A Daily Dose of Mediocrity

Wormhole Generator

2009-07-27T02:35:00.005-05:00

I haven't been able to find many WoW engineering blogs and the few I have come across never seem to update or stop blogging shortly there after so from time to time I will put some little engineering tidbit for you to read...

Today's Topic: Wormhole Generator Northrend

I am not on the PTR so I have not gotten to play with this yet, but the mats on the PTR are as follow: 8 Titanium Bars, 2 Eternal Air, 2 Eternal Fire, 2 Eternal Shadow and 2 Eternal Water. So if you are looking forward to creating this you may want to have these items ready when the patch finally goes live (whenever that is going to happen). The one thing I am not sure of yet is how you get the plans themselves. Hopefully they will come from the trainer or a world drop that is fairly easy to obtain.

Achievement Update

2009-07-24T19:26:00.004-05:00

Last night I hit exalted with the Argent Crusade which gave me the 'Crusader' title from the Argent Tournament having completed all the Valiant quests with the five cities as well as getting me 'the Argent Champion' title for being exalted with the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade. I am currently sitting at 99 Champions Seals with only one more to go until I will have enough to get me Argent Charger as soon as patch 3.2 is released. I hope it gets released soon, I can not wait to get that new mount. Also, once the patch hits and all the mount prices get really cheap I will get the rest of the mount I need for the 50 mount achievement so I can get my Albino Drake.

Offtopic Post: An email I created for work...

2009-07-24T19:17:00.003-05:00

This post is not even close to WoW related so free free to skip it and move on if you do not wish to read it. Now I can continue with today's post. I work in a 911 center and every once in a while I might post something related to that job. In this case it will be reference an email I created the other day after we were told our emails did not have enough information in them. I unfortunately did not send this email since I do like being employed but I thought I would post it here anyhow.

The original email would have been basically this…

Station2’s CAD crashed this afternoon and had to be restarted.
Jason

But since these emails were not considered thorough enough, I added more information and the email below was a product of that.

In the wake of recent events apparently emails being sent by some of us were not deemed as being thorough enough with all possible information available contained in the email. Therefore this email will be an attempt to rectify that situation to the best of my ability in the time allotted to type this all up.

On Tuesday July 21st 2009 at approximately 1720 the weather was sunny and it was 91 degrees and winds were calm On the floor one set of lights was on and we had approximately 10 dispatchers, 3 call takers , and 2 supervisors named as follows: (listing deleted) There was an assortment of news, weather, and various television shows on the TVs. At the time this incident occurred P was on a 911 call and various dispatchers were talking on the respective radio channels. The temperature on the floor could be described as pleasant with the air conditioners running. Then while I was sitting on station 1 checking priority ones and foster homes M informed me that his CAD had in fact crashed and he was having to restart it. I acknowledged his statement that his CAD has crashed and told him I would let the I.T. department know about it.

Thoroughly yours,
Jason

The preceding email was deemed as thorough as possible by the author of said email. All information contained therein is considered privileged information.

A few notes from the latest 3.2 PTR Patch Notes:

2009-07-13T20:35:00.000-05:00

Jormungar Leg Armor now requires Heavy Borean Leather x 3, Jormungar Scale x 12
The old reciple called for Heavy Borean Leather x 5, and one Jormungar Scale, so I would stockpile these now before the material change occurs.

Tome of Cold Weather Flying: New heirloom item. Players who have reached level 80 can now purchase this book for 1,000 gold from Hira Snowdawn, the Cold Weather Flying Trainer in Dalaran. Similar to other heirloom items, this item can be mailed to other characters of the same realm, account and faction. The book is consumed when read training the character in Cold Weather Flying. Requires level 68.
This might make me inclined to level the druid above 70 now, gathering herbs in flight form FTW!

Jeeves now requires Field Repair Bot 74A x 2, Field Repair Bot 110G x 10 (Up from 4), Scrapbot Construction Kit x 20 (Up from 10), Titansteel Bar x 8, King's Amber x 2, Handful of Cobalt Bolts x 30.
Looks like its time to start stocking up on these mats to be able to make it once the patch goes live. Its a good thing I had some of the old bars (khorium) and primals (fire) stockpiled which will make construction of all this stuff a lot cheaper for me

A nice achievement to end the day with

2009-07-13T02:35:00.005-05:00

I decided to grind out the last 4k rep I needed with Argent Dawn tonight, which took about 50 minutes in Stratholme. (I would have been done sooner but its good to check before you delete the Stratholme Holy Water thinking it was mana potions...doh!) That done, I was at 14 exalted reputations then I decided to turn in a few Relics of Ulduar to get the last 700 or so reputation I needed to hit exalted with Sons of Hodir and that did it. Now I just need to get the rest of the way through revered with Argent Crusade...

Its kind of funny to think that less than a month ago I only had 5 reputations to exalted, I guess you could say I have been a little busy with the reputation grind on Tyderium as of late. Last night with the Argent Tournament turn-ins I hit exalted with the Alliance Vanguard which means I can now learn the plans to make a chopper. Now to make myself spend all the gold to actually make the thing might take a little while.

Are you still playing your Hunter?

2009-07-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

There was an article up on Wow.com the other day about the decline of the Hunter class. I tend to agree with their findings that the hunter class is in decline. I was reviewing my played time on all my 80's last night and while my other three 80s total played time was measured in days, my hunter was sitting at a whopping 7 hours played time since hitting 80. I haven't logged into him in quite a while and just really haven't felt the urge to play him. My pet has not even hit 80 yet. So I have to ask anyone else reading this, have you played your hunter lately?

Update

2009-07-08T20:14:00.002-05:00

Wow, it has been a while since I have posted on here, and this is my 4^th post for this entire year. I have typed up a few posts but never managed to post them. So I will just make a rather short post on what I have been up to lately. I now have four 80's that have made it though Northrend. For a while my mage was the toon I played the most and has been on several raids into Naxxramas and also numerous heroics. Then the big ordeal with The Marvel Family happened a few months ago and none of my 80's has really seen the inside of an instance/raid since.

So as it usually happens when I have nothing to really do with my 80's I start leveling alts up some more. I had my warrior who was stuck at 60 for the longest time that I had leveled up along side my priest with recruit a friend last year sitting there wasting away so I decided to play him some and have managed to get him about halfway through level 71 as of last week. I also started a rogue which is a class I never really could get past level 6 or 7 in the past who is now level 42. Once I hit around level 10 on the rogue and was able to dual wield it made life a lot easier leveling her up.

In the past few weeks however, after learning of the new paladin-only mount you can get from the Argent Tournament I decided that I should start doing those dailies. As a prerequisite for this however I needed to hit exalted with all the cities so that I would be able to get the titles from the tournament as well. My paladin was leveled up way back before Burning Crusade launched and they increased the amount of reputation you would get from quests etc so I had a little ways to go to hit exalted with the cities. I had managed to make it just a little ways into revered with all five cities so I went to work doing the starting quests for the various alliance races to increase my rep with them. In just two nights worth of doing these quests I managed to hit exalted with all 5 alliance cities to get my Ambassador title.

I then went on to grind out exalted with the Kurenai and Sporeggar on the way to my diplomat title with just the rest of the Timbermaw Hold rep grind to go. So far I have only gotten into friendly with them so I have a ways to go on that one. That grind is on hold for a little bit while I concentrate more on the tournament dailies for the time being. I have already gotten Exalted Champion of Stormwind and Exalted Champion of Darnassus and am currently working on the Exodar with two more days of dailies left until I am finished with them. I have gotten 29 champions seals so far so I am still a ways off from being able to get my Argent Charger but I will get there eventually.

A Blizzard Cover-up? (The Marvel Family)

2009-04-29T18:12:00.002-05:00

I haven't posted in quite a while I know, but I found out some information today that I thought I would share with you. My paladin was in a guild on Vek'Nilash called The Marvel Family and some things have happened over the past few days that I am just now getting more information on and since Blizzard seems to be killing all the forum topics on this issue I thought I would address some of it on here.
A member of this guild had gotten his account hacked many months ago and it took Blizzard a full 4 months to get all his items restored to him, included with these items they returned was a GM item, apparently it was a plate chest piece item that had an on use effect that would kill everything within 30 yards or something to that effect. The person that got the item was a cloth wearer and thus gave the plate chest piece to the guild leader so someone could use it. Now they may have executed poor judgment when the guild leader used this item in a few raids such as Ulduar 25 and Obsidian Sanctum. This caused the members in the raids to get several achievements including two world first achievements for Ulduar 25 which got a lot of peoples attention. This has since led to the banning of accounts of everyone who was in any of the raids in which this item was used. So far 55 accounts have been banned*. Now I understand banning the accounts of the person who used the item and the ones who benefited from its use such as the ones who received gear that they would not have received otherwise. What I can not understand is that everyone else who was in the raid getting banned whether they benefited from its use or not and for that matter may not have known about the item even existing until it was used.
Blizzard is quickly killing any forum threads in relation to this also. I wonder if Blizzard is trying to cover up their mistake for even giving this item out to a player by getting rid of any evidence to that effect as soon as its posted and banning anyone involved in the incident? Being is how this is not a Blizzard forum and can not be deleted by them I would like to ask for the truth about these events from Blizzard and why they may have unnecessarily banned some players involved only peripherally in this incident to keep them quiet. Anyone who is reading this who has an idea as to what going on is free to comment on this post and it won't be deleted by Blizzard or myself.I myself was not involved in any of these raids and still do have an active account at this time but a lot of people I know have been banned because of this.
*That number was given to me by one of the people whose account was banned and it looked to be a believable number by how much the guild shrank yesterday. I have also left the guild at this time.

Edit: Learning more about the story now I kind of wonder if all the bans were necessary and have to agree with what a lot of other people stated in an article on WoWInsider. The GM is at fault here and who is to say if anyone reading this would have gotten this item would not have done the same thing. This item was used for fun and nothing more, now I would have to concede that I might not have taken the loot that dropped as a result, but then again I might have. How about this, Blizzard just take away any items they obtained during this incident and remove their achievements give them a 3-day or so suspension and then get over it and let them get back to playing.

A few new achievements

2009-03-03T03:11:00.002-06:00

Ok so it has been another eternity between posts again so I thought I would post a really quick one. As soon as I logged in tonight I was invited to a 25-man Obsidian Sanctum run. We did the entire run with 20 people for the 'Less is More' Achievement. I managed to stay alive until the last few seconds of the fight when I was out of mana and an add decided to pay me a visit. It was pretty fun though and it was also my first time to see this particular place on any of my toons. No loot for me but it was quite fun.

I'm not dead I swear...

2009-02-04T04:45:00.001-06:00

Long time no post. In fact it has been over a month since the last time I posted on this blog. I haven't had too much time to play as of late because as of January 18th I became a father for the first time which has taken up some of my play time to say the least. Over the past month I have managed to get my hunter to 80, and doing dailies have gotten my mage to 73 but otherwise that's about all the leveling of the high level toons I have been doing lately. A few of my good friends on my home server have switched servers recently so I made an alt on the server the moved to to be able to talk with them still. I made yet another paladin and he is currently sitting at level 20. The paladin charges they released prior to the wrath release have made leveling the paladin a little easier but I find that my judgements are missing a lot more than I remember them doing wile leveling paladins in the past. Well this post was fairly short but that is a quick update to what I have been up to as of late.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T05:50:00.002-06:00

..and a Happy New Year!

Reputation Rewards for Paladins in Wrath Part III

2008-12-21T15:59:00.004-06:00

Welcome to part two of my reputation rewards for paladins in Wrath of the Lich King Post. Today I will cover The Sons of Hodir and the Wyrmrest Accord.

The Sons of Hodir
This faction is opened up after doing a really long series of quests and as you increase your reputation with them you will get more daily quests to do as well. This the faction that has the shoulder enchants as well so you may want to try and get to exalted as soon as possible to to be able to get the better enchants.

Giant Ring Belt - yes, this item is mail but it is a decent choice for retribution paladins. I actually upgraded to this belt over the green text plate one that I had been wearing since it provided more attack power. Get a blacksmith to make you a belt buckle to add a socket to it and it makes it even better. You can get this item at honored reputation and level 78

Lesser Inscription of the Axe - 30 attack power, 10 critical strike rating available at honored and level 80, good to retribution paladins.

Lesser Inscription of the Crag - 18 spell power, 4 mana per 5 sec, one of the choices for holy paladins.

Lesser Inscription of the Pinnacle - 15 dodge rating, 10 defense rating, this one is for protection paladins.

Lesser Inscription of the Storm - 18 spell power, 10 critical strike rating this would be my choice for the holy paladin shoulder enchant out of the two choices.

Spaulders of the Giant Lords - now for this piece you will need to grind to revered and level 80 to obtain these but they make very nice retribution shoulders.

Once you hit exalted you have access to all the greater versions of the inscriptions above.

Greater Inscription of the Axe - 40 attack power, 15 critical strike rating
Greater Inscription of the Crag - 24 spell power, 6 mp5
Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle - 20 dodge rating, 15 defense rating
Greater Inscription of the Storm - 24 spell power, 15 critical strike rating

The Wyrmrest Accord

Bracers of Accorded Courtesy - plate healing bracers available at level 78 and honored reputation. They have a yellow socket as well.

Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions - protection cloak available also at level 78 and honored reputation.

Arcanum of Blissful Mending - 30 spell power and 8 mp5 make this a nice holy head enchant available at level 80 and revered reputation.

Breastplate of the Solemn Council - protection spec chest piece.

Gavel of the Brewing Storm - holy mace which will be better than the one you can get from the Kalu'ak at revered with more spell power and critical strike rating.

Sabatons of Draconic Vigor - protection spec boots available at revered and level 80.

Legplates of Bloody Reprisal - now we get to the exalted item you can get from them. These are a nice retribution spec item.

This concludes part three of this guide, I hope you found it mildly informative.

Keep Your Relics of Ulduar

2008-12-15T14:42:00.002-06:00

According to an article on WoWInsider you will be able to turn in the Relics of Ulduar 10 at a time for 250 reputation with Sons of Hodir. So hold on to your relics and turn them in for a good chunk of reputation when the patch hit.

Reputation Rewards for Paladins in Wrath Part II

2008-12-13T01:36:00.003-06:00

Welcome to part two of my reputation rewards for paladins in Wrath of the Lich King Post. Today I will cover Knights of the Ebon Blade and The Kalu'ak.

Knights of the Ebon Blade

You will need to do some questing in Icecrown to open up this reputation vendor, but once you have they can be found in the Shadow Vault.

Dark Soldier Cape - this piece is obtainable at honored and level 78. It is a good starting holy cloak with a good amount of stamina, intellect, and spell power on it. I personally picked this cloak up to replace the one I had gotten out of Karazhan to add to my healing set.

Tokin-Tempered Sabatons - here's the piece a protection pally might like also obtainable at honored and level 78. With defense rating and shield block rating these should be some nice starting tanking boots.

Arcanum of Torment - this is a head enchantment that you will need to get to revered and level 80 to purchase. With 50 attack power and 20 critical strike rating, retribution paladins should get this as soon as possible.

Runeblade of Demonstrable Power - this is a very nice 2h sword you can get your hands on once you hit revered with this faction. It has a ton of attack power and crit on it and should do you quite nicely for a weapon. The one downside of this weapon is that it has 0 stamina on it. I replaced my De-Raged Waraxe from the Amphitheater of Anguish quest line with this weapon.

Death-Inured Sabatons - once you hit exalted you can grab these from this faction. They are a very nice epic boot for retribution paladins with a ton of critical strike rating as well as a blue and red socket to fill.

The Kalu'ak

This faction you can make it into honored with just by doing all the quests they have for you in the starting areas and in Dragonblight. They also have 3 dailies you can open up fairly early on in your leveling career to give you a nice head start on reputation.

Ivory-Reinforced Chestguard - this piece requires honored reputation and level 76 to get your hands on. This is a nice beginning tanking chest piece you can pick up fairly cheaply.

Whalebone Carapace - here is the retribution counterpart of the chest piece above. Its also available at honored and level 76. It has a large amount of strength for attack power on it as well as a nice bit of crit.

Totemic Purification Rod- holy paladins have to wait until level 78 and revered before they can get their hands on this mace. But once they do it should last them for at least a little while before the upgrade it. I personally replaced my level 70 epic healing mace with this as soon as I could get my hands on it.

Whale-Stick Harpoon - also requires level 78 and revered to purchase. A decent polearm for retribution paladins starting at level 78 and should do nicely until you can get the sword from Knights of the Ebon Blade at level 80.

Nurtured Penguin Egg - okay, okay so this isn't paladin specific but I thought I would throw it on here anyway. Once you hit exalted with The Kalu'ak you can grab this and have your very own penguin pet.

That's it for this part of the guide, will have part 3 up soon.

Reputation Rewards for Paladins in Wrath Part 1

2008-12-12T04:25:00.004-06:00

I am going to go over some of the items you can acquire through the various reputation factions in Wrath of the Lich King. I will break this into several parts with this one encompassing items from the Argent Crusade, and the Kirin Tor. A lot of these items you will be able to get and use prior to level 80 to help in your leveling process.

Argent Crusade
Cloak of Holy Extermination - This cloak would be good for retribution paladins and is accessible at honored reputation and usable at level 78. I replaced the cloak I got from the Nesingwary quests in Scholazar Basin with this cloak as soon as I could get it. It has a nice chunk of attack power and crit as well as a healthy dose of stamina. As far as enchants go, I put 16 agility on it for a little extra crit.

Special Issue Legplates - These would be good for protection paladins and are also available at honored reputation and level 78. These might be replaced fairly soon after hitting 80 but these will serve as a beginning tanking piece with a good bit of defense and hit rating on them as well as an available red socket.

Standard Issue Legguards - And now we have the holy piece also available at honored and level 78. I picked these up for my holy set as they are better than my level 70 healing legs I had before. These also have a socket available on them, in this case a blue one.

Argent Skeleton Crusher - moving up to revered reputation requirement and level 80 to use this two-hand mace. Its slow speed (3.60) and high end damage range with a ton of strength make it a fairly good ret weapon. The only thing its missing is critical strike rating opting instead for armor penetration rating.

Fang-Deflecting Faceguard - a plate helm with a ton of strength and stamina on it. Once again I am not too happy with the lack of crit on it but it still would be a solid retribution piece with 89 strength on it for a metric ton of attack power. Throwing on the head glyph from Knights of the Ebon Blade would make it even better.

Helm of Purified Thoughts - this piece requires exalted reputation and level 80 and is epic quality. Both the epics offered by the faction are suited for holy Paladins so if you are retribution or protection you can skip them. This helm has a lot of stamina and intellect as well as 84 spell power and a good bit of critical strike rating as well.

Signet of Hopeful Light - a very nice ring for holy paladins, as well as many other if not all of the caster classes.

Kirin Tor

Being a faction dominated by mages there isn't too much that paladin would want off this faction, but there are still a few items you may want to grab. To get to the first item on this list you will need to be at least revered with the Kirin Tor and level 80.

Girdle of the Warrior Magi - this piece has holy paladin written all over it, its plate, has spell power and critical strike rating as well as a yellow socket. Its definitely a nice piece for any holy set. Requires revered reputation and level 80.

Arcanum of Burning Mysteries - a nice head enchant for holy pallies here. Spell power and crit, can't go wrong with those. This also require revered reputation and level 80.

Fireproven Gauntlets - something for protection paladins here. This epic piece requires you to be exalted and level 80 but has a good chunk of defense rating as well as dodge rating.

Daily Quest Locations Part Two

2008-12-05T03:12:00.003-06:00

This is part two of my daily quest location guide. As stated a few posts ago this guide is by no means complete since I haven't opened up all the dailies yet, nor am I doing every one I can right now. From Borean Tundra I head up into Icecrown for some more dailies.

5. Death's Rise actually has several daily quests I do and I will list them below.
From Their Corpses, Rise! - Faction: Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation 250 (275 if human)
Intelligence Gathering - Faction Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation 250 (275 if human)
Both of these quests are completed at Onslaught Harbor off the coast of the zone. You need to kill the mobs to get the keys to open the chests to get the intelligence documents, and you can use the quest item from the other quest on the mobs you have killed to complete it. Be advised, not every chest will have the documents in them. So far in my experience it seems that about one in three will actually have the quest items in them. You will therefore need to kill more than just the ten you need for the other quests to get enough keys to open the chests the documents may be in. If you are a class with no healing abilities be wary around groups of them because their agro radius is fairly large, and I have routinely had at least two to three mobs on me at once.

Once these quests are done and turned in, you can head to the other daily quest hub on the map in this zone. These quests are all completed in the Jotunheim region to the southwest from The Shadow Vault.

6. The Shadow Vault also has several quests you can complete daily.
Leave Our Mark - Faction: Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation 250 (275 if human)
Pretty simple quest, just kill 15 mobs and plant the banner in their corpses.
Shoot 'Em Up - Faction: Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation 250 (275 if human)
This quest has been slightly bugged over the past few days but is still doable. You will find the harpoon guns on the buildings along the cliff face in the northern and western part of the area and use them to shoot down 20 drake riders. The guns seem to only target to the right of wherever the are placed. They will not allow you to aim left at all right now which does seem to add a degree of frustration in getting the quest done. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
Vile Like Fire! - Faction: Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation 250 (275 if human)
Grab a proto-drake and go burn some buildings in town, very easy quest.
Once these are completed I turned them in and headed over to Storm Peaks to do some dailies out there.7. Dun Niffelem is the daily quest hub I visit in Storm Peaks and all these quests will be for The Sons of Hodir faction. I have only made it to honored with them so I have yet to open up all the dailies available to me yet. The ones I have done so far will be listed below.
Blowing Hodir's Horn - Faction: The Sons of Hodir Reputation 250 (275 if human)
This quest involves heading out to Thunderfall in the northeastern part of the zone, killing some mobs then blowing the horn over their corpses.
Hot and Cold - Faction: The Sons of Hodir Reputation 250 (275 if human)
This quest involves killing elementals in Frostfield Lake and collecting items to take over to Fjorn's Anvil in the eastern part of the zone to use on the smoldering metal found there. Collect five of these and the quest is complete.
Polishing the Helm - Faction: The Sons of Hodir Reputation 250 (275 if human)
Go into the Hibernal Cavern, kill some Viscous Oils for guess what (their oil) and then return to the helm to polish it. This quest would be really easy and quick except for all the worms in your way. This quest may also take a little longer if there are others in the cave at the same time doing the quest.
Spy Hunter - Faction: The Sons of Hodir Reputation: 350 (385 if human)
Doing this quest involves using the Ethereal Worg's Fang on the worgs corpses which summons the Ethereal Worg to sniff out the spies. The only annoying thing about this quest is that he sniffs back and forth over the same area for a little bit before he actually uncovers the spy you need to kill.

As you can see in the image of reputation gains before doing these quests daily will get you a nice chunk of reputation for these various factions.

This guide will be continued as I do more daily quests in the future.

Daily Quest Locations Part One

2008-12-05T02:14:00.003-06:00

I start my daily quest circuit from Dalaran and head south into Dragonblight for the first dailies that I work on.

1. Defending Wyrmrest Temple - Faction: The Wyrmrest Accord Reputation:250 (275 if human)
This is a pretty fun and easy quest where you get to ride a Wyrmrest Defender (drake) to kill off the Azure dragons attacking the temple.
2. Planning for the Future - Faction: The Kalu'ak Reputation: 500 (550 if human)
This quest involves the collection of 12 Snowfall Glade Pups to turn back in to the quest giver.
Both of these first two quests are pretty quick and easy and even accessible in the lower 70s to start doing if you so desire.

From Dragonblight I fly into Borean Tundra to continue my dailies.

3. Preparing for the Worst - Faction: The Kalu'ak Reputation 500 (550 if human)
This is another easy quest to do, that is if no one else is doing it at the same time. You need to collect 8 Kaskala Supplies and turn then in to the quest giver to complete the quest. If others are doing it at the same time it might take you a couple of minutes more than if you were doing it with no one else around but otherwise its a really quick quest.
4. Drake Hunt - Faction: The Wyrmrest Accord Reputation 250 (275 if human)
This quest is also fairly easy, but one thing I have noticed is that the quest giver Raelorasz doesn't have the blue '!' above his head any longer once you hit 80, but don't worry the quest is still doable.

An idea for the next few posts

2008-12-04T21:39:00.000-06:00

After realizing that someone (thanks by the way :) ) had linked to my blog from theirs I realized I should probably post some meaningful information instead of my usual random ramblings which I tend to type up at work for later posting while being semi-distracted by work. So I have decided to make a post or posts detailing the locations in the various zones where to find all the daily quests I have discovered so far in my travels. I am not sure if I will do just one zone a day or a few a day yet, but that is my goal over the next few posts to get accomplished. Now that my paladin is 80 and I am still neglecting all my other toons for the moment working on some gear upgrades for him I have been spending a lot of time getting my reputation up with the various Northrend factions that have some gear I am wanting either by doing their dailies or just doing the quests that give reputation for their faction I thought it might be nice to post a small guide to daily quest locations. It will be by no means complete as of yet but I will update them as I find more to get it more complete. I might also list the gear they have that I am looking for as well even though that information is readily available off of better sites such as Wowhead.

Storm Peaks screen shot..

2008-12-04T05:08:00.002-06:00

In my exploration of Storm Peaks I came across this scene in Thunderfall. Now that I have done a few more quests out here its a little more active in this region, but this first time I saw it, it was like a battle frozen time.

Professions

2008-12-03T18:42:00.001-06:00

Its been a few days since my last post saying that I had hit 80 so I figured I should probably put another post up. I have been working on farming some ore to send over to the jewelcrafter to prospect and I haven't had too much luck pulling rare gems out. I have prospected about 10 stacks of Saronite over the past few nights and I have only pulled 2 rare quality gems out of all that prospecting so far. However I prospected 8 stacks for a friend and he got 7 rare gems out of his so I am guessing its just my luck. I am actually making pretty decent gold over the past few days selling the uncommon gems on the AH so I will keep putting them up until the prices on them drop which will probably start to happen fairly soon since more and more gems are getting put on the AH daily. I have also used some ore to get my engineering skill up some, but my blacksmith has yet to see any ore and his blacksmithing is still sitting at 350. All the ore is going to stay going to the jewelcrafter for now while I can still make money in the AH until the market drops off some then it will switch back to leveling up some of the other professions.
I have noticed that the prices for blue cuts and some green cuts has already dropped considerably down to as low as 2g per already but for the most part the other color gems cuts are still going from 18-30g each for now. Hopefully it will stay that way for a good while yet. The few rare cuts that I have gotten so far are selling for an average of 90-110g each for now but that price will also most certainly start to fall soon.
I still have a ton of arcane dust and planar essences from before the expansion and you cant give those mats away on the A now they are so cheap. If I wasn't trying to level my enchanting up on my mage somewhat I could be making a decent amount of money on the new dusts which are seeming to be going for around 7-8g ea on the AH right now but the disenchanting doesn't seem to be yielding as many mats as the disenchanting did in Burning Crusade but that might change as I get more high level green to disenchant.
They have also made it easier in wrath to create the Eternals (the new primals) from the various crystalized elements (the old motes) and vice versa. In BC you could combine the motes into the primals but it didn't work the other way around. In wrath it does. Right-clicking on the eternal element will yield ten crystalized elements. Converting Borean leather scraps into Borean leather has also became easier by simply right clicking on the leather scraps to make the leather meaning you no longer have to be a leatherworker to make leather from scraps which is nice for all my skinners.
Besides mining to get ore for my jewelcrafter I have been doing more quests out in Icecrown to get my reputation up with Argent Crusade and Knights of the Ebon Blade to obtain items from their quartermasters. I have gotten my reputation with both of those factions up to honored and am a little ways into revered with the Kalu'ak. My goal is also to get my reputation up with the Sons of Hodir to get some nice items from them as well although the quest chain to be able to start doing their dailies is quite long, 33 quests in the line to be exact. I am still not through all 33 quests to open up their dailies but I am hoping to get the last few quests in the quest line done over the next day or so to be able to start with their dailies as well.

Ding 80!

2008-11-30T04:31:00.000-06:00

Just a really quick post saying that I have hit 80 on my first toon!

Screenshots from Howling Fjord

2008-11-26T01:49:00.002-06:00

Just another quick post today with a few more screenshots that I have taken while leveling up in the expansion...

Riding the harpoon back to Valgarde.
Riding the plane out to the Explorers League Outpost.Just a rather scenic screen shot that I took while out exploring the zone.

My 'guardian' I got for a short time during a quest.

Screenshots from Borean Tundra

2008-11-25T04:19:00.004-06:00

A screenshot from inside the Nexus, which was the first and only instance in the new areas I have been inside yet.

Here I am doing a little drake wrangling for a quest in the Coldarra.

Here I am among the penguins out in the ice.

The vehicle you get to ride in on flights out of Fizzcrank Airstrip.
The dragon you ride from Amber Ledge.

The mammoth you get to ride on a quest out in Borean Tundra. As I said, it doesn't turn very well but otherwise it got the job done.

This is a screenshot from the coast where you meet your first Tuskarr and he give you quests. The fogginess is due to the Mist of the Kvaldir.

77

2008-11-25T03:14:00.001-06:00

So much for the increased amount of posts once the expansion hit a few weeks ago...

Well to be honest, I have been too busy leveling my paladin to post too much so far. I have managed to get him halfway through 77 so far and would have to say I have been really impressed with all the new zones I have seen so far. After the first starting quest I did on my paladin I switched from protection to retribution due to my severe lack of dps as protection spec. I went from roughly 300 dps to over 600 dps with a simple switch of specs which made questing alot faster and easier overall. I figured I would post a little bit about each zone I have been through so far to give my impressions of the zones.

Borean Tundra

This is the starting area that I originally started in and was able to quest there until around level 72 when I moved to the next zone. The overall zone layout is quite diverse from a sandy beach to a more barren area further inland I would have to say the most annoying quest area in the zone is the quests you need to do in the Coldrock Quarry. When I first went through and everyone was in there killing the mobs almost as soon as they spawned it wasn't too bad, but once the area cleaned out the concentration of mobs made the area quite annoying. I also found my first Cobalt nodes I mined as well in the zone. The various methods of flight from one flight point to another is quite interesting as well. At one flight point (Amber ledge) the flight master is a dragon, who will then fly you to wherever you need to go. At Fizzcrank airstrip, all flights leaving from this flight point are aboard an aircraft. The questing in the zone itself was fairly easy and you get your first taste of a quest where you get to ride a mount to complete, in this case a mammoth that lets you ride it in order to kill the quest objective. You might find the mammoth to not be very maneuverable as you are riding him to your destination however. You will also get the chance to do a quest to free baby murlocs as well as once you make it to The Coldarra to do a little dragon wrangling. The first of several daily quests are opened up in this area as well. One of them being the previously mentioned dragon wrangling quest and the other being gathering some supplies for the Tuskarr in their village along the coast. There may be a few more as well but these are the two that I have done.

Howling Fjord

I then went to the other starting area to do the questing out here. I made it from 72 all the way to 74 in this zone. One thing you may notice as the amount of xp needed to go from one level to the next doesn't increase by too much, only adding about 10 to 20 thousand xp per level as opposed to the almost hundred thousand between levels in the Burning Crusade. Instead of going back to the old world and taking the boat from Menethil Harbor I just took the turtle boats over to Howling Fjord, getting the flight points along the way. The boat brings you to the Tuskarr Village on an island on the western side of the zone and then you take a boat shaped gondola I guess you could call it to the mainland from the island. I then rode across the zone until I was on the mountain over looking Valgarde below. Instead of looking to find the road leading down I just bubbled and jumped off the edge and landed down in Valgarde to start questing there. The unique methods of transport dont end when you hit this zone either. Once you complete a quest chain starting in Valgarde that leads you across the fjord over to Nifflevar you get a key that lets you ride a flaming harpoon back down to Valgarde from this village. Its a rather unique method of transport. There is also a quest chain where you need to use a golem to complete various quests for an Explorers League outpost toward the southeastern end of the zone and once you are done they send you to Westguard Keep and you get to hitch a ride in the same golem all the way across the zone. Its only a one time flight however, unfortunately. There are two dailies in this zone that I know of as well, one once again from the Tuskarr helping the sea lions to find love and the other is a bombing mission from Westguard.

Dragonblight

Once I hit 74 and had the quest acheivement for Howling Fjord I moved over to Dragonblight to start questing here. I started at Stars Rest doing the quests located there, then moved to Wyrmrest Temple to do the quests out there. Here you will find some familiar faces if you have read any of the WoW books or are a fan of WoW lore in general. Doing the quests for them were fun. One you get to ride on the back of a dragon to fight off the attack azure dragons. Whereas on another quest you actually fight alongside your future self in defense of an hourglass at the bronze dragonshrine. You even get to do some quests at the behest of the black dragonflight who apparently are sharing an uneasy truce with members of the other fights. Once done there there is a small encampment to the north of there that will give you some quests. My final stop in the zone was to Wintergarde keep to quest for them some quests there. I found the quests were all turning green so I decided to leave the zone to head to Grizzly Hills to start questing there. Now that I know what I didnt know before I missed out on probably the best quest line in the expansion concerning the Wrath Gate and ending in the Battle for Undercity. I will have to go back and finish that quest chain in the next few days since I am really wanting to see how the quest line pans out.

Grizzly Hills

Trolls. A lot of the questing you will find here involves trolls in one way or another. I had basically entered this zone to quest as soon as I hit 75 leaving Dragonblight behind. Now trolls aren't the only quest objectives you will find in this zone, you also get to help doing some quests in Thor Modan fighting various dark iron forces and learning a little Titan lore in the process. You also get to kill some of your old favorite races from Winterspring, furbolgs. Nothing is really standing out in my mind as overly interesting to add in here. The quests were fairly fun and fast. Oh I forgot to mention you also get to rescue Harrison Jones and escort out of an area with some undead troll. On top of the escort out of the tomb, you get to help him fight a rather large snake which of course he hates before exiting. I still haven't quite finished questing in this zone because once I hit level 76 and ported back to Dalaran I got a quest that sent me to find good ol' Hemet Nesingwary in Scholazar Basin. The quest giver was kind enough to send me there through a portal.

Scholazar Basin

You are sent through the portal on a flying machine and emerge through the portal in Scholazar Basin only to get shot at almost immediately from a Venture Company plane that pulls in behind you. Your ride gets hit and you get to parachute down to the ground as your plane goes on to crash ahead of you a little ways and get your quest started to go find Nesingwary and see what he has to say. Before you can start doing all those great hunting quests you know and love from Stranglethorn and Nagrand he needs you to deal with the Venture Company who just shot down your ride into the zone. He send you off to go kill some of them and then on to kill the leaders in the same area before you get to start hunting for him. Also when you first get to his camp you notice there is no flight point there yet so you need to do some quests to repair the airplane before you can use it as a flight point. I won't go into too much detail on the hunting quests but the final quest you get to fight the elite on a mammoth of Hemet himself helping you. This zone is also where you will run into the Oracles which is an intelligent race or Gorlocs and the Frenzyheart tribe which are Wolvar and after doing some quests you get to pick which side to choose. I was really worried doing the starting quests because they were all for the Frenzyheart tribe and I wanted to be affiliated with the Oracles. Don't worry though, at the end of the quest line you will get to make your choice as to which faction you want to side with. This zone was the first zone I had entered where I actually found Saronite and Titanium nodes to mine. In fact I had maxed out my mining skill within about 45 minutes of entering the zone that first night. I made is to about 80% through level 76 before I had run out of quests to do in the zone and had to head back to Grizzly Hills to get the rest of the way to 77 to be able to fly once again.

Once I hit 77 and got my flying skill I went back to Grizzly Hills and got a little over half a level questing out there and will be heading back to Scholazar to get some more questing zone now that I can get them. I still haven't done any questing in Zul'Drak yet other then the Ring of Anguish quests which I completed for a nice weapon upgrade.

I really do enjoy being retribution and will stay that way for the foreseeable future until the implement dual specs hopefully sometime soon then I will make my other spec be holy for healing when I am needed to. I can imagine trying to level through all this new content as holy or protection with the diminished dps I am sure the specs would be doing as opposed to retribution. I am now running over 1000 dps just questing and it should only go up more as I get more well geared once I hit 80.

Once I start leveling my hunter over the next few weeks at a more relaxed pace I will try and post a little more often.

Random Rambling

2008-11-12T00:32:00.000-06:00

Servers are still down so I guess I will write another post. There is less than two days until the Wrath release now and I can’t wait to set foot in Northrend. My collector’s edition should be delivered to my door sometime on Thursday (hopefully before I go to work) and I will be ready to install and play it as soon as I get home. It was a good two or three days after Burning Crusade was released before I got the chance to play it due to my pre-ordered copy coming in late so this time I hope to get in on all the fun the first day of launch.

On another note, even after the nerf to ret paladins I still I am not having any trouble killing mobs quickly. I really haven’t noticed much of a change in my dps either. Keep in mind my ret pally is a fresh 70 with only quest gear and no pvp or reputation gear equipped and he is still managing to average 650-700+ dps while doing his Sunwell dailies. I am noticing a little more of a mana drain than before but it is still fairly reasonable and I do not have to stop to drink that often. If I find myself starting to get low on mana I will just seal and judge wisdom until it builds back up then go back to using Seal of the Martyr which I totally love using. As another poster said however, I sometimes forget to watch my health bar when using the seal and after a while find my health to be rather low, otherwise I have no problems with the seal at all and it hits fairly hard as well. My judgments will usually crit anywhere from 2300-2600 which takes a nice chunk of health out of whatever I happen to be fighting at the time.

Well that’s enough rambling for now, expect to see more posts once Wrath is released and I am actually doing new and exciting stuff again.

Invasion! ...sort of

2008-11-11T23:52:00.002-06:00

Servers are down so I thought I would post a screen shot from the Stormwind Invasion event from last night.

Exalted with all 5 cities

2008-11-08T03:23:00.002-06:00

Just a quick post. I finally finished getting exalted with the last two Alliance factions I needed to tonight and got my ambassador title.

Scourge Invasion

2008-11-06T21:14:00.002-06:00

The scourge invasion has been a really fun event that I have enjoyed thoroughly. I had a lot of fun rounding the mobs up 6-8 at a time and killing them all before moving to the next group of roughly the same size on my prot pally. Since they were all undead, the more I had at once the better it was. I was averaging over 800 dps when taking down the groups by hitting Holy Wrath every time the cooldown was up and constantly consecrating. With Blessing of Sanctuarys mana return mechanic I found myself never short on mana even though I had a fairly small mana pool. The healing was helped out my judging light on the mobs.

I have managed to get the Tabard of the Argent Dawn on five on my seventies at this time and may go ahead and try to get it on the sixth. The invasion points in the Burning Steppes have been largely ignored lately on my server and at times I would find myself alone with an entire invasion point to myself. I would go out there on my mage and kill the regular mobs until the rares spawned then kill them for the epics that I could disenchant into void crystals. About 10 minutes worth of work yielded me 12 void crystals which isn't too bad at all. I only wish the prices in the AH on my server hadn't dropped so much lately. Void crystals are selling from 17-20 gold each now and large prismatic shards are going for only 9-11 gold each. A few months ago the prismatics were easily going to 25-27 gold each and I don't even know how much the void crystals were going for.

Seventy number 6, etc

2008-11-04T21:58:00.000-06:00

Good Lord it has been a while since my last post. I am a bad blogger...a very bad blogger. Lets see what have I been up to lately. I got my sixth toon (ret pally) to 70 last week. I went through Sethekk Halls with a group right before I hit 70 and got a very nice axe that I got enchanted and gemmed up. This axe should do me for quite a while until I can find a better one somewhere in Northrend. I got his blacksmithing to 350 which is as high as I need to get it until making it out into Northrend as well since the new recipes for all professions are available starting at skill level 350 which will save the cost of mats in getting his blacksmithing all the way to 375. With my druid having inscription now I now have a toon with every profession in the game with all of the professions over 340.

Tyderium - 375 Miner/375 Engineer 375 Cooking/375 Fishing
Tyder - 375 Skinner/375 Herbalist
Tyderia - 375 Enchanter/375 Jewelcrafter
Tyderios 365 Leatherworker/375 Skinner
Tydir - 355 Inscription/375 Herbalist
Tyderic 350 Blacksmith/375 Miner
Tyderian 375 Alchemist/375 Herbalist
Valleriana 344 Tailor

So I have at least 2 toons each covering all the gathering professions, and I have one toon with maxed cooking/fishing. I will not be leveling fishing on any other toon however, it takes way too long.

The question remains however is which toon to level to 80 first. I figured on Tyderium first since he is my original main, with probably Tyderia being leveled some too just to get access to Dalaran at 71. I may end up having to level several simultaneously just to keep up with materials etc for all my various professions.

I have the epic flying mount on four of my six seventies and was debating getting the epic flying mount on the fifth 70 but I think I might hold off since flying mounts wont be usable until level 77 in Northrend anyhow. Plus I don't want to spend too much gold because I just don't know how much I will need to have while leveling/training in the expansion. I know I will need at least 6000 gold to get cold weather flying for all my max level toons I have now to learn cold weather flying on all of them. Hopefully once my jewelcrafter gets some of the new cuts in the expansion I will once again be able to start making a decent amount of gold again to stockpile for bigger purchases on down the line.

What I have been up to...

2008-10-21T03:37:00.002-05:00

This will just be a short post summarizing what I have been up to lately. I have been working on starting quests in the dwarven/gnome area to get rep up with Ironforge and Gnomergan Exiles on my mage. After the first few quests I had reached exalted status with Ironforge since I was most of the way there prior to starting the quests. As of last night I was a little over 4k away from exalted with Gnomergan and still have some more quests to do that will give rep with that faction. The I will be forced to turn in stacks of runecloth for the remaining bit of rep I will need to reach exalted status. The faction I have left to work on now is the Exodar. I am at about 13k/21k right now and still have all the starting area quests to do for them so hopefully that will get me very close to if not completely exalted. I figured she has the best chance to get the Ambassador title out of all my toons since she had the best rep with all of them at the start. She was already exalted with Stormwind and Darnassus before I even started working on this. The paladin doesn't have a chance to get this title since he was leveled before the changed to rep gains that took place after I started working on leveling the mage. He might be revered with one of the five cities but is no more than honored with the rest of them.

I also need to work on the hunter some more since I tamed a devilsaur once the patch hit last week and need to get the devilsaur who has yet to get a name to 70 from 65 by the time the expansion hits. So far I haven't played the hunter too much so I have only gotten my devilsaur a little over halfway through 65. If anyone reading this has a good idea for a name for my devilsaur please let me know. As of right now I still cant think of one. If I would have tamed a core hound like what seems like every other hunter on the server has he would have been named something like fluffy or something along those lines just for giggles but since I didn't I am having to think of a good name for the devilsaur. I did manage to get the Leeroy Jenkins achievement on my hunter done the other night as well. From here on I shall be known as Tyder Jenkins!

Patch problems...

2008-10-17T04:45:00.004-05:00

I tamed my Devilsaur.. hearthed back to Shattrath.. then ended up floating out in the middle of nowhere...

A small update a few days late..

2008-10-16T05:08:00.000-05:00

I hit 70 on the shaman on Friday last week and made the rest of his Fel Stalker set and bought two pieces of the reputation PvP set so work on his stats some. After all was bought and gemmed and enchanted I had 1178 unbuffed attack power. I then helped a lower level friend and some others in a run through Lower Blackrock Spire and my dps average in the instance was about 575 which I though was not too bad for a fresh level 70. It is going to be interesting to see how the new itemization of stats will affect his attack power. The old version granted 2 attack power per one point of strength where the new formula is 1 attack power per point of strength and 1 per point of agility. And there is also a talent down the enhancement tree that will make 1 point of intellect also equal 1 point of attack power so I am hoping to see an nice increase in attack power once he is respecced tonight.

I also have been collecting a ton of herbs to power level the inscription profession as well tonight. I have a complete bank tab full of herbs on top of even more sitting in my bank alts bags. I have over 2100 herbs right now which should hopefully be more than enough to get inscription to 350+.

2008-10-08T03:40:00.001-05:00

I have been playing around on the Public Test Realm off and on over the past few weeks on my paladin and hunter and for the most part have been really enjoying the new talents and skills that both classes will be getting. On the hunter I have tamed just about all the currently available exotic pets and a few of the non exotic ones to give them a test run. I think the stomping noise will get old pretty quick but have really enjoyed both the Devilsaur I had tamed and the Core Hound. If I tame a Devilsaur on the live realms I will have to get him the rest of the way to 70 prior to the expansion hitting just a little over a month from now. The fix to pet leveling should help out some that they announced late last week. Before a pet required 1/6th the xp of the hunter to level and when the patch hits this is getting changed to just 1/10th of the amount of xp the hunter requires. If they also implement the accelerated leveling from 60-70 that will also help out considerably.

I have been playing around with all the new holy talents on the paladin and the new judgment system etc. It was really fun playing as holy on the PTR but now that the nerfed Infusion of Light that granted instant cast Holy Lights after a Holy Shock crit I am a little less happy with it. But as it stands on the PTR I went from about 1600 + healing and 700 or so +damage to a little over 900 spell power which is really nice. I found that I would still be pretty much at full health and mana after every fight. I found it really easily to take out the elites at the forge camps in Nagrand with no trouble at all. And the groups of non-elites were also pretty simple to take down. With Holy Shock on a 6 second cooldown and with the increased judgement range it made things a lot simpler although it is still just seal, judge, holy shock, judge etc without too much variation so I can see how that would get old fairly quickly.

Last night I switched the paladin to protection to see how all the new protection talents worked out. I dont have the best protection gear but I manged with a mix of dps type gear a few protection pieces and the other few were still my holy gear. I ended up after the respec with about 1100 attack power and almost a 19% crit chance and just a hair over 10k health and about 5500 mana. While my mana pool got cut in half I still found it fairly easy to kill the same elites in Nagrand as well as the packs of elites. The main difference between Holy and Protection is the amount of buttons you push. There is more to do as protection as far as abilities go. While I no longer can judge from 30 yards I now have Avengers Shield to use to pull the targets that I want to kill. You also have Holy Shield you keep up to increase your block and to do holy damage to the enemy and Hammer of the Righteous which like Holy Shock is on a 6 second cooldown. The difference between the two skills is that Hammer of the Righteous will actually hit up to three targets (as will Avengers Shield) and Holy Shock only hits one target. I found my mana pool tended to stay more full when I was concentrating on one elite mob than when I was killing a group but the difference wasn't too bad. I did try one different mob as protection to see if I could take it on. I went after the Overseer of Hate who had 66k hit points and managed to solo him okay and never ran out of mana throughout the entire fight. I have not yet tried to kill him as holy spec but I might give that a try in the near future.

The only bad thing about the PTR is there is no DPS meter I can use to measure the Dps of the two specs to see which one puts out more. I guess that will have to wait until the patch goes live to more thoroughly test. Overall both specs seen to be quite enjoyable and I am not sure exactly which route I will go once the expansion hits.

A small update...

2008-10-07T17:37:00.000-05:00

So, it has been quite a while since my last post yet again... Well let’s see, I haven't done too much more with my warrior/priest combo. I managed to get the priest to 61 the other night but the warrior is still sitting at 60. I got the ret paladin to 61 as well and leveled his blacksmithing up to 314 so he is finally caught up on that. I was on vacation last week so I spent a lot of time mining the mithril and thorium he needed to get to 300. By the time it was all said and done I had about 350 bars each of both thorium and mithril which I managed to go through in about 20 minutes worth of Blacksmithing skill ups. I still haven't picked a specialization on him yet because I can't quite decide on armorsmithing and weaponsmithing yet. If anyone reading this has any ideas on which specialization to take please feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions.

The other thing I did on my vacation was decide to start leveling my shaman again and as of last night he was about 4 bubbles into 68. I had hoped to get him to 70 during my week of vacation but I didn't quite make it. I am sure I can get him the rest of the way to 70 within the next week or so. I had forgotten quite how much fun he was to play and now that I have my earth elemental totem which I got at level 66 and my fire elemental totem I got at 68 I get the chance to dish out a little more damage every 20 minutes or so, or can use them as a way out of a bad situation. The earth elemental has saved me on more than one occasion and I am sure will continue to do so in the future.

Now that my blacksmithing is over 300 on my second paladin I now have 300+ skill in every profession in the game with most all of them at 350+. So I need to decide which toon will be my inscriptionist come expansion time. I am debating on dropping one of my gathering professions on either my hunter or druid to take up inscription of now that I think about it I might make the deathknight I will create the inscriptionist.

Yes I am still here...

2008-09-22T14:13:00.002-05:00

For all two or or of my readers, yes I am in fact still here, just been really lazy about posting lately. I managed to get my warrior/priest combo to level 60 in just 2 days of played time which in my humble opinion is pretty darn fast. I then used the grant a level feature to level my second paladin that has been sitting at level 55 for the past 6 months to level 60. I decided to start leveling him some again to take advantage of all the cool retribution stuff coming out when patch 3.02 hits the live servers here in a few weeks. I could have made the 70 ret for a while but he really doesn't have the gear for it so therefore I turned to my old neglected paladin to get him levelled up some to take advantage of the new changes. The second paladin is 61 at this time and now I need to go back to doing a little trade skilling on him since his blacksmithing is still sitting at 225 and his mining is currently at 230. Blacksmithing is the only profession I don't have on a toon above 300 now. Thanks to my priest I am leveling I now have a 300+ tailor which was the last profession I didn't have yet. The only profession I am missing now is Inscription which I will pick up once the patch hits.

2008-09-10T03:42:00.001-05:00

Okay so it has been quite a while since my last post so I decided I should make a new post already. So I will just talk about what I have been up to lately. I haven't been through any raids and have only been in one heroic in the past few weeks. I got bored one night about two weeks ago and decided that I should level a new toon since I really do enjoy the leveling process and it would be a nice change of pace since it has been a while since I started a brand new toon. I know I have told myself in the past that I would never level another toon from level 1 again but as you can see I have changed my mind.

Since I wanted a toon that I could easily solo most things with and level fairly quickly I went with another hunter. I might have given her some upgrades though since I do have a high level leatherworker my hunter might have gotten some level 2 leggings with a Clefthide Armor Kit attached to them. So I ended up with a level 5 hunter with almost 500 health. This made the starting quests quite easy although I really couldn't restore but a fraction of my health with the food available to me at the time or bandages. I leveled her all the way to 30 when she got her mount and now she is sitting and soaking up the rested xp for a bit until I decide to go back and level her some more.

Then late last week I got another idea into my head that I needed to get a second WoW account so I could transfer my mage to so that I would be able to enchant all my other level 70's armor and weapons etc so I went out and bought another copy of WoW. Also with the Recruit-a-Friend promotion they have going on right now this gave me an excellent opportunity for some faster leveling and that free Zhevra mount once I had paid for two months worth of service on the second account. I went onto the WoW website and went to the Recruit-a-Friend page and sent out the recruitment email to myself with the free trial code. I created the second account then immediately upgraded it to a full Burning Crusade account about 20 minutes after creating the trial account. I have heard a decent amount of news lately and read several blogs dealing with dual-boxing and since I now had this second account I thought that I would give it a shot and see how it worked. I then had to figure out what classes to play. I gave it some thought and decided that I would give two classes a try that I have never really played before which is a priest and a warrior. Well that's not entirely true, I had played a priest before but only up to about level 5 or so and my highest warrior made it to level 11 before he also got abandoned. I thought I should give these two classes another shot since I think they compliment each other rather well. The warrior to kill everything and the priest for buffs, DoTs, and to keep the warrior alive. I play the warrior on my desktop PC with the priest running on the second account on the laptop that I set up on the computer desk next to the desktop so that I could control both fairly easily.

A few things about this Recruit-a-Friend program...

First of all I love it, the triple xp is nothing to sneeze at considering I left the starting level 1-5 area with both of them at level 8. I got out of the 5-10 part of the starting area at levels 12 and 13 respectively. Another fun thing is being able to grant a level to your friend with the joint account. Now this is only able to be don't on the second account that you as the veteran player invites, and then only to the veteran players toons that are a lower level than the player granting the level. I made the mistake of granting my warrior a level once because my priest hit level 11 a little bit before the warrior did dinging him up to 11 but I didn't realize at the time that they were granted a whole level and once I did that it made the warrior only a bar from level 12 instead of just getting him up to 11. That is why my warrior has stayed one level ahead of my priest since then. They will be the same level for a very short time but then the warrior once again gets a level ahead of the priest. Another thing you have the ability to do is summon your friend to you once an hour. This has also been helpful and has been like a second hearthstone to me. I would hearth one back to wherever it is set to (currently Stormwind) then use the summon a friend feature to get the other one there, that way I could you the other ones hearthstone a little later if I needed to get back to town quick. So far I have only managed to get both of these toons killed at the same time once, the rest of the time, which still isn't that often its only the warrior or the priest who dies. It usually ends up being the priest since I pay more attention to keeping the warrior alive and sometimes fail to notice the priests dropping health bar until its too late sometimes. I guess a drawback to this accelerated leveling would be the fact that I tend to forget to go and train their new skills as often as I should. I was wondering why my warrior didn't have dual wield yet at level 26 since I figured I should have gotten it at 20 like hunters get. So when I went to train at level 28 I realized that I hadn't trained since level 18...doh!

You can also miss out on doing some quests with all this extra mob and quest xp that you get when doing this. I still have several quests in Duskwood that I haven't even started yet and they are both over level 30 now. But there is still a quest or two that I want to complete in that zone before I head off the Stranglethorn Vale to get started out there tonight. I managed to hit 31 on the priest and 32 on the warrior as of last night and that is only after about four nights of playing these toons. I got them 4 levels each in just a couple of hours last night and will be trying to get them close to 35 tonight is at all possible. I was working on doing the cooking and fishing daily quests every day on my paladin as well until I started dual boxing these two toons and since then I have only managed to do those daily quests once, but my paladins fishing is now up to 369 so he only has a few more skill points to go.

As far as professions, for my priest, I went with tailoring (my first toon ever to take up this particular craft) and enchanting which is my second toon that enchants. The only 'profession' my warrior has so far is First Aid which I just started leveling yesterday. I have been leveling too fast to really do much profession work on the warrior since his professions would probably involve mining which take longer than I really want to spend working on for now. It was rather funny last night when I realized that my priest with Inner Fire up had more armor than my warrior did. I then went and looked at his gear and at level 29 he was still wearing a level 13 chest piece. I did visit the local auction house last night to get him a few upgrades.

Right now my warrior is Fury spec and the priest is Shadow spec although I may respec her to Holy if she stays in the healing role at least until I start playing her on her own.

Well that's about it for this rather extensive wall of text.

Quick post

2008-08-28T03:18:00.000-05:00

I post yesterday the quote from Eyonix about the upcoming pre-expansion patch before Wrath hits. Reading on WoW Insider today I saw that this patch will be released on the PTR sometime in the very near future. I think I will be copying my toons over there to test out some of these new talents and abilities prior to the patch hitting the live realms to start to get a feel for all these new changes, plus since I am not in the Beta I have been dying to try the new talents and abilities out. I will probably try to copy all four of my 70's over to try out as many of the changes as possible and report on my finding here on the blog. It has been quite a while since I was last on the PTR so this should be an interesting experience.

Pre-expansion Patch coming soon...

2008-08-27T02:07:00.001-05:00

Quote from Eyonix on the forums-

With the release of Wrath of the Lich King approaching, we wanted to provide you with some important information. In preparation for the expansion, we will be issuing a new content patch in the coming weeks. Much like the patch made available shortly before The Burning Crusade's release, this content patch is designed to bridge current game content with that of the expansion and will contain some exciting changes and additions.We have outlined some of the larger features scheduled to release with the patch below:

New class spells and talents
Stormwind Harbor
Barbershops in capital cities
Zeppelin towers outside of Orgrimmar and Tirisfal Glades
Two brand-new Arenas featuring challenging new layouts, terrain hazards, and moving obstacles
Guild calendar
Hunter pet skill revamp
New profession: Inscription

As mentioned above, this is not a comprehensive list, just some of the major highlights. We’ll post the full patch notes as soon as they’re available. Regarding Inscription, please note that all Burning Crusade players will be able to select Inscription as one of their two professions and level up to a skill level of 375 with it. Upon the release of Wrath of the Lich King, players who purchase and install the expansion will be able to continue leveling in Inscription and the other professions beyond 375.

More Wrath Paladin Stuff

2008-08-26T01:32:00.002-05:00

Warning: This is a long post.

I put up a post last week about why I think Blessing of Kings should be a baseline ability and no longer talented. Reading through the data on the Elitist Jerks forums I realized that losing blessing of kings and with Blessing of Salvation and Blessing of Light gone, the only blessings remaining that are not talented will be Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom.

Now I still think that it would be good to have blessing of kings as a baseline ability but once I started looking over the Elitist Jerks data i have decided that it may not be so bad without it. Figuring that Blessing of Kings increases all stats by 10% lets look at the impact on a holy paladin. The typical holy paladin does not stack much strength or agility so increasing them by 10% doesn’t result in much of an attack power or crit increase so you are not losing out on too much there. Spirit as a stat is also pretty much useless for paladins so again no real loss for the paladin. The biggest hits we will take are intellect and stamina. Say you have a total of 450 intellect or so typically with blessing of kings that would add another 45 intellect which translates to an additional 15 damage/healing soon to be spell power. Also you lose some spell crit out of the deal which isn't great. Another major hit you will be taking not having it will be in the stamina department, that extra 400-500 health loss will hurt a bit.

New talents
Considering this, looking at the new talents in the retribution tree we will still be losing the stamina and some spell power but will be gaining the spell crit back with talents such as Heart of the Crusader which increases the critical strike chance against judged targets by an additional 3%. And with the revamp of Divine Intellect we will be getting an extra 5% intellect now that it increases total intellect by 15% instead of the old version which only gave us a 10% increase. Both of these talents you can easily have at level 70 once you respec before heading up to Northrend.

Spell power changes/healing changes
Now on to some more stuff of the elitist jerks website. I figured out approximately how much spell power I will have on all my current gear once wrath hits by looking at the wrath stats on the gear I have now off of Wowhead. I am currently at a little over 1600 plus healing and 650 spell damage on my healing gear right now. When it all converts to spell power I will end you with about 920 spell power. That should be a big hit on the amount I heal right? Well, not really. I had been looking for the new spell coefficients for quite some time and finally came across them yesterday on Elitist Jerks. The old coefficients on holy light and flash of light respectively were 71% and 43% which would mean that with 1600 plus healing that would equal out to roughly 1136 bonus healing to holy light and 688 bonus healing to flash of light. The new coefficient for holy light is 166% of spell power and flash of light is now 100% of spell power which is a substantial increase to make up for the lower spell power number. Lets look at an example of 900 spell power to have a nice round figure. Holy lights bonus healing with the spell power coefficient is now 1494 and flash of light will be 900. Also they have revamped the base healing spells so that they heal for more, an example used on elitist jerks is holy light rank 11 which had its base healing increased by over 600.
Overall with the spell power changes and new coefficients as well as increased healing done by the base spells you will be healing for more once wrath goes live.

Spell reference:
Blessing of Might level 70 255 attack power
Blessing of Wisdom level 65 41 Mp5, level 71 73 Mp5

Seal and Judgement changes
All Seals have been reduced to 1 rank and now cost 14% of base mana. The duration has been increased to 2 minutes and are no longer consumed when a Judgement spell is cast. The effects can be triggered from all weapon based special abilities.

Judgement has been replaced by 3 new spells: Judgement of Light, Judgement of Wisdom, and Judgement of Justice. All Judgement spells are considered ranged attacks. All cause damage based on attack power and spell power.
Judgement spells do not consume the current seal.

The standard holy damage dealt by Judgement spells is 36% of attack power plus 58% of spell power; some seals may increase this amount.

Using the above information lets look at the kind of base damage judgements will do. Again I will use my stats as an example. If I have 900 spell power and 450 attack power, the base damage for judgements should be 522+162 or 684 damage..now adding blessing of might into the equation you will get 522+253 or 775 damage on judgement. This is just the base damage of judgements and some of the seals you will have will add to this base damage.

Seal of Blood and Seal of the Martyr now increase Judgement damage by 45% of weapon damage. (That is, unleashing the seal deals the standard judgement damage described above, plus 45% of weapon damage.)

Seal of Command now increases Judgement damage by 30% of weapon damage, 60% on stunned targets. (It appears that the entire judgement damage is doubled against stunned targets, not just the weapon-damage portion.)

Seal of Righteousness deals damage based on weapon speed plus an amount based on attack power and spell power, and increases Judgement damage by 25%.
Damage per second done by this seal is 5% of attack power plus 10% of spell power across all weapon speeds and types.

Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption damage over time duration has been returned to 15 seconds and is now applied on every swing, causing damage based on attack power and spell power. These seals increase Judgement damage by 10% per instance of the damage-over-time effect.
The damage done every 3 seconds is equal to 7% of Attack Power, plus an additional 3.5% of Spell Power per stacked instance of the debuff. (Hence at the maximum stack of 5, damage per "tick" will be 7% of Attack Power plus 17.5% of Spell Power.)
Melee hits with this seal when the stack is full will deal additional damage of 1.2% of Spell Power, times Weapon Speed (hence, damage per second equal to 1.2% of Spell Power) as well as refreshing the stack's duration.

Seal of Light restores health equal to 28% of attack power plus 28% of spell power. Judgement damage is standard.
Using the 900 spell power, 450 attack power this will be 252+196 or 448 health

Seal of Wisdom restores mana equal to 14% of the attack power plus 14% of spell power. Judgement damage is standard
This would end up being about 224 mana using the same figures.

Seal of Justice now has only one rank. Judgement damage is standard.

Judgement of Light heals the paladin based on 18% of attack power and spell power but can not trigger more than once every four seconds. 243 health restored.. Using 900 spell power and 450 attack power.

Judgement of Wisdom restores mana based on 9% of attack power and spell power but can not trigger more than once every four seconds. 121 mana restored.

Auras
Retribution Aura damage increased and now gains damage based on Holy spell power and the new base damage is more than two times the original damage. Causes 62 Holy damage to any enemy that strikes a party or raid member within 30 yards. The spellpower coefficient is 6.66% per hit. With 900 spell damage that adds 59 damage to it making it do about 121 damage at a time which is a lot better than the old 26 damage it would do.

A change of pace...

2008-08-25T23:16:00.000-05:00

I have been working on leveling the secondary professions on my paladin over the past few days for a nice change of pace. Although I admit fishing is not very exciting, but just play some music while you fish and it helps out a lot. As of three or four days ago my fishing skill was stuck at 180 or so and I hadn't even learned the cooking skill yet. Well a few days ago I decided to change that and have at least one toon with these skills prior to the expansion because you never know when they will come in handy. As of last night my fishing was up to 332 and cooking was up to 363. This also allow me to easily to the fishing and cooking daily quests now which I did last night and it didn't take long at all to do both of them so that was nice as well. My plans tonight is to level the fishing skill a little more and try to get a few more points in the cooking skill considering the fish I need now are fairly rare to get the skill up much higher. I know I will at least get it to 365 tonight because I have two fish in my bags now that will give me those two skill points. And of course I will get the fishing/cooking dailies done as well again tonight.

You read it... You can't unread it!

Ouch.. Fun in SSC

2008-08-25T03:46:00.003-05:00

Friday night I got my first taste of Tier 5 content in Sepentshrine Cavern. I was a pretty fun experience and we had enough paladins in the raid to give out every blessing that paladins can give with the exception of Blessing of Sanctuary.
Fully raid buffed I was sitting at just under 1750 plus healing which was pretty nice. I got an 8.7k crit Holy Light and a 3k Flash of Light crit so that was pretty cool I thought.

This was also the first 25-man raid I had been in other than the Gruul's Lair run I was in a little while back. We made it through all the trash on the way to Lurker okay but once we got to Lurker we ran into a brick wall so to speak. We made 3 or 4 attempts on him but could not get him down. We kept getting a third add on one of the islands that wasn't supposed to be there and it ended up taking out the people on the island fairly quickly because it was bugged and we couldn't hit it. As you can see in the last screenshot the last time I died it was underwater so I couldn't see how the rest of the raid did once I managed to die that time. Hopefully I will get to go in there again and this time see him die.

Hello Mr. Lurker...

Argh...

Offtopic Post: A little dose of 911

2008-08-23T02:13:00.002-05:00

This post will be off topic obviously but I figured I would write a little about it anyway. I work in a 9-1-1 center and we hear some rather interesting stuff to say the least. One minute you could be talking someone through the step of CPR and the next you could be taking a reckless driver call (Oh how I love taking those). Anyhow here are a few examples of some of the stuff that I have dealt with over the past 6 years and I thought I would share them as tips if you will and what to do when you call 9-1-1 and what its used for.

1. When you call 9-1-1 it is okay to keep the music in your car blaring as loud as possible because we enjoy trying to decipher what you are trying to tell us over your radio. (Please turn your radio down so that we can actually hear you talking to us)

2. No that cow will not eat your kids, but thank you for calling us to let us know it just might. (Got to just love the informed public)

3. If your cell phone has no service and is disconnected its okay to give it to your children to play with. We don’t mind talking to them at all. (Disconnected cell phones can always call 9-1-1 as long as they have power. Take the battery out of the phone before letting your child play with it)

4. We are really glad to hear it when you call to tell us about the grass fire along the side of the road and the fire truck is already out there since we obviously didn’t know that already. (I love when people call us to let us know that the fire truck or whatever is already out there, we appreciate you tying up a 9-1-1 call to tell us something we already know)

5. We at 9-1-1 love for you to call us whenever you don’t pay your cell phone bill and demand that we get your phone turned back on. (We are in fact not the phone company so please call them instead of us.)

6. We would just love to take a few police officers off the robbery in progress call just to address the vehicle parked in front of your house for the past 15 minutes since you are a tax payer and you deserve to have a police response as soon as you call us no matter what your problem is. (In larger cities you really need to understand this type of call may not be dispatched immediately because there are more serious calls currently being dealt with)

7. It is our fault that you have had to wait for longer than ten minutes for an officer response so please call us back to tell us that and to curse at us for not having officers to your house right away. (We have to dispatch priority calls first before the report type calls.)

8. Feel free to exaggerate and tell us you have been waiting for two hours for an officer to show even though it has only been 20 minutes. (Believe it or not, we know when you called us and exactly how long that you have been waiting)

9. Please feel free not to lock the keys on your cell phone and put it in your pocket so it calls us while you are walking or shopping etc. We just love hearing the swish swish swish of you walking down the street or wherever you may be with that phone in your pocket. (If the phone is in your pocket or purse or whatever make sure its keys are locked or we at 9-1-1 might hear some stuff you really don’t want us to and when we call you back we might ‘accidentally’ interrupt something that you and your ‘friend’ were in the middle of)

10. It is perfectly okay to go 10 miles under the speed limit on the highway and then call us to complain about all the people riding your bumper or passing you on the right hand side. (Here is a helpful tip, if this happens to you, and this might be hard for you but just try it. Move over into the right lane and see if that solves your problems before calling us)

I may try to throw in a little random 9-1-1 goodness into the blog every now and then just to change things up a bit.

Woot! This here is my 100th post! Just in case you wanted to know

Boredom set in..

2008-08-22T04:12:00.002-05:00

Last night, I couldn't find anything I was really interested in doing so I resorted to fishing. A very exciting way to spend about an hour or so. Well maybe not exactly exciting, but I did manage to get my fishing from 185 to 225 then headed off to go pick up the fishing quest in Dustwallow Marsh. The quest itself isn't too hard. The hardest fish out of the four to catch was the one you get in Feralas which took about ten minutes worth of fishing to get. Once I got all of them I went back to turn in the quest and can now skill up to 300 in fishing. Exciting huh? Aren't you glad you took the time to stop and read this?

Names..

2008-08-21T00:13:00.002-05:00

This post is going to be off topic for today. I am going to write a small post on names. As in what were their parents thinking when they named their kids this. In this particular case, this person was named after a flower. Now flower type names are not that uncommon and some are even sensible such as Rose or Lily. Simple easy to spell names. Now this particular parent must have really wanted to give their child a challenge whenever they were first learning to spell their name because this particular parent decided to name their child...wait for it..Chrysanthemum. Now how in the heck would you expect a four or five year old to learn how to spell that easily. You can't really shorten it to make it easier for a nickname or something like that other than maybe just calling them Mum but would you really want that to be your nickname?

An Idea.

2008-08-20T04:17:00.002-05:00

With all the new paladin talents and spells released so far in the beta I have been thinking about something that I think should change with the paladin class. All the new healing specs are going to be Holy/Ret combos with no points left over to throw in the protection tree. In this sense I think that Blessing of Kings should be a baseline spell instead of a talented one. If the talent needs to stay in the protection tree have them change it to Improved Blessing of Kings or something along those lines changing it from 10% increase in stats to 15%. That shouldn't be too overpowered in my humble opinion and that will open up the regular blessing for all paladin specs to have. The protection tree already has another talented blessing (Blessing of Sanctuary) further down in the tree which is fine because that is a blessing that is geared towards tanking whereas Blessing of Kings is just a stat increase in general. All my paladin builds throughout my leveling and limited raiding career have included Blessing of Kings because it is such a nice blessing to have. I am going to greatly miss having it come expansion time and I am sure when I start running the five-man groups in Wrath the other party members are going to miss it as well. I like the Holy tree and find with my current spec 40/21/0 I can still kill relatively fast and do not want to have to change over to Retribution or Protection come expansion just to be able to kill faster. I guess I will be running with Blessing of Wisdom/Might from now on and might try a respec to a Holy/Ret build and give it a try until the expansion does come out.

On an unrelated note, I noticed while in Karazhan with my mage last night I was running out of mana fairly quickly. I ended up having to use all three charges of the Conjured Mana Emerald and the last two mana potions I had as well as evocate once during the Prince fight and still found myself stuck using my wand towards the end of the fight. I really need to get some more mana regeneration on my gear I suppose. I will have to re-gem the gear I have some with some mana regeneration and re-enchant my chest piece to add another 6 mana per 5 sec and see if that will help the situation out some.

Mage in Kara

2008-08-19T02:03:00.003-05:00

I was doing a little questing on my shaman tonight when my brother sent me a tell and asked me to join their Kara run, they were just about to do Chess. So I switched over and joined the raid. We took down Chess and Prince. Although we had an unfortunate infernal drop right as prince died so we were taking some damage getting our badges off of him. It was a good run for me since I got one item off each of the two bosses that were nice upgrades for me. And I am now 3/4 the way through neutral with The Violet Eye now. It just goes to show you how often my mage has been in Karazhan. This was her second time inside this particular raid. I was second on the dps meter for the raid which wasn't too bad I thought. Out of the chess event I got the Ring of Recurrence and from Prince I got the Nathrezim Mindblade. As soon as I got out of Kara and back to Shat I immediately enchanted both items which ran me just about out of shards.

Overall I added about 2% crit and about 40-50 spell damage to my gear so now I am sitting at a little over 700 spell damage, which isn't great but its not too bad either.

What to do until the expansion hits...

2008-08-17T23:25:00.000-05:00

So, there are still a few months until the expansion is released and what is there to do now? I have gotten three out of four of my 70s exalted with Shattered Sun, with the fourth 70 sitting at revered currently. I have two 70s exalted with Netherwing. I am okay in the gold department thanks to my Jewelcrafting sales and daily quests. I have two toons in the mid-60s but really don't have the urge to really level them quickly so they are just kind of sitting around. So that really just leaves me farming herbs, ore and leather most days or dabbling some in the Auction House. It's close enough to the expansion so it really wouldn't be economical to buy new jewelcrafting plans considering they will be obsolete come the expansion so I sold the last two plans I had and hadn't learned yet. I am selling off some of the primals I have collected because those two will soon be replaced with new primals (eternals I think).

The guilds I am currently in are nice casual guilds that I am never really asked to go run this or that which is fine with me. By the time I get off work in the evenings at 11pm I am really not wanting to go run an instance usually. I do on occasion but I tend to prefer to spend most of my time solo and doing some dailies or farming etc. I like the guilds I am in, but at the same time most all my toons could really use some upgrades through instances or Kara etc. The bad thing to me about being in a bigger guild is being asked to go run stuff fairly often and then having to turn the person asking down. I really hate doing that but most times when I am on I have a good idea of what I want to be doing and the instance run might take a little too long to get done considering its already almost midnight before I even log on in the evenings after work. I am also looking at the prospect of having to cut down on my play time in the coming months which is something I am really not looking forward to but can't be helped unfortunately.

I guess I need to bite the bullet so to speak and just go ahead and join the larger guild so I will have more opportunities to get better gear. I would probably join on my paladin considering the guild he is currently in is pretty much dead anyway and all my other 70's are in guilds that I still have friends in from the guild I was in when I first started playing the game back in September of 2006. The bad thing about getting my paladin in this bigger guild is that he is in the least need of upgrades as most of his gear his Kara level or higher.

I keep getting asked to move one of my toons into this guild or that but just haven't done it yet. One of the guilds is running Tier 5 content I am pretty sure while the other is doing Kara/ZA etc still. This would be fine with me because I really do enjoy running Kara and I have yet to see the inside of Zul'Aman. My paladin just needs maybe another half clear or so of Karazhan to hit exalted then I would like to get my hunter and mage in there because they could really use the upgrades. I hit revered with Shattered Sun on my hunter and bought the crossbow you can get from them to upgrade from my Valano's Longbow which I have had since I hit 70. I would really like one of the nice bows or guns that you can get out of Karazhan. My mage could also use some nice upgrades considering she is still in some greens and four pieces of the level 70 reputation PvP set. Her spell damage is okay thanks to the epic sword she has but is severely lacking in the spell hit/crit/and intellect departments. My druid could use some upgrades but he has some Kara gear now since he has been in there a few times already and has just hit honored with the Violet Eye. He has an okay tanking set and a fairly decent dps set. I would like to know about one thing though, the season two arena (now honor gear) feral pvp seat has healing on it, why? Season three and up has bonuses more geared to feral play but the season two gear and reputation PvP gear all has healing on it for some reason.

I would like to have all my 70's fairly well geared for the expansion once it hits so I may join that bigger guild just to have the opportunity to do that.

I wants it!!

2008-08-17T02:13:00.002-05:00

Image from MMO Champion

I was over at MMO Champion tonight and came across some of the new mounts in the expansion... all i can say is I wants it!!!!

Emeriss 1, Raid 0

2008-08-15T05:01:00.005-05:00

So, I signed onto WoW tonight when I got home from work to check on some auctions and do a daily or two. I sign on to my mage and get a tell from my brother telling me to log to my paladin because he was needed. I asked why this way and he said they were going to try and take down a world dragon in The Hinterlands.

I thought that could be fun so I switched over to join the raid that was going after him. Pre-BC this guy was a 40-man raid and tonight we attempted him with about 20-25 toons from level 68 and up just for the heck of it to try and get him down. None of us to my knowledge had ever really attempted to kill one of these before so we had no idea what we were doing. We were basically just out to have a little fun and try something a little different. Well the best be did was getting him down to about 29% but it was pretty fun nonetheless.

So we didn't beat him but I did get a few cool screen shots of Emeriss in action.

Sir Isaac Newton's Final Resting Place?

2008-08-15T04:53:00.003-05:00

I was out in Nagrand farming some Motes of Air from a Windy Cloud or two when upon landing on this floating island I came across this rather unfortunate guy here. It seems that someone was just sitting here minding their own business when a runaway axe happened to find him.

Poor guy.

A new area and new quest..

2008-08-15T01:54:00.003-05:00

Reading a post on Ardent Defender the other day he was talking about a little known spot (at least to me) that he has been mining/skinning. It is up in the northern part of Shadowmoon Valley at Coilskar Cistern. In this area there is a cave, a rather large cave in which you can find plenty of Coilskar Cobras to skin and there was also no less that four nodes of Adamantite Ore in there as well.

I was in there on my druid who is a skinner exploring the cave some and skinning all those cobras to get some cobra scales. Almost all the way to the back of the cave there was a room in which 5 captured water spirits (water elementals) where entombed. I thought thus was rather unique so I took a screen shot of them. I then continued my exploring all the way to the back of the cave where I noticed a named naga and in front of her there was a person named Earthmender Wilda entombed as well and it was being suspended in the air by some lightning bolts of some kind. So I stealthed up to the named naga a 69 non-elite and killed her. Then the bubble holding the Earthmender in it dropped the the ground and the person inside was freed from it. Lo and behold once this happened an exclamation point appeared above her head. A quest, and on top of that it was an escort quest all the way back to the mouth of this rather large cave.

It was a level 70 quest recommending a group of two to complete it. I have done many escorts in my WoW career but I would have to say this one was the most fun. Wilda was putting out some decent dps with her lightning bolt/chain lightning spells while I was also killing off the mobs in our way. When we reached the room with the captured water spirits in it and killed the two cobras by them the water spirits were released and so now it was me, the person I first freed and 5 water elementals all together fighting our way the rest of the way out of the cave. It was just awesome. I would shift into bear and charge into a group of 2 or 3 naga and then they would get hit with chain lightning and bombarded with water bolts from the elementals. Stuff was dropping so fast the escort was a breeze.

Just make sure when you do this escort, and I highly recommend that you do just for the fun factor, make sure you try and hit the mobs first or else you would not be able to loot the corpses afterwards. The rewards were not too great but they weren't too bad and you did get 22g for completing the escort which is a decent chunk of change for such an easy (in my opinion) escort quest. So, if you have never found this cave, I encourage you to go out and find it and you can get a good amount of leather/scales and ore out of it and while you are in there, go ahead and do the escort quest as well. There are a good amount of mobs in there but they are not too tough and just about any class should be able to handle them okay. It would be a little easier if the toon you take in there was capable of decursing since there is a curse the naga in there like to put on you but other than that they are not too bad.

I may try the quest on my holy paladin just to see how easy it is for a toon without stealth and real high dps to get back to where the escort is then to do it. The only bad part about it is that the paladin doesn't skin and that could be potentially a lot of cobra scales wasted.

New Engineering Goodies Posted on World of Raids

2008-08-12T02:06:00.002-05:00

New Engineering Goodness..

Scrapbot - Creates a mechanical vendor that buys anything. The scrapbot leaves after 5 min.

Nice I suppose.. just a repair bot minus the repairs, question remains to be answered if how cheap the mats for this will be.

Nitro Boosts - Permanently attaches overpowered nitro boosts to a pair of boots, allowing a skilled engineer to greatly increase run speed for until cancelled. The nitro boosts can only be activated every 5 minutes.

Super speed for boots, I will take two, I just wonder what kind of malfunction it will have.

Gnomish Lightning Generator - Generates a bolt of lightning to strike an enemy for 2250 to 2750 Nature damage. This entire device is made of metal, and the bolt occasionally hits you.

Typical Gnomish Engineering at its finest. It will only backfire...sometimes.

Belt-Clipped Spynoculars - Permanently attaches a pair of spynoculars to your belt, allowing you to see far away. Only a skilled engineer can use the spynoculars.

Interesting belt attachment

Flexweave Underlay - Permanently attaches a flexweave underlay to a cloak, allowing a skilled engineer to turn the cloak into a parachute to fall slowly for 10 sec. The cloak can only be used every 5 minutes.

Not too bad but the slow fall duration is a little short so don't go jumping off any real high cliffs with this equipped :)

Heartseeker Scope - Attaches a permanent scope to a bow or gun that increases its ranged critical strike rating by 40.

More scopes makes my hunter happy.

Micro Stabilizer - Attaches a permanent micro stabilizer to a bow or gun that increases your ranged hit rating by 40.

Again with the huntery happiness.

Hyperspeed Accelerators - Permanently attaches hyperspeed accelerators to a pair of gloves, allowing a skilled engineer to increase their haste rating by 340 for 8 sec. The gloves can only be activated every few minutes.

Since my paladin is the engineer this could help get out some faster heals in a pinch.

Personal Electromagnetic Pulse Generator - Permanently attaches a high-powered device to your belt, allowing you to stun nearby mechanicals. Only a skilled engineer can activate the modified belt.

I wonder if this is a hint that we will be dealing with more mechanical mobs in the expansion?

Saronite Grenade (45 yd range, instant) - Inflicts 540 to 900 Fire damage and incapacitates targets for 3 sec in a 3 yard radius. Any damage will break the effect. Unreliable against targets higher than level 90.

The upgraded grenade with stun component.

Saronite Bomb (45 yd range, instant) - Inflicts 1125 to 1875 Fire damage and medium siege damage in a 10 yard radius.

Interesting comment about medium siege damage, possible uses in Lake Wintergrasp PvP zone?

I also really hope the motorcycle mount will be engineer created as well so we will have a nice crafter land mount to go with our flying mounts.

I also noticed today at max level tailoring, tailors will be able to make a flying carpet flying mount. Now how awesome is that? Makes me wish I had a tailor.

Paladin Glyphs

2008-08-11T04:58:00.003-05:00

From MMO-Champion.com...
Blizzard released some of the inscriptions that apply to Paladins... the list is below
Paladin (Skills List / Talent Calc. (8770))
Glyph of Seal of Command - Increases the chance of dealing Seal of Command damage by 20%.
Glyph of Hammer of Justice - Increases your Hammer of Justice duration by 1 sec.
Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom - Your Blessing of Wisdom causes your target to also regenerate health at the same rate as mana.
Glyph of Hammer of Wrath - Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.
Glyph of Crusader Strike - Your Crusader strike deals 20% more damage when your targe is incapacitated or stunned.
Glyph of Consecration - Increases the radius of Consecration by 1 yards.
Glyph of Righteous Defense - Increases the chance for your Righteous Defense ability to work successfully by 8% on each target.
Glyph of Avenger's Shield - Your Avenger's Shield hits -2 fewer targets but for 100% more damage.
Glyph of Turn Evil - Reduces the cooldown on Turn Evil by 5 sec.
Glyph of Exorcism - Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 0 sec.
Glyph of Blessing of Kings - Your Blessing of Kings also increases attack power on affected targets by 3%.
Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light heals for -50% less initially but also heals for 196% of its inital effect over 1 to 0 sec.
Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.
Glyph of Blessing of Might - Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
Glyph of Lay on Hands - Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.
Glyph of Seal of Wisdom - While Seal of Wisdom is active the cost of your healing spells is reduced by -5%.
Glyph of Seal of Light - While Seal of Light is active the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.

On an unrelated note, my druid hit Exalted with Shattered Sun Offensive tonight.

Polar Bear Form FTW!

2008-07-29T05:25:00.001-05:00

A quote from the latest patch notes on Inscriptions:

Glyph of the White Bear - Changes the appearance of your bear and dire bear forms to that of a polar bear.

This could be the first of several possible model changes for druid forms.

Druid back in Karazhan

2008-07-26T23:48:00.003-05:00

This afternoon we went into Karazhan where I got a little more tanking practice in. No drops for me but we one-shotted all bosses that we did except for Opera due to having no interrupts at all on our first try. We did all the bosses today except for Nightbane and Netherspite. Although we did make an attempt or two at Nightbane without any success.

I got to pull all the mobs down the stairs prior to Moroes which was pretty easy with the exception of me not pulling them back far enough once and getting myself killed.

On Moroes there were three druids in the group and therefore we just all went bear form and and held all the adds with me and the main tank holding Moroes as well. We took them all down with no problems on the first attempt.

We then went on to one shot Maiden and headed to Opera to discover we had Romulo and Julianne and we had no interrupts to stop Julianne's heals. We went ahead and tried it and it took quite a while but we got her down, then Romulo down. Once Julianne and Romulo both came back together it was my job to tank Julianne. Since there were no interrupts it was pretty much me and the rest of the raid working on getting her down while one or two others worked on Romulo. It took a while and it almost worked the first time but once we didn't quite get Romulo down the rest of the way once we got Julianne down fast enough and they both repopped and we then wiped due to mana issues at the end. On the second attempt we added a rogue to the group which made it a lot simpler and they then dropped without much of a problem

Once we got to Curator the main tank said that I would be the one tanking Curator so that was my first time solo tanking a boss in Karazhan and I would have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

We then proceeded on to Illhoof and one shotted him as well and on this fight I got to tank Kil'Rek and Illhoof went down with no deaths at all. The punk still didn't drop the staff but hopefully it will drop for me soon maybe.

We then went on to one shot Shade, Chess, and Prince to finish off the evening. I got a total of 18 badges for the run today which isn't too bad for a few hours of play time.

Another Transporter Malfunction..

2008-07-26T04:11:00.003-05:00

After a few successful uses of the transporter I got a new malfunction tonight. That's right, it turned me into a chicken. The debuff lasts three minutes.

'Apparently there was a chicken near the pad when you materialized.' - the debuff text.

On another note I was leveling my neglected shaman again today and managed to get him halfway through level 62.

More Beta Patch Notes: Updated

2008-07-25T19:10:00.002-05:00

Quote from Blizzard staff
Death Knight
Blood
Will of the Necropolis now increases your expertise by 3/6/9 instead of 4/8/12
Blood Gorged now only affects melee damage
Frost Aura increases your Frost Resistance by 32/65 instead of 22/45.
Unholy
Corpse Explosion base damage has been changed from 60 to 216.
Improved Corpse Explosion now casts a disease on enemy target that deals 36% of the explosion damage over 15 seconds instead of 9 seconds.
Unholy Aura increases your Shadow Resistance by 32/65 instead of 22/45.
Druid
Balance
Moonkin Form mana cost has been changed from 22% base mana to 538 mana.
Typhoon mana cost has been increased from 475 to 645 and the range changed from 20 to 24 Yards.
Force of Nature mana cost has been changed from 12% base mana to 284 mana. Cooldown has been reduced from 3 to 2 minutes.
Starfall mana cost has been increased from 655 to 866. Range increased from 30 to 36 yards. Damage seems to be changed as well but it looks like the version displayed in the talent calculator isn't the first rank of the spell.
Feral
Faerie Fire range has been increased from 30 to 36 yards.
Primal Tenacity now increases your chance to resist Stun and Fear mechanics by 5/10/15% (Old version : Reduces the duration of Fear effects by 5/10/15% and reduces all damage taken while stunned by 5/10/15%)
Improved Mangle now reduces the cooldown of your Mangle (Bear) ability by 7% (instead of 0.5 sec) and reduces the energy cost of your Mangle (Cat) ability by 2.
Restoration
Tree of Life mana cost reduced from 28% base mana to 978 mana.
Flourish mana cost decreased from 585 to 450. Amount of healing decreased (Rank 1 now heals 672 HP instead of 1610).
Hunter
Survival
Hunting Party now gives your critical shots a 20/30/40/50/60% chance to restore 2% mana, 10 energy, 4 rage, or 10 runic power to all member of your party. (Old version : 20/40/60/80/100% chance)
Potent Venom now increases the amount of damage done to targets afflicted by your Wyvern or Serpent Sting by 1% regardless of the rank. (Old version : Increased the damage by 1% for each rank, up to 3%)
Mage
Arcane
Arcane Impact is now called Spell Impact and increases the critical strike chance of Arcane Explosion, Arcane Blast, Blast Wave, Fire Blast, Ice Lance, and Cone of Cold by 2/4/6% (Old version : Was only affecting Arcane Explosion / Arcane Blast)
New Talent - Student of the Mind (Tier 3) - Increases your total spirit by 4/8/12%
Arcane Potency now requires 1 Point in Presence of Mind instead of 5 points in Arcane Concentration
Potent Spirit has been removed
New Talent - Arcane Flows (Tier 8, requires 1 point in Arcane Power) - Reduces the cooldown of your Presence of Mind, Arcane Power, and Invisibility spells by 30 secs.
Netherwind Presence now increases your spell haste by 2/4/6% (Old version : Gives your Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and Forstfire Bolt spells a 1/2/3/4/5% chance to cause the next Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt to be instant.)
Frost
Arctic Reach doesn't influence Ice Lance anymore
Paladin
Holy
The amount of health point healed by Holy Shock has been increased by 66%. (eg. Rank 7 now heals for 2401-2599 instead of 1431-1549)
Infusion of Light now reduces the cast time of your next Holy Light spell by 1.3/2.5 secs instead of 1.25/2.5 secs.
Protection
Holy Shield will now give you 6 charges instead of 4.
Avenger's Shield mana cost reduced by 70%, damage has been reduced. (eg. Rank 3 now deals 494-602 damage for 780 mana instead of 705-861 for 1745 mana)
Guarded by the Light now reduces the mana cost of your Consecration, Holy Wrath and Avenger's Shield by 15/30% (Old version : Whenever your parry or dodge an attack you have a 10% chance to reduce the mana cost of your next Consecration, Holy Wrath, or Avenger's Shield spell by 25%/50%)
Retribution
Improved Blessing of Might now increases the attack power bonus of your Blessing of Might by 10/20/30/40/50% instead of 4/8/12/16/20%
Vindication now has a chance to reduce the target's attributes by 10/20% for 15 seconds. (Old version : 5/10% reduction)
Pursuit of Justice is now a 2 rank talents (was 3), reducing the change to be hit by spells by 1/2% and mounted movement speed by 9/15% (Old version : 1/2/3% hit and 5/10/15% mounted speed)
Repentance now costs 395 mana instead of 9% of base mana.
Rogue
Subtlety
Fixed a typo in Honor Amongst Thieves, now gives a 10/20/30% to gain a combo point when you or someone in your group critically hits with a damage, healing, or spell ability. (Was ... 100/200/300%)
Shaman
Elemental
Convection (Tier 1) is now a 3 points talent, reducing the mana cost of Shock, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Thunder and Lava Burst spells by 4%/8%/12% (Old version : 5 points and 2/4/6/8/10%)
Concussion doesn't affect Lava Burst and Thunderstorm anymore.
Storm Reach now also increases the radius of your Thunderstorm spell by 10% along with the range improvement on Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning.
Elemental precision increases your chance to hit with Fire, Frost, and Nature spells by 2/4/6% and reduces the threat caused by these spells by 4/7/10% (Old version : 1/2/3% hit and 10/20/30% threat)
Astral Shift now has a 33/66/100% chance to shift into the Astral Plane reducing all damage taken by 30% (Old version : 100% chance to reduce all damage taken by 10%/20%/30%)
Thunderstorm range increased from 10 to 12 yards, damage increased from 595-679 to 640-729, knockback stays 20 yards.
Enhancement
Improved shields now increases the amount of Mana Shield orbs by 10% instead of 5%, improvements to Lightning Shield and Earth Shield stay the same.
Shamanistic Rage now gives your successful melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana equal to 15% of your attack power. (Old version : mana regeneration equal to 30% of your attack power)
Maelstrom Weapon now reduces the casting time of any spell by 4/8/12/16/20% when you critically hit with a melee weapon. (Old version : was only affecting Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst)
Feral Spirit now lasts 45 seconds instead of 30 seconds.
Restoration
Nature's Guardian cooldown has been changed from 8 to 5 seconds.
Spirit Link now also breaks if a shared damage would reduce a target's health below 20%. Warrior
Arms
Bloodletting has been renamed to Improved Rend once again and doesn't increase the amount of damage caused by Bloodbath anymore.
Fixed a typo in Second Wind, Stun or Immobilize effects generate 10/20 rage. (Old version ... 100/200 ^^)
Protection
Shield Specialization now gives you a chance to generate 1 rage when a block occurs. (Old version : 2 Rage)
Warlock
Affliction
Death's Embrace (Tier 9) does not affect Shadowburn anymore. Haunt has replaced Shadowburn here.
Haunt (Tier 11) has been changed from a 10 sec cooldown to a 15 sec cooldown.
Demonology
Soul Link (Tier 3) is not required for Unholy Power anymore.
Master Demonologist (Tier 6) is no longer required to take Demonic Empowerment (Tier 7)Destruction
Aftermath (Tier 2) changed to 2%/4% chance to daze the target for 5 sec. (Previously 5/10% for 5 sec)
Chaos Bolt (Tier 11) changed to an 8 sec cooldown. (Previously 12 secs)

The Moon - another shot

2008-07-24T02:29:00.003-05:00

I took another fairly decent photo of the moon tonight so I thought I would post the photo I took.

Transporter Malfunctions - A Gallery

2008-07-24T02:25:00.003-05:00

I finally made my Ultrasafe Transporter: Toshley's Station tonight and on its first use it malfunctioned :) Anytime you step through a portal or relog you change into yet another race.

No more Blessing of Kings...

2008-07-22T19:39:00.000-05:00

This post is all speculation using the latest Beta info from Wowhead and MMO Champion so not all these abilities or amounts healed/damaged could be 100% accurate but its still fun tp speculate anyhow

With the changes to the talent trees in Wrath of the Lich King I have decided on a build of 46/0/15 upon entering Northrend. I know I am going to miss Blessing of Kings but with the reworked ret talents that tree looks a lot more promising than the talents in the prot tree.

Level 70 46/0/15
A quick summary of this new build:
Holy -
Seventy Percent chance not to lose casting time when casting healing spells which with Concentration Aura the heals will be uninterruptable.
12% increase in amount healed by Holy Light (HL) and Flash of Light,(FoL) 12% increase in effectiveness of Holy Shock (HS).
Intellect increased by 15%.
60% mana return on HL, FoL, and HS crits
Guaranteed crit on HL, FoL of HS every two minutes
6% increase in crit chance for HL and HS
5% increase in crit chance for all Holy spells
HS crits make the next HL spell instant cast
Spell power increased by 35% of your total Intellect.
Range of Judgment spells increased by 20 yards.
2% haste for 30 seconds after every judgment spell.
9% increased damage done by Seal of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance
Retribution –
15% reduction in mana cost of Judgment and Seal spells
Reduced cooldown on Judgment spells by 2 seconds
3% increased crit chance of all attacks against judged targets
5% crit increase on all spells and attacks

In summary against a judged target:
A total of 19% increased crit chance on Holy Shock
A total of 13% increased crit chance on all Holy spells

In summary against a non-judged target or ally:
A total of 16% increased crit chance on Holy Light or Holy Shock

Taking an example of say a 15% crit chance before talents on Holy spells would mean that once a target is judged you will have a whopping (yes I used the word whopping) 34% chance to crit on a Holy Shock spell, even if the target wasn’t judged you would still have a 31% crit chance. That is basically telling you for every 3 Holy Shock spells you cast (now on a 6 second cooldown) 1 of them should be a crit. Not too bad if you ask me.

If you had 500 intellect that’s a free 175 spell power as well

Now for the Level 80 Paladin build
48/0/23
Summary of additional talents in the Level 80 build:
Holy-
Spell Haste is now 6% for 30 seconds after every judgment spell
Retribution-
50% increase in Retribution Aura damage done
3% increase in all damage caused against Humanoids, Demons, Undead and Elementals
Increases spell power by 30% of your attack power
Critical Healing spells now heal the target for 60% of the amount healed over 12 seconds.

So in this case since you are a Holy Paladin and probably haven’t stacked too much strength for all that attack power we will use an example of 500 attack power. This is give you another free 150 spell power.

If you just cast a critical Holy Light Spell that healed the target for lets say 8000 hit points this would mean you would now give them a HoT (Heal over Time) for another 4800 damage healed over 12 seconds. Not too bad at all for one spellcast.

Now let’s have one more example:
Let’s say that you hit Divine Favor to guarantee that next Holy spell to crit and you used a Holy Shock to heal another player… This critical Holy Shock then will allow you to cast that instant Holy Light spell right afterward. Then we will go on to say that the Holy Light spell on your target crits as well. This will make for a whole lot of healing in next to now time with the HoT applied to your target as well.

Now for some numbers just for fun.
Lets use an example of the paladin in question having 1000 spell power
Level 80 Holy Shock Healing – 1431-1549 or 1851-1969 with spell power figured in
Level 80 Holy Light Healing – 4888-5444 or 5609-6154 with spell power figured in
Then we will figure in the 150% crit bonus to arrive at our actual totals using a median value on the spells listed above so 1910 Holy Shock and 5881 Holy Light prior to the crit multiplier.

2865 Holy Shock + 8820 Holy Light for a total of 11685 healing in that 2 second or so period accounting for the global cool down. Then you add the 60% HoT component which is 8820*.60 = 5292 more damage healed over 12 seconds.
So that would be direct healing of 11685 plus a 12 second HoT for another 5292 healing
All together this will totally heal the target for 16977 in about 14 seconds time.
That is A LOT of healing done. Now this is just an extreme example and not something that would happen on a regular basis unless you are having to keep up with some rather intense healing and are casting more Holy Lights than Flash of Light.

I know at least right now in my case I can usually keep the main tank up just fine in Karazhan using Flash of Lights with the occasional Holy Light when needed.

I think this is a large enough wall of text for now.

Accelerated Leveling!!

2008-07-22T19:38:00.000-05:00

According to Tigole on the forums...

They are planning on accelerating the leveling process from 60-70 just as they did from 20-60 probably in an effort to get people out to Northrend even faster. I will try and keep up with updates on this as they are available and get further info posted as its available.

I present you..the Moon

2008-07-22T05:34:00.002-05:00

Okay, so this isn't a WoW related post, but I have been trying to get a good picture of the moon over the past few weeks and the one I took tonight turned out fairly well considering the camera I am using.

So here it is, enjoy, and more WoW info on the next post.

Paladin Beta Patch Notes

2008-07-21T20:32:00.003-05:00

Paladin Patch Notes from Wrath of the Lich King Beta
with some commentary on changes by me.

· All Auras now affect all party and raid members within the area of effect.

· Anticipation (Protection) moved to tier 1, now increases chance to dodge by 1/2/3/4/5%.

· Avenger's Shield (Protection) cast time reduced to .5 seconds, duration increased to 10 seconds.

· Avenging Wrath no longer causes Forebearance, damage increase reduced to 20%, now increases healing done by 20%. -this looks pretty awesome overall, while you lose the extra 10% damage increase (used to be 30%) it now effects healing as well and no longer locks you out of your bubble should you need it.

· Blessing of Freedom renamed Hand of Freedom. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana.

· Blessing of Light and Greater Blessing of Light removed. Their effects have been folded into all relevant abilities.

· Blessing of Protection renamed Hand of Protection. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. All ranks now cost 6% of base mana.

· Blessing of Sacrifice renamed Hand of Sacrifice, is now only 1 rank and transfers 20% of the damage taken to the caster, duration reduced to 12 seconds, cooldown increased to 2 minutes. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana. - no more keeping Blessing of Sacrifice up on the tank during the Maiden fight but I guess come expansion time we won't have to worry about the Maiden fight much any more.

· Blessing of Salvation renamed Hand of Salvation, now reduces total threat on the target by 2% per second for 10 seconds while also reducing all damage and healing done by 10%. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana. -hmm...no more Blessing of Salvation on party members for agro control. I have read both good and bad things about this change. Good in the fact that it makes it one less buff to worry about, bad that this is now a situational ability and may make a paladins job a little tougher having to watch agro of all raid members at all times to know when to use it.

· Conviction (Retribution) now increases critical chance with all spells and melee attacks. - awesome change, 5% crit increase on healing spells, I'll take it.

· Divine Intellect (Holy) moved to tier 2, increases total Intellect by 3/6/9/12/15%. - more Intellect (5% more to be exact) is never a bad thing.

· Divine Intervention cooldown reduced to 20 minutes. -is it wrong that I have played a paladin for two years and never knew this ability had a cooldown. I do keep the reagents on me but have maybe only used it once in my entire tire playing WoW.

· Divine Protection and Divine Shield now cost 3% of base mana.

· Divine Purpose (Retribution) now reduces chance to be hit by spells and ranged attacks by 1/2/3%.

· Divine Strength (Holy) moved to tier 1 in the Protection tree.

· Greater Blessing of Salvation removed.

· Hammer of Justice now costs 3% of base mana.

· Hammer of Wrath is now considered a Retribution spell, moved from Holy, mana cost reduced, missile speed increased, now usable on targets below 35% health.-sweet now you can hammer them even earlier in the fight and depending on who you are fighting you can hammer them more than once.

· Healing Light (Holy) moved to tier 2.

· Holy Shield (Protection) cooldown reduced to 8 seconds.

· Holy Shock (Holy) range changed to 20/40 yards when used on enemies/friends respectively, cooldown reduced to 6 seconds. - more holy shocks, never a bad thing especially with the healing component it has now and the extended range makes it a much more useable healing spell when helaing on the move, although the mana cost is still a little steep at 650 mana per shock.

· Holy Wrath is now instant cast, causes a 3 second stun, cooldown reduced to 30 seconds, radius reduced to 10 yards. - Instant cast good, lower cooldown good, shorter radius ?

· Illumination (Holy) moved to tier 3.

· Improved Concentration Aura (Protection) moved to the Holy tree.

· Improved Concentration Aura moved from the Protection tree to tier 4 in the Holy tree.

· Improved Devotion Aura (Protection) moved to tier 4, reduced to 3 ranks, now increases armor of Devotion Aura by 17/34/50% and increases all healing done to units affected by Devotion Aura by 1/2/3%.

· Improved Hammer of Justice (Protection) now reduces cooldwon by 10/20/30 secs.

· Improved Righteous Fury (Protection) threat bonus folded into base spell, talent still reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.

· Improved Sanctity Aura (Retribution) renamed Sanctified Retribution, now causes all units affected by Retribution Aura to cause 2% more damage.

· Improved Seal of Righteousness (Holy) moved to tier 1, renamed XXX, now affects Seal of Righteousness, Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption.

· Improved Seal of the Crusader (Retribution) renamed Heart of the Crusader and the effects now apply to all Judgement spells. - 3% more crit on judged targets, very nice and a definite must have.

· Judgement of Justice will no longer prevent Fear effects, only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health).

· Lay on Hands no longer drains all mana, cooldown reduced to 20 minutes.
-lower cooldown and not taking up all your mana is a good thing which will lead to this being used a little more frequently and with the Improved Lay on Hands talent, cooldown is shortened ever further to 16 minutes.
Im curious now as to how much mana this spell will actually cost.

· Pure of Heart (Holy) reduced to 2 ranks, now reduces duration of Curse and Disease effects by 25/50%.

· Redoubt (Protection) moved to tier 2.

· Repentance (Retribution) mana cost changed to 9% of base, duration increased to 1 minute (10 second PvP duration), now usable against Demons, Dragonkin, Giants, Humanoids and Undead. - nice form of crowd control for ret pallys and is now useable against a wider array of mobs. Also 4 more seconds of a stun in PvP up from the original 6 seconds.

· Retribution Aura damage increased and now gains damage based on Holy spell power. - according to MMO Champion the highest level of retribution aura you can learn before seventy got its damage upped from 26 damage all the way to 62 and if modified by spell power now it will be interesting to see what its coefficient will be.

· Righteous Fury now increases threat caused by Holy damage by 90%.

· Sanctified Light (Holy) now also increases the critical chance of Holy Shock. -more crit for holy shocks makes a new talent a little further down even more attractive.

· Sanctity Aura (Retribution) removed.

· Seal of Justice/Judgement reduced to 1 rank with all the effects of the previous rank 2, the Judgement effect no longer prevents Fear.

· Seal of the Crusader has been removed. The effects of Judgement of the Crusader have been folded into all relevant abilities.

· Seal of Vengeance damage over time effect duration increased to 18 seconds.

· Spiritual Focus (Holy) moved to tier 1.

· Stoicism (Protection) moved to tier 2, now reduces duration of Stun effects by 10/20/30% and reduces chance your spells will be resisted by 10/20/30%.

· Toughness (Protection) moved to tier 3.

· Turn Undead (ranks 1 and 2) removed. Turn Evil now granted at level 24, mana cost changed to 9% of base. - this skill be now be useful at lower levels of PvP against those pesky warlock pets.

· Unyielding Faith (Holy) moved to tier 2.

From the WotLK Information Wiki:

· Blessed Hands (Requires 20 points in Holy) - Reduces the mana cost and increases the resistance to Dispel effects of all Hand spells by 15/30%

· Infusion of Light (Requires 35 points in Holy) - Your Holy Shock critical hits reduce the cast time of your next Holy Light spell by 1.25/2.5 secs. - that's right, with this talent maxed with a Holy Shock crit you get an instant cast Holy Light. Just imagine a Divine Favor+HolyShock+Holy Light for a whole lot of healing in a very short time.

· Sacred Cleansing (Requires 40 points in Holy) - Your Cleanse spell has a 10/20/30% chance to increase the target's resistance to Disease, Magic and Poison by 30% for 10 sec.

· Enlightened Judgements (Requires 40 points in Holy) - Increases the range of your Judgement spells by 10/20 yards. - another good new talent in the holy tree. Now you can still smack that enemy player or mob for a chunk of damage even if they try and escape.

· Judgements of the Pure (Requires 45 points in Holy) - Your Judgement spells increase your casting and melee haste by 2/4/6/8/10% for 30 secs.
-faster casting/melee attacks are always a welcome thing.

· Beacon of Light (Requires 50 points in Holy) - The target becomes a Beacon of Light, healing all party or raid members within 10 yards for 2000 over 15 sec. (Rank 5, Level 80, 2330 mana, 1.5 sec Cast) -depending on how many targets get effected by this it could be a very efficient spell and since it transfers the threat the healing generates to the targetted party/raid member targetting a tank with this spell will give him/her even more threat generation for the duration of the effect.

· Divine Guardian (Requires 15 points in Protection) - While Divine Shield is active 15/30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin. -nice protection talent soaking up a good percentage of the raid damage while your divine shield is active.

· Touched by the Light (Requires 40 points in Protection) - Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your Stamina and increases the amount healed by your critical heals by 10/20/30%. -this should help with spell power needs of protection paladins who sometimes come up short in that area while balancing out all their other stats.

· Guarded by the Light (Requires 40 points in Protection) - Whenever you parry or dodge an attack you have a 10/20% chance to reduce the mana cost of your next Consecration, Holy Wrath or Avenger's Shield spell by 25/50%.

· Shield of the Templar (Requires 45 points in Protection) - Increases the damage and reduces the mana cost of your Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield and Shield of Righteousness spells by 5/10/15%.

· Judgements of the Just (Requires 45 points in Protection) - Your Judgement spells also reduce the melee attack speed of the target by 10/20%.

· Hammer of the Righteous (Requires 50 points in Protection) - Hammer the current target and up to 2 additional nearby targets, causing $s1% of weapon damage as Holy damage. This ability causes high threat.

· Sanctified Retribution (Requires 20 points in Retribution) - Damage caused by targets affected by Retribution Aura is increased by 2%.

· Sheath of Light (Requires 20 points in Retribution) - Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 20/40/60% of the healed amount over 12 seconds. -interesting talent in the retribution tree to be sure. I am sure a lot of holy paladins may spec this far down into ret just to get this talent at the expense of not being able to get Beacon of Light. As a lot of other posters have said this will lead to two healing build for paladins.

· Sanctified Wrath (Requires 35 points in Retribution) - Increases the critical strike chance of Hammer of Wrath by 25/50%, reduces the cooldown of Avenging Wrath by 30/60 secs and while affected by Avenging Wrath 25/50% of all damage caused bypasses damage reduction effects.

· Swift Retribution (Requires 40 points in Retribution) - Your Retribution Aura also increases casting, ranged and melee attack speeds by 1/2/3%.
-more haste gives you more attacks in less time always a good thing if you are specced this deeply in the ret tree.

· The Art of War (Requires 40 points in Retribution) - Your damaging Crusader Strikes have a 5/10/15% chance to cause your next Judgement spell to cause double damage. -double damage is just tasty and if that judgement crits it will do even more damage.

· Righteous Vengeance (Requires 40 points in Retribution) - Increases critical damage bonus of all attacks by 3/6/9/12/15% -once again more damage = good.

· Divine Storm (Requires 50 points in Retribution) - An instant weapon attack that causes Holy damage to up to 4 enemies within 8 yards. The Divine Storm heals up to 3 party or raid members totaling 20% of the damage caused. -a nice AoE attack for ret pallys that also has a healing component.

More In-depth analysis on these changes can be found in a series of articles on Wow Insider. One of these articles is linked below which from there you can see all the other articles as well. It is in a total of five parts.

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/18/wrath-beta-patch-notes-paladin-part-iii-the-holy-tree

Just a note all these new spells and abilities could still be modified prior to the live release so I will try to keep up with the updates as much as possible.

Blood DK leveling video

2008-07-21T02:25:00.002-05:00

Blood DK leveling from Sam on Vimeo.

Unholy leveling video

2008-07-20T14:34:00.000-05:00

UnholyDK.wmv

Death Knight Intro

2008-07-19T04:26:00.000-05:00

Wotlk Login Dk starting area. from xhuha on Vimeo.

Druid In Karazhan

2008-07-13T00:21:00.002-05:00

Last night I got my first taste of doing a little off-tanking in Karazhan. It was a pretty fun experience and gave me a little more much needed practice tanking. We ended up almost clearing the entire instance at once last night, I left the raid with only Prince and Nightbane left to do since it was a little late and I had to work the next day unfortunately.

The group was really good and we one-shotted every boss in the instance with the exception of Maiden due to an unfortunate Holy Fire incident and Netherspite due to my inexperience taking the red beam.

I got a few nice upgrades in the run last night as well. Moroes dropped Edgewalker Longboots which were a very nice upgrade for me. Maiden dropped Bracers of Maliciousness which were also a very nice upgrade. Curator dropped the Tier 4 token for druids but since I had already gotten a few nice items it went to another druid in the raid considering I had the Merciless Gladiator’s Dragonhide Gloves which I got last weekend after running a ton of AV’s for honor. And finally I got the Gilded Thorium Cloak from Illhoof.

I mainly tanked some of the trash mobs whenever there was multiple pulls which was a learning experience in and of itself especially trying to keep threat on multiple mobs that would would stay bunched together.

I did, however, get to be the second tank on Moroes which was fun. We swiped to keep agro on Moroes and all his adds while the group burned down the adds and then concentrated on Moroes himself. In my humble opinion tanking this fight is a lot easier than healing it. I really do enjoy the tanking/dps a little more than when I am healing.

Geophysics of WoW

2008-07-06T04:57:00.001-05:00

Found this video on Leafshine and thought I would share it here as well

Happy Fourth of July.. a day late

2008-07-06T01:00:00.001-05:00

How do you treat people in WoW?

2008-06-30T21:59:00.002-05:00

Now granted most of my experiences are on a PvE server but I have also leveled a toon on a PvP server as well albeit only to 60 so far. I ask the question, how do you treat people in WoW? I am not talking about in a group or raid situation but as to how just treat others while you are out on your own, whether you are questing, farming, etc.
If I see another player who is getting close to death while fighting one too many mobs while I am out and about I make it a point to either stop and help/heal them depending on which toon I am on whether they be Alliance or Horde. An example of this would be when I was flying around Nagrand on my paladin and noticed a few people trying to fight Tusker and I saw that their healer had just died I stopped what I was doing and landed to heal the other players who were still fighting Tusker until she went down. I also try to buff other players as I am passing by them if I am on a toon that has the capability. For the longest time when I was playing my warlock I almost felt bad that I couldn’t buff other players back that had given me buffs.
I think there’s also something to say about giving people a little courtesy. I will give a few examples of this. I was leveling my Horde toon on a pvp server and I was busy fighting a few mobs for a quest I was working on in the Hinterlands at the time when a level ?? Alliance hunter came up on me. I was in a bit of trouble at the time when I had a few to many mobs on me and he helped me to kill them all off before he went back along his way without harassing me at all. That is my belief as well; as long as another player is fighting a group of mobs even on a pvp server I wouldn’t stop and kill them unless they came after me first. I definitely would not attack a member of the opposing faction while they are on an escort quest. This might just be my view on it since I spent most of my leveling career on a PvE server but this is what I believe. Another good example of courtesy or in this case the lack thereof would be when I am out on my paladin mining for the daily quest or whatever and a Horde toon flies over, sees me mining then tries to mine the same node at the same time preventing me from mining any further. This might seem like a little QQing but if I see a mining node and someone else is mining it I don’t try to steal the node from them. Granted this has only happened a few times and most of the time if another player sees me mining they will go about their business to find another node.
This is just a short post on some of my thoughts on this question. I think it all comes down to being helpful to others regardless of faction if you see they could really use it, buff people if you are able, and show a little courtesy towards other players. Who knows when the person needing that help will be you? So I once again ask the question to you my readers, how do you treat others in WoW?

Blog Azeroth shared topic - Top 10 WoW Memories

2008-06-30T18:58:00.003-05:00

1. I agree with a lot of the other posters about the first time I really walked into Stormwind and saw how grandiose it was with the towering statues and the battlements you pass by as you enter the cities gates.

2. That first run in Deadmines on my first toon I ever leveled. It was the first instance I had ever been in and the design of the instance is just really well done. I would love to see a level 70 or even 80 in the future heroic mode for this dungeon.

3. Dinging 60 on my paladin in Scholomance. It was before the expansion came out when 60 was as high as you can go. We had just cleared around the bottom of the first staircase you go down in the instance so the group could pick up first deed for the quest in the instance.

4. Just recently in the first heroic run I ran on my paladin. We pulled two groups of mobs instead of just the one we intended to pull in one of the rooms of Blood Furnace. Everyone had died but myself and the druid tank. He still had about four mobs to finish taking down and I managed to keep him alive through the entire ordeal, it was an awesome feeling to make it through all that and live.

5. Karazhan. That is the first BC raid I had ever gone into and the design of the place had just almost awe-inspiring. The fights are really well designed and the ambiance in the instance fits fairly well. It was doubly cool for me since I had just read the book about Medivh which I can’t remember the name of off hand but after reading it and actually seeing some of the characters and locations from the book made the experience even better.

6. Seeing Prince die for the first time in Karazhan. That was one of the most exciting moments thus far in the game for me. I had only been a part of a few Prince attempts but on this one he finally went down. Also with this one I would add seeing Illhoof die. I hated that guy because no matter what I always seem to die when we tried to kill him, darn all those imps.

7. Getting my first flying mount. It was slow but at least I had crusader aura to speed it up some and boy did it make questing easier not to mention how fun it was to be able to fly.

8. Hitting exalted with Netherwing the first time. Hitting exalted and seeing Illidan appear before you and paralyze you only to have one of the goblins in the camp turn into a huge dragon to spirit you away to safety. That was just awesome riding on the back of this huge dragon all the way back to Shattrath then circling around the center of town before landing to be able to get a Netherdrake mount of your very own. It didn’t lose any of the excitement hitting exalted on my second toon and getting that same ride. All I can say is Netherdrake + Crusader Aura = super speed.

9. Flight form on my druid. A free flight form is great, being able to fly at 68 is even better. While the quest line to get the epic flight form is a little long and has you travelling all over the place getting Swift Flight Form as the reward makes it all worth it.

10. Getting my Charger on my paladin. I had been 70 for quite a while before I even started the quest line to get it. I had seen so many paladins on their epic chargers and had always wanted one so one day I finally started the quest line and when I finally got to speak to the chargers spirit in the basement at Scholomance to get the ability to Summon my very own charger it was truly one of my top 10 moments in my WoW career.

Should I level another toon?

2008-06-30T18:52:00.002-05:00

It is a question I have been pondering since I got my last too to 70 in the past week. This gives me a total of four 70’s now and I have been debating whether or not to level another toon to 70. I have two that are fairly close right now with my warlock sitting at 65 and my shaman at 61. I would like to finish leveling the shaman to 70 but nine levels is a lot further from 70 than my warlocks five. I suppose once I manage to get my druid geared out some and his rep up with Shattered Sun I could go back and work on these two some more and slowly work them up to 70. They have both been sitting at max rest for quite a while now which means they could pretty much be rested almost all the way to 70 with the quest turn ins on my lock and to the high 60’s on my shaman. I know if I managed to get another week or so to play I could easily get the warlock to 70 considering on my last week of vacation I managed to get the druid from 65 to 70 with not too much effort. I really do enjoy the leveling process as I have stated before in this blog but I just don’t know if I want to have a fifth 70 with even more gear to have to get and another 6000g to spend on his epic flying skill. Time will tell I suppose. I ask this of you my readers, what do you think? How many 70’s do you have and how many 70’s do you think is too many? Or is there such a thing as too many 70’s?

Zoom Zoom..

2008-06-28T04:09:00.002-05:00

Last night I managed to get my quest done for my swift flight form. The added speed is really nice to have and the form itself looks awesome.

We started of the evening in Shadow Labs to get my rep up to honored so that I could get the key to run heroic Sethekk Halls to get the druid quest done. I was in there with a group of friends including one of the best bear tanks that I have ever had the pleasure to play the game with. He let me do a lot of the actual tanking in this instance while giving me tips on how and when to pull certain mobs etc. I also got to tank all the bosses in Shadow Labs except for Murmur. I learned a lot with him in this instance and hope to get in a lot more practice at tanking before really trying to tank and instance without any sort of help. I am still not too confident in my ability as a tank and to make sure I hold agro on multiple mobs, there were a few times last night when I would lose a mob or two and have to go chasing after it. I only had to use Challenging Roar once in Shadow Labs after one of Blackhearts 'fun times' to be able to regain agro on him. I felt really stupid too because until that day I never had Challenging Roar on my action bar for bear form at all. /doh I did find it really fun though during that fight to hit feral charge when I was knocked up in the air to hit Blackheart again. Once we completed the instance I stoned out to go and get my key to be able to run heroic Sethekk.

Sethekk Halls was a pretty fun run although I didn't tank this one because my gear is no where near good enough to tank in a heroic yet I don't think. On some of the four-pulls I got to tank one of the mobs while he controlled the other ones. Nothing any of the bosses dropped gearwide was any use to me but I did get two epic gems, both Stalwart Fire Opals that I now have and once I get better gear to put them in I will socket them but for now they are just sitting in my bags. The Anzu fight for the druid quest was pretty interesting. During the fight you have for spirits (eagle, hawk, falcon) that will aid you. They appear in the form of birds and while they are flapping their wings they are giving your group a buff. Every 15 seconds or so they will turn back to stone and you need to through a HoT on them to get them to come back to life. I started out by throwing rejuvenation on them but with my mana pool being so small I was quickly running out of mana. So after a little bit I figured out one Lifebloom at half the mana cost of Rejuvenation had the same effect. So got the boss down and I got my quest completed to I am now a very happy and fast flying druid. Sethekk Halls was also the heroic daily yesterday so I now have 5 badges of justice on my druid as well.

70 number four and the quest for Swift Flight

2008-06-23T02:57:00.007-05:00

Last night my druid hit 70 making him the fourth level 70 I have on this server. I immediately went out and got the epic flying skill so I could start working on the swift flight form quest line to be able to get my swift flight form. Boy is that a long quest chain although I guess its not near as bad as the level 60 pally or warlock mount quests but it still took me about 2 1/2 hours to complete the whole thing up to the Sethekk Halls run.

The first step has you gathering bog blossoms. In case you ever wondered what those plants on top of the mushrooms in Zangarmarsh were, now you know. A little warning though some of them will explode on you so watch out. As you can see in this image that is what happened to me.

After you gather those and turn in 10 deaming glory and ten ancient lichen he sends you back to moondglade to talk to a guy in the Stormrage Barrow Dens in the eastern part of the zone. You wake him up from his dreamstate and proceed to escort him around gathering some artifacts to turn back into the person in Zangarmarsh. It was an easy escort and I had no problems with it. It took me a while to get back to Zangarmarsh for the turn in since I had to take the long way since my hearthstone was still on cooldown.

Once you do this and get back to Zangarmarsh finally the questgiver there will want you to take the artifacts up to Blades Edge and speak to the questgiver there in Evergrove who will give you an item and have you get a Aether Ray eye to combine it with to be able to see the next person in the quest line that you need to speak with.

You will need to speak with this guy pictured to the left. While you are effected by this Aether Sight you are also slowly taking damage and by the time the Aether Sight had expired I was at around 46% health. Anyhow once you get done talking to him and go back to Evergrove and turn in they will then send you to Nagrand to speak with Watcher Elaira who wants to you capture a Wild Sparrowhawk with the net she gives you. Once you have the net and target one you should just be able to cast the net at a bird to capture it, right? Well no, not exactly. As soon as you target one of the birds it 'senses danger' and starts flying all over the place at very high speeds making it impossible to net. The way I finally succeeded was to Hiberate the bird long enough to net it. It did resist attempt to hibernate or fly out of range a few times before it finally worked and I captured it. Once you capture it and return to her she then tells you you need to go to Skettis to have the help help you dig up eight raven stones. This is also fairly easy to do and once you do all this you need to return back to Evergrove where she will assemble all the stones and then pieces together the Book of the Raven. She reads it and discovers you need to go confront three guardians, the Eagle, the Falcon, and the Hawk. These are all located back in Terokkar Forest. Two of them are in the area of Skettis and the third is on an island south of the bone wastes.

The first one, Guardian of the Eagle it recommends you go bear form to fight it for the best effect. This would be correct because as you fight it, more and more birds come and join the fight against you until you get the guardian down. I had to pop Frenzied Regeneration towards the end of the fight to stay alive but in the end I did and I turned it in and headed for the second guardian, the guardian of the falcon. For this fight it recommends going cat form for the added damage to get it down before it has a chance to kill you. As you can see by this picture here I failed at it twice before I had a friend come help me with it to get him down. Don't be afraid to ask for help on these guardians because they are the hardest parts of the entire questline up until the actual instance portion of the quest at the very end. The final guardian, the guardian of the hawk recommends that you use nothing but spells against it since it is almost immune to physical damage. With my friend I also managed to get this one down on the first try although be died and had to self rez during the fight. Once you have completed this last guardian quest you get to go back to Evergrove to turn it in. You reward for this turn in is the Charm of Swift Flight which is a pretty nice little trinket to have and even nice once you get your Swift Flight Form. Just when you think you are done and are ready for the final quest. Evergrove sends you back to Zangarmarsh once again and they tell you you need to go to Azshara to get the Southfury Moonstone that you will need on the last step of the quest. Simple enough, port back to Moonglade, fly to Azshara go north along the cliffs to the very northern part of the zone, locate the stone sitting in a trough pick it up and.. oh wait a goblin just took it and jumped into the river now you get to chase her, fun fun. So you have to quickly jump into the river and start swimming after her. She doesn't make it easy for you though she drops little depth charges at fairly regular intervals all through the river as she swims. They will either (1) freeze you in place or (2) explode and send you flying out of the water. There is some assistance in the river in the form of swim speed power ups that you can get to help you catch up to her. I ended up swimming the entire length of the zone of Azshara and into Ashenvale before I finally caught up with the little goblin to get the stone back. Once you get the stone its off to Zangarmarsh again to turn in where you will finally get the quest to fight the guy in Sethekk Halls to earn your Swift Flight Form.

I am all ready to run the heroic Sethekk Halls run now except for one little thing. As of last night I was still 2700/3000 rep through neutral with Lower City so I still have to work that up to honored before I can run the heroic. I went back to the Bone Wastes tonight and did all the quests I had skipped that gave Lower City reputation and also turned in some feathers for a little more rep. As of the time I had logged off tonight I was halfway through friendly with them and only have another 3000 rep or so to go until I hit honored and can get the key for the heroic instance. That is still a lot of feathers to farm but I will see if I can get it done over the next few days to get that last quest done by this weekend to get my Swift Flight Form.

MIdsummer Fire Festival - Easy Money

2008-06-21T05:16:00.002-05:00

If you happen to be level 70 and bored a quick way to make some money is to do the Midsummer Fire Festival quests. One even turns you into a crab for a few minutes. If you go around to all the alliance towns you can do a quest called Honor the Flame which rewards 5g95s per turn in. You can do this quest at every alliance settlement so if you are bored and don't mind flying all over this is a way to make some easy money!

Edit: I made 243 gold doing the Honor the Flame quests. Not to bad an investment in an hour or so of play time

Almost there...again

2008-06-21T03:40:00.003-05:00

I managed to get my druid to level 69 today, so only one more level to go until I will have my fourth level 70. I finally got to go into Underbog on the druid today to get those quests done that had been sitting in my quest log for the past five or six levels. The quests were green now but were still worth 22000 xp each at turn in so that was well worth it just for the experience turning in the quests. I spent most of level 68 in Blades Edge Mountains doing the quests up there and made it to within 3 bubbles of 69 before I headed out to Netherstorm to start out there. I got a quest or two done when I got a group to down Durn the Hungerer and the rest of the group quests that I still had in my log in Nagrand. While we had the group together we also did the Ring of Blood. I remember back when I did those quests on my paladin with a group it was a lot harder than it seems to be now. We breezed right through them with now one else there but us. As I turned in the final quest there to get my new staff I dinged 69. The staff I replaced it with I had just gotten then night before doing a quest in Blades Edge. Now with the new staff I got tonight with only Mark of the Wild I have finally broken the 2000 attack power mark in cat form. With a shammy and warrior in out group tonight with their totems and buffs I was just a hair under 3000 attack power in some of the fights in the Ring of Blood. That was nice!

Once we got done with all that I switched over to my paladin to help a friend and guildie with the first part of his level 60 pally mount quest in Stratholme. We pretty much tore through the instance after collecting his holy water getting a few other quests other party members had done in there. It went fairly smoothly except for one pull when I went and grabbed a few too many mobs and I was the last one in the party left alive but managed to get all the mobs down.

As soon as I got out of Stratholme I was asked by a friend to come heal for the daily heroic, Blood Furnace. We had a really good group for the run and only had a few wipes due to getting a few too many mobs at once. Although in one pull just before the second boss we got two groups of mobs instead of just the one group we wanted and it made it down to just me and the druid tank still standing but we managed to get all the mobs down while keeping ourselves alive, now that was fun. My paladin at the conclusion of this run is up to a whopping 24 whole badges of justice now.

That pretty much sums up my day of play maybe tomorrow I will be able to hit 70 on my druid although I doubt it. But within the next few days I will then I will have another toon to start doing all the daily quests and to start working on his quest for epic flight form which I also hope to acquire in short order after hitting 70.

Ding 68

2008-06-20T02:19:00.002-05:00

I made it with two whole days to spare on my vacation. I hit 68 this evening on my druid and now have flight form. I have managed to stay in rested xp since level 61 and am now 25% through level 68 and just now finally running out of rest. I will try and get him at least to level 69 before I head back to work on Sunday if at all possible. Once I hit 70 it will be time to start working on the epic flight form quest!

Mounts at 30?

2008-06-20T00:18:00.003-05:00

I have been on vacation over the past week and haven't been keeping up on the latest WoW related news but found out in guild chat tonight that Blizzard is lowering the level to be able to get a mount down to 30 from 40. I went over the the PTR patch notes and there it was. I wonder what made them enact this particular change? With the speed increase in leveling it really doesn't take players long to hit 40 now, but it can also be another way to speed up the leveling process a little faster if you have that mount ten levels sooner to cut down on the travel time to get from one quest objective to another I suppose.
Overall I think it will be a good thing even though I don't have but one toon which would actually benefit from this change when it goes live. What do you think about this change?

Test Realm Patch Notes from World of Warcraft.com

2008-06-19T20:19:00.001-05:00

World of Warcraft PTR Patch 2.4.3

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

General

Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
Parry Rating, Defense Rating, and Block Rating: Low-level players will now convert these ratings into their corresponding defensive stats at the same rate as level 34 players.
Haris Pilton has launched a new line of bags and jewelry. Check her out in the World's End Tavern!
Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.
Blood Elf flightmasters outside of Silvermoon City and Tranquillien have traded in their bats for glorious fire-breathing dragonhawks.
Alcohol cooldowns have been rolled into Drinks: All 10-second cooldowns have been removed and replaced with the 1-second Drink cooldown.
Numerous flying non-combat pets have had their flight height modified to no longer skim along the ground: captured firefly, dragonhawk hatchlings, moths, owls, parrots, phoenix hatchling, spirit of summer, sprite darter, and tiny sporebat.
Nether Ray Fry (a non-combat pet) is now available from the Skyguard Quartermaster. This requires an Exalted reputation with Sha'tari Skyguard.
Equipping an item will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress.
Placing an item in your bank will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress if the spell was cast by that item.
You can no longer move backwards to stop racing rams.
When a stun wears off, the creature that was stunned will prefer the last target with the highest threat, versus the current target.

Druids

Barkskin: The cost of this spell is now reduced by Tree of Life Form.

Hunters

Growl: Pets will no longer generate additional threat from this ability based on attack power buffs cast on them. Attack power buffs on their master will still indirectly increase the threat generated by the pet's Growl.
Pet Aggro: Pets will no longer generate threat immediately from being summoned.
Scare Beast: This spell will now be limited correctly to one target.

Paladins

Greater Blessing of Light Rank 1: This spell will no longer overwrite Greater Blessing of Light Rank 2.
Summon Warhorse is now available at level 30.

Priests

Mind Vision: This effect will now be cancelled immediately on targets who use an Invisibility Potion or Gnomish Cloaking Device.
Spiritual Healing: Ranks 2-5 of this talent will no longer prevent refreshing Prayer of Mending.

Rogues

Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.
Shaman

Earth Elemental: This pet will now leash back to its totem when pulled beyond 50 yards away.
Lightning Overload: This talent will no longer do excessive damage when used with Lightning Bolt Ranks 2-10.

Warlocks

Curse of Shadows: This spell has been removed.
Curse of Elements: This spell now applies to Arcane and Shadow damage, as well as Frost and Fire.
Demonic Sacrifice: This ability will now interact correctly with the Spirit Guide resurrection system in battlegrounds. A sacrificed pet will not be resummoned on death, and will not prevent keeping a record of the most recently created pet.
Health Funnel: This ability will now cancel channeling when the target pet is Banished.
Ritual of Summoning: The mana cost of this spell will now be properly deducted when cast.
Summon Felsteed is now available at level 30.

Warrior

Revenge: Ranks 1-5 of this ability now have damage ranges instead of fixed damage values (like ranks 6-8.)

PvP

The Warsong Gulch flag can no longer be picked up at the same time as a flag is capped.

Professions
Alchemy

Philosopher's Stone now requires 200 Alchemy.
Cooking

Juicy Bear Burgers now correctly increase healing as well as spell damage.
Jewelcrafting

Activated beneficial effects from jewelcrafting trinkets can no longer be dispelled.
Mining

Green quality gems can be found in mining nodes again. The drop rate of blue gems from mining nodes remains unchanged.
Tailoring

Removed the cooldown from regular Mooncloth.
Herb bags can now hold Un'goro Soil and Evergreen Pouches.
Mycah of Sporeggar has discovered how to create 28 slot herb bags.
New Tailoring patterns are available from Haughty Modiste in Steamwheedle Port, Tanaris: Haliscan Jacket and Haliscan Pantaloons.

Quests

Bhag'thera now spawns at a normal quest spawn rate.
For the quests, Intercepting the Mana Cells and Maintaining the Sunwell Portal, phased characters will not be able to see non-phased character AoE effects and vice-versa.
For the quests, Intercepting the Mana Cells and Maintaining the Sunwell Portal, pets gaining/losing phase status will now properly break off combat from unphased/phased opponents.

Dungeons and Raids

Players can now be summoned to raid instances from heroic dungeons.
Magister's Terrace
The Stun component to the Sunblade Mage Guard Glaive Throw has been removed and the Bounce range reduced.
Vexallus and Kael'thas are now tauntable in Heroic mode.
Vexallus' damage caused by Pure Energy has been decreased.
Kael'thas' Arcane Sphere has had its visual size increased. His Arcane Sphere attack has had its range decreased and the damage/second of Phase two on Normal mode has been decreased. (Heroic mode remains unchanged.)
Sunblade Warlocks have had their damage reduced slightly.
Fel Crystals in the Selin Fireheart encounter have had their health reduced slightly.
Warlord Salaris and Kagani Nightstrike have had their damage output reduced slightly.
Sunwell Plateau
Creatures in the area around Grand Warlock Alythess and Lady Sacrolash will no longer spawn while the twins are in combat.
Nether Protection will now correctly trigger from Kil'jaeden's Shield Orb Shadow Bolts.
Vanish now correctly wipes threat on Kil'jaeden.

Items

Bow of the Verdant Keeper's Aim: This item's triggered effect no longer breaks the effect of Scatter Shot.
Brutal Gladiator's Pummeler has had its Stamina value increased to the appropriate value.
Clockwork Robot Bots fight amongst themselves again...without attacking people in the arena. Well... they'll blow up other Bots in the arena, but you know what we mean.
The Eredar Twins will now award the same items regardless of which order they are killed in.
Invisibility Potions: These potions now are on the same cooldown as other combat consumable potions (such as mana potions.)
Pendant of the Violet Eye: This item will again work correctly with Holy Light and Flash of Light.
Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen: The triggered effect from this Item can now occur on periodic damage ticks.
Thori'dal, the Star's Fury is now Unique as intended.
Vengeful Gladiator's Baton of Light: This item now appears in the correct position on the vendor list.

User Interface

The help interface has been simplified dramatically. Players will no longer be required to select a category when opening a GM ticket. In addition, players can use the “Talk to a GM” button to fill out a ticket that requires a GM response or the “Report Issue” button to fill out a ticket that does not require a GM response.
Target buff/debuff timers that appear when you cast a spell are now more visible.
Time Management features have been implemented! These features include an alarm clock, stopwatch, and viewing your computer's local time.
The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds, and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds.
Added the following macro commands: /targetenemyplayer, /targetfriendplayer.
Added key bindings for tab targeting players.
Ctrl-Tab and other target nearest friend functions will no longer target you.
Targeting using /target will prefer live targets over dead ones.
You can no longer click the minimap to cast ground targeted spells.
Invisible players with Hunter's Mark can see the hunter that put the mark on them.
Vendor items now show their Duration in Inventory.
For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros Forum.

World Environment

Winterspring Ice Thistle Matriarchs and Patriarchs may now drop Thick Yeti Fur.
Skinning any Winterspring Ice Thistle yetis may now result in Thick Yeti Fur.
Increased the drop rate of Pristine Yeti Horns from Winterspring Ice Thistle Matriarchs and Patriarchs.
Goblin Weather Machine- Prototype 01-B weather changes will no longer force the affected character to stand.
Collector's Edition Pet Redemption NPCs/items/quests have been relocated/modified to/for towns with mailboxes (Goldshire, Razor Hill, etc.).
Young Sporebats and Greater Sporebats in Zangarmarsh now drop Sporebat Eyes for the quest Gathering the Reagents.
Blacksmithing Supplies vendor and repairer, Blazzle, in Area 52 is now next to the forge and anvil outside the inn.
Banker Meeda, in Area 52 is now in the...well...the bank, along with a guild vault and guards. The other three Area 52 bankers are still located in the auction-house-turned-bank.
Wastewander Bandits and Rogues should be more plentiful in the northern parts of Tanaris.

Bug Fixes

The mage spell, Counterspell now shows in the combat log.
Gan'arg Analyzers will no longer occasionally become friendly to players.
Talented abilities that cost a percentage of base mana will no longer display an incorrect mana cost when inspected by a player of a different class or level.
Guild leaders should now be able to properly promote a new guild leader regardless of their range.
Druids: Mangle will no longer incorrectly indicate a 100-yard range on the tooltip.
Hunters: Using an instant ability after Steady Shot will no longer lock out auto shot.
Hunter Snake Trap will no longer break players out of stealth if the snakes pass near the stealthed character.
Hunters: Concussive shot will now properly have a chance to proc Bow of Searing Arrows.
Rogues: The talent Heightened Senses, Rank 1 and Rank 2 will now affect attacks from wands.
Using Jewelcrafting figurines will no longer cause scrolling combat text to appear twice.
Fixed an issue in which shadows were not appearing properly for users with GF4 video chipsets in Open GL mode.
Corrected an issue in which users with Creative X-FI sound cards would sometimes hear a slight popping noise when running.
Players will now correctly receive a Battleground Mark message for the marks that are received at the end of a battle.
Corrected an issue where the initial trigger or activation sounds for Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap could not be heard by some players.
Smelt Hardened Khorium will now properly require a forge instead of an anvil and hammer.
Corrected a typo in the tooltip for the Druid spell Rip (Rank 4).
Looting a Nightmare Vine will now properly no longer apply poison when the node is looted.
The Figurine- Seaspray Albatross ability will now properly restore the correct amount of mana.
First Aid bandages can no longer be applied to a player with the Recently Bandaged debuff. An error message of, "Could not activate more than one bandage" will be displayed.
Corrected the tooltips to read properly for the flight paths from The Stormspire, Toshley's Station, Blade's Edge, and Area 52.
Greater Elementals summoned by a shaman will now properly have a combat log entry.
Players will no longer become stuck on the Nimboya's Laden Pike when driving it into the ground.
The quest, "Going Going, Guano!" will now have a more consistent level requirement for the dungeon.
The quest, "Into The Scarlet Monastery" is now available to players of the appropriate level for the instance.
Blueleaf Tubers can now be properly looted.
The quest turn-ins for the Ahn'Qiraj war effort now give the appropriate amount of credit for each successful quest turn-in.
Cloak of Shadows will now properly remove Shrink.
Nightbane will no longer become unresponsive and unkillable during his air phase.
Several items sold by the Consortium reputation vendor Paulsta'ats are now bind on pick-up: Formula: Enchant Weapon- Major Striking, Design: Delicate Blood Garnet, Design: Shifting Shadow Draenite, Design: Lustrous Azure Moonstone, Design:Thick Golden Draenite.
It is no longer possible to delete a character that is an arena team captain without first promoting another player to captain.
Taunts will now properly stick when a target is stunned while being taunted.

Another day, another ding

2008-06-16T04:08:00.004-05:00

Well I can actually sit down tonight and type a proper (longer) post unlike the past few that I have posted. The image on the post tonight is actually from a few days ago but it was my highest crit so far on the druid so I thought I would post it :)

I managed to get my druid from 65 to 66 tonight. I am still in rested xp as I have been since I started playing him again at 61 a week or so ago. I still have another 55% of a level in rested xp to go through so hopefully with quest turn-ins etc I will be rested all the way into 67.

I spend most of level 65 in Terokar Forest doing the quests out there. I don't mind the zone too much but it seems to slow me down a little because I really enjoy Nagrands quests a lot more than I do Terrokar'. I try to get through Terokkr as fast as possible just like I do with Hellfire, those two have to be my two least favorite zones. My favorite zones being Zangarmarsh and Nagrand. I also finally did the little follow quest in Shattrath yesterday and picked my faction. I went Scryer, which is going to work out real well for me since I have a ton of Scryer rep turn-in stuff in the bank right now. I added it all up and it looks like I have about 16000 rep worth of turn-ins in the bank right now just waiting to be turned in. The one thing that really irritates me about the rep turn ins for Scryers is that Firewing Signets only really drop one the one area in Terokkar forest which is really irritating since the Mark of Kil'jaeden for Aldor rep drops in several locations. If anyone reading this knows of another area where Firewing Signets drop besides Firewing Point please let me know.

In other news I did my second heroic instance ever last night on my hunter. We ran Heroic Sethekk Halls last night which went really well. All the drops were sharded for the most part but I did get a new ring to replace one of my old ones that he has had for a while. My hunter after that run now has three whole badges of justice to his name since we did the summoned boss to get one party member his epic flight form quest completed.

After the heroic I switched back t my druid to run through Ramparts yet again to try and get the staff to drop which of course it didn't yet again so I guess I will give up on trying to get that staff now. I do have this staff from a quest reward in Zangarmarsh but the one from Ramps is just a little better :)

After that run I switched to my mage to go into the daily heroic which was Steamvault to do the quest there, but once I got in there my WoW connection decided that I didn't need to run that instance after all and disconnected me, and then disconnected me again, and again. When I did get back online my latency was at over 16000 so needless to say I didn't get to finish that run and it ended up being called because it was also getting fairly late in the evening.

I guess thats about it for now.

Long Time, No Post

2008-06-14T03:16:00.002-05:00

I have to go to a class for work this week which meant a lot less WoW time and no time for blogging but now that class is over and I am off for the next week its time to really get down to leveling my druid some more. I did manage over the course of this week manage to get him to level 65 by the time I logged off this evening which I think is pretty good considering the amount of time I had to play this week and he was 63 on Monday.

A druid buddy of mine pointed me to a new site that compares gear for druids and from what I have seen so far, it looks to be pretty useful. Check it out.
http://www.emmerald.net/

I will also add a link to this site on my links list on the right-hand side of the page.

Well this post was short but I will have more to say tomorrow hopefully.

How do you spend your time in WoW?

2008-06-08T05:12:00.002-05:00

It is probably a question that gets asked very often among WoW players. How do they like to spend their time in the game? What do they prefer? PvP, PvE, raids, solo etc. I read a lot of blogs written by WoW players. I noticed a good number of blogs are written by raiders, which I find really interesting to read about. Then there is some others written by players who are still leveling their various toons. So I ask you, my readers how do you spend your time? And to quote BBB, what is your cheese in WoW? I know his article is not quite the same as this one, but I think it still applies. I really like leveling alts, I spend a lot of my time in that pursuit. Due to my work hours I am never on during prime raiding time and most of the time when I do get home from work and sign on most if not all my friends have already logged for the evening. I have taken my paladin into Kara some and really enjoy being a healer in that raid, my hunter and mage have also seen the inside of Kara but have only been in there a handful of times each. With my work schedule I will never be able to join a real raiding guild and see all the 25-man content that there is to see, will never stand face to face with Illidan or anyone else in those places but it would be nice to see the inside of Tempest Keep or the Black Temple sometime, but I know in all actuality that I never will. I am okay with that so I tend to spend my time in WoW doing something that I have a lot of practice at, leveling alts. I tend to quest alone as well for the most part due to the hours that I am able to play which is also okay with me. It just means my group or instance quests will have to wait until my days off to get completed. Now, I have been fortunate enough to take part in one 25-man raid a few weeks ago which was Gruul’s Lair. We managed to get High King down but Gruul himself refused to die for us. That for me was an interesting glimpse into the world of 25-man raiding and just some of the coordination that is required once you get up to raids of that size.

That is enough rambling on this topic for now, I may post some more questions in coming posts to be answered by the readers we shall just have to wait and see. I am looking forward to your responses to this post.

A new video from BaronSoosdon

2008-06-08T04:26:00.000-05:00

Chilled Escapism from BaronSoosdon on Vimeo.

Here is a new video from BaronSoosdon, enjoy.

Another day, another level

2008-06-08T02:49:00.007-05:00

I managed to hit 62 on my druid last night and tonight I got him to 63. I am letting the shaman sit and get a little rest for a few days while I play through my druids rested xp. I got all quests in Hellfire Peninsula done tonight with the exception of the elite quests and the quests for the instances. I am hoping to get those completed over the course of the next few days providing I can find a group to do them with.

I did a minor respec at 62 last night to be able to get Omen of Clarity after seeing how often it would proc on my tauren druid I decided I really needed it on my alliance druid. It has made some difference in the times it take to kill stuff and with my dps I am now getting. Another spell I had on the horde druid I was looking forward to getting was Maim. It is really nice having that interrupt and it has come in fairly handy today whether it was to interrupt a spellcast or to stun a mob while I shifted out of form to heal back up real fast. So getting my druid to 63 today leaves my shaman a little further behind since he has only just barely hit 61 as of a few days ago.

One other thing I am really looking forward to hitting 70 on my alliance druid is for the Idol of Terror. I did a little research to see where it came from and it can be mine for a measly sum of only 20 badges of justice once I hit 70. It seems to proc fairly often on my horde druid and I can't wait to get it on my alliance one. Now all I need is to get about 1600 more attack power and my alliance druid will be right up there with my horde one :)

After hitting 63 on my druid I switched over to the horde side to knock out a few quick dailies on my other druid. I have noticed over the past few days skinning Clefthoof's for the gathering daily they seem to be dropping Clefthoof Leather fairly frequently. A lot more frequently than I am used to seeing. I wonder if Blizzard upped the drop rate on the leather for some reason.

A little Horde PvP

2008-06-07T04:32:00.002-05:00

I had a nice little PvP adventure on the horde side the other morning while playing my Tauren druid. I was in Garadar in Nagrand after getting my monthly supply of gems from the Consortium and had just landed inside the inn and was about to log when I noticed in the local defense channel that Garadar was under attack. So I thought to myself I should check it out and see what was going on. I flew back out and over Garadar and saw where the trouble was. There we three alliance players, 2 druids and one warrior out there beating up on the NPC’s. I knew I really didn’t have a chance against three of them but I thought I would go ahead and give it a shot. One druid was in bear form with the warrior taking out the NPC’s while the other druid was in caster form healing them. I shifted into cat form and stealthed over to where the caster form druid was healing and proceeded to try and smack her down before the others could react. I did make a slight tactical error though considering the other two were very close to the healer but I tried anyway. I got a nice opening hit on her and then she kept running and jumping about all over the place while she was moonfiring me. Then the warrior and other druid got in on the fun and with the three of them together made rather short work of me so of course I died. Now the closest graveyard to Garadar is Halaa apparently so I had a little corpse run to make before I could get back to my body. I got my body back and flew back to the in to med up before making another attempt. I was kind of hoping some back up would show up but none ever came. I guess since it was about 6am that could be why. Anyhow I got back into flight form to see where the 3 alliance people currently were then dropped back down and shifted into cat form to make a second attempt. This time I waited a little too late before stealthing and was hit by their healer as I was stealthing, so there went death number two. So I made the run back to my body once again for a third and final attempt. I knew I couldn’t take them off but that healing druid really needed to die. This time I stealthed a good ways away from them and proceeded to sneak up behind their healer and then lay into her and I had a really nice opening crit on her for 3158 and a few nice maul crits shortly after and had her down to less than 10% of her health when I hit the wrong stupid button and shifted into caster form accidentally, then was sliced and diced by the warrior and other druid while she got away while I was killed yet again. Then I decided to go ahead and give up for the evening after circling above them a little longer looking for a long target to attack. It was pretty fun though even though all I really did was due repeatedly. I would do it again if given the chance just for the challenge of it.

A few days late but heres an update

2008-06-07T04:27:00.002-05:00

I have been pretty busy over the last few days and haven’t had the time to post too much but I have gotten a few things accomplished. I have gotten my shaman to 61 over the past few days. The other night I ran Hellfire Ramparts again (this time with the quest for there), then proceeded into Blood Furnace with the same group and knocked out the quests in there. The group for these runs was 60 shaman (me), 61 paladin(holy), 68 paladin(ret), 70 paladin(unk), and 70 warrior(arms/fury). There we no deaths on the Ramparts run at all considering all the healing classes we had in there and the run went really smoothly and quick. I didn’t get any drops out of this run that I could use but the quest reward was very nice so that made the run worth it. As a side note on this run I was almost tied with the 68 ret pallys total damage and right behind them in dps. I did an average of 255 dps compared to the pallys 268. With all the consecrates being dropped in ramparts I never drew agro off the other party members for long. It is interesting to note though that when I was taking damage it was taking some fairly hard hits.

The Blood Furnace run was a little different. I died a few times in this run as these mobs hit a little harder and that I seemed to be pulling agro a little more. Note to self: mobs don’t appreciate being hit with chain lightning. Anyhow this run did not yield any new boss drops for me but once again it was a fun run with getting the two quests done that I had for that instance.

I was about 35% into level 60 when we started these runs and I was rested and by the time the runs were finished I was almost 80% the way through 60 and doing a few quests after the run was done I hit 61. Overall the shaman has been pretty fun to play and I think I am going to keep working on leveling him and the druid since both are now at 61. I still need to take the druid through those two instances to get his quests done in there as well; maybe I can get that done over the next week or so. My warlock may end up sitting a little longer while I work on leveling these two for a while.

Quick update

2008-06-04T18:40:00.001-05:00

Tonight I am going to run my brothers druid through Gnomer on my paladin. This run should be fun and full of AoE goodness. Consecrate FTW! The run itself shouldn’t be too hard and will give him a nice new pair of leggings that I had on my druid and didn’t replace until my 50’s. Since I haven’t gotten to post much over the past few nights I will get some posting done tonight. I actually have two posts pretty much finished that I will have up over the next day or so.

Associate Professor Evil Kills All Ninja Looters

2008-06-02T04:09:00.007-05:00

A new short from Oxhorn, enjoy... WoW Videos

Dont forget your gems!!

2008-06-02T03:58:00.002-05:00

Thats right, once again its time to fly or ride out to Nagrand to get your free bag of gems. Now go out there and get them!!

Tyderios in Outlands

2008-06-02T03:48:00.007-05:00

I finally hit 60 on Tyderios last night in Hellfire Ramparts and decided to finish my last few quests in Winterspring then just head straight to Hellfire to start questing there. I managed to get myself killed in Ramparts a few times last night but I got a nice new pair of pants out of the run to replace my old ones that I have been wearing since that run the Maraudon a while back.

Since I have been getting some nice upgrades I have definitely seen a nice rise in the amount of dps I am doing. I am now up to nearly 800 attack power which is up from the 500 range just a few days ago. I also had my first Earth Shock crit for over 1k tonight as you can see in the image.

I made it about 25% the way through level 60 tonight getting a few of the quests done.

My horde druid who I have been neglecting the past few nights is up to a little over 200g now from the 40 silver he started out with just doing a few dailies and selling some leather and a gem on that server. He is really fun to play and I need to really start playing him some more to get his money level up closer to at least 1k gold. We will see how long that will take.

Tier 4 Shouldery Goodness

2008-05-31T02:16:00.001-05:00

Here I am as of tonight with the new shoulders.

Gruul 1, Raid 0

2008-05-31T01:38:00.003-05:00

So I was working on getting my shaman to 60 tonight, and he had just hit 59 when I was asked if I wanted to join a group doing Gruul's Lair. Having never been in there before I accepted the offer and they needed healing so I brought my paladin in for the run. The trash before the first boss went down smoothly and then we proceeded to attempt High King Maulgar. The first try we had an accidental body pull which led to a wipe, second try we lost a lot of people due to the whirlwind. Note to self: Stay out of whirlwind or you could die. I was happily healing the main tank while High King was doing his little whirlwind and didn't pay attention as my health slowly fell and fell until I of course was dead. Doh! So a review of my performance of the first two attempts; first try - too far away from the main tank and he was out of my healing range = dead tank, second try - too close to tank and High King whirlwind hits me, I die..tank dies shortly after. On the third try however everything went smoothly, the tank on High King died but was battle rezzed and another tank took over while that went on, we lost a few other but in the end High King went down and dropped one of each of the Tier 4 shoulder tokens of which I won the paladin one, go me! He also dropped Maulgar's Warhelm.

We then proceeded to Gruul, had a few decent attempts at him and a few accidental pulls again but in the end we got him down to 40% on your last try then people had to log for the evening as to the fact it was getting a little late.

I then went and repaired (20g worth ouch) and got my new shoulders. I put the Aldor healing enchant on them and now just need to get a few gems to throw in the sockets and I will be all set. This now give me two pieces of the Tier 4 set and got me my first ever experience with 25-man raiding. It was pretty awesome, and I can't adequately explain in works how good it felt to see High King Maulgar drop and I hope to get in on another run to see Gruul himself eat pavement.

Flash Vulnerability

2008-05-30T06:22:00.002-05:00

Just a quick post in case you haven't seen the news yet. I will refer you to the WoWInsider article on it here.

Back in the Outlands again..

2008-05-30T06:10:00.002-05:00

Well I played my shammy tonight and with some help on a few quests I managed to get him to 58 from 56 tonight. This makes the 7th toon of mine that has taken that step through the dark portal. I went through and picked up the first few quests but haven't done them yet. I will probably get back on him tomorrow and do the first few quests then head back to the old world to get him to 60 or a little higher before setting foot back into the Outlands.

In other news I now have a 70 Tauren Druid to play around with so I have been playing around on him a little bit the past few days just to see what all he can do. I was given an account with this toon on it that the person just didn't want any more so now I have a 4th 70 to play around with. The primary concern I have is raising money on the druid. He was excellent gear but when I got him he only had a few silver to his name. I have managed to get him back up to 50 gold or so just doing a daily quest or two. Seeing how this Tauren druid is playing really make me want to finish leveling my 61 druid to 70 just because of how much fun they are to play.

I am also working on another post right now with a website review, but it is still a work in progress and might be a few more days before I can actually get that post up.

Netherspite hurts a little

2008-05-27T03:33:00.003-05:00

So I was doing some dailies on my hunter tonight to get him a little more Shattered Sun rep when a friend of mine whispers me and asks if I would like to bring on of my dps toons to Karazhan to go after Netherspite. Well, neither one of my dpser's, the hunter or the mage are really geared out enough for Kara but the needed dps so off I went to get on my mage who puts out a little more dps than my hunter.

I have never before seen nor attempted Netherspite before and was with a group of people I really didn't know so I knew this would at the least be interesting. So I get summoned to Kara and then follow the warrior who summoned me into where Netherspite was. My particular job in the fight was to be the second person in the blue beam during the second portal phase. The other mage in the party had it first, then it would be handed off to me.

The first attempt I was in the group with them for was a quick learning experience. Several times during this fight all beams were hitting Netherspite which is very bad news for all involved parties. I managed to get in the blue beam but it took a few seconds to get positioned properly so it hit him for a short time before I actually got it. During this time the first mage who was in it died. The beams give you a great stacking debuff the does a fair amount of damage so you can only really stay in the beam for a short time before you have to step out and other toon replaces you in the beam. Once you are out of the beam there is another debuff placed on you that makes you unable to enter another beam for the next minute and a half.

This first attempt at him we only got him down to 87% or so by the time it was all said and done then we wiped. We regrouped rezzed and rebuffed and all that good stuff then proceeded to try him again. This time the beam people were right on it and beams didn't start hitting him until someone would die and there would be no one to replace them. This second and last attempt we managed to get him down to 25% before we wiped. It was pretty late when I joined the raid to begin with so that was the last attempt on him for the evening.

I would like to thank the healers on this fight who did a awesome job keeping me and everyone else alive while they were alive but he seemed to favor the healers. I also learned I really need to upgrade my gear before attempting anything like this again. For the fight I was only putting out 499 dps while the other mage in the party was putting out 696 dps so I still have a lot of work to do. According to recount however I only had a 3% miss rate which was really nice considering I am not where close to the amount of spell hit I need at this time.

Overall it was a fun run although it was brief and from what I saw of the group I was with they seem like fun people.

Once I got done with all that I switched back to the hunter to turn in the few dailies I had gotten completed then switched to the druid to quest with another friend of mine in Hellfire for a while before logging for the evening.

My Own Guild Bank

2008-05-26T03:58:00.004-05:00

Well I finally managed to get my own guild started just so that I would have my own guild bank. I have been getting tired of shoveling items between various toons for the past year or so, so now I have one place to store all my various junk. I bought two tabs and have already mostly filled them.

I was finally able to delete my poor little level three rogue mule tonight and I am thinking about deleting this mage in the pic who is currently the leader of the guild I made and instead putting my level 55 paladin in this guild and making him guild leader. Deleting the rogue gave me one open character slot on this server and if i decide to delete this guy it will open up two slots. I know for sure I need to keep one slot open for my Deathknight when the expansion finally hits.

I did manage to get a few more dailies done on my hunter tonight as well but other than getting the guild formed and getting my bank set up etc I didn't get too much more accomplished.

Edit: I forgot to mention I also managed to get my mages enchanting to 375 finally tonight. I have been thinking about it and figured out I have almost all the professions covered now. I have a 375 miner, skinner, herbalist, alchemist, enchanter, engineer and jewelcrafter with a 315 leatherworker and 225 blacksmith. The only profession I am really missing now is tailoring. Woot!

I am also considering getting a second WoW account to move my mage to so that she will be able to enchant all my other toons BoP items as well as hers. I will keep all you readers advised of what I decide.

Now finally after the edit I have reached the end of this post.

Hunter Upgrades

2008-05-25T03:34:00.006-05:00

Okay so now I will try and compose a slightly longer post to improve upon my last one. I decided to finally spend those 2000+ arena points I have had for the past few months and used them to finally update my chest piece.

I replaced my Breastplate of Rapid Striking which I have had for a very long time, with Vengeful Gladiator's Chain Armor.

Comparing the two pieces, this was the biggest upgrade out of my other options. Switching out the chest pieces I lose 13 agility, 8 hit rating, and 8 attack power but I gain 57 stamina, 25 critical strike rating, 1 whole intellect and three sockets, red, red, and yellow, not to mention about 400 more armor.

The enchant I had on the old chest piece was +6 to all stats and I have temporarily put a Heavy Knothide Armor Kit on the new one until I can find someone to throw the +6 to all stats on it. I also filled the red sockets with Bright Living Rubies, and a Glinting Noble Topaz. Once everything was socketed, I ended up with 20 more attack power than with the old chest piece and only lost 4 hit rating with the critical strike rating making up for the loss of agility on the old chest piece.

I further decided to re-socket my Felstalker Bracers that I have had for a while to give me a little more attack power. With the great increase in stamina that I got off the chest piece I can forgo the socket bonus on these without feeling too bad about it, so I destroyed the Jagged Deep Peridot that was currently in them to replace it with another Bright Living Ruby. So lets take a look at the new stats once all this was done.

I gained about 4 dps with Aspect of the Hawk as opposed to the old armor so it wasn't too much of an upgrade in dps but overall a nice improvement to that particular piece of my gear.

Now all I need to do is upgrade a lot of the other items I have so make him even better. I think I will hurry up and get him to revered with Shattered Sun Offensive so he will be able to purchase the head enchant to give me 18 more stamina and some more resilience to boot.

So ends a slightly longer post.

A little more leveling done...

2008-05-25T00:21:00.003-05:00

I got a little more levelling done on the shaman tonight getting him to level 56 from 53. I finished off all the quests in Un'Goro Crater tonight and then headed into Felwood to get started out there. I got most of the quests in Felwood completed tonight.

So ends another short and boring entry, have a good evening.

Scarlet Monastery Fun

2008-05-23T06:15:00.003-05:00

Haven't been on too much over the past few days but I did manage to get my shaman's leatherworking from 261 to 315 in about an hour between all the leather I had in my various banks and a 'few' trips to the auction house.

My hunter hit honored with Shattered Sun Offensive last night.

Tonight I played the shaman a little more then switched to my mage to do some enchants for a good friends pally alt he has been working on then decided to run him through SM once or twice on my paladin. Fun times were had by all, especially me :) Nothing beats aggroing one third of the instance at a time and consecrating them all down. I was averaging 600 plus dps through out the runs into SM.

Back to serious shammy leveling tomorrow.. I think.. later all.

A Unique way to fight Shade of Aran and other stuff..

2008-05-19T00:38:00.005-05:00

So I started out the evening yesterday on the shaman getting his class quests steps done so that he would be ready to go back to Sunken Temple. Once that was done a group was formed and I headed back into ST. It was me (52 shaman), 48 hunter, 48 mage, and a 70 lock to make things progress a little faster. A little later we also picked up a 70 rogue from the guild to aid us and to give him some stuff to DE to level his enchanting skill. There was no healers so I switched out a little gear that I had in my bags for a touch more intellect and did the healing when it was needed which wasn't very often except for when the mage got a little AoE happy once or twice but it was a smooth run with no deaths.

I got a few more nice drops out of there as well. I got me a new offhand mace that Ogom the Wretched was kind enough to drop for me. I also ended up with a shield off of Shade of Eranikus to use should I be called to heal again. It was during this run that my brother sent me a tell saying he had something for me but wouldn't tell; me what it was until I met up in Shat with him after the run. So once the run was over I hearthed back to Shat and met up with him where he gave me a very nice upgrade for me mage he got in Karazhan the night before. I then mailed it off to my mage, switched over to her, equipped it and put 40 spell damage on it getting my enchanting skill up to 373, only two more points to go.

I then stayed on the mage for a short while and helped with some group quests in Shadowmoon Valley and while I was out there got another tell from my brother saying they needed a healer for Kara. I finished helping them with the quest they were on then switched over to the paladin.

My brother and some of our other friends have recently left the guild my paladin is in due to the fact its pretty inactive at this time and joined a new one, so this was my first run with a lot of the people in the raid last night. It went fairly smoothly though and we didn't have too many problems.

They had done the first few bosses the night before so we went straight to the back entrance to start at Curator. We had one accidental body pull right inside the back door before everyone was inside the instance that caused a few deaths but we recovered quickly and proceeded to one shot Curator. He dropped the Gloves of the Fallen Hero (tier token) and the Staff of Infinite Mysteries which made the warlocks in the party very happy.

We then proceeded up to Shade of Aran and did the fight in a very unique way. Apparently if you all stand outside of his door with the entire raid, open the door then hit Aran with a DoT or other quick spell and let the door close you can get him down albeit slowly with no deaths and quite easily. You will avoid all the damage he does in side the room (still can't move for the flame wreaths) and only hit him every once in a while when he comes outside the door to directly attack someone. The warlocks kept curse of doom on him to do a nice chunk of damage and some other DoTs were applied as well. This method does take a while (for us it was 18 minutes) but we did it with taking only moderate raid damage. One other thing to remember is when he gets to under 10% to stop applying DoTs to him to make sure that he dies outside the room with the raid so that he will be lootable. This is a nice easy way to take him down which means it will probably be hotfixed soon :) One word of warning though, after killing him do not open the door to his room for any reason because if you do all those arcane missiles he was firing will come out and hit the raid for a good bit of damage. The door was opened accidentally once or twice causing a few deaths :(

Anyhow he dropped the Saberclaw Talisman and the Steelspine Faceguard which no one could really use so they were going to be DE'd. The warrior decided to keep the Talisman to use as an offspec item but the helm was sharded.

After this we proceeded to the boss I pretty much hate the most in Karazhan, Terestian Illhoof. This guy took two attempts to get down. The first attempt the healers (including me) kept getting put in the demon chains which led to a dead tank. On our second attempt we tried a slightly different strategy that worked out better, we lost a few raid members including myself but in the end the last members of the raid got him down. An excellent job was done by all on that second attempt to get him down, you guys rock. On a side note, I have only seen this guy go down twice and I died on both those occasions. I think he has something against me.

We them headed off to the chess event for a nice relaxing end to our Kara run for the evening. Both items that dropped in chess were DE'd as well since no one could use them.

It was a pretty good night overall with 8 more badges for me to bring me up to a whopping 18 whole badges and am now about 1800 rep away from exalted with The Violet Eye.