure what the problem is outside of this just being a new fight to a majority of the raid team.. but it rekindled my hatred of learning new boss fights. TD is new to BT as well and I don't know if I want to look forward to wiping in there a bunch.

This is me being stubborn I guess. Afterall, I'm an undergeared Moonkin raiding T5 content in T4 gear so I AM lucky to raid where I am at the moment.

I'm debating on taking a break until WOTLK comes out and then seeing if the interest is still there. My wife raids earlier than I do so for a few days we don't really see each other for about 8 or 9 hours at a time. We're both really bored when the other is raiding and I don't want to keep putting time in to WoW's raiding content at the moment when the gear is going to be obsolete soon enough.

I'm really not sure what to do at this point but I can honestly say that last night being my first night back raiding I didn't enjoy myself. Not because I didn't get loot. Not because we wiped on Kael for a few hours but just because it's getting old and time consuming. The days I raid takes up all my free time online. The days I don't raid I spend my free time doing dailies to fund repairs and consumables. I have 4 70's and no interest in rolling another alt or switching factions. I came from the Horde. I switched to Alliance after hitting 70 on my Undead Warlock and realizing that our server sucked for Horde.

Even if I switched factions for a change of scenery, what would I do? Hit 70 again and raid the same places I've been raiding? It's not the people that are burning me out so I don't think that would help matters at all.

We'll see what happens, I guess.

Moving On Up Part 2

2008-06-13T08:21:00.001-04:00

My wife and I start the move today after work around 2:30pm EST.

We'll be without internet for 2 days - Blah.

New PVP Bot

2008-06-12T19:59:00.002-04:00

I created a Mage to PVP with at 70 or 80, etc., isntead of respeccing my current toons. I've wanted a Mage for awhile and some friends recently rolled on our server so hopefully I can PVP with them. I know one of them loves to PVP so who knows.

My first toon ever in WoW was an Undead Mage named Vevister. My Warlock spoiled me so I deleted him and rolled a Human Mage named Aulbeth. He's only 11 but he'll be 70 soon enough as he'll be my primary concern when I'm not raiding on Jandrae.

The pic above is just a palceholder until I can get home and take a screen cap of him to post. Credit goes out to whoever this is lol.

Arena Season 4 Confirmed.

2008-06-11T19:46:00.006-04:00

Photo found online. This isn't me, I just loved that he's using the Corrupted Ashbringer.

As confirmed by a blue post via the official forums, Season 4 will start June 24th.

What does this mean?

Outside of horrible looking "Brutal Gladiator" (el oh el) PVP gear, all Season 1 gear will now be buyable from rep vendors much like the the blue gear is now. Season 2 will now be buyable with a mixture of honor and tokens much like Season 1 is now. I don't think the honor cost has been leaked yet but I wonder what they'll do about the weapons and other non-set epics?

This is good news for anyone with an undergeared or newly reached 70 character. The current blue PVP set can be purchased for a little under 150g and, albeit not Kara ready, is a good start. If they keep the price the same, this would also make gearing for offspecs a bit easier.

Mutoh is fully epicced outside of his chest peice which I'd be happy to pick up the S1 Elemental chest and the entire Enhancement set. I wouldn't mind picking Jandrae up some S1 healing pieces for the slots I haven't filled from Kara yet. Adiar is a few levels from 70 and full S1 would be an awesome start. I know it's blasphemous to show up to tank in S1 but it's better than the blues I'd have, I'm sure.

The downfall is that this is just another dumbing down of the game, making it easier for casual players to hang with the big boys that actually dedicate their time and effort to progress in the game. Sure it's S1 and S4 is available but buying epics for very little gold seems a bit cheap. I expect to see countless people showing up for Kara in full S1 isntead of actually TRYING (god forbid) to gear themselves.

I guess I'm torn because it's a good chance to gear up my alts really fast but at the same time I've been playing awhile and hate when things just get handed to people. On the other hand, WOTLK is being advertised with a November release date by EB Games and I think Blizzard is trying to milk it's own teet and give people the chance to experiance all the Burning Crusade has to offer before it's looked over by new players in WOTLK.

Buying S1 epics but still having to attune yourself to do Ony for fun? I don't get it.

Grats!

2008-06-11T16:44:00.001-04:00

Just wanted to congratulate Total Dominance on downing Azgalor for the first time this week and to also congratulate my friends over in Grand Theft Kodo for downing Shade of Akama for the first time.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Rush RH and Win.

2008-06-10T15:49:00.003-04:00

Yesterdays PVP daily was AV which I never pass up. It's also double honor weekend in AV. You figure that AV has been around forever and most people know how to win.. skip Galv, rush the hordes RH, cap their towers and defend until they're ours.

Alliance sucks at AV at the moment and it took about 2 hours to actually pull off a win. On the bright side, I'm only about 1k honor & 8 EOTS tokens short from the PVP neck which is a nice upgrade.

Ah well. With only about an hour a day to play between packing, AV is all I can handle at the moment.

Adobe Account Haxx Info

2008-06-09T20:10:00.006-04:00

Anyone who has logged in to WoW at all during the last 8 days has noticed a huge warning to upgrade to the most recent version of Adobe Flash as there has been a security issue.

Someone that I run heroics with regularly said their account was hacked and fears that it was because of the Adobe issue. He said that the hacker got on his account and spammed the trade channel that he was selling Spectral Tiger Mount loot-card codes for 1500g, made about 12,000g from it and mailed the money to another account before logging out. He still had all of his gear, etc., but now he has to suffer the wrath of angry spammers that paid for their loot codes and never got them.

GO UPDATE YOUR ADOBE FLASH DRIVE, lol. Don't let this happen to you.

Movin on Up!

2008-06-09T03:38:00.001-04:00

Packing and moving this week so I won't have much time to play, if any at all.

Don't expect many updates for about 2 weeks.

Eff Joo, Tidewalker!

2008-06-07T06:28:00.003-04:00

Thats about how I felt tonight. We had a few no-shows so the raid started an hour later than scheduled but we still managed to one-shot Lurker, Leotheras and Fathom Lord. We wiped 3 times on Tidewalker and called it a night which dissapointed a few people but with the late start we were already 30 minutes over raid time.

Total Dominance does the Tidewalker fight a lot different then Grand Theft Kodo did. TD uses a Pally tank to bring all of the murloc spawns to Tidewalker so the AoE damages him as well. It works OK until the Pally tank gets the Watery Grave 3 times and a row and wipes the raid.. and the same thing happens every attempt thereafter.

I somehow managed to get Velvet Boots of the Guardian from Lurker on my first night. I think the other 3 people were rolling for offspecs and when they noticed I was rolling they all kindly passed to help me gear up with them. It was very welcoming and something I had never seen in GTK. I definitely feel like a part of TD right now, even though I'm still in recruit status.

Just a crit buff? I think not.

2008-06-06T12:59:00.003-04:00

It seems that a lot of people are ignorant to what a Moonkin brings to the raid. I will honestly say that 90% of the players only see a Moonkin as a +5% spell crit buff for casters but there is more to us than that.

+3% hit to the entire raid - A Moonkin specced in to Improved Faerie Fire brings a valuable utility to the raid with 3% hit. Not just melee, not just spell hit. As long as the Moonkin's Faerie Fire is on the mob the entire raid gets this buff.

2% avoidance for tanks - Insect Swarm is a DoT but also reduces the mobs chance to hit by 2%. Yes, it even works on raid bosses.

25% reduction of attack speed - Hurricane is an unappreciated AoE that is usually lol'ed at for it's lack of damage. What people DON'T know is that ANY mobs affected by Hurricane has their attack speed reduced by 25%. Sure, all Druids get Hurricane but a tank or healer isn't going to be using this very much.

More aggro on the tank - Brambles increases the effectiveness on Thorns which in turn increases threat generated by the tank while taking damage.

An additional Innervate - Moonkin provide good single-target DPS while also bringing the utility of an additional Innervate for the healers. This is a risk free Innervate because the Tank sure isn't popping out of form to use his/hers and the Resto Droods don't have to stop healing to use theirs.

An additional Rebirth - The same benefit as listed above for Innervate. The healers don't have to stop to use theirs and it adds another one to the pot. Good times!

Backup Healing - Balance Druids get talents that increase their spell damage and healing by a certain percentage of their Intellect and pack a lot of it. In situations where tanks need that extra healing, a Boomkin can pop out of form and throw up every HoT a Resto Druid has, albeit less effective.

Treants - Ok so this is just a fun spell to use and it never fails to hear someone on vent say "WTF?". Sure it brings nothing to the table but I don't leave home without them. Sometimes wiping repeatedly brings everybody down but Treants turn that frown upside down. I'm a rapper. Quote that.

You Live & You Learn.

2008-06-06T12:09:00.003-04:00

As I continue raiding with Jandrae, a few things have come up that I'd like to point out as well as some macros that I would like.

In Zul'Aman, spamming Rank 1 Entangling Roots on the Scouts is just as effective as the max rank and is far more mana friendly.

On raid bosses, using Rank 1 Faerie Fire with the Improved Faerie Fire talents provides the same +3% hit rating as is far more mana friendly.

Being a Moonkin that normally runs with a Paladin and isn't as geared as the rest of the DPS, it's kind of pointless to take the Subtlety talent and I should have taken Intensity isntead for 15% mana regen while casting.

If a boss has no aggro table (i.e. Aran) I can blow my entire mana bar in 20 seconds. That sucks. I need to learn how to conserve mana. Badly.

I need to make a macro for Entangling Roots that casts the max rank with a shift modifier for rank 1 (for times like ZA or PVP).

Thats about all I can think of at the moment.

4 Out of 6 Aint Bad?

2008-06-06T06:06:00.007-04:00

Got the Eagle, Bear, Dragonhawk & Lynx bosses down tonight on my first "official" raid in the new guild. Went well outside of the Dragonhawk boss. We missed the 2nd chest by 2 minutes I think but wiped on the Dragonhawk about 3 times. 2 shotted Halazzi which was nice considering one of our healers was a PuG. Since it wasn't a full guild run we decided to call it after Lynx instead of heading to Malacrass.

The Bear boss dropped the Fury of the Ursine bracers which are a very VERY slight upgrade from the Windhawk bracers I crafted but they're cloth and would ruin my set bonus. I passed on them for a Mage. I did manage to get enough badges to pick up these sexy shoulders (instead of the boots). I didn't notice the amount of spell hit on them before and they were a HUGE upgrade from the crap shoulders from Aran. The boots are a nice upgrade as well but the ones I have at least had crit and MP5 on them as well as damage.. where the shoulders from Aran have the ever-useless spell pen. It doesn't hurt that they're sexy as well!

But man.. I'm so tired T_T. I have to get up in a little over an hour for work.

Also just wanted to give super kudo props to my wife's guild, Endless, for getting Bloodboil to 1% twice. I'm sure they'll down him if they go back on Sunday. Also wanted to congratulate my friends in Grand Theft Kodo for their first downing of Supremus. Although I'm not in the guild anymore, I DO have friends that still raid over there and just wanted to commend THEIR actions.

On a side note, I took Mutoh out of that new Kara guild, respecced BACK to Elemental and put him back in Forsaken for the time being. I need some badges for him so hopefully there is a Kara run sometime this weekend.

Kiss My Malacrass

2008-06-05T16:37:00.003-04:00

I was informed with about 24-30 hours notice that I "may" be needed for ZA tonight with the new guild, Total Dominance. Thats awesome! I like ZA and I've never had the chance to attempt Malacrass or Zul'jin but apparently they run 2 groups with full clears on Thursdays.

I woke up and watched a "how to" video for Malacrass before work but didn't have time to check out Zul'jin. I DID manage to send myself some of the boss strats via work e-mail to check out during my night shift here.

I have a list of things I need to do when I get home before the raid. I wish I had gotten more notice but the guild leader really wants to gear me up before taking me in to Hyjal and ZA is a nice step in the right direction. If we fully clear I'll be 1 badge short for the Moon Walkers.

When I get home, I need to check the AH for any shadow resist gear, get my boots enchanted, put +shadow resist on my cloak, farm mats for another Flask of Blinding Light, re-watch the Malacrass video and actually find and watch a "how to" Zul'jin video. Oh, and I need to respec to put some talents points in other places. I've been told that I need to keep Brambles for Imp Thorns on the tank and I suppose I'll keep Imp Faerie Fire until I reach 12% spell hit.

Hopefully I don't make a fool of myself tonight because I'm still used to raiding as a Warlock and not used to having important things to do during the raid like Innervating healers or battle rezzing. All in due time, I suppose! I also need to farm about 6k more honor and 8 more EOTS tokens for the PVP neck. *sigh* I hate PVP sometimes.

And Back to Raiding I Go! + Knowing When to Say When.

2008-06-04T16:51:00.004-04:00

An officer from the guild I had applied to whispered me last night in the middle of a horrid Kara group on Mutoh. He had mentioned wanting to take me on a Kara run on Jandrae later in the night once he gets more people and I agreed to go to make a good first impression.

We WTF pwned Kara but left behind Nightbane because no one had their urn on them and we were in a hurry to finish the place so it wasn't worth the 2 badges. I'm now 10 badges shy of my Moon Walker boots. Wewt!

After the run, he whispered me again and said they were prepared to give me a guild invite and would like me to run SSC with them on Friday. I R EXCITED!

So by Friday I somehow need to obtain 10 badges and 9k honor.. ouch..

So yeah.. as of now.. I am a raiding Boomkin. <3

On to part 2!

A new guild had formed on our server and said they were just looking to farm Kara for badges once a week. I had whispered the guild leader and said that I had a Shaman I would like to bring and since they were short on healers I would respec Resto.

He shot me a guild invite and the way they were all talking in guild chat you would figure they've all been to Kara 100 times, they were geared and were just looking for a fast one night clear per week for 22 badges.. yeah right.

Tonight was our first night in Kara and it was a total nightmare. We didn't start the first pull until almost an hour after the raid started and the people that showed up didn't even have the gear to run heroics, let alone Kara. The healer assigned to the MT was in 60% greens with the Wal-Mart Healer package of the Crystal Pulse Shield and Essence Focuser. Nothing against those two pieces of gear but at least get them enchanted before you walk in to a raid.

Lets take a run down the raid list here. For our healers we had a Priest with a few pieces of S1, some greens and some isntance blues. A Holy Paladin which is who I spoke about earlier with mostly greens and the AH blues, and me. A Resto Shaman with +1400 healing,, 200 mp5 while casting unbuffed and the only person in the entire raid using consumables.

Our tank was pretty geared in a few pieces of S1, the badge shield and Thunderfury. He was the raid leader and I was actually pretty impressed with his tanking ability and raid leadership. Sadly, he was the only one in the raid that I was impressed with. Out OT was a Feral Druid with full S1. No PVE gear at all.. and he was taking a TON of spike damage.

Our DPS consisted of a Hunter, a Warlock, a Mage, an Arms PVP Warrior and a Rogue. The Hunter was wearing PVP gear which is OK for Hunters I guess. The Warlock had a few Kara epics so I figured they knew what they were doing but they seemed to die every.. single.. pull.. The Warlock and the Rogue were in a DPS race trying to out-do each other but they both just seemed to pull off the tank and die very very often so I stopped healing them.

The Warlock wore their Argent Dawn Commission trinket the whole time and said they didn't have anything else to wear. The Rogue was to concerned with his DPS and died regardless of how much gear he might have had. The Arms Warrior kept attacking shackled targets and was wearing the S1 2h sword and the blue pvp rep gear that came out with the last patch. Let me tell you, it was a great time and more than 2 hours after the raid started we wiped on Moroes for the 2nd time. 2h 30m in to the raid we finally down Moroes and then most of us wipe on the next trash pull so I called it quits.

My question is this. When is it OK to say when? If you don't dislike anyone in your raid group but you just don't want to spend your entire night wiping on Kara with a group that has no business being there, when is it OK to tell the raid leader "I give up"?

During our second Moroes wipe I whispered the raid leader and told him that I was very familiar with Kara and didn't feel that we had the right group makeup or the gear to be in there. He whispered back and said it was a lot of their first times in Kara and to be patient but there has to be a line there. Is it worth being patient when 80% of your raid isn't geared enough to even run heroics?

I made an excuse and told the raid that my mains guild whispered me and needed me for something and I couldn't tell them "no I'm running something on an alt", hearthed, left the raid and have little to no interest in signing back up for their Kara runs. Part of me feels like a total jerk for doing that but at the same time I was told they were geared, experianced and just looking for a "weekly, fast" Kara runs which was far from true.

At least this allows me to focus on raiding 3 nights a week on Jandrae =X

New Gear FTW

2008-06-03T20:03:00.003-04:00

I wanted to seperate this blog from the previous one since it doesn't really deal with the same issue.

A group of us formed a regular Kara group for our alts that run every Saturday night. I'm taking Jandrae to gear her up after last week was so profitable. This week I ended up with about 18 badges (we skipped Illhoof and Netherspite due to lack of time), the Mantle of the Mind Flayer from Aran & the Ruby Drape of the Mysticant from Prince.

The Mantle is horrible (+spell pen FTL) but it has more spell damage and stats than my current shoulders so I took them. No other casters wanted them so they didn't count as my "roll" for the night. The cape from Prince dropped and +spell hit is win. I used my roll for that and beat the Warlock for it. Wewt!

Hopefully this weekend gives me the offhand from Netherspite and the neck from Moroes. =X

Guild Drama 4: The Finale

2008-06-03T16:56:00.003-04:00

Ah, where to begin?

I am not a raider with GTK due to my work schedule conflicting with their raid times. My wife IS a raider with them and has been for 8 months, 3 of which she has been the Mage class leader. My wife has a close in-game friend that is also a Mage and raided with us in GTK.

As time went on, my wife grew tired of obvious favoritism, selfishness and (insert word here for "going behind class leaders backs and telling people to do what the guild leader thinks would boost their own dps instead of bettering the player and raid group") on behalf of the guild leader.

A former guildy of ours left for a more progressed guild, had been raiding with them for about a month and was quite happy. He is also friends with my wife's Mage friend and told him that their guild was hurting badly for 2 really geared Mages to down Archimonde and move on passed the first 4 bosses in BT. This sparked an interest in the Mage friend leaving our current guild for the more progressed guild and asked my wife to go with him for the 2nd Mage spot.

They were both unhappy with the current leadership (not all, but mainly the guild leader) and considered this for over a month. The Mage friend finally got fed up with up and gquit without posting a reason or telling anyone.

My wife continued to raid in our current guild and was whispered by an officer asking why her friend had left the guild. She told him that he had left for another guild because he wasn't happy but was asked if she was leaving as well. She responded that she wasn't sure what she was going to do and was instantly belittled and cussed out by the officer.

She never said she WAS going to leave, just that she wasn't sure what she was going to do. She wasn't sure if she was going to leave or just stop raiding altogether, etc., but this officer, in my opinion, overreacted and jumped down her throat for no reason and called her selfish.

She talked to the guild leader over vent shortly after, telling him that the officer she talked to treated her unfairly and wanted to talk to him about her future in the current guild and why she was unhappy. She was given an ultimatum that if she left GTK she was done and would not be allowed back followed by the guild leader trash talking her Mage friend saying he was trying to take her away from the guild.

If someone is unhappy and respectful enough to TALK with an officer and the guild leader about their situation and is, for lack of a better term, slapped in the face and disrespected, what are the odds that person is going to stay in the guild when they've been offered a raid spot by a more progressed group of people? Zero.

So my wife, after talking to the officer and guild leader, left a post on the guilds forums saying that it was a hard decision and that she would be leaving for another guild.. but did NOT mention how she was treated by the officer and guild leader out of respect for the guild and to avoid people leaving based on what happened to her.

I was furious at the way she was treated and /gquit shortly after. I am close with a few people from the guild and sent them a personal in-game mail explaining why I chose to leave and put all of my characters in to the Mage friends Alt guild until I found a new home.

My wife took the position in the new guild and starts raiding BT with them tonight to down Na'jentus, Supremus, Akama and Gorefiend and I wish her all the best. Shes an amazing Mage and very passionate about her class so she deserves better than the way she was treated in our previous guild.

Shortly after, a guild posted that they were recruiting a weekend late-night Moonkin for their 25-man content. I hadn't heard of the guild before so I assumed they were new and recruiting for Mag/Gruul. I questioned the person posting and he said they raid Hyjal at the moment and referred me to their website but he had armoried me and said that my gear might be an issue. I explained that I misunderstood and that I had a T5 geared Warlock that I would be interested in raiding with so I was told to apply online.

I apply but the application asks for the names and classes of my alts. I received an in-game letter from the guild leader.. on my Moonkin, not my Warlock. It said they were running ZA this Thursday and they would like to take me along. Puzzled, I responded and said that I was unsure if the time would work.

Later last night I received a whisper from an officer about my application and he, again, said my Moonkins gear might be a slight issue but he wanted to discuss it with the guild leader again and might have a raid spot for me. Wait, my Moonkin? I applied on my Warlock lol. They said they're more interested in a raiding Moonkin that fit their schedule and he liked my personality so he'll talk to the guild leader and see where to go from here.

As it stands right now, I'm nervously awaiting their response as I would LOVE to raid end game content on my Moonkin.. but I wouldn't be that upset if they turned me down. A bit depressed because no one likes rejection, but I'd understand their reasoning. ;)

Another guild had formed from the ashes of a 25-man guild and just wanted to do some easy weekly Kara clears so I signed up to raid on my Shaman with them.. however they want him as a healer. Boo. I respecced Resto and I HATE it. I'll see how tonight goes in Kara and if it sucks I'll just tell them healing isn't for me and see if they want my lock instead.

So there is the weekend drama in a nutshell.

The farming is finally over.

2008-05-29T16:23:00.002-04:00

Finished farming and crafting the last piece of my Windhawk Armor for Jandrae.

I never want to farm another Wind Scale again.

Raiding 101: Moonkin (part 1)

2008-05-27T21:13:00.004-04:00

The primary focus of this post is to prepare new Moonkin to the entry level 10-man raiding experiance of Karazhan. Part 2 will focus more on higher level 25-man content once I get to experiance it first hand.

So you've hit 70 and are ready to climb the raiding ladder, eh? Here are 6 pieces of advice that will help prepare you for your Kara experiance.

1 - "Don't be afraid to wear cloth!" & other gear to look out for.

Most of the epic leather gear for Moonkin comes from badge rewards rather than drops in Kara. Outside of the Bracers of the White Stag from Attumen, there are NO other leather drops for you side from off-spec pieces. There are trinkets, weapons, rings, capes and necks to look out for but you'll be collecting badges to get your leather gear in the long run.

Starting off in pre-Kara gear, don't be afraid to wear a lot of cloth. You'll get a lot more spell hit, spell damage and base stats from cloth than most leather gear you'll find out there at this point in the game. Pay attention to cloth pieces that focus on +Int, +Spell Damage and +Spell Hit and snatch them up. A few pieces of the Warlock's Oblivion set has a few good spell hit pieces and the Robe of the Crimson Order (+30 spell hit) usually goes for cheap on the AH.

If you are a Tribal LW, feel free to craft the 3-piece Windhawk Armor set as it should last you quite awhile.

When it comes to gemming gear, it's time to step away from the Potent Flame Spessarites and putting some +spell hit gems in. If you have epics that you think you'll have for a bit, feel free to splurge on the blue quality Veiled Noble Topaz. If the set bonus isn't appealing, feel free to avoid it by packing in Veiled Nobles instead of wasting the slot. Most slot bonuses are blue sockets. For that, I'd just recommend the +stam/+spell damage gems but ONLY if the socket bonus works for you.

When it comes down to accessories, there are a few options for everything except trinkets. If you are Scryer, I would farm rep until Revered for the Scryer's Bloodgem trinket. There is a ton of spell hit on it as well as a push-to-use +spell damage bonus. Hopefully you took the Vengeance of the Illidari trinket from the "Overlord!" quest in Hellfire because it's still valueable at this point in the game. If you're ok with spending money, the Storms deck is pretty nice for Moonkin with it's stacking +spell crit buff but crit isn't your top priority. The Nexus Horn from Skyriss in Arcatraz is really nice with a decent crit rating as is Xi'ri's Gift which is available with revered reputation with Sha'tar.

For everything else just try to get as much +spell hit and +spell damage as possible.

2 - Spell Hit is your best friend.

I can't stress this enough. Yes Moonkin and Elemental Shaman thrive on spell crit.. in PVP. PVE is a different ball game. Later on down the line once you've maxed out your spell hit THEN you can focus on crit, but for now +spell hit is your priority until you have a 16% chance to hit.

Take talents in to consideration. You get +4% chance to hit from the Balance of Power talent and if you spend the 3 points in Improved Faerie Fire thats an additional +3% as long as you keep it up.

Take your group in to consideration. If you run in a set group each and every week you might be lucky. If you have an Elemental Shaman with Totem of Wrath, thats another +3%. That Shaman is also a Draenei which gives off a +1% spell hit aura as part of their racials. With the two above mentioned talents and an Elemental Shaman thats +11% spell hit WITHOUT taking gear in to consideration. This means you only have to gear for +5% spell hit and the rest of your gear and gems can focus on +spell damage and +spell crit. Woot!

The simple rule of thumb is "you can't crit what you can't hit."

3 - Spell rotations.

Spell rotations are very important but differ from trash mobs to raid bosses. The purpose of a spell rotation is to maximize your DPS but certain situations require you to keep an eye on your mana pool. Long fights (i.e. Netherspite, Nightbane, Illhoof) are not our strong points.

The most effective spell rotation for raid bosses is-

Insect Swarm -> Moonfire -> Starfire x3, repeat.

If you have push-to-use spell damage trinkets, you want to use them BEFORE you put up your two DoTs. If you took Improved Faerie Fire you'll want to start with that and refresh it when it falls. If you took Force of Nature, it's best to blow it early so it doesn't disrupt your cast rotations but be smart about it. Don't drop them during heavy mob-AoE encounters (thankfully there aren't a lot of those in Kara) or you'll just be wasting your mana.

For trash pulls, it's probably best just to spam Starfire and use Wrath when thier health drops low enough.

It's best to avoid using Wrath if at all possible. It's way to mana intensive for the amount of damage it puts out. I usually save it until the end when the mob is about to die and I know I don't have 3 seconds to get off another Starfire.

4 - Consumables.

You will go through mana.. a lot. Bring tons of mana pots. Also, during boss fights, use them early on so the cooldown is available when you need it the most - in the end. If you're in a new Kara group and you think you'll be wiping a lot, I advise using flasks over pots and elixirs for spell damage buffs since they persist through death. Flask of Blinding Light is what you want to aim for. The mats can be pricey if you don't have an herbalist but 50g (the average price) is worth 2 hours of a spell damage boost.

Bring a few charges or Wizard and Mana oil. I'd say both because, for some of the fights, mana regeneration is more important than extra spell damage. Nightbane is a good example. He has no enrage timer and a few aggro dumps so there is never a need to go balls to the walls with him. Shade of Aran has no aggro table and needs to drop as fast as possible - this is a good time for Wizard Oil.

I recommend bringing stamina and spell damage buff foods. You'll mostly use the spell damage foods unless you feel that survivability is a must. If you notice yourself dying often or the fight is not a dps race (i.e. Nightbane) I'd go for stamina over damage. Food buffs are very easy to farm for and there is never an excuse to NOT have them on you.

5 - Addons.

Most addons are common sense. Get some sort of Deadly Boss Mods and a Threat meter. For Moonkin, I'd recommend grabbing a DoT timer as well to help you keep track of your Insect Swarm and Moonfire ticks and trinket cooldowns. The rest is just person preference.

6 - Common mistakes. Oops.

Unless you have points in the Resto talent Subtlety, you're going to have to keep a close eye on your aggro. If a Pally is present, request Blessing of Salvation over anything. If a 2nd Pally is available, Blessing of Wisdom is the next best thing, follow by Blessing of Kings.

Give the tank time to gain threat. You aren't a noob and this isn't new information but don't start off with something that can crit (i.e. Starfire, Wrath, Moonfire). Start slow and then lay in to them or just wait a few seconds before spamming Starfire.

Do not Cyclone targets that are not marked for CC unless they're going for a healer. Resto and Balance Druids are notorious for overusing Cyclone. Don't be that guy. Unless the raid leader asks you to back-up someones CC that died, refrain from using Cyclone at all.

Check with other Druids in your party and see if any of them have Improved Mark of the Wild and/or let them know if you do. Those Druids should be buffing the group. Also let the group know if you took the Brambles talent so you can rebuff Thorns on the tank.

Get in the habits of using push-to-use trinkets every cooldown, even on trash. This is an increase in your DPS. You are a DPS class. Make sense?

Hope this helps make Kara a little easier. Once I do more 25-man raids I'll see how different it is and, I'm sure, will post about it.

Ding 70.. again.

2008-05-27T18:46:00.003-04:00

So Jandrae is finally 70 after being abandoned at 34 and again at 63 to play other alts. I don't mean to come off so negative but this being my 4th 70, it's safe to say it's lost its luster. I did, however, enjoy every moment of leveling her (even the 2 or 3 levels I was Feral) and had little to no problems leveling as Balance for a huge majority of the experiance.

I had about 2k XP left until I dinged when a former guildy asked if I would like to DPS for their Kara run. 5 minutes later, I was trained, gemmed, got +40 spell damage on my Bringer of Death and was in Karazhan. Who gets to be that lucky? I didn't look a gift horse in the mouth, thats for sure!

We did a full clear with no wipes but I had a bit of a problem with threat in the beginning. This was due to a few things - The first being that I was still in my leveling spec with no points in Subtlety for threat reduction. The second being that we had no Paladin for Blessing of Salvation. The third being my attempt to hang with the "big boys" in epics in DPS.

I was top DPS until the trash on the way to Maiden. The only AoE was a Hunter, another Moonkin and myself. 2 Hurricanes and a Volley is pretty sad. The healers didn't get the AoE group topped off and due to my lack of epic gear with stats, I dropped like a rock as soon as I pulled aggro. Even with Barkskin up, my 7500 health went down in seconds. There were points though where I would be sitting at 50% for 5 or 6 seconds with no heals going off. Ah well, stuff happens.

We only had 1 tank which was a Warrior. He was marking a kill order/CC but would attack something in the middle of the order instead of getting threat on skull first. This led to lots of healer aggro early on and me "turkey tanking" a few mobs thanks to DoTs and some unwanted Starfire crits. We're all pros in Kara unless we're on alts lol. Then anything goes.

Maiden was the last of my few deaths and we had no wipes for the rest of the raid. We did a full clear in a little over 3 hours and I was pretty lucky with drops. I replaced my green quest reward trinket with the Pendant of the Violet Eye from the Shade of Aran and left with both my T4 gloves and helm. My wife's Shadow Priest is on the same T4 token as I am but she didn't need the helm thanks to her being an engineer with the overpowered epic goggles hehe. She wants the gloves from Attumen or Kael in Heroic Magisters instead of her T4 as well so she passed on them for me. I passed on the ring from Attumen and the cape from Moroes for her as well. Sharing gear is nice. Awwwww. *cough*

I dropped 600g on mats because I have money to burn and no desire to farm, but finally got my Leatherworking up to 375. I picked up the training for the Windhawk set and started to farm Wind Scales (*shudder*). I have enough to make the bracers but I need to farm the Primal Air and 1 Primal Might first. I'm in no hurry really but it gives me something to do. I also threw in 3 AV matches to get 1k+ honor to save up for the S2 staff once S4 starts.

I used 20 badges and picked up the epic Idol which procs, I'd say, every other Moonfire. It only lasts for 10 seconds so I usually spam Wrath until it stops and then go back to my normal rotation. 5 Wraths appear to do more damage than 2 Starfires with the buff up.

Did all of this and STILL had time to blow through a few more levels in Super Mario Galaxy and get some packing done for our move on June 15th. Multitasking ftw!

So close.

2008-05-24T12:02:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to rush Jandrae to 70 as fast as possible so I can get back to Super Mario Galaxy. Blasphemy, I know, but the game is addicting. Not so much as WoW obviously but the last 2 days have been pretty enjoyable online.

I'll go on record to say this has been the most fun I've had leveling an alt and have had great luck on gear drops so far. Jandrae is 3 bubbles in to 69 and I should hit 70 sometime tonight unless Mutoh is abducted for someones Kara run.

Last night I ran a few instances and got the Mantle of Three Terrors and Moonglade Pants from BM, the moonkin boots and Sethekk Oracle Cloak from Seth Halls, Moonglade Gloves & Oblivion Robe from Labs and the Incanters Shoulders and moonkin belt from Steamvaults. All in all it was a good night.

At least I'll have some decent gear at 70.

Wii be needin' a WoW break.

2008-05-21T17:50:00.001-04:00

I'm getting really burnt out on the game at the moment and FINALLY picked up a Nintendo Wii over the weekend.

The blog won't be updated much, if at all, over the next few days/weeks while I enjoy the goodness that is Nintendo.

..not like anyone reads this anyway.

On a semi-update note, Jandrae is 67. I hate to give up so close to 70 but there really isn't anything else to look forward to. I've cleared Kara numerous times on 2 different toons and outside of farming heroics and dailies (more of the same) the only new thing coming out before WOTLK is Arena Season 4.. yay.. I don't PVP.

This just seems like the best time for me to back out.

Ding! 65

2008-05-16T12:43:00.003-04:00

Clearing all of the mastery quests in one sitting? Check

Hit 65? Check

Getting the Moonkin Gloves and the healing idol from the quest chain? Check

Jandrae is well on her way to being a 70 Moonkin. Hopefully I can hit 66 sometime this weekend, finish up Nagrand and head over to Blades Edge Mountains.

Not much of an update but thats the jest of it. Sorry folks =\

Leveling 101: Shaman

2008-05-15T16:02:00.004-04:00

There is no wrong way to eat a Reese's, right? With the Shaman being a hybrid class, there is no wrong spec for them. There are, however, two wrong specs to level as. If you take a look at the loot itemization early on in the game, you'll notice there isn't a lot of caster leather pre-40, nor caster mail post-40 until the late 50's or Outlands. This eliminates Restoration and Elemental as faster specs.

The key to getting your Shammy to 70 as fast as possible is to level Enhancement. I cannot stress this enough. There is a ton of Rogue gear to roll on until you hit mail at 40. At that point, the pieces in Scarlet Monestary will last you until Outlands.. yes.. that long. If you have a main with a few high level enchanting mats, it's worth it to throw on some +STR or +AP enchants to that gear.

The first thing is to not get discouraged early on in the game. You'll be using a 1h + shield until level 20 when you can finally equip a 2h so those are going to be the slowest levels for you. At 20 you want to focus on getting the best 2h Axe or Mace possible and keeping Flametongue weapon on it at all times. The most depressing news is that you do not get Windfury for quite some time so you'll be using Flametongue in it's place until then.

At 40, Dual Weilding becomes available and makes life much easier for you. Pop Windfury on both and go to town.

Before we get a bit more in-depth, lets discuss the races available for Shaman.

Your choice is simple if you plan on rolling Alliance since the Draenei are the only option. Their Gift of the Naaru racial is nice when you're out of mana or in a pinch. It also comes in handy to toss on yourself before pulling multiple mobs.

As a Hordie, you can pick from the Orcs, Trolls and Tauren. The Tauren have War Stomp which is great when you need to pop a quick heal or stop another player from casting in PVP. The Trolls Berserking works great, especially as an Elemental Shaman. The Orc's Bloodrage is a bit too situational for me but still comes in handy. My choice? Troll.

How about professions?

This really depends on how you want to spec your Shaman at 70. If you're in to making your own gear, you can't go wrong with Blacksmithing or Leatherworking (Dragonscale). If you're planning to level and stay Enhancement, Blacksmithing can provide some amazing weapons to deal out DPS. Shaman cannot use swords so going Swordsmithing is out of the question but there are some great 1h maces (i.e. Dragonstrike) that are Black Temple quality. Leatherworking will provide you with some great gear later on and you'll want to go with the Dragonscale specialization. This allows you to create mail gear that fits Elemental and Enhancement pretty well but not so much Restoration. If you're going Restoration I might suggest something like Engineering or Alchemy instead. As always, First Aid is important regardless of class.

Lets look at gear priority.

Since you'll be leveling as Enhancement, you'll want to focus on +STR and +STA gear. STR gives us +AP and scales better than raw +AP gear. STA is important since you'll be soloing as a melee class because you'll be taking a beating. AGI is more a Rogue stat. The common misconception is that Shaman need AGI for the crit % but that only helps our "white damage" crits. Unlike a Rogue or Fury Warrior, white damage is only about 30-40% of our DPS. The rest comes from Windfury and Shock damage which aren't effected by our crit rating.

While you're stuck with a 2h weapon from 20-40 you'll want to aim for about a 3.0 speed. Anything faster is going to lower your DPS but anything higher is for Warriors and Ret Paladins. They have attacks that work off of weapon damage where Shaman do not. 3.0 is the perfect speed because it'll do a decent amount of DPS and you'll have your Flametongue Weapon effect proccing each hit. Once you get Windfury, it has a 3 second internal cooldown so anything faster than 3.0 lowers you chance to proc per swing.

Once you start to dual-weild, stay away from fast weapons. You want both weapons to be at 2.6 speed or slower. This doesn't blow the Windfury internal cooldown as often and deals more damage with Windfury when it procs. Some people use Flametongue on the off-hand since off-hand has a higher miss rate and deals less damage than the main-hand by default. The reasoning behind this is to not waste a Windfury cooldown on a weaker off-hand hit. If you have a faster off-hand weapon than 2.6, I'd always use Flametongue Weapon over Windfury on that weapon to make up for lost DPS. If both weapons are 2.6 or slower, having Windfury on both will increase your DPS.

Shock it to me?

As you level, you'll eventually learn Earth Shock, Flame Shock and Frost Shock. Each serves it's own purpose and should be used in your combat rotation.

Earth Shock - ES deals burst damage and interrupts spell casting. Since it is nature damage, the damage is increased if the Stormstrike debuff is on the target. My advice is to have Rank 1 and your max rank on your bar. If you just need to interrupt a spell cast, Rank 1 does the same thing that the max rank does. Only use the max rank for DPS purposes.

Flame Shock - Flame Shock works like a Warlock's Immolate spell where it deals intial burst damage followed by damage over time. This is the highest DPS shock for a Shaman and is very underestimated. I also recommend having Rank 1 on your bar if you PVP. Hitting a Rogue with a Rank 1 shock will remove their ability to Vanish.

Frost Shock - Frost Shock deals burst damage and adds a slowing effect to the target. The downfall of this shock is that it also deals additional threat, so avoid using anything over Rank 1 in dungeons or you'll wind up tanking the mob. At first, this will deal more damage than Earth Shock but in the end (at 70) Earth Shock will beat it at.

Your shock rotation should be Flame Shock -> Earth Shock when cooldown is over, repeat. Always start with Flame Shock to let it's DoT deal it's damage while piling on Earth Shock as well.

How bout dem totemz?

At first, totems will become a bit overwhelming. You'll get a ton of them very early and I recommend downloading a totem mod to keep track of them for you. I prefer YATA but some people prefer Chaman. Totems are broken down in to 4 categories - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Only one totem from each element can be dropped at a time. Any totems dropped afterwards will replace the previous one of the same element.

For example - If you drop Strength of Earth and then drop a Tremor Totem, the Tremor Totem will replace the Strength of Earth since both are "earth totems".

Honestly, you'll waste a lot of mana dropping one of each totem. Most are better set for group settings but for soloing I'd only use Strength of Earth and Grace of Air totems. You won't get Grace of Air until after 30 I believe. It's also a good idea to set yourself in the middle of the mobs you'll be killing, dropping your totems and then pulling the mobs to you. If this is the case, feel free to drop a Mana Spring totem as well. If you're going to be killing and moving, Mana Spring will cost more mana than you'll receive in return and will be a waste.

SPECS! SHOW ME SPECS!

The first 5 points don't give you many options. Shield Spec is useless so go 5/5 Ancestral Knowledge for +5% mana. The next 5 should go in to Thundering Strikes to increase your melee crit chance by 5%. Both of these are very self explainitory.

The next point goes in to the new Ancestral Focus which gives you a mana reduction on your next shock whenever you land a critical melee attack. Since shocks are a huge part of your DPS, this is a great idea. Toss the next 2 points in to Enhancing Totems for a 16% boost to Strength of Earth and the drop the final 2 points up in to Improved Ghost Wolf making it an instant cast. Some people laugh at this but it's a great GTFO button and gets you from point A to point B faster.

Tier 4 should have 5/5 Flurry to boost attack speed by 30% whenever you land a melee crit. This is huge when you're stuck using a 2h weapon.

When you reach the Tier 5 level, put the first point in to Spirit Weapons. This is the only way to get Dual Weilding. This is also the only way for Shaman to learn "parry" and it's threat reduction helps a lot in dungeons. Pop 3 points in to Elemental Weapons to increase the damage bonus to your Flametongue and Windfury effect. This is also the only way to learn Stormstrike which will be a great addition to your combat rotation. Now you're stuck with 1 point to throw somewhere to hit Tier 6. My advice is just to throw it in to Improved Lightning Shield to help kill a bit faster or to put a point in Anticipation for +1% to dodge.

Put all 5 points in to Weapon Mastery to increase your overall melee dps. Tier 6 is pretty self explainitory.

Once you ding 40 you have a choice to make. Dual Weilding or Storm Strike first? Personally, I'd go for dual-weilding and pick up Stormstrike at 41. Stormstrike attacks with both weapons dealing their exact weapon damage and applies a debuff which increases the amount of nature damage the target receives by the next 2 sources. This is the reason you want 2.6 speed 1h weapons. Drop the last 3 points in to Dual Weild Specialization for a quick +6% chance to hit in melee.

5/5 Unleashed Rage for Tier 8 and 1/1 Shamanistic Rage for Tier 9 is what you're aiming for.

There is really nothing more to spend points on with Enhancement so you'll want to move over to the Restoration tree from here on out. Rather than give you an order to pick from, here are the talents to place points in and you can decide which are more important to you. Personally, i'd get down to Healing Focus as fast as possible and put 5 points in that. That and 3/3 Natures Guidance are the only reasons to really be in Restoration.

5/5 Improved Healing Wave
2/2 Improved Reincarnation
4/5 Totemic Focus
1/1 Totemic Mastery
5/5 Healing Focus
3/3 Natures Guidance

Thats pretty much the jest of it. One you get in to Resto it's just icing on the cake. You have all the tools you need from Enhance to breeze your way to 70. Just keep Lightning Shield up, drop Strength of Earth & Grace of Air totems, keep Windfury on your weapon and unleash the Shamanistic Fury.

Leveling 101: Warlock

2008-05-14T17:47:00.003-04:00

The general rule of thumb while leveling your new Warlock is "stay away from Destruction". While a great instance and end-game raiding spec, it's far from being a quick and efficient solo choice.

Before we get in to specs, lets discuss low level gear. Stamina, stamina, stamina. There. Done. Thats it. Why stamina? Easy.. Lifetap. Our health IS our mana. Stacking Intellect increases your spell crit % but who cares? We aren't Mages and DoTs do NOT crit. Stay away from Spirit as well since mana regeneration is pointless for us. Again, I go back to Lifetap. That is our mana regen. You will not see a lot of +spell damage gear until the late 40's-early 50's so survivablity is priority over anything else.

Now, lets discuss races.

If you're going the Alliance route, you can choose a Gnome or Human. Gnomes get a boost to Intellect while Humans get a boost to Spirit. Both of which are equally useless to us. Consider their other racials. If you'll be focusing on PVP more than PVE, the Gnome has Escape Artist to get out of roots/snares. If you'll be going for PVE the Humans Diplomacy racial will help a ton in Outlands when it comes time to grind rep. My choice? Human.

If you want to roll a Hordie, you can pick from an Undead, Orc or a Blood Elf. The Undead get an amazing racial that works very well with Lifetap in Cannibalize. Kill, eat & repeat will take you a long way as long as you're grinding on Undead or Humanoid mobs. Orcs get Command which increases pet damage by 5% which is a great idea if you plan on going Demonology. Blood Elf racials gear more toward PVP as a Warlock. Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent don't got a long way since Lifetap returns a substantial amount of mana which makes AT nothing more than an AOE silence. My choice? Undead.

How about professions?

Personally, I tend to avoid professions until 35 when you can cap it out at 300 before Outlands BUT they are MUCH easier to level as you go along. If you're dead set on picking something, I'd go for Tailoring EVEN if you have another Tailor. The Shadoweave set is very easy to farm for and will last you a very long time. Just to give you an idea, I have 2 70 Warlocks. One that is at Kara level and the other at BT/Hyjal level. The Kara level Warlock still uses all 3 pieces while the raiding one still uses the Robe. I'd go for a gathering profession as your second choice to help offset the money you'll spend on gear, enchants, spells and pet grimoires. On my server, Mining is the most profitable followed by Herbalism and finally Skinning. The difference is very minimal but I have a 375 level in all 3 and my ore/bars/gems sell faster than my skins and herbs that I might end up having to relist.

Are secondary professions important?

First Aid is mandatory, in my opinion. Unless you are rolling an Undead Warlock, you'll need bandages to offset your Lifetap and minimize downtime. Fishing and Cooking really can be left behind unless you're wanting another toon to do their assigned dailies.

So we've chosen our race and our professions. Lets take a look at the pets you'll be using on your journey to 70.

At level 1 you can pick up your quest to get your Imp. 10 is your Voidwalker, 20 the Succubus, 30 the Felhunter and at 50 the Felguard if you choose Demonology.

The Imp is your pet of choice if you are grouped up for questing or an instance for it's boost to the groups Stamina. It's also ideal to keep his Phase Shift activated and avoid using him for DPS. The Imp is a frail creature and even the slightest AOE damage or Cleave from a mob can send him packing.

The Voidwalker is your solo pet until level 50. At low levels, he provides a competent off-tank in dungeons or for group quests but he's primarily a solo pet. His DPS is bad but his Suffering and Torment taunt spells are his bread and butter. He's not there to kill things for you. He's there to keep things from killing you while your DoTs and wand wear the mobs down.

The Succubus is your crowd control and PVP pet. Early on, you won't be doing any CC with your Succubus but if you choose to PVP after level 26 her Seduce spell makes PVP much easier. Her DPS is decent and if you're grouped in a dungeon with another Warlock using an Imp, this is your second best pet choice.

The Felhunter is your anti-caster PVP pet. You'll rarely, if at all, use your puppy in PVE but in PVP he makes other casters cry. His ability to devour buffs and debuffs and interrupt casting makes him the ideal pet for PVP.

The Felguard is available at level 50 if you decide to spec in to the Demonology tree. He is basically your pocket Arms Warrior with a Taunt, Intercept and Cleave ability but he also gets two passive abilities in Avoidence and Demonic Frenzy. Avoidance reduces the chance he'll be hit by AoE damage by 50% while Demonic Frenzy is a stacking +AP buff every time he lands a hit. At 50, this is the ideal solo pet and if you're group isn't in need of the extra stamina, he can be a great DPS addition and off tank in dungeons.

So what about specs?

My advice is to level as Affliction from 10-50 and then switching over to Demonology from 50-70. At 70, feel free to stick with Demonology or go off in to Affliction or Destruction but this post isn't about 70 specs.

Your first 5 points should go in to Improved Corruption. This reduces the cast time and makes it an instant cast spell. After Imp Corruption, I would put the next 2 in Improved Life Tap since it will become a staple spell. Follow this up with your next point in Improved Drain Soul and the last 2 of the second teir in Soul Siphon. You only want 1 point in Improved Drain Soul for the mix of 5% threat reduction and 7% mana return whenever you make a Soul Shard while soloing.

With your next 5 points going in to Fel Concentration you can now do what we like to refer to as "drain tanking". This refers to DoT'ing up 3 or 4 mobs, AoE fearing them with Howl of Terror and spamming Drain Life until they all die. This ability can also be used to solo heavy hitting mobs that happen to be immune to Fear since you'll have an increased healing effect from Drain Life and a 70% chance to avoid interruption while channeling it. This makes your life much easier.

Pop your next 2 in to Nightfall to get a small chance at an instant cast Shadowbolt every time your Corruption and Drain Life deal damage. The overall % looks low at first but again, you'll be DoT'ing up 3, 4 or 5 mobs at a time so the chance for an instant Shadowbolt increases. Follow this up with 2 points in Grim Reach to increase your casting range. The further you can cast Drain Life, the better. Avoid Empowered Corruption and put your last point up in to Suppression. Why go back to Tier 1? Simple. You're going to start questing in higher zones to get more XP for your quests and a 2% chance to hit is gold.

Your next 5 points are going to look a bit weird but put 1 point in to Siphon Life which will help a TON with drain tanking, and 1 point in to Shadow Embrace. You will not put more than 1 point in to this talent. It's entire purpose is to work with Soul Siphon as an "affliction effect" and increase the effect of Drain Life by an additional 5%. Put 2 in Improved Curse of Agony and your final point in to Suppression giving you 2/5. Why not go for Imp CoA earlier? It's generally not worth it that early as the 10% bonus will give you about an additional 100 damage. Even now it's not THAT big of an upgrade but it's better than wasting points anywhere else.

With your Tier 6 points, all 5 will go in to Shadow Mastery to increase the damage of your shadow spells by 10%. Pretty self explainitory.

Your first Tier 7 point should go in to Dark Pact while will eliminate a lot of your downtime. This works like a Lifetap for your pets but it drains your pets mana and gives it back to you. It also works off of +shadow damage gear just like Life Tap. Put your next 4 in to Contagion to round of this set of points.

2 of your Tier 8 points go in to Improved Howl of Terror to make it an instant cast. Use 1 point to cap out Contagion and the last 2 back up top in Suppression to give you 4/5.

At this point you should be hitting level 50 and this is where you'll want to respec Demonology to get your Felguard.

I recommend putting points in the following -

2/2 Improved Healthstone
1/3 Improved Imp
5/5 Demonic Embrace
3/3 Fel Intellect
2/2 Improved Health Funnel
1/1 Fel Domination
2/2 Master Summoner
3/3 Fel Stamina
5/5 Unholy Power
1/1 Demonic Sacrifice
5/5 Master Demonologist
3/3 Mana Feed
3/3 Demonic Resilience
1/1 Soul Link
3/3 Demonic Knowledge
1/1 Summon Felguard

Now that you've done that, I'll explain why we did this and why we did and did not take certain things.

1/3 Improved Imp - This is a filler point to reach a lower teir of talents without wasting it. Not all groups will want you to use your Felguard so you might as well grab something semi-helpful, right?

2/2 Improved Health Funnel - Most people laugh at this until they spec Felguard. Health Funnel already scales with +shadow damage gear and this increases the amount he'll be healed by an additional 20%. This lets him take a pretty good beating.

0/3 Demonic Aegis - Why no Demonic Aegis? You don't get Fel Armor until after 60 so that's when you'll start putting points in to it. Remember, this is a leveling spec guide, not a level 70 guide.

The rest of the talents are pretty self explainitory in their importance to a Demonology spec. The key things is to make sure Soul Link is always active on your Felguard as well as his Cleave and Anguish ability. Leave his Intercept ability off so you can manually use it to interrupt spell casting and save mana. Mana Feed will help keep his Cleave going off every cooldown and you'll see why you took it after only a few kills. He goes through mana pretty fast.

51-55 put your 5 points in to Demonic Tactics for a 5% chance to crit and that'll finish off Demonology for the moment. The next 5 points should go in to Improved Shadowbolt followed by 5/5 Bane and finish up 66-70 with 5/5 Improved Corruption.

Demonic Aegis is a VERY tempting place to spend 3 points but in all honesty, unless you are going Affliction with Demonology being used as a support portion, you're only getting +30 spell damage from it with a Felguard at 70. It does help your Drain Life but as Demo your spell is going to be a bit weak and has a 100% chance to get interrupted so you won't be using it often.

2 tips that also come in handy - Using Rank 1 Drain Soul is your best bet. It's 55 mana and still returns a soul shard. Since you wont be using this spell for DPS, chances are you'll only use it at the end before the mob dies so why waste mana on max rank? Rank 1 Curse of Recklessness is also the only rank of that curse you'll want to use for now. It's only there for you to pop on humanoid mobs that will eventually run away at low health. This prevents that altogether. No need to waste mana on max rank when Rank 1 provides the same function.

Hopefully this guide helped as I'll be making leveling guides for Moonkin, Shaman and Warriors in the same fashion eventually.

Hello Nagrand! + Wrath Info reaction.

2008-05-13T20:49:00.002-04:00

Just to get the small part of my post out of the way, I totally skipped Terrokar Forest on Jandrae and headed straight for Nagrand at 64. I haven't started the "mastery" quest chains yet but managed to hit up the Jump-o-tron chain for the caster cape. It's a good start!

Blizz released some new info on Wrath which 98% of WoW players already read about. I was a little excited about Wrath before (not as much as I was about TBC) but after reading the info I'm fully excited about the new content. What I am mostly anticipating is -

*Northrend is BIGGER than Outlands and has multiple starting zones from you to pick from. This will eliminate what happened with TBC with thousands of players crammed in to Hellfire Penninsula. Great move on their part.

*All instances will continue to have multiple wings, much like TBC instances did, but will also include heroic versions, 10 -AND- 25 man raids. Not only this but the normal and heroic versions will have seperate loot tables (unlike the level 70 instances in TBC where the only difference was a possible epic gem drop and the epics from the final bosses). All major raid bosses will also appear in both the 10 and 25 man versions of the raid & all raids will be on seperate timers. This allows guilds to run the 10 man version and 25 man version on the same day. End game guilds will have way more to do this time around instead of having 2 choices before progressing.

*Arugal & the worgen return! Arugal was one of my favorite bosses early on in the game and I bet he's going to be brutal now. I'm sure he'll just be some boss in one of the instance wings but it's nice to see returning faces. The little that I heard about it, apparently he was ressurected to lead the Sons of Arugal somehow.

*Lore focuses on Arthas, the Corrupted Ashbringer and the Scourge which is right up my alley. I wasn't to fond of the Burning Legion lore at first so TBC was just a grind to 70, getting a flying mount and raiding. WOTLK is going to be a more enjoyable ride to 80 and should keep me interested the entire way, instead of just blowing through quests.

*New flying mounts at 77 as well as new instance & quest specific mounts. I'm glad they won't make us wait until 80 for a new mounts. I also like the idea of the new quest Mammoth having it's own combat bar. Apparently you'll be able to do cool things like drop ladders dowm from your flyer to rescue NPC's being attacked by Scourge. In instances you'll be able to access specific flying mounts to reach certain areas of the dungeon that would otherwise be unreachable.

*Death Knights. The new info released made the DK class a bit more appealing to me. At first I couldn't care less about completing a quest chain to start ANOTHER alt that I'd have to level alongside thousands of other players doing the same thing. There was an ongoing joke in our Horde guild that went something like "DK LFG!.. LF1M for Kara.. NO DKS!.. Tanking DK, DPS DK LF3M for Labs!".. you get the point.

-Blizzard confirmed that the DPS version of a DK will not be able to out-dps a pure DPS class as they'll be more of a utility as well.

-They have the ability to ressurect fallen players and mobs as a "ghoul" to fight alongside them. If they control a player, the player has the option to take control of the ghoul version and fight manually.

-They tank with a 2h and are forced to rely on a huge Parry rating. I, personally, expect to see a huge increase in the +Armor stat to 2h weapons. They can also dual weild.

-Rather than respeccing, they only have to use specific runes and Pally-like Aura's to fullfil their tanking or dps roles.

-No more quest chains are needed to start a DK. A player only needs a toon of 55+ to be able to create one. They start at level 55 in EPL on a floating Necropolis similar to Naxx.

-Will be very easy to pick up and play, apparently, and will start with a summonable level 40 speed mount. At 60 they will have a quest chain similar to a Warlock or Paladin to receive their faster epic mount. Most players should be able to get from 55 to 58 in a day and then 58 to 60 in a few hours in Hellfire so I expect to see epic DK mounts in the first 2 days. Maybe even 1 in the first day depending on how fast they level.

I'm sure every WoW-blog on the net right now has something about WOTLK going on but I'll try to refrain from just posting direct info about the expansion and just focus on what I think is important and interesting to seperate my posts from others.

Tonight starts the "mastery" chain for Jandrae and hopefully I'll squeeze in an Underbog and Mana Tombs run before I pass out. Other than that, it's lots of music and beast genocide in Nagrand. Thank Jeebus I'm a skinner!

Ding 64 x 2.

2008-05-12T20:20:00.003-04:00

Got Adiar and Jandrae to 64 over the weekend after finishing up Zangarmarsh and a few UB runs. Jandrae got a healing cloak for an offset but I'm really after the moonkin gloves from the first boss. He won't stop dropping the friggin totem!

I've been stuck healing with Jandrae on the last few pugs. Not that i've had trouble getting in to groups as a moonkin but the groups just always seem to need a healer. Lifebloom makes healing 100x easier and less mana intensive. Once I get a good healing set together I won't mind healing as much but for now it still kinda sucks. I've gotten compliments on my healing despite being Balance specced, so I guess I'm doing OK.

I respecced Adiar to a Fury/Arms hybrid build with DW spec down to Precision and then went Arms for Deep Wounds, Impale and working down to get a few points in Sword Spec. So far I seem to be killing faster while in combat but there is a little more downtime without Bloodcraze's healing effect.

My wife wants to run UB and MT tonight so I just need to decide who to take. I think I'm going to take Jandrae until the last boss and then swap her out for Adiar for a shot at the shoulders. We'll see.

A bit more guild drama over the weekend as well which actually led to my wife logging out in the middle of the raid in frustration but I'll refrain from going in to details because things are still up in the air at this point. Run-on sentence of the year!

I got my little Hunter alt, Serpentina, to 10 and made the long, multi-death run from Darkshore to Orgrimmar to tame a level 9 Venemous Scorpid. Sure, I could have waited but I really wanted a Scorpid since everyone and their mother has a Ravager. I named him Pepper ^_^. The whole run took about 25 minutes and lasted me about 4 deaths. It should have taken a shorter amount of time had I figured out that rezzing at a spirit rezzer at level 10 wouldnt give me rez sickness and I could have graveyard hopped the entire way there. DOH! Ah well.. I earned Pepper the hard way.

Guild Drama 3: in 3D!

2008-05-08T16:14:00.002-04:00

When I joined GTK as a raider, Veresitha was fire-specced Destruction and had no problems keeping up with (and sometimes beating) the top DPS spots. I was made fun of, laughed at and basically told that I had to spec Shadow Destruction to raid. No matter how good my dps was I was asked to respec and, for the good of the guild, I did.

Now I know that with my being fire and my wife's mage, Natallia, being fire that we built each others DPS. She was also asked to respec Arcane along with ALL of the guilds mages.

At the time, this made sense because Curse of Shadows was being used and that helps all of our Shadow Priests, Warlocks and Arcane Mages.

Arcane Mages don't need a lot of hit.. so for the last few months of raiding they were not rolling on +hit gear and focused on damage and crit. Our guild lets people roll on off-spec gear that no one wants for their main spec by paying a void crystal instead of EPGP but the raid leader and officers refused to let arcane mages roll on +hit gear for void crystals claiming fire or frost was not an "off spec" yet our Warlock guild leader was able to get the Voidstar Talisman with a void crystal because, according to him, Demonology is an off-spec.

How is Demonology an off-spec but Fire and Frost are not? Easy! The guild leader is not a Mage.

So yesterday my wife tells me that after their SSC raid, the guild leader had spoken to her and said that he wanted all of the Mages to go Fire as two of our 3 Warlocks would be going Fire. Wait.. so I was laughed at and basically spit on for being fire but now that the guild leader is falling behind in DPS he wants to respec 5 or 6 of our casters for HIS dps?

My wife told him that she brought it to his attention before that Mages should have been given off-spec gear for crystals incase this day would come when they needed to respec but the GL was against the idea. The GL said that if it's an issue than JUST ONE of the Mages will respec fire so HE could get the Improved Scorch debuff to up HIS dps. What a douchebag.

He needs to know that a Warlock is not meant to be a top-dps spot class since we provide more to the party than just our dps. He NEEDS to be the top in his raid group and in order to do that he'll bring down 5 other people for his own gain. We've had issues before with him stacking his party in the raid with an Elemental Shaman and a Moonkin so he could get the crit/hit/spell damage buffs and he has the other Warlocks handle Curse of Shadow/Element duty and banish duty to pad his own DPS.

Going back to the Imp Scorch debuff, this same Warlock guild leader refused to put up Curse of Elements for our Fire Mage, which is an instant cast mind you.. yet he wants one Mage to keep up 5 Imp Scorch debuffs on every single mob so HE can get a boost to HIS dps. Selfish people kill me and this is why I'm glad I don't raid anymore.

Name Change pt. 2

2008-05-06T17:31:00.003-04:00

I had previously made a post explaining the name change and new direction of my blog but Blogger was kind enough to give me an error message when I hit the "publish" button. Normally it saves it as a draft but I had lost everything.

The short version of this is that recently I've been blogging about all 4 of my toons and wanted to steer away from a Moonkin-only blog and layout. The title of the blog is a play on "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" considering my toons are a Warlock (Lock), Shaman (Shock) with 2 female Nelf toons being a Warrior and Druid (two smokin' night elves).

Here is a little info on the 4 toons in this blog-

Veresitha - My 70 female Human Warlock. Raided with her in SSC, TK, Kara, Gruuls and 4/6 in ZA before putting her on hold. I put the most work in to her but GTK's raiding schedule doesn't match my work schedule so I discontinued raiding for the moment. She's 375 Shadoweave Tailor as well as 375 Enchanting and is currently Demonology raid specced 5-46-10.

Mutoh - My 70 male Draenei Shaman named after The Great Muta, Keiji Mutoh. Raided Kara and Gruuls but nothing more. I played him as Resto but hated healing 5-mans as a Shaman so I respecced Enhancement. Stayed Enhance for awhile but went back to Elemental which I leveled as and currently love it and refuse to respec out of it. I had a blast running heroics and Kara getting badges for gear but once our alt-Kara runs stopped I didn't have much to do with him so much like Veresitha he's on hold for the moment. Mutoh is my farmbot at 375 Herbalism and 375 Mining.

Adiar - At the time of this post, she is my level 63 female Night Elf Warrior and my primary focus in WoW. Once she hit's 70, she'll be my main toon and focus when WOTLK is released. Currently leveling as DW Fury, I love tanking and will be Prot specced at 70. She is a Blacksmith/Engineer but very low at the moment. I'll focus more on these at 70.

Jandrae - Currently sitting at 63, she is my female Night Elf Druid Moonkin. I play her along side my wife's Shadowpriest, Catalis. She's currently playing her Hunter, Darbley, so Jandrae is on hold until Catalis gets the dust knocked off her. I leveled her Balance and love the spec but I don't want to play her without Catalis. She is a 375 Skinner and 330-ish Tribal Leatherworker & I have full intentions on getting her to 70 before WOTLK.

I'm also going to put more effort in to the presentation of my blog with images and links. The lack of this is due to the fact that 100% of my posts are done at work where certain websites I need to link are blocked behind a firewall. I'm also going to work on tagging posts that deal with specific toons, raid/boss, professions, etc., to make it easier to navigate.

At the moment I don't get a lot of readers but I'd rather have it look nice to attract new readers. Lets see how things turn out!

Arms Tanking Pre-70

2008-04-30T21:05:00.003-04:00

I know not everyone levels Fury so I'm going ahead and making another post, much like my previous one, as to how an Arms spec will still do for tanking up until 70.

5/5 Deflection - +5% to parry? Yes pls.

5/5 Iron Will - +15% chance to resist Stun and Charm effects is situational but still helps. I normally skipped this unless I was speccing for PVP but I suppose it could help while tanking.

3/3 Improved Thunder Clap - +100% more damage for Thunder Clap which also causes more threat from Defensive Stance. Not too shabby if you'll be tanking a lot but you wont really use this soloing. If you have it, great, if not, oh well.

1/1 Anger Management - 1 rage per 3 seconds as long as you're in combat. Worth the 1 point.

3/3 Deep Wounds - All melee crits cause your enemy to bleed 60% of your weapons average damage over 12 seconds. Bleed effects are great because they ignore armor and will keep consistant threat on the mob.

5/5 Weapon Specialization - Whichever weapon you specced in to, thats what you want to use while tanking. I prefer sword spec for the additional swing but +5% chance to crit with the others arent bad at all.

2/2 Blood Frenzy - Anytime Rend or the Deep Wounds debuff is on the target they will take an additional 4% physical damage from all sources. More damage = more rage.

1/1 Endless Rage - The amount of rage you obtain from damage delt is increased by 25%.

In my opinion, Arms doesn't offer as much in the ways of tanking as a Fury build does because some of the talents arent taken by players while leveling. Most of the great stuff in the Fury tree is viable while soloing unlike, say, Iron Will or Improved Thunder Clap. Arms also loses one of its best attacks in Mortal Strike since it cannot be used in Defensive Stance.

Either way you spec you'll still be a viable tank as long as you use Sunder Armor, use Revenge whenever it's available and pop Shield Block every cooldown on hard hitting mobs. The rest depends on your healer.

My advice is to warn your group ahead of time that you are not Protection and that you'll require a little extra time to grab aggro before they start to DPS. You shouldn't take much more damage early on in Outlands instances since you'll still be using a shield, it's just your ability to solidify aggro that seperates us. We don't have Devastate, Improved Revenge, Improved Shield Block or Last Stand but we can still hold our own with a patient group and a competent healer.

Fury Tanking Pre-70

2008-04-30T16:38:00.004-04:00

Adding on to my post from yesterday, I wanted to point out a few things that the Fury tree has going for it when being put in a tanking position for your group on your way to 70.

5/5 Unbridled Wrath - Gives you a chance to gain 1 rage every time you hit the target with a melee weapon. Since we need rage to hold aggro, this helps a lot.

1/1 Piercing Howl - Dazes all enemies near the Warrior reducing movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds. Warriors have a harder time than Druids or Pallys holding multiple targets so sometimes healer aggro is a problem. If you get enough rage, pop Thunderclap then Piercing Howl to make it easier to pick up the stragglers. At 10 rage and no cooldown it's a winner.

3/3 Blood Craze - Anytime you are critically hit (melee or spell damage) you regenerate 3% of your total health over the next 6 seconds. Since you'll be taking more punches in the face than anyone in your party (excluding the Mage of course) you'll be getting crit a decent amount pre-70. Any extra healing helps.

5/5 Enrage - Also procs every time you are critically hit and increases all melee damage you deal by 25% for 12 seconds or 12 swings (whichever comes first). More damage = more threat and more rage. More rage = more threat.

5/5 Flurry - Increases attack speed by 30% for 3 swings after you deal a critical strike. This increases rage generation and also has a chance to proc Unbridled Wrath more often.

1/1 Sweeping Strikes - 30 rage gives you 10 swings to hit an additional nearby enemy. This is more rage-efficient than spamming Cleave and also causes your Heroic Strike to hit other targets to cause more aggro.

3/3 Precision - +3% chance to hit with melee weapons. +hit is a given for any melee class, tanking or not.

2/2 Weapon Mastery - You will get disarmed.. a lot.. this reduces the duration of all disarm effects by 50% normally dropping it to about 1 or 2 seconds.

1/1 Bloodthirst - 30 rage to deal X amount of damage (based on attack power) and heals you for X amount for the next 5 swings. Since you'll be taking more damage than a Prot specced Warrior you'll need all the help you can get.

I might make a post later going in to the Arms tree, but we'll see.

Meatshield LFG.

2008-04-29T17:09:00.003-04:00

Warriors have it hard from 60 to 70. Paladins can level Prot just fine (some even say it's the prefered level spec) and the same can be said for Druids that level Feral. They can both level fast and when asked to tank, fill said role without changing their spec. Arms or Fury is the prefered level spec for Warriors but we miss out on important tanking abilities like Last Stand, Imp Shield Block and Devastate which makes it more difficult to hold aggro or survive the beating.

Last night while trying to form a PuG for Ramparts I came across 3 Warriors, myself included, who were either Arms or Fury and none were interested in tanking or respeccing Protection.

I finally just said screw it and strapped on my shield, brought in a Rogue, Hunter and a Mage friend but had the hardest time finding the OTHER important part of the group.. a healer.

I guess healers are in the same boat that Warriors are. I don't say tanks due to the above statement. Shaman, Paladins, Priests and Druids do not level Resto/Holy. If anything, you'll always be stuck with one of these classes in a healing set of gear much like a Warrior wearing more tank-friendly gear. Sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't.

My Druid is Balance but I heal just fine. My Warrior is Fury but I tank just fine. It just takes a little more effort than normal to make ends meet.

Last night I tanked Ramparts after spending 45 minutes looking for someone to heal. We had little to no problems at all and no one died. Not too shabby for my first tanking job since SFK lol.

Domo Arigato Mr Fel Reaver.

2008-04-28T18:45:00.003-04:00

After a night of sushi and drinking I still managed to hit 58 on Adiar and take her to Outlands. Outlands is usually a breath of fresh air for me on my toons but with Adiar it was dissapointing.

Sure, I loved getting all the free upgrades for doing next to nothing but I had worked to get gear in BRD, Strat and Scholo only to see it dissapear in a day or so. I was proud to get my Valor helm in my first Scholo run but replaced it yesterday before I hit 59. My epic Bloodrazor was replaced with a green 1h sword from the first quest and my Strat shield was replaced shortly after.

Ah well, it's the nature of the beast. Greens are the new Epics when you hit Outlands and it's for the better. If I had gone in to tank Ramparts in what I had when I entered Outlands I would have done OK but I've gained over 1k health and +30 def since then.

I did enough quests to hit 60, trained and picked up my Swift Frostsaber mount from Darnassus before calling it a night.

Hopefully tonight I can get in on a Ramparts run since there are a few upgrades as well as the quest I have.

Still debating on when a good time to respec Prot will be.

Scholowned.

2008-04-26T12:41:00.003-04:00

Dinged 55 and am now a bit over halfway through it thanks to last nights Scholomance run. I had read somewhere that Scholo is now 55+ so I figured as long as I was just going in as DPS that it would be fine but boy was I wrong.

The only mobs that were yellow to me were the 4 skeletons in the initial room but everything else was orange to red. The larger room (sorry i'm horrible with names) with the first deed was BRUTAL! I forgot about the mass amount of damage the ghosts do and how annoying the chain fearing was from the others. Having your Pummel miss 9 out of 10 Dark Mending's was also no fun at all.

We did a "fun run" with a 66 Druid tank and a 54 Mage from our guild and tried to 3-man it. No way in hell! The Druid hearthed and respecced Resto and his brother signed on to his raid-geared Prot Paladin to help out. Once he showed up it was MUCH easier but the mobs still had their fun with the Mage and I.

The Mage, Zath, and I were the only ones with our trinkets on so we banked on all the Scourge Stones and I ended up with 7 Corruptors Stones. Ras was kind enough to drop his main-hand axe (FINALLY and upgrade to the epic Bloodrazor from 45) and Darkmaster Gandling handed over his Helm of Valor. We didn't get the Blood to drop so I couldn't get a shot at my Boots of Valor T_T.

I still really like the instance but being unable to fully DPS the whole time was a bit of a letdown. I'll hold off until I'm 57 before I try to go back for anything else. I think we might give Strat a shot with the same group but hopefully I'll be able to lay waste to a few Winterspring quests and be 56 by then.

4/8 Valor is still nice =)

T-minus 4 levels to go.

2008-04-25T11:39:00.003-04:00

Adiar dinged 54 last night as I finished up a few Felwood quests and is now sporting 3 pieces of Valor gear. I know the D1 stuff sucks compared to the gear upgrades from the recent patch but I'm a collector. Do I plan on getting the full set for fun? Of course.

I had mentioned to an in-game friend of mine that I had planned on getting Quel'serrar, full Valor and starting the Thunderfury quest chain eventually.. to which I got a resouding "WTF for?" response.

I started playing WoW in May of 2006, shuffled around a few alts to find my niche' and eventually landed my first 60 in December later that year. The Burning Crusade landed in January of 2007 which gave me a little over 2 weeks to enjoy life as a level 60 and, of course, missed out on ALL of the level 60 raid zones outside of UBRS.

I've always been interested in the "old world" stuff and ALWAYS tell myself that I'd go back and do it all just to experiance it eventually. To some extent, I've done that. On the Horde side, to get our guild in to raid mode, we formed a team and cleared ZG as well as the first 2 bosses in AQ20. On my Alliance Warlock I've done MC about 3 or 4 times and collected a few pieces of my T1 set.

Where am I going with this?

In response to the "WTF for?" comment, for fun.

I already have 3 70's and have spent extended amounts of time gearing each of them. This time around, it's all for *gasp* fun. I wan't to see things I had never seen on any of my toons before and from a different perspective.

The first time I had ever seen Thunderfury my jaw dropped. I was playing my Troll Warrior pre-BC and had told my friends that one day I would have it. I wasn't joking. I know it's going to take forever but I'm in no hurry. I know people still like to run MC. Oh yes.. she will be mine.

There are other "old world" things on my list of things to do with my Warrior -

Acquire Quel'Serrar
Do a DM Tribute Run
Tank Onyxia
Clear BWL
Clear AQ20
Clear AQ40
Run Naxx (pre-BC Naxx but this is unlikely.)
Get full Valor set
Get full Might set
Tank Baron in Scholomance

To me it's not always about getting the best gear but to enjoy the experiance that I pay for. I've experianced the end-game part of TBC to an extent (raided 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK) and want to see what I missed out on before.

Rock out with your Lock out!

2008-04-22T21:20:00.006-04:00

I've been on a Warlock blog kick lately and I like what I've read so far. It's good to know that there are smart Locks out there that don't give us a bad name. For the most part we're considered selfish (No CoE for joo magez!) and the Mage class already hates us for having a better AoE in Seed of Corruption but a lot of other players don't see us as a viable CC option.

Srsly?

I'll give you an example.

Our guild has 3 Warlocks. Myself, and 2 Destruction spec cookie-cutter raid Locks. When asked about using your Succubus for CC the other two would respond something like "lolwut? I sac my Succubus for the buff." I, however, am totally comfortable using Seduce in any situation. Most locks are so concerned about their own personal DPS that they'd rather screw the group over for their own personal gain.

CC > DPS

On the Horde side, I normally ran with 2 Rogues as the other DPS which left me as the only viable form of in-combat CC. I got used to chain fearing, banishing, enslaving and, most importantly, seducing.

Seduce is an odd creature that takes some time to master due to it's inability to be reapplied before it breaks (much like all Lock CC). Downloading some form of timer add-on and creating a focus macro helps a ton but it's not required. After awhile you'll start to remember when the CC is about to break by timing it with your cast rotation. Once you seduce, see how many shadowbolts it takes before it breaks and plan accordingly. I'd rather just play it safe and use a timer myself but I know not everyone likes to use addons.

Another issue I have with the Warlock community is the "my spec is better" attitude. Most Warlocks are dead-set in their ways and REFUSE to accept that the other specs are viable at all in PVE regardless of the amount of WWS, math and spreadsheets you put in front of them.

"LOL Fire?"
"Felguard FTL"
"Shadowbolt > DoTs"

I'm sick of it.

Every spec is viable if the person behind the keyboard is not a total douchebag and the raid make-up is there.

Fire can actually pull of better DPS than a Shadowbolt spamming assclown IF (and only IF) you are in a raid with a Fire Mage that is on his A-game and doesn't let his Improved Scorch debuff fall off, you sac your Imp and use Curse of Elements.

Immolate -> Incinerate x6

There is your cast rotation. Run with it.

Demonology can put out more DPS than any spec but is the most gear dependent spec of them all. Having 2 pieces of T5 for the set bonus as well as the Void Star Talisman trinket from Solarian is a MUST. You also need a Shadowpriest in your group for VE/VT. VE is needed to keep your Felguards mana up and keep Cleave going off every cooldown.

If your Felguard dies you lose a huge chunk of your survivability and DPS. Have a "Dismiss pet" macro handy so if he's about to take a dirt nap you can dismiss him fast and save his buffs. If he dies you need to fully rebuff him and will, again, lose a huge chunk of DPS. The general spec is 5/5 Imp Corruption, 5/5 Imp Shadow Bolt, 5/5 Bane, Shadowburn and the rest in Demonology all the way down to the Felguard. Also ask another Warlock to keep CoS up.

CoA -> Immolate -> Corruption -> Shadowbolt x3

Keep the DoTs refreshed between Shadowbolt spams. Run with it.

Affliction is a great support spec and still has potential to close in on the top of the DPS meter due to it's increase in damage for Seed of Corruption. It's a little harder to keep up with higher burst-DPS specs during trash mobs but who cares about trash? A raid full of Ret Paladins can clear trash. It's the boss encounters that count. If you're stuck on CoS/CoE duty, 3/3 Malediction is a must and having Dark Pact is just icing on the cake. Another huge advantage that Affliction Warlocks get is 5/5 Suppression for 10% spell hit on Affliction spells which lets you pack more +damage gems instead of Veiled Noble Topaz. You'll still want some spell hit since you'll be using Shadowbolt in your rotation a bit but not nearly as much as you would need with the other specs.

It's up to you to put that last point in Unstable Affliction or move over to Ruin. Ruin will help with your burst dps but Unstable Affliction will give you 100% consistant DPS instead of relying on lucky crits.

Curse -> Siphon Life -> UA -> Immolate-> Corruption -> Shadowbolt

Refresh DoTs as they fall and spam Shadowbolt anytime you aren't refreshing. For AoE you only want to use Seed of Corruption unless the mobs are immune to shadow. For trash you do not want to waste mana on DoTs.

Curse of Shadow -> Shadowbolt

Thats it. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't matter if you're Affliction, Demo or Destruction. Trash mobs die way to fast for any dot to do much damage at all. The only exception would be if you are Fire specced then always use Immolate. If you can afford the mana, use Conflagrate as a finisher.

So there you have it. How to maximize your DPS through cast rotations. I'll go more in dept with each spec in a later post and maybe have another post about starting a Warlock for you noobsauces.

Sweeping Strikes + Whirlwind = Win.

2008-04-22T16:12:00.003-04:00

As you could have guessed by the title, I've been playing my Warrior a lot lately. Adiar is now 51 up from 34 a few days ago and should be stepping foot in Outlands by the weekend.

I'm still debating how to level her once Outlands enters the picture. At the moment she's DW Fury all the way down to Rampage which I don't really care for when soloing but comes in handy when in groups. I'd like to try out the 2H Fury spec for Imp Slam but 2H weapons are way to slow for me. I've also considered leveling Prot and just instancing my arse off.

Why Prot?

I've talked to tanks who have said that it's hard to tank the Outlands instances as Arms or Fury due to the boost in DPS gear for other classes. Without Shield Slam and Devastate it's hard to keep up your threat. On the other end it's hard to get in to a group as an Arms or Fury Warrior for DPS because some people still doubt their potential which is absurd.

I'm trying to weigh out all of my options before I respec at 58. These are my reasons -

Arms - 2H weapons are easily obtainable in Outlands. The Hellreaver polearm from Ramparts lasts a long time and Poleaxe spec is the way to go anyway, IMHO. 1H weapon skills will slowly fall behind. Hard to tank as Arms.

Fury - My 1h weapon skills are maxed for the most part and I'm very familiar with the spec already. Another plus is that when I spec Prot at 70 none of my 1h weapon skills will be low. Harder to tank as Fury.

Prot - Never have a problem finding groups. Very slow solo-grinding and horrible questing spec. Gear is never an issue.

Ah well. I still have 7 levels to think it over. Regardless, I'm still respeccing at 58 to put points in different places and may not go so deep in the Fury tree. It's also nice to see that my Bloodrazor (epic 1h sword, lvl 45) will last me to 58 and that it wasn't a total waste to put Crusader on it.

Kara: Round 2

2008-04-14T16:37:00.003-04:00

With the mass amount of upgrades I've gotten for Mutoh, I was asked to attend our casual Kara run on Friday last week. Unlike last week, I got 3 pieces of healing gear, another T4 Helm token and 22 badges of justice. To round out my healing set, I used the token on the Resto spec helm.

I did manage to pull my weight this time with the help of the recent upgrades and after the run and a few more heroics I picked up the badge shield. I know Nightbane drops a caster shield but it's MP5 and not crit. Crit is my friend.

Saturday night after our guilds ZA run, some people still wanted to raid so they through a collective Gruuls run together for an easy 5 badges. It consisted of half Grand Theft Kodo members and the other half Unrestrained members. Some of Unrestrained are former GTK alumni so we worked together fine and 2 shotted High King and sent Gruul packing in 1 shot.

They offered to let me take Mutoh in and I actually won my T4 shoulder token. Cyclone Shoulders FTW! Afterwards we ran heroic UB and I picked up the epic legs from the Black Stalk. My Shammy is sexified!

I've been in need of another alt to take up my time and have a Warrior, Shadowpriest, Moonkin and Rogue available. My Moonkin is on hold until my wife gets bored with her Hunter alt and comes back to play her Shadowpriest so Jandrae is out of the question. Telura, my Shadowpriest, is fun sometimes but it's a little boring since i've already played 2 Warlocks and leveled both Affliction from 10-50. I've played the DoT-n-Run game twice. Bucksavage, the new Rogue, is fun but more a screw around type toon. I decided to stick with Adiar, my Warrior.

I sent her some gold, respecced her DW Fury and got 3 levels on her last night. I heard that 2H wasn't a good leveling choice until 50 when you can afford to put points in to Fury for Imp Slam. The Splam spec, as it's called, puts out amazing DPS according to WoWwiki but is tough to master and requires a very slow 2h weapon. I might check it out later but for now I need to worry about leveling first.

At the moment, Adiar is half a bubble from 37 and I have 2 pieces of Herod's gear in my bank. I have a Troll Warrior at 53 but from there I'm clueless. I leveled Aulbeth as Prot and it was sort of a nightmare. I went DW Fury for a few levels but I mostly ran instances pre-BC with him so Prot was the way to go for me.

I love alts.

Magister's Terrace: CC Thoughts.

2008-04-09T19:26:00.004-04:00

On one hand, I love the new instance as it's, well, new.. and also provides a nice challenge to geared players in heroic mode. One thing that I do dislike is how heroic mode is way too dependent on CC that non-cc specs have a hard time finding groups for it.

Here is a rundown of each class and what CC is available for them during the course of the instance and primarily the 3rd boss (*shudder*).

Druid

Feral Druid's and Resto Druid's usually come to fill a tank or healing role but some Feral Druid's can be used for DPS as well. If you're in this roll, your best CC is just to assume bear form and OT when needed. Balance Druid's can spam Cyclone but diminishing returns can turn around to bite you in the feathers. Another option for Balance Droods is to spam Cyclone until the mob is immune and then either Panzerkin tank it or assume bear form until it's your mobs turn in the death rotation.

Paladin

Paladins are a lot like Druid's in a sense that if they are Prot or Holy they are there to fill a specific role. A Ret Pally can either use Turn Undead on the Demon mobs (which we all know how well fear works in instances) or just slap on a sword and board and OT until it's his/her mobs turn to die. Just make sure that if you are stuck in this roll to keep Righteous Fury up but to turn it off when you're DPS'ing.

Warrior

Prot Warrior's are there to tank while Arms and Fury are there to spread the pwn sauce. That's a given. Slap on a shield and OT just like Druids or Pallys. It's really all you can do.

Warlock

MrT is pretty Lock-friendly with the amount of demons mobs. The succubus mobs make amazing pets and can take on mobs by themselves. I totally recommend enslaving one each pull, putting it on a mob to OT and then releasing and killing it in the end. You don't want to keep the same succubus each pull in fear of it breaking in combat. The seduce spell they use is brutal and the mob can be DPS'ed without breaking it so spam it! During the Delrissa fight there are 2 possible Demon mini-boss adds that can be banished so keep an eye out for those.

Mage

Nothing new here. Sheep whatever can be sheeped and Frost specced Mages don't be afraid to frost kite mobs when needed. Arcane Mages specced in to Slow will also find a lot of use for it here.

Priest

Holy/Disc priests are here to heal so let the Shadowpriests Mind Control when needed. I'm not sure if Delrissa's adds can be MC'ed so if not be prepared to step out of Shadowform and backup heal if needed. As for CC during this fight, I honestly have no idea but i'll edit this post after I talk to our guilds Shadowpriests to see what they do.

Shaman

Shaman have it rough and need to get creative. Rank 1 Frost Shock and Earthbind Totem is your friend during the Delrissa fight. Pick one of the adds that aren't a caster or a Rogue and keep at it until the rest of your group gets the nasty Priestess down. Also don't be afraid to drop your Fire/Earth Elemental away from the CC'ed mobs if needed and pop Heroism early to help your group down Delrissa.

Rogue

Rogue's have it pretty easy with Sap and being able to blind broken CC'ed mobs but also being able to Evasion tank as a last resort.

Hunter

Also pretty self explanitory being able to keep mobs trapped during the encounter but also Beast Mastery Hunter's can OT with their pet. Even if their pet dies it should give the group enough time to pick it up before the Hunter takes a dirt nap himself.

/Headdesk

2008-04-08T16:37:00.002-04:00

My wife has been playing her Dwarf Hunter a lot lately which doesn't leave us a lot of time to play our Shadowpriest/Moonkin pairing so I made ANOTHER alt to keep my occupied.

I've always wanted a strictly PVP toon and what better class to PVP as than a Rogue? Normally I try to keep my toons names serious but I thought to myself "who wants to get ganked by a Rogue with a serious name?" so I named him Bucksavage. I had an Orc Warlock named Sisterfister on a PVP server for the same reason.

I only got Buck to level 6 but I sent him 4 16-slot bags and 4g to get started. Step 1 was to run to Darnassus and have my wife port me to Stormwind to learn 1h sword. Any Rogue that doesn't level Combat/Swords should be shot according to the 70 Rogues I know. Step 2 was to finish all the noob quests and log out at Goldshire. Mission accomplished!

In other alt news, I got my Warrior, Adiar, up to 34 and FINALLY finished her Cyclonian quest chain to get the Whirlwind Axe. I had to take Veresitha out to Arathi to farm the elementals needed and enlisted the help of a friends Priest to come kill the 40 elite elemental summoned at the end.

The same friend has a Mage and another in-game friend has a Warrior in their early 30's so I quested with them on my Shadowpriest, Telura, in STV up to 33.

It was a lazy day but after raiding a few days in a row I needed a break.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

2008-04-07T21:00:00.002-04:00

A guildies Kara run came up short on DPS spots so he asked me if I wouldn't mind taking my Shaman. I told him that my Elemental set needed work but I could respec Enhancement and probably do fine.

A majority of the people in the run were primarily there for badges so I made out like a bandit, picking these up -

[Cyclone Faceguard]
[Bracers of the White Stag]
[Boots of Foretelling]
[Belt of Gale Force]
[Heart-Flame Leggings]
[Forest Wind Shoulderpads]
[Badge of Justice]x22

After Kara I used my badges to pick up [Shawl of Shifting Probabilities].

The next night we ran Heroic Slave Pens and I picked up [Totem of Spontaneous Regrowth] & [Pauldrons of Wild Magic].

Last night, for some reason or another, our guild leader whispered me and asked if I'd take my Warlock to SSC as they were short on DPS again. I had told him that I had just run ZA the night before and was a bit burnt out. He asked what spec my Shaman was and I responded "Elemental but his gear is still a bit lacking." Instantly I received a raid invite and was asked to bring my undergeared Shammy to SSC. WTF?

I'll admit it was fun and I had never thought in a million years that I would be raiding on my Shaman in SSC. We downed Lurker in one shot and all was well but they were short healers and one of our Resto Shaman had signed on so I was replaced before we pulled Tidewalker.

After the raid I picked up 2 Nether Vortex using my Warlocks badges and picked up the mats for a friend of mine to craft me [Monsoon Belt]. It's nice knowing that I have an SSC quality belt as a non-raider.

[Omor's Unyieleding Will] dropped last night in Heroic Ramparts and I picked up enough badges of justice from the SSO dailies today to pick up [Skycall Totem].

Last but not least, I finally got Revered with the SSO and picked up Seeker's Gavel. I know it's more a Pally Tank weapon but it was 30 more spell damage that my current POS dagger and the +spell hit is nice. It'll do until the first boss in heroic Magister's drops his dagger.

Over the course of a few days, my Shaman is totally ready for Kara and I would even say Gruul's Lair/Mag. Hopefully they drag me along to a few more raids lol.

Ch-ch-ch-changes?

2008-04-04T14:03:00.005-04:00

At the start of this blog I was hoping that I would have enough to write about with just focusing on my Boomkin, Jandrae. Sadly the level grind has been slower than expected (thank you 2.4 dailies, you bastards!) and a majority of my recent blogs have been about my main Warlock, Veresitha, and my main-alt Shaman, Mutoh.

Not today, but sometime soon I -might- change the focus of this blog from just my Moonkin to all of my toons since I suffer from alt-itis but have enough 70's and knowledge to give good (I think) info on each class and specs. Again, I'd like to have a strictly-Moonkin blog so I haven't talked myself in to this change yet.

If this does occur, I'll wind up tagging my posts with the classes mentioned inside to make it easier to navigate. I also update this blog from work about 98% of the time which explains the lack of images and nifty wowhead links. I'm going to start editing posts when I get home to include these things to make the blog more appealing, informative and easier on the eyes.

I also find this layout and color scheme and bit dull so I'll be toying around with the different layouts and whatnot sometime in the near future. I'm almost 100% sure I'm the only one who reads my blog anyway but who knows.. maybe someday a few people will start to read it and I don't want them to run scared from the drab appearance of ZOMGZ Treants. Speaking of which, the name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue so a name change might be due as well. We'll see ^_^.

(Insert witty title here.)

2008-04-04T08:29:00.002-04:00

Not a lot to update with at the moment. Still busy doing dailies trying to get the badge vendor open T_T.

Ran UB the other night at 63 with a 67 Shadowstep Rogue in the group that I demolished in DPS even while healing for each boss encounter. I'm liking this Boomkin thing =). I think a lot has to do with spell rotation as Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire x3 works nicely together and provides the highest overall DPS if both manage to finish their duration.

I made the switch to Elemental on Mutoh as well and picked up a few green pieces to fill in the gaps. I also picked up the epic Lightning Crown for 140g which was a steal in my opinion. There is no stats but it'll be great for instancing with the mass amount of crit and damage.

Someone was selling the Storms deck for 512g which is pretty cheap so I bought it to hold on to. I'm not sure if i'll wait until the Faire is in town and sell it or give it to Jandrae or Mutoh. My wife's Mage, Natallia, might also want it but she isn't sure if she wants to replace the Icon of the Silver Crescent with something that isn't a push-to-use. She sure as hell isn't replacing the Serpent-Coil Braid from Tidewalker with it.

Ah, we'll see.

Last night GTK's raid team was short again (drama drama) so instead of wasting time in SSC with a short raid they took a break and went to Mount Hyjal just to have some fun, check out a new instance and clear some trash for free epics.

I'm no longer a raider but I was asked to go to fill in a spot since their 3rd Warlock had quit raiding earlier in the day (drama again). I've always wanted to raid end game as a Felguard Warlock after reading Nyarleothep's article at Warlocks Den & Elitist Jerks so I didn't turn it down.

Honestly, I had a blast last night. I loved how the instance worked with NPC's helping out and wave after wave of mobs pouring in. Overall I'd say I did really well as with no consumables what-so-ever I still managed to pull 4th in DPS behind 2 Arcane Mages and a Destruction Warlock.

Talk about luck though! In roughly 4 hours of trash clearing we all managed to obtain Friendly status with Scales of the Sand, our Paladin tank got the spell damage mace, our main Rogue got BOTH of the new Molten Fury fist weapons.. BOTH!, one of our Warrior tanks got the +dodge tanking cloak and 2 patterns dropped. I'd say it was totally worth the grind and wouldn't mind going once a week just to clear trash.

I'm really glad I was asked to go as the only thing i've wanted to do in WoW for months was to raid end-game content as a Demonology Warlock just to show their potential and I think I did that last night. If and when I stop playing WoW I can be totally content and happy.

Altitis.

2008-04-02T16:14:00.002-04:00

Silvermoon has moved down to 22nd overall but our portal is almost open. I think we're 75-ish% through phase 2 as well. I can't wait for the badge vendor T_T.

In other news, DING 63! Alternating 2 70's through about 15 dailies per day takes it's toll on me & not wanting to actually quest or do anything on an alt at the moment. In fact, I don't really have much of an update today at all.

I've got my Enhancement set on Mutoh up to par for Kara so I'm trying to get a decent Elemental set as well. I'm starting from scratch and haven't had a single piece of Tidefury drop for me so I started with the 5-piece PVP rep set that came out with 2.4.

Some of the pieces, in my opinion, are better than Tidefury and slightly under what i'd get for S1 honor gear. Outside of those 5 pieces, I've picked up a Draenei Honor Guard shield for 30g out of the AH to put in the bank. The staff from BM dropped and no one wanted it so I took it for starters but I know Shaman need a shield to take a beating.

Man I'm sick of doing dailies.

I pity the foo'!

2008-03-31T17:44:00.003-04:00

So apparently our server has adopted "MrT" as the acronym for Magisters Terrace to avoid confusion with Mana Tombs, much like what happened with Deadmines and Dire Maul. I'll admit it's quite funny seeing someone looking for a Healer for Heroic MrT.

Speaking of which, I FINALLY got the chance to run it on Veresitha. Wow. That's really all I can say is "wow". We only had 1 hangup but we had an amazing group make up. I have NO idea how anyone can do MrT on heroic without 3 classes that provide some sort of CC for the 3rd boss.

The trash was pretty similar to normal mode but of course hit harder and live longer. The bosses each provided a little something extra as well, with the exception to the 3rd boss.

The first boss now uses Drain Mana which needs to be interrupted or you're group will suffer a lot more AoE explosions after the crystal drain phase. The second boss spawns 2 orbs at a time instead of one & Kael'thas now has a Pyroblast.

I'm not exactly sure what the Pyroblast looks like because our group tore him apart before he had a chance to cast it. From what I've heard, he surrounds himself in a bubble that has it's own health pool and then starts the cast. The shield has to be destroyed and he has to be hit before the cast time is over or your tank gets hit for 65k and dies.

Our group consisted of 1 Arcane Mage, 1 Fire Mage, 1 Felguard/Demonology Warlock, 1 Druid Tank and 1 Holy/Disc Priest all geared for SSC/TK.

Overall it was a lot of fun and a little challenging but i'd still say Heroic Arc is the hardest instance to date since Heroic Durn was nerfed. It's not TOO hard by any means and provides a nice challenge for players that are at least in Heroic/Kara quality gear.

The only gripe I have is that the 3rd boss would be almost impossible without 3 forms of CC. This leaves out Elemental & Enhancement Shaman, Balance Druids (boo!), Fury & Arms DPS Warriors and without any of the Demon adds a Warlock is going to have trouble keeping their Succubus alive to Seduce after it breaks once. There is also the case of bad luck if the Warrior add charges her, she'll die in one hit. Fear is always an option but not a very good one unless you are specced for Curse of Exhaustion.

So far I've gotten the epic gloves from Kael for Veresitha. Shockingly and sadly they're better than my T4. My Shaman could use a laundry list of upgrades from MrT but so far only 1 has dropped for me with the +haste melee DPS cape.

I was also upset to learn that the Void Shatter enchant requires an upgraded enchanting rod which will take an arm and a leg to do AND it's on a 24 hour cooldown. WTF? It's the ONLY enchant to even use it so far as well. GG.

As for a Moonkin update, I ran SP last night and got a few more bubbles in to 62. The level grind is taking forever since 2-3 hours of my day is spent doing dailies on 2 different toons and that I ONLY play her when my wife and our friend Odo is on. Once we hit 70 though it's all fair game and i'll be playing Jandrae a lot more. I also won't be doing as many dailies once the SSO event is over.

For the final update, I just wanted to say that I'm proud of our little server of Silvermoon. A majority of the server are tools but our server is ranked 19th of 214 US servers as far as Shattered Sun Offensive progression goes. I bet that place is a NIGHTMARE on PVP servers. Oh, and I want to spec my Shammy Elemental for a little bit. I'm having horrible luck with Enhancement drops and could buy 5 pieces of Elemental gear. I'm also having horrible luck with Elemental pieces dropping too though. Not 1 piece of Tidefury so far T_T.

Guild Drama 2: The Return.

2008-03-29T09:53:00.003-04:00

When things go on behind the scenes and nothing is explained to the rest of the guild, players will form their own opinions based on what information IS being shared.

With that being said, what happened in SSC on Thursday night is a prime example. What was initially told to us is that "Person A & B are having connection issues" shortly followed by "Person A has left the guild". To clarify, Person A & B are married. Person A is our raid leader and Person B is our healing class leader. 2 major people in our raids success.

All that was known by the raiders is that Person A was upset that we would bring players in to the raid that were undergeared, specced incorrectly, not gemmed or enchanted correctly and that the Guild Leader overrode his descision by allowing said people to raid with us that night anyway. This upset Person A enough to say they've had enough, leave the raid group and eventually disconnect.

Based on THAT information, I made the descision that since Person A was a huge part of our guilds success and that I agreed with them that we should never bring in people to a 25 man raid unless they are geared and ready to go, that I would no longer raid as a backup unless this person was leading the raid. After all, the person LEADING the raid should have the final say-so in who is actually raiding with us.

Apparently others in the guild felt the same way that I did and responded to Person A's post on the forums in the same fashion. They felt without Person A's leadership, our guild would not be able to progress.

This caused quite the uproar and the officers felt it was necessary to explain the ENTIRE situation to us. I wish this was done initially but I understand why it wasn't. To them, they had no idea how this was going to play out while we were already in SSC and didn't want to give any misinformation.

Apparently the top guild on our server has the top Resto Druid on the server and they had stopped raiding. This Druid is friends with a few people from our guild and offered to bring his Druid to raid SSC with us. We already have 1 Resto Druid but just lost our best Resto Shammy. As luck would have it, this Druid also has a Resto Shammy alt and offered to bring him instead.

This was done on a moments notice with no time for preperation on the Druids part but Person A had told the other officers that the Shaman's gear was under what was needed for SSC, his gems sucked and his spec was off.. just not in as nice of terms. Again, this is the top Resto Druid on our server. He has raided SSC, killed Illidan numerous times and obviously knew a thing or two about raiding. Person A continued to belittle the Druid's Shaman alt and said that if he comes to the raid then Person A wouldn't be there.

Person A was against the Shaman coming.. the other 5 officers were for it.

On top of this, we had 1 Holy Priest, 1 Shadow Priest, 1 Mage & our only Moonkin no-show the raid and our best Rogue was late. With 24 people the raid made their way to Lurker while, according to the officers that explained the situation to us, Person A was not DPSing, not dropping totems and cursing out the other officers in officer chat (in guild) the entire way. The officers asked if they could discuss the matter AFTER the raid to which Person A said there was nothing to discuss. Que him leaving the raid group. His wife, Person B, had told the officers she couldn't play under the stress of her husband freaking out & a crying child so she had to log out as well.

Que "Person A & B are having connection issues".

After leaving the raid group, according to the officers, Person A continued to curse out the other officers in officer chat while they tried to replace the missing people. With Person A & B leaving, that left us with 22 people standing around Lurker's fishing hole. This is when I was whispered to fill in. Also asked to fill in was a Druid friend of an officer/Pally MT and at the same time the above mentioned Rogue signed on and was brought in.

Finally, with 25 people, we pulled Lurker and wiped. With patch 2.4 came bugs and Lurker was no exception. Our MT was getting "target must be in front of you" issues while myself and about 4 or 5 others were being damaged by his Spout ability while we were under water. I was also being hit with Whirl while off the main ring AND underwater which caused an early death in the wipe. Our Hunters also reported LOS issues while DPS'ing from the islands. No idea why this happened but eventually we downed him and moved on to Tidewalker and wiped 3 times before calling the raid.

I feel this part of the story was important because after 4 hours of wiping with only 1 boss down everyone was in a crabby mood. This fueled the fire with us only knowing a tiny portion of the story and we blamed the nightmare on our raid leader not being present and our best Holy Priest having to log out (Person B). This, to me, explains why we felt the way we did. No one was explained anything and we formed our opinions with the little bits of information that we were given.

I was the first person to respond to the post saying that I wish I hadn't chosen a side without being given the full story but I still felt that this person was a core part of our guilds success in our raids and that without him it's going to be hard but i'm sure we'll pull through. I said that I wished things would be resolved but honestly I don't see that happening. I later whispered the same officer that explained the entire situation and said that even though I said I'm finished with raiding that until they find a full time Warlock that i'd fill in the spot because I owe it to the guild that helped gear and educate me.

Personally, there isn't much more that I can do but wait and see how everything plays out and I expect to be drug in to the raid on Sunday for 5 hours. I'll pick up some consumables and do what I can but I've already respecced and regemmed my toon to Demonology for solo-play and 5-man dungeons and will not respec/regem back to Affliction to fill a raid spot. I hope they like my Felguard =).

On a Moonkin note, I FINALLY played her for the first time since 2.4 hit and gained about 6 bubbles in to 62 but I didn't have a ton of time after the lengthy officer discussion on vent to do much else. Hopefully tonight I can run Magister's Terrace on Heroic with Veresitha and play a bit on Jandrae since, most likely, i'll be stuck in SSC tomorrow.

Back On Track.

2008-03-28T10:36:00.004-04:00

My last few blogs have had little to nothing to do with Jandrae but sadly I haven't had much time to play her since 2.4 hit us on Tuesday. I was surfing around and came across a really good Moonkin blog via Gray Matter. It's always refreshing to come across other Moonkin blogs that are still being updated. It seems that every blog I've come across hasn't been updated in months or has been cancelled altogether.

What I like most about it is that it's posted from the perspective of a player who is at similar raid progression that I'm used to on my Warlock. His blog is also full of useful information on up-and-coming Moonkin like myself and which gear to look out for.

A couple of key points that I noticed are:

Don't be afraid to wear cloth - This is something I haven't looked at too much myself. I try to wear as much leather caster gear as possible but honestly, why not choose cloth? Unless you're soloing, you shouldn't be getting hit much if at all. A lot of the cloth caster gear nowadays has stam on it anyway for heavy AOE encounters. It's also 10 times easier to find cloth over leather.

Smart Innervates - I work a lot with a Shadowpriest so usually one of us gets the Innervate. In groups I've always thought to save the Innervate for the Healers but apparently that's not always the case. I knew that it worked off Spirit-based mana regen so it wasn't ideal for Pally or Shaman healers that normally use MP5 or other ways to regen mana but I never thought to use it on myself. Innervate is on a 6 minute cooldown so if I know the fight could last longer, I should cast it on myself early on. This way the cooldown should be over when the Priest or Druid healer needs the extra mana. If your healer is a Paladin or Shaman there shouldn't be an issue casting innervate on you or a Shadowpriest over the healer.

Melee for mana? - I agree with Gray that this should be a last resort and some boss fights just aren't ideal. What I never considered was to carry around a Feral staff. "They have attack power for Moonkin for a reason" right, Gray? Not once have I thought of that. Equip the Feral staff and whack the boss for 10-20 seconds and go back to casting. Casting between whacks is stupid and ruins the 5-second rule of mana regen so avoid doing that.

Idol macros - This doesn't apply to me yet since I don't have more than 1 idol but there are macros to switch them in combat when you cast Moonfire, Wrath or Starfire. I fully credit Gray for these.

Moonfire
/cast moonfire
/equip [noequipped: Idol of the Unseen Moon] Idol of the Unseen Moon

Wrath
/cast wrath
/equip [noequipped: Idol of the Avenger] Idol of the Avenger

Starfire
/aftercast +start/equip [noequipped: Ivory Idol of the Moongoddess] Ivory Idol of the Moongoddess
/cast starfire

Also worth noting..

"There are a couple of things that make idol swapping macros difficult. 1. Equiping an Idol triggers the global cooldown (GCD). 2. Unlike a spell, an idol can be equipped during the global cooldown. 3. An spell's damage is calculated at the end of its cast.

What this all means is that if you write a macro that equips the idol after the spell cast, then you suffer only one global cooldown and still get the benefit of the idol. This even works for instant casts like moonfire."

Thanks for the help, Gray!

Guild Drama

2008-03-28T08:25:00.003-04:00

Last night was an unusual night for Grand Theft Kodo. I had notified my guild that I would no longer be raiding but was asked to come to SSC. The guild leader had no problems that I had respecced out of my raid spec and was full Affliction, had no consumables and a whopping 9 Soul Shards so I knew they were desperate for help. They've done a lot to gear my character so the least I could do was help them when they needed it. I just hope they don't get the wrong idea and ask me to come to ALL of the raids. I stopped raiding for a reason.

My wife explained to me that earlier in the night we had a few no-shows and to fill the gaps they had invited people in to our guild and ranked them up to a raider without giving them a trial. This irritated our raid leader (who is not our guild leader) and he said that he refused to lead a trash raid filled with people who didn't belong in there and with new people who weren't even given a chance to prove themselves so he logged out and took his wife with him (who is our head healing Priest).

I totally agree with the guy. When I joined GTK I had to have close to full epics just to show that I was serious about my toon BEFORE I applied. I also had to run the gauntlet of doing numerous heroics with Officers to show that I knew my class and could follow directions and take criticism. I EARNED my raid spot. Pulling in people who haven't even sent in an application and instantly making them raiders not only shows favoritism, in my opinion, but shows desperation.

Dragging these people in to SSC on a moments notice without them reading strats or even so much as watching the videos is not only unfair to those of us that attend, wipe and spend money and consumables for them to learn the fights but also the guild. Like I said, I earned my spot. Nothing was handed to me or the people I raid with normally. This irritated our raid leader so he quit. Not only did he leave the raid group but he gquit shortly after.

Hopefully he comes back as he was, hands down, our best raid leader. Last nights SSC raid was blind without him and was a complete nightmare. If he doesn't there will be a large gap in our guild that I'm not sure could be filled by anyone else.

I had a bit of an issue last night as well. After notifying GTK that I would no longer be raiding I still attended the last 2 raids because I knew they needed help. They still had me listed as a raider and I was earning EP (DKP-ish points). Last night when we downed Lurker, the cloth boots dropped and they were a nice upgrade for me. I notified our Master Looter that I was interested in them and I hadn't spent any EP since our frist raid in SSC about 2 months ago. I lost out on them to a Shadowpriest (nothing against him. I like him and he's a great player) who has gotten 2 pieces of loot over the last 3 weeks.

Later in the night, Spyglass of the Hidden Fleet dropped off trash and I wanted it for my Demonology set. I lost out to a Druid (who is a close in-game friend of mine) who I know had a lower EP/GP ratio than me as well. I had no idea why but sometime in the last 24-48 hours I had been demoted to a "relief pitcher" which means that I cannot win loot, reguardless of my EP, if a player of "raider" status rolls against me. You're welcome for the help. GG.

After 4 miserable hours I did some of the SSO dailies on my Shaman and called it an early night. I worked early the next day (today) and needed to get some sleep.

Magister's Terrace: My Thoughts.

2008-03-26T17:27:00.003-04:00

Before I stepped foot inside, the first thing I did was look at the loot table in AtlasLoot. In normal mode, my Shaman could use a LOT from this place. On heroic, the gloves from the first boss are actually better than my T4 and the trinket from the 3rd boss is amazing for an Affliction spec.

My wife had ran it twice and had gotten up to Kael on heroic before I even got a group for it. According to her, a lot of CC was needed and heroic mode was "no bitch." Exciting!

Also worth noting is that at the time of this post I still haven't ran it on heroic so the details of that will come in a future post (hopefully tomorrow).

My first group consisted of me (Affliction Warlock), a Survival Hunter, an Elemental Shaman, a Holy Pally and a Druid tank. After 2 pulls I could tell that she wasn't lying about the CC issue and our Druid tank called it quits. We replaced him with ANOTHER Druid tank but didn't get any further than getting the 2nd boss down before the Shammy called it.

I took a bit of a break but eventually went back in with my wife (Arcane Mage), another Hunter, another Druid tank and the same Pally healer from before. We had MUCH better luck this time due to communication not being an issue. The previous Druid tank was not from our guild and was not using vent with us. This tank was our guilds main Druid raiding tank as well, so that helps lol.

We downed Selin Fireheart in one shot. He reminded me a LOT of the last boss in SV when he siphons energy from the crystals around the room. Once he drains the energy or the crystal is destroyed he does AOE damage until he goes OOM and then goes back to tank-n-spank.

Vexallus gave us a bit of trouble and we wiped twice before getting him down. He's similar to Curator where he spawns orbs that need to be taken out between dps phases. The catch to this is that whoever gets the killing blow on the orb gets a debuff that increases the amount of damage they take by 50% and adds a DoT effect to you.

If they get 4 stacks it's pretty much game over so you have to alternate kills through your dps and heal through it. This makes it hard for Pally & Druid healers since they have no form of party heals. He doesn't have a lot of health and all of the damage is Arcane so your tank can actually tank in DPS gear. It's a DPS race to down the boss before your dps takes a dirt nap.

We one shotted Priestess Delrissa who is like a mini version of Moroes, Maulgar & Karathress. The boss isn't lootable until ALL of her adds are killed but thankfully they can all be CC'ed. We sheeped the rogue, trapped the shaman type and banished the engineer to take out the main boss first and then picked off the adds one at a time. LOS plays a huge issue since you have to fight around a few pillars but wasn't really that though of a fight.

Finally we pulled up to Kael'thas Sunstrider. WTF happened to this guy? This fight, in my opinion, is the funnest boss fight i've ever done. It starts off as a tank-n-spank fight where he spawns an AOE effect every so often on the ground that everyone has to avoid. He also summons a Phoenix that needs to be nuked ASAP. Wherever the Phoenix is there is an AOE consecrate-like effect so all DPS needs to DPS on the move. Once the Phoenix dies, it spawns an egg that needs to be destroyed on a timer or another Phoenix spawns. At 50% Kael will toss everyone in to the air and deal 400 damage every few seconds while you swim around in mid air (awesome!) dodging water globes. If you hit the globe or the floor it's instant game over. Once his gravity trick is over, he kneels to the ground to take a breather and you can unload on him before he sends you back in to the air. From 50% to death, the tanks job is just to pump out as much DPS as possible since he can't be tanked while you float around.

Overall, the instance looks AMAZING and the tactics on the pulls and the amount of CC needed makes the encounter very on-edge and interesting. I liked all of the boss encounters and can't wait to give it a shot on heroic on both my Shaman and Warlock. GG Blizz.

2.4 is LIVE!

2008-03-25T16:42:00.003-04:00

Yay..

I want to be more excited, but i'm not. I like the patch content but not what happens after the patch.

My Warlock main has about 177 badges in the bank and the 2 pieces I need the most are boots and pants which are 175 total. Thats fine.. but I know the next few days are going to be full of instance server crashes, hotfixes and rolling restarts.

What I'm not excited about? Being asked to summon the slackers in to the instance instead of using the summon stone outside.

I am, however, looking forward to the new quests, new zone, new 5-man and new badge gear once it's unlocked. I am also glad that we Locks dodged a bullet for a potential nerfing of Life Tap. Whew!

There really wasn't much in there to effect Jandrae outside of the new badge loot and bosses dropping 3 tier tokens making it easier for me to gear her up. I do plan on taking her in to Kara but I don't know if she'll go any further since she's just an alt.

On a side note, my LW is up to 335 and my Skinning is close to being maxed out at level 62. Getting Maim as a new spell 62 wasn't very excited as a Balance Druid though lol.

Let's go see how the new patch treats my Warlock!

Rugged Leather is FTL

2008-03-24T04:10:00.007-04:00

Ran Ramparts and Blood Furnace a few times over the weekend and finished the quest for [Moonkin Headdress]. Also FINALLY found an [Idol of the Moon] for sale on the AH for 50g. It was a bit steep but I had been looking for it forever.

Skinning is finally maxed out and I've been farming ore on my Shammy to sell and fund Jandrae's Leatherworking. Speaking of which, I had a bitch of a time finding the pattern for [Turtle Scale Gloves]. Turns out the only NPC that sells the pattern is the guy who gives you the Tribal quest chain and it's a horrible spawn rate. I just picked up the mats and had someone craft me 2 pair. I am now, for the love of god, a Tribal Leatherworker.

I'm up to 285 Leatherworking and my god is Rugged Leather EXPENSIVE on my server! 18-20g per stack! I don't know if thats normal but I didn't skin much before moving on to Knothide Leather in Outlands so I'm having to either farm it or buy it. Farming ore in Outlands is 10 times easier and I can buy it in mass quantities that way.

I'm proud of my little Doomkin and the gear I've acquired so far. I can't wait to hit 64 and get the two leather caster items from Underbog.

My wishlist, however, is topped by these which is the main reason I took Tribal Leatherworking.

[Windhawk Belt]
[Windhawk Bracers]
[Windhawk Hauberk]

A friend of mine is helping farm the Primal Air's with his Mote Extractor while I up my Leatherworking. It's nice to have helpful people in the game =D.

Also wanted to note that I took the script off of Wowhead's website to add item mouse-overs to my blog. FTW!

Hard Labor: Easing the Grind.

2008-03-21T12:19:00.005-04:00

Picking up Skinning late was a nightmare, imho. Picking up Mining at 70 is actually quite worse.

My 70 Draenei Enhance Shammy is my gold farmer. I got his Herbalism from 1 to 375 in 2 days with no problems at all, albeit tedious, and I make a ton of money off him. I picked up Mining at 70 as well but it's been about 4 or 5 days and still haven't hit 375.

I've spent more time in Silithus farming Thorium than I spent there pre-BC when level 60 was the cap. I won't complain TOO much since stacks of Thorium bars sell for 20g+ and the dense stone is a nice bonus. At the end of it all, I'll have every gathering profession maxed to 375.

Here are a few things to make grinding gathering professions less of a pain in the arse.

Think of the money - Thats right. We all take gathering professions for 1 of 2 reasons. To further your crafting profession or to rake in the gold. If you need motivation to grind your profession, check the AH and see the possible money to be made. You can mine 3 Rich Thorium Veins in 20 minutes and make 60g on my server. Thats faster than doing dailies and shouldn't come with a repair bill.

Pace yourself with music - I have playlists made up of MP3's that lasts about 2 hours. When the playlist is over, I stop farming and take a break. Music will make your mind wander while you're skinning corpses of dead turtles (awwww) or plucking Terocone from Mother Outland. Before you know it, the playlist is over and "BAM!" you have some skillups. I try to aim for more Industrial or ambeint music instead of the normal fast paced Metal-ish stuff. It's much easier for me to farm listening to Skinny Puppy than, say, Slayer. Pick.. Pick.. Pick.. is always a better routine than ZOMGPICKHEBRZRAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Set goals - Trying to get from 1 to 375 overnight is only going to burn you out. Some people would rather get it all over with at once instead of pacing themselves but i'm not one to do so. Start off trying to get from 1-100 and take a break. Come back to hit 175, then 275 and up to 375. When I got herbalism up in 2 days, the last thing I wanted to do when I maxed it out was to go farming the next day. Setting up smaller grinding times will make it easier for you to want to farm when you finally max out your profession.

Don't be afraid to be lazy - Thats right. Be lazy if you want. It's your money paying for the game, after all. This is impossible with Herbalism but easier with Skinning and much easier with Mining. I had bored friends with 70's come lay waste to zones so I could skin the dead in a fraction of the time. With mining, pay attention to what level you need to smelt certain ore. The instant you learn to smelt, check the AH (if you can afford it) and buy the ore isntead of going out to farm it. Go back and smelt for the skillups and sell the bars back on the AH for a similar price to break even.

This is all I can come up with at work but if anything else pops up I'll be sure to add them to the post. Enjoy the grind, if at all possible!

Hello Outlands! (Revenge is Sweet)

2008-03-20T15:49:00.002-04:00

My wife and I had about 3 bubbles to 58 so we decided to go grind out on Felboars and the buzzards out in Hellfire. 2 70 Horde tried to make our lives miserable by training mobs over to us and dropping Snake Traps. I still have no idea how a Snake Trap dropped on a PVE server can still attack the opposing faction. A ST from a 70 on a 57 really hurts.

I recognized the guild they were in so I sign on to my Horde toon and whispered them, asking nicely if they would piss off so we could continue what we were doing. This went on for about an hour until some friends of ours showed up on their 70's to taunt them. One of our friends brought his Hunter and gave them a taste of the Snake Trap bug and eventually one of them left.

We had the idea to flag so we could eventually just get it out of the way and get the Hordie killed. Eventually he tried to train a Fel Reaver over to us but he was dismounted and nearly killed until he bubbled.

I'd say no more than 20 minutes later, a 61 Undead Mage targets my wife and hits her with a Frost Bolt. I dropped trees on him and crit him with a 1500 Starfire. The stun procced and my wife nailed him with a Mind Blast crit to take him down. As soon as that happened, a 58 Tauren Druid that was stealthed Ravaged me for about 700 damage and then he got raped. PVP is going to be fun on my Moonkin at 70!

Afterwards, just for paybacks, the 4 or 5 70's from our guild that were around decided to go take out Thrallmar and did so for a good solid hour.

On a good note, I did manage to hit 58 and get my skinning to about 302 and I started my Tribal Leatherworking quest. Farming Turtle Scales is FTL! We did about 4 or 5 quests and got 4 huge upgrades with a staff, helm, legs and a blue chest from the quest to mark the towers over at Zeth'gor.

There is a BoE idol called Idol of the Moon that I want that increases the damage from Moonfire. There is also a leather helm from the BF quest at 61. It'll all come in due time, of course!

Last night was my final night raiding with my guild. There were some personal decisions that I had to make and I decided to make them now instead of waiting and it being twice as hard to do. The short end of it is that they raid too early and I'm falling behind in EPGP (DKP sort of) and eventually it'll get to the point where i'll be so far behind in gear that I won't be able to pull my weight. As a DPS class (Warlock), that isn't going to secure my raid spot.

Ah well. Time to concentrate on my BOOMKIN!

All ur skinz R belong 2 me!

2008-03-19T17:04:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine brought his 70 Warlock with me to Un'goro last night for some dino genocide. My skinning is finally on par with the mobs that i'm killing at 290 and I should be able to get the rest of my skillups before I ding 58 tonight. 2/3 of a level to go!

All the skin is taking up a lot of bank space so I sucked it up and vended all of my Feral gear. I had a full set and mostly blues so I made a decent amount of money from it but I always regret selling off-spec gear. Ah well. It'll all be replaced at 58 anyway!

Hopefully I'll be skinning Felboars and running Ramparts sometime tonight!

Food for thought.

2008-03-18T20:34:00.003-04:00

I don't normally do two posts in one day but I just read over at another blog something interesting about Nature's Grace.

With talents, Wrath becomes a 1.5 second cast. When Nature's Grace procs off of a crit it reduces the cast time of our next spell by .5 seconds. Since the GCD is 1.5, this proc is wasted when used by another Wrath spell during spams since you still can't cast Wrath more than once every 1.5 seconds.

Maybe making a stop-cast macro to cast Starfire when it procs might not be a bad idea?

So close, yet so far.

2008-03-18T15:42:00.002-04:00

A 70 Pally friend of mine ran my wife, our friend Odo and I through BRD and LBRS last night. Didn't get any gear at all but gained 2 levels. Ding 56!

2 more levels until Outlands! I R EXCITED!

I'm trying to play around with different spell rotations to figure out which provides the most DPS. So far it seems like Moonfire, Starfire, Wrath until it's dead for trash mobs and Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire x3, repeat on boss fights.

My skinning is still a little behind. 20 points behind as a matter of fact. All of the mobs we killed in both instances as well as Burning Steppes had to go to waste T_T. I need to get it up to at least 260-270 and eventually 300 before Outlands.

Since we're all levelling together I don't want to go kill mobs that still give XP so I have to run around until I find corpses and take sloppy seconds =\.

Hopefully I'll hit 57 tonight and should easily be in Outlands by this weekend.

It burns when I PVP.

2008-03-17T20:36:00.002-04:00

Now i'm not a Resto Druid by any means. I'm a lazor owl, nature cannon, boomkin, doomkin, what-have-you.. BUT.. I hate when classes get nerfed in PVE over something that happens in PVP.

Such is the case with Lifebloom losing 8% of it's bonus healing because the devs at Blizzard feel it's to powerful in Arena. Lamesauce. What this does is make it harder for Stickform Druids to heal in PVE, as explained by Lifebloomer.

Even if I were a Shaman or a Warlock (of which I am actually both) I wouldn't appreciate it when other classes get a PVE nerf because of PVP.

Thanks to Leafshine for the banner to post on blogs and forums to protest not only the current Druid nerf but for me to protest PVP nerfs that affect PVE in general.

There is something about stacks of dead animal flesh in my bank..

2008-03-17T16:24:00.002-04:00

I swore that i'd never take another crafting profession again after getting two tailors to 375. I already have an Herbalist & Miner with my Shaman. My Druid's Alchemy was up to about 112 but her Herbalism was only 2. Thats right.. 2.

See, months ago when I started Jandrae, a friend of mine in-game was just picking up Herbalism for his newly 70 Shaman. He didn't want any of the herbs until he got to Outlands so he gave them all to me to up my Alchemy. 112 was as high as I could get with his herbs but I was too lazy to go farm at level 30-ish.

The other night I was looking through the Tribal Leatherworking stuff and found a few nice epic pieces for level 70 that wouldn't be to hard to farm for, so I dropped Herbalism and Alchemy and picked up Leatherworking and Skinning.

After following people in Ashenvale & STV for a few hours I finally got to 225 Skinning and used the leather to hit 180 Leatherworking. Grinding out LW is a lot like tailoring in the sense that you only level up to the point of being able to make new bolts of cloth, then making nothing but those bolts until they turn gray. With LW, it's the same way with making items until you can learn to cure certain types of hide or convert leather in to a higher grade of leather and then doing only that until it turns gray.

At this rate I hope to be in Outlands sometime this weekend. I'm off for 3 days and would like nothing more than to rake in some of those caster leather quest rewards!

Commence Doomfire Spamming!

2008-03-15T17:07:00.003-04:00

Alrighty! The blog is started so it's time to let the cat out of the bag. This isn't my main. Sad, I know, but I raid as a Human Warlock in the same guild 3 nights a week. This is my escape character. I can do what I want, spec how I want, /lol at whoever I want to without feeling like I have some sort of commitment to stand by.

I leveled as Balance from 10 up until about 45. I don't know if I was burnt out or what but I took about 2 months off to level my Shaman to 70 and play around with him for a bit. My wife and one of our good in-game friends had alts around that level and it gave me an excuse to play her. I took about 25g and respecced/regeared Feral. That lasted til about 50 and I went back to being a Boomkin.

I've been playing WoW overall for about 2 years now. I started on the Horde side with a Mage, then a Warrior and finally a Warlock. The Horde side on our server kinda sucked so some friends and I rerolled as Alliance to raid. I stuck with the Warlock and got another one to 70 (the one I raid with now) but I still am an altaholic.

I love the Boomkin spec and I think what appeals to me the most about eventually having a 70 Boomkin is how to acquire the gear. I love instances and heroics and there is a TON of gear for us in there. Add that to the badge gear and a piece of Kurenai rep gear and i'll be occupied for quite some time.

At the time of this post I am level 53. I hope to be 70 sometime soon so I can get the fun parts started. I'll be using this blog to talk about the misadventures that occur and the /lol'ing I get from peers, guildies and R-tards as well as things i've learned and strats for certain things. Hopefully I'll keep with this!