I’d Rather Be Wowing!

I’m a shadow priest…isn’t it obvious ?

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the scourge invasion event getting started (if you haven’t, read here for more info). A couple guildies and I went to BB. That corrupted crates are mighty attractive. So what if touching it caused you to be infected? And so what if I actually have a “cure disease” button placed so conveniently on my spell bar? Being a zombie is definitely more fun than being an boring ol draenei :).

But, who knows that Zombies lead such a hard life?

1. We are frequently misunderstood. Everybody out to get us. The fact that everything we said ended up being a gibberish to other healthy people doesn’t help either. We don’t try to eat you because we are bad (some do), we try to eat you because we are lonely.
2. And also because we try to survive. Every second spent not eating brain sucks the living out of us.  We are always hungry.
3. I wish I exercised more before I was zombified, because I can feel all the muscle pains when I walk now. I only have the strength to run every 30 sec. So give us zombies a favor and stop running away from us.
4. Where did my brain go (oh yeah someone ate it), because every healthy person knows that you need to run away from a ret pally, not to chase em to eat their brain, especially the zealous ones who made it their life goal to eradicate the infected.

In all seriousness, it does take an effort to stay a zombie for a long time. We made a mistake of hanging round in the city when we turn and the guards made an easy target of us. Even when you think you are in the place where there weren’t any guard around, if you are in the city, it seems like a guard can always find you. Before you turn to zombie, run out to a safe area (watch out for the argent healers, you can usually out-range them so they couldn’t heal you). Generally, avoid a large gathering because you’ll never know if someone would attempt to cure you. If you are a warlock, you can kill yourself with hellfire and turn yourself into zombie in much shorter time. It is definitely better to travel in group. If you have to die, do it in style. Also, I read about durability damage if you are killed as a zombie. I was killed many times yesterday, but it only cost me 4g to repair, so I’m not sure if that’s really the case.

Well, E finally have enough burning blossoms to get Captured Flame. Double cheers! Unfortunately, I doubt that she ever gonna get the dancing draenei

I was thinking of expanding my post of the encounter with Ahune. Keep in mind, however, that this is going to be mostly in the perspective of pally tanking and shadow priest. Both of the characters have successfully done the fight several times in regular mode and once in heroic mode (still no Scorched Stone though).

First thing first. Fact: The loot table between heroic and non-heroic is not the same! I have someone I grouped yesterday that insisted they are the same, regardless to what I said. I’m going to refer you to this post by WowInsider for the loot table distribution.

Summoning Ahune
In the regular mode, you would need to complete the chain quest that is started from any capital city. It is really easy to do, and completing it, not only you will get a tabard at the end of the quest line (after killing Ahune), but you will also unlock another daily that is also very easy to do.

1. From any capital cities, talk to the Earthen Ring representative to pick up Unusual Activity quest. He/she will send you to Zoram Strand in Ashenvale.
2. Port/fly there and make your way to the ZS, which is on the northwest area of the map. Kill the twilights people until it drops the quest item Twilight Correspondence. Click on the totem provided to you by the Earthen Ring guy to summon Earthen Ring Guide. You have to be in ZS to summon it.
3. The next quest will ask you to travel further northwest. If you look at your bag, you will see Orb of Crawler. Clicking it will turn you into a crawler At the northwest end of the map, you’ll notice area with ice stones and Heretic Emmissary nagas. As a crawler, hang around there (you should be able to see their conversation) until you get the mission completed message. Again, summon the Earthen Ring Guide, which will send you to any of the capital cities. Note that you don’t have to go back to the place where you pick up the quest, any of the Earthen Ring guy in capital cities will suffice.
4. At this step, the Striking Back daily quest will open up. Also, he/she will send you to talk to an npc in Slave Pen.
5. Travel to Slave Pen. Keep in mind that you will only be able to continue the quest line in regular mode. Talk to the npc right as soon as you enter Slave Pen. He will send you to another npc further in the inside.
6. Once you clear, oh I think 5 packs of mobs, you will see the next NPC. Feel free to talk to her to complete the quest. Now, I am not sure if you have to at least reach this step before you can summon Ahune in heroic. For both of my characters, I only did heroic after finishing up the quest line in regular. If you finished up the quest until this step, every day you can talk to her to get the daily quest to summon Ahune. It will net you 11g, which is pretty sweet
7. Clear up the mobs surrounding the area before you click on the stone to start the event. The pats behind the area where Ahune will appear can also be cleared, but it is really optional. From all the time I’ve been there, we’ve only aggroed it once.

Fighting Ahune
The perfect group make up for this fight is a druid tank, a good mix of melee and caster/range, and healers with hot or group healing. But this doesn’t mean that the other tanks and pally healer are not viable. It’s just a bit disadvantaged, in my opinion. The same phases and strategy apply to heroic, with exception that mob hits harder and have more HP. In heroic, it is even more important to protect your healer as the small elementals will make a quick work on him/her. If your group can kill Ahune within 2 rounds or a short bit into 3 rounds, they are most likely will breeze through the heroic as well.

1. Ahune’s fight is a repetition of 2 phases. On the first step, he will appear but he will be invulnerable (-75% of damage). Don’t bother attacking him. He will spawn one big elemental guy (hailstone) and many waves of smaller elemental guy. The first occurrence of 1st phase, only water elementals will appear. One the subsequent occurences of 1st phase, air elemental guys will appear. There will also be more elementals (the 3rd time in 1st phase will have more elementals than the 2nd time, and so on). Because of that, it is pertinent to finish the fight in 2 or at most 3 rounds, otherwise your healer may potentially be out of mana.
2. First phase:
   • When the big guy is still up
     • Tank: You will mainly concern with tanking Hailstone. Having frost resistance aura up helps tremendously in this fight. Another word of caution, pally tank can easily get multiple little guys on them with consecrate. This may not be very desirable because it will force your melee to fight near the big guy (see next bullet) and the damage from all (especially the magic dmg) can easily eat your health bar. Judge for yourself whether you have enough health and leet enough of a healer to survive. On the upside, warlocks, mages, and boomkins will love you :0. All the elementals are tauntable.
     • DPS: If you are range, focus on the big guy first. If you are melee, don’t worry about the big guy (unless you only have melee dps, which in this case, assign one or two for the big guy). Having melee on the big guy will be very taxing on the healers because of the stacking aoe debuff that will incur 300 dmg every 3 sec up to 10 stacks. Not something to take lightly.
     • Shadow Priest: Don’t forget your VE in here, which is going to help your healers a alot. Because of the mana intensive nature of the fight, focus on the big guy at entire time before moving to smaller guys.
   • If you see blue swirly appear at your feet, move away. You don’t usually have to move away right away, but don’t stay there too long. The swirly will turn into an ice spike that will throw you up in the air and damage you for almost 1000 dmg + falling dmg.
   • When only waves of small guys left:
     • Tank: These guys usually have initial aggro on the healers. Regardless, you can focus on the person who has the most aggro and drop cons in front of them. You can downrank it so that you are mana conservative but enough threat to gather the little guys on you. The nice thing about doing this is that, you can intercept for your party members and collect them together, which will make your melee dps-ers (trust me they hate running around chasing those elementals) and your aoe-ers really happy. If you have a lot of casters in your group, putting up cons aura may help with the push back. One druid tank that I partied with shifted into cat and make a quick work on the small elemental guys.
     • DPS: Nothing more to add here. Keep your cooldown for the burst damage until the 2nd phase though. Just keep killing the elementals and do your best protecting your healer and keep yourself alive.
     • Shadow Priest: Usually 1 MF (+ SWD) or 2 MF will be enough to kill this guys. The problem is protecting yourself from the push back when you get aggro. As you might have known, it really sucks to MF if that happens. If you have spirit tap, remember to try to get the killing blows from thse elementals. Doing this frequently will make a difference in your mana bar. If you have a lot of high dps-ers, don’t worry about dotting them, as you will only waste your mana.
3. Second phase: An emote will appear telling you that Ahune has retract back, or something along the line. You will only have 30 sec in this phase, so hopefully you don’t start this phase when there’s still a lot of little elementals left. The core itself doesn’t have an aggro table and it doesn’t do any damage, so dps your heart out without worrying about aggro and healers can get their 5sec rule here.
   • Tank: Pally tank and prot warrior is more disadvantaged than their druid counterpart because druid can shift into cat form and provide a good addition to dps during this phase. What I did as pally tank is as follows: If you still have little elementals left, tell all dps to just focus on the core while you tank all the remains. Otherwise, put blessing on wisdom on the core so your casters can replenish their mana. If you don’t starve on mana, I guess you can put a bit of dps. Just make sure that you will have enough for the next 1st phase. This phase is really boring for pally tank, to be honest
   • DPS: Blow all your cooldown trinket, heroism, etc. The good target to aim is around 50% for regular and around 40% in heroic.
   • Shadow priest: If there’s leftover little elementals, dot them on your way to the core stone. Nothing really to add other than to remembet to sick in your pet in if your mana bar is less than 50%. Feel free to use SW:D cause your healer won’t have anything to do anyway
4. Rinse and repeat until Ahune is dead. Loot the Ice Chest :0 If this is your first time killing Ahune, don’t forget to loot the shards of Ahune from the chest, right click on it to start up a quest, and return it Luma (the npc near Ahune summoning stone). This will give you a tabard and 20 burning blossoms.

Assuming that all your party members has done the quest chain up to the slave pen npc, each of you can summon Ahune again. Remember that if you touch the stone to initiate the summon, and if you don’t get him down, you will lose that summoning chance (but you still complete the daily for 11g, so no biggies really). In heroic, I think you can summon him as many times as you’d like until you beat him. But you can only kill him once a day in heroic.

The first time I did this, I don’t have to reset the instance to resummon Ahune. But yesterday, for some reason, we do have to reset the instance to make the summoning stone respawn. I am not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with whether or not the ice chest despawning. The best chance is to make sure everybody looted the chest.

It’s here! The chance to get your very own Captured Flame or Brazier of Dancing Flames, among other cool things. It’s also a great time to earn some additional easy moolah, as each activity can reward you 5-10 g. Here are some activities that I’ve done so far.

1. Torch tossing. The first activity available by the Fire Eaters at every major cities (Shatt is not included). Given a short period of time, you need to toss the torch to some brazier for X number amount of time. After you have done Torch catching quest, the “daily” version of this activity becomes available. It is not much harder, in my opinion, than the original quest. Hint: Put the torch in a keybind. Zoom out or stand further out so you can see all the braziers. Click on your keybind and target the brazier that has a hunter mark on it. If you missed out on the brazier, don’t blindly try target the next brazier, cause you will miss that one too. Instead, wait a bit until it changes its target again before targetting it.

2. Torch catching. You need to stand on the bonfire, click on the quest item (wood), and catch the torch for X amount of time. Warning: failure to catch the torch caused the torch to “explode” within a short range and put a fire damage dot on you that ticks for about 400-500 damage. You won’t die from one explosion, but it does take quite a chunk of your life. I imagine how this must be terrible for non-healing class. I personally hate this quest. While I was able the original quest twice, I am only able to finish the daily version of it once. Hint: You don’t have to be so close to the bonfire to start the quest. I noticed that, regardless which direction you faced when you light up the torch, it tends to bounce on the same direction. The important thing to do is follow the shadow that the torch casted. When you caught the torch, get ready to turn and change direction. A decent amount of fast reaction is needed. I imagine it is easier for mouse-turning people than keyboard-turning people. I really suggest to do this quest while not many people around are doing the same quest. It can get really confusing to know which shadow belongs to you.

3. Striking back. This daily quest becomes available once you finish a short quest chain. This is the same quest chain with the summoning Ahune quest. I picked up the start of this quest in Shatt, but I am guessing that any other locations in major cities would work as well. The quest chain will send you to Ashenvale, near BFD. They are really easy, just involving a few traveling. Now it seems like the daily quest differs depending what level you are. But they are kinda similar in what you need to do. For us, level 67 and higher, the daily quest will send you to the Dark Portal. Click on one of the 4 ice stones, located in the vicinity around the Pit lord, and a elemental looking guy will spawn. Just kill it and you are done.

4. Honoring and Desecrating the flames. Each area will have a festival fire that we can honor (the same faction) or desecrate (the opposite faction). Each fire that we honor will net you 5 Burning Blossoms (currency to buy the event items) plus 5 g (if you are 70). Each fire that we desecrate will net you 10 burning blossoms and around 10g worth of g. Although you can only honor/desecrate the fire once per event (per year), it could easily net you up to 300g. These fire always located outside the city itself, so if you are in PvE server, desecrating the fire is really easy to do. The npc surrounding the fire itself won’t aggro you. However, once you completed the quest, you will be flagged. Remember that you can get rid of the flag by hoppint on a flying path. You can also steal the fire in the capital city that will net you 25 burning blossoms (I don’t know how many g since I haven’t done it myself), but they are much and much more trickier.

5. Summoning Ahune. The quest chain which started by the Earthen Ring representation in any capital cities (incl Shatt) will lead you to slave pen. Now, I heard that you can only complete the chain in the normal mode, but you can still summon Ahune in the heroic mode. When we did this in normal mode, each of us in the party can summon the frost lord once. You don’t have to “reset” the instance to summon or to be able to loot the ice chest that spawned once you down him. Just to try it next, we did this in heroic mode, right after we summon him 5 times in normal mode. Since you don’t require any totem, you can just click on the ice stone to summon him. Now I’m not sure if you can repeatedly summon him without reseting in the heroic mode. I imagine that you would have to since Ahune drops a heroic badge - forcing it to be summonable only once per day in heroic.

Now, there are some confusion about the loot table in normal or heroic. For the 5 times we did it in normal mode, we get the epic cloaks to drop (healing, defense, and dps caster). And on the heroic mode, we get the melee dps trinket and Deathfrost recipe. But people say that the loot table is completely the same, with exception of the badge. (Not true, heroic and regular have different loot table. Recipe seems to drop more frequently in heroic. So far is 2 out of 2)

The fight itself is not so much difference between normal and heroic. It just seems that he has more hp in heroic. (Upon the 2nd tries in Heroic, it seems like there are more small guys spawned during the first phase in heroic). Having a melee dps is totally helpful. We had a fury warrior and hunter in the group, and they totally own the multiple of waves of adds. On the first phase, I, myself, concentrate on the Hailstone elemental guy, until it died before helping killing the little adds. The melee dps are on the little guys because the big guy will give you a stacking debuff. I found myself blowing a lot of mana since the melee/range dps-ers can kill the little adds really fast. So all I did was MF-ing. Also on the first phase, there will be spikes coming out from the ground that will throw you out on the air. If you see a swirly blue thingy on where you stand, move away. The funny thing was, it happened once that I got thrown to the water. I can hear myself saying “oh no”, not knowing how I can get back to the fight. But next thing I know, I am back to the land, where we are fighting. So don’t worry about the water

On the second phase, we attack the “core”. There doesn’t seem to be anything special on this. Just burn it as soon and as fast as you can. There’s no aggro table for this guy. The first and 2nd phase will then repeat. We got him, in all occasions, after 2 repeats. On heroic, we just barely made it.

When I saw someone with Peddlefeet (a vanity pet) - or affectionately referred as ugly cupid or mini Kwee Q (genius name, I must say) by Cor and I - the other day, I knew that I just have to own one of them. So E spent her whole playing time yesterday doing the “Love is in the air” event. It is actually quite fun and addictive. In the end, E managed to get a Silver Shafted Arrow (to summon Peddlefeet), one rose petal (to shower someone with rose petals), 6 love rockets - (to fire 2 heart-shaped fireworks - funny icon btw ^^), a bag of candy (every minute, you can grab a heart shaped candy, that just like the non-virtual heart candy, it has romantic writing on it - the candy is not soulbound), a box of chocolate (contains various +stat buff, which unfortunately E got one that mostly contains +defense rating buff chocolates - quite useless for a shadow priest) ><, and a lovely purple dress.

There are at least 3 ways you can get Love in the air’s items (the arrows, fireworks, etc - except the dress, which comes from this quest chain). For all of these, you need to purchase cologne (10 charges each, each charge last for 60 min), parfume (same deal as cologne), and love tokens (stack of 10) from the innkeeper from major cities (with exception of Shattrath and not sure about Exodar). They are really cheap to get. Applying cologne would allow your to give your love tokens to female npcs and guards with heart on top of their head. Applying perfume would allow you to do the same to male npcs and guards.

• The easiest way possible is to do this quest. This guarantees you to get 1 box of chocolate, 1 rose petal, and 1 love rocket.

• Every hour, you can give your love tokens and get a gift of adoration or a pledge of adoration in return. The rule of thumb is: Guards give you pledges and NPCs give you gifts. Each usually contains 3 items: one random event items, such as the arrows, petals, etc, a number of unbestowed friendship bracelets, and one quest item (varies depending the NPC’s faction - a human npc in Ironforge will give you Stormwind related quest item). You may also get some rare items such as a romantic picnic basket or lovely black dress that is not soulbound.

• The next quest that you want to tackle is this one. Completing them will let you choose between 5 love rockets, 5 rose petals, or 5 silver shafted arrow; and 1 box of chocolate. The goal is to get an Alliance gift collection (or the horde counterparts if you are a horde) that you turn in at your local Kwee Q While you have the “Adored” buff, you can still give your love tokens to NPCs and guards. The guards will give you pledge of friendship in return while npcs give you a gift of friendship. A pledge of friendship will contain either a pledge of loyalty or a guard’s card while the gift of friendship contains the remaining quest item (i.e., homemade bread for Stormwind faction). Keep the distinction in mind so you can complete your collection as soon as possible.
  • Each Alliance gift collection will need: 1 Stormwind gift collection, 1 Ironforge gift collection, and 1 Darnassus gift collection.
  • Each faction has 3 types of quest items. For example, Stormwind faction related quest items are homemade bread, pledge of Loyalty: Stormwind, and Stormwind’s guard’s card. For every 5 quest items (of the same kind), you create a bundle of that quest item. Combining the three bundles, one for each quest item, will give you one gift collection of the respective faction. None of these are soulbound, I believe, so you can give trade them off to complete your collection faster.

When you give out a love token, you may also end up being rejected, instead of receiving gifts, and getting a heartbroken debuff (*cry*). The debuff lasts for 1 hour and made you unable to give out love tokens. Heartbroken debuffs can only be cured if someone cast their unbestowed friendship bracelet to you (to cast it to someone, just target the person and right click on your unbestowed friendship bracelet). When someone cured you, you will get their friendship bracelet in return (these are not castable to other people). So you need to ask people to cure you. In my server, the people are nice enough that I generally got cured even without asking ^^.

My goal is to get some Love fools, Silver shafted arrows (shoot it to someone, and that person will get their very own Peddlefeet until they dismiss it), more rose petals, and love rockets. It will be a lovey dovey raid this Sunday
Edit: Finally got them all plus the romantic picnic basket. I’m still trying to get the black dress for my lovely bank alt.