I’d Rather Be Wowing!

More guild progression from our yesterday’s run. We completed Botanica on the first try, yielding us the key of arc, and finally completed Arcatraz (it was our second run for Arc). We breezed through Bot and we definitely did much better in Arc than our first try. Our main tank, having successfully gotten a new shield and sword from S1 reward, respecced back to protection. It’s definitely much easier now since I noticed we rarely able to pull any aggro from him, which allows me to use my VE more often.

I’m really happy to say that we didn’t wipe at all on the bosses. We did wipe on three trash pulls, unfortunately. Two were due from bad pulls and one was due to pat aggroing on our sheeped mob. I like almost all the boss encounters at the Bot. But 5 bosses are definitely too much on an instance and they were kinda boring after a while since all they did are just calling for adds. The last boss on Arc, however, was kinda fun. We enjoyed the conversations between the boss and Millhouse. Too bad we let the boss killed Millhouse, though
Upon completing Arc, we got all the key fragment and I guess BM will be our next destination. Only thing left is that we need to start recruiting if we want to start running Kara soon. But I suppose we have some time to do that since we need to run all the heroics. From the way we breezed through Bot and Arc, I am more confident about our capabilities in running heroics.

My staff, by the way, is awesome. I’m loving it.

After 3 hours of running AV, I finally accumulated about 5k worth of honor points. I only need a little less than 3k points to get my staff. But you know how Bliz always over-estimates the points, so I am hoping that I have enough “room” to fall into. What’s the chance from 5k points to 3k points? Minuscule, I hope. Anyway, I cannot wait to get that S1 staff and it will add at least 60 additional spell damage. Yum

After missing playing WoW for 2 days ( I know I’m addicted ) , when I logged in on Sunday night, I got a pleasant surprise of seeing a full house attendants of our lvl 70 guildies (well, almost, we just missed one person). Not longer afterward, P rang and inquired about running an instance. Of course the answer is yes, you silly ! We ended up running Mech at 9:30 at night. I knew I’m going to be in trouble this morning.

Anyway, we finally completed Mech. It was not pretty, but it was not awfully bad either. We passed the first boss without casualty, a much improvement from our first run. D died from the explosion after the boss died however, which was kinda funny. We found out about the chest that can be opened using the Legion key. A leather dropped the first time. No W around, too bad Anyways…have I mentioned how much I love mage’s sheeping capabilities? Well, let me say it again then. Mage’s CC rocks !! And best of all, I could DPS most of the time, instead of having a heart attack from doing MC left and right.

We had some trouble with the 2nd boss. The first time, we managed to get her down to 50%. Our tank, G, got blasted by multiple hellfire, however, and even our super healer P couldn’t save him. The second tried, both P and I were targeted by the elementals, leaving G heal-less. It was definitely our bad The third time, darn Sepethrea kept on targeting me when she rendered G disabled. I died after the 3rd aggro, not long afterward N died, followed by C. But luckily, it was only 4% left of her health. We finally succeeded in killing her. We definitely need to work on our strategy for her though. That was a sloppy victory.

Next is the gauntlet. We wiped one time because both N and I couldn’t organize our CC correctly. It was a shared fault, I should have known that he would target the astromage and I should have let him and chose the other mage instead. Anyway, one wipe on a trash mob is not bad at all, isn’t it? No wipe on the last boss, but he made us scramble for our lives Yikes. I have to admit that I didn’t bring my A game yesterday. On several occasions, I was confused on what do I need to do.

Almost all drops went to N, since I had better items most of the time. But lucky dawg
There won’t be any run today, I think. I’m taking the opportunity to grind my last remaining 3k worth of honor points for my staff. I hope I could get it by Tuesday. It would be a great boost on my dps. We’ll see

Assuming the worst case scenario (without discount and all), I would need 5,200g for my flying mount. So far, I only have about 2,700g (or 3,600g if counting the money in bank alt). That means that I would need another 2,500g (or 1,600g) to get one. According to the WOW reputation calculator, to get the nether ray mount, I only need 13 days worth of daily quests rep grinding (which I translates to about 20 days since I don’t have the patient to look for the prisoner for the escort quest). I usually do one Skettis’ quest, tall the Ogri’la’s daily quests (4 of them), plus daily cooking quest, and occasionally the BG ’s daily quest (when it is not WSG). So, I usually earn about 55g to 65g. Again, assuming the lower bound, it will take me about 45 days to get my last 2,500g. Not a pretty picture. So, I decided that I need some money making scheme.

Edit: I’ve finally gotten my flying mount, but below is a list of what I did to make some money in a pretty good rate.

1. Do daily quest. This is a no brainer. So far I have opened Skettis and Ogri’la daily quests. That alone net me about 60g per day. I’m planning to do the quest to start the Netherwing daily quests and since the next patch will allow us to do 25 daily quests, making money will be much easier. Here is a link detailing a list of possible daily quests.

2. Farm for motes. My favorite motes to farm is water. Being a fisher(woman), I can fish for motes. That would allow me to farm at Nagrand Elemental Plateau. I can wait for the fresh water pools to appear while killing the water elementals. Unfortunately, this area crowded most of the time and the respawn rate really doesn’t let more than one person farming at the same time. The other two locations worth visiting are Skettis (just go around the lake) and the lake outside of Shattrath (need water breathing potions to farm efficiently). My favorite location is by far Skettis. For each round around the lake, I can usually get one primal and few motes.

My other favorite motes to farm is Shadow. In my server, it has the same price as water. My favorite place to farm is in Nagrand. Just go around the Oshu’gun area. The void-walker type of mobs are easy to down and they spawn quite fast. Just be careful of the elite that roams around the north part of the area. The mobs also drop silver, clothes, and other grey weapons/armors to vend. If you see someone’s already farming the area, just choose the opposite side and work your way around it. The oshu’gun crystal powder can be returned to Halaa where you can get an (unique) 18slot bag when you have enough tokens. Also turning in every 20 powder for a research token will net you 2g (consider it a pocket money). The powder is stackable up to 100, so it’s a good way to save bag space. And stack of netherweave clothes are always popular.

The most expensive motes in my server would be fire and air. I personally loath farming for these. Nagrand Elemental Plateau is also the popular place to farm this. For fire motes, I like to do farm these while I am doing my daily quest in Ogri’la. The forge camp to the south of Ogri’la have several elemental fire that you can kill while you’re doing “Banish the demons” quest. I found that the drop rate is quite good here. I can generally get 1 primal from doing this. Naturally, you’ll be slower in doing the quest and there were not that many elementals around. For motes of air, I’ve never found a good place to farm these. The area around altar of shadow in Shadowmoon Valley is notorious for farming them. But, I don’t find them to be dropping at a rate of my liking.

3. Being a jewelcrafter, one of the most profitable thing you can do is prospecting, especially if you are also a miner. Even without mining, you can make some profit (at least in my server). Each stack of ore costs 20-25g. The price tends to fluctuate around this range, so be patient and wait until the price drops. The problem with prospecting is that it has a lot to do with luck. I have a streak where i burnt 5 stacks without getting any gems. But, averagely, I can get 1 blue gem every stack. With Talasite you will break even. But with the other gems, that’s at least 20g in profit. I know that people mentioned that buying a rare gem cut recipe is profitable, but I am not very successful in doing that. I think do this only if you have mining as your other profession since there’s not much profit from buying uncut gems and selling cut gems. Just my experience though.

edit: I forgot to mention to remember to take your gems ration from the consortium faction Gezhe in the camp south of Sunspring lake every month. If you are a serious JC, you would want to grind consortium faction anyway. Being exalted with them guarantees some blue gems every month. Related to that, beginning of the month may be the best time to look for some cheap gems.

Plan 4. Play the auction house. This one, I have to admit, rather sucks. I usually stick with trade items, enchanting stuff in particular. There’s a tendency for the profitable item to change. You should find multiple items that are profitable so that you can switch around and wait for the best opportunities to buy and sell them back. For example, water motes to fluctuate pretty rapidly. There are some days where they sell for 14g and other days where they sell for 22g. A good way to look for items like that is through wowecon.com. Put in your server, look for the item, and examine the price history chart. You want the items which price fluctuates up and down.

Good luck, and remember that the economy is different from server to server. It’s always good to watch for auction house and lurk on the trade channels. This way you can see what crafting item that people tend to sought for and see if you can get a hold of the pattern/recipe.

Gotta run some instances/finish quests for these drops:

(Edited to reflect the current need)

Head:

1. SMV - Quest - Evoker’s Helmet of Second Sight - Cloth: Head (Got it!)
   
2. BM - Aeonus - Mana-Etched Crown (70) - Cloth: Head

Shoulder:

1. BM - Chrono Lord - Mantle of Three Terrors (68) - Cloth: Shoulders
2. Arc - Zereketh - Mana-Sphere Shoulderguards (70) - Cloth: Shoulders
3. Frozen Shadoweave Shoulder (Crafted)

Chest:

1. Bot - Warp Splinter - Warp Infused Drape (70) - Cloth: Chest
2. Frozen Shadoweave robe (Crafted).

Back:

1. Netherstorm - quest - Cloak of Woven Energy - Cloth: Back

Waist:

1. Steamvault - Warlord - Sash of Serpentra (70) - Cloth: Waist
2. Badge of honor (60) - Voodoo-woven belt. (Bought!)

Leg:

1. Bot - Laj - Devil-Stitched Leggings (70) - Cloth: Legs
2. BM - Temporus - Khadgar’s Kilt of Abjuration (68) - Cloth: Legs
3. Trial-Fire Trousers dropped (oh yeah!)

Wands:

1. Arc - Dalliah - Nether Core’s Control Rod (70) - Wand: Range

It was the first time for our guild to head down to Shattered Hall. G (prot warrior), P (holy paladin), C (fury warrior), N (fire mage), and me (shadow priest) were along for the ride. I know that any reasonable group’s make up would supposedly work, but having a mage certainly makes everything much easier. We wiped out twice and had some single and double deaths during trash and boss kill but we never really got stuck at one encounter and we certainly could easily prevent all the wipes and some of the deaths.

The big challenge of this instance is the number of mobs per pull. Several times that we ended up pulling 6 at a time. Our strategy was mostly having the mage sheeped one of the mob, I, the priest, MC-ed and offtank-ed one while the rest of the dps did focus fire. In general it works pretty well. I learnt that dispelling the shadow resistance on the mob goes a long way when it comes to MC.

The first wipe was due to our mistake of not downing the Legionner first and MC-ing the wrong mob. This happened in the room at the end of a hall where they have bunk beds that hold sleeping mobs (don’t remember which one). When left alone (or left too long alone), legionnaire will wake these sleeping mobs (which are elites) to help him. I was assigned an acolyte because we thought he could do some offensive skill such as mind blast. Big mistage, all the spells that I could see was healing and shield. So, I couldn’t get offtank another mob and we went down when Legionner started to call for backup. Yikes. Afterward, we made sure that Legioneer went down first and I MC-ed the darkshooter instead. Darkshooter is a really nice mob to MC because of the rain of fire spell. It really helped downed the rest of the mobs that were beating on our tank relatively fast.

The second time we wiped was because our tank was unaware of the pats and we ended up pulling multiple mobs at the same time. And then he accidentally do a fear causing another group to come and beat us to pulp. Hahaha, it was fun to see all the mobs charging toward you. Anyway, we learned (or he learned) in the next attempt and we moved on.

The bosses of this instance were so much easier compared to the bosses in another instance. On the first boss, only C died because we wanted to see whether P can healed him through while C is dps-ing. It was a wrong strategy on our part because we actually had enough range dps to down the boss on 20%. And P was too busy healing through the tank. Next time, G and C could actually run when the boss was doing his dark spin. No wipe on this boss. Lesson: all mellee stay away from this boss when he does the spin at 20%.

The second boss is the ogre with two heads. This boss switched head and each head has its own threat list. When he switched head the first time, it will pick randomly one person in which he has a small amount on threat of.  On this boss, both C and N went down at like 80%. N got the aggro when the boss switched head and G couldn’t get the aggro off him, which I suspect due to N running away from G and keep on casting offensive spell whenever we could. I don’t really know what happened to C. I know that he got the aggro from the boss next but I didn’t think that he would go down so fast. So, me, P, and G pretty much 3-manned the boss down for the rest of the encounter. It took a while but other than P almost died because of the aggro on him (and he couldn’t stop healing) , it was a pretty easy encounter. Lesson: on this boss, make sure that you let your tanker to establish threat on both of the head.

The lass boss requires some positioning. On the last boss, we ended up with no death whatsoever. We used the strategy where we stood on the stairways, carefully not aggroing the stealthing assassins. This allows us not  being hit when the boss is doing his dance blade. We were confused at the beginning on who should be taking care of the adds. I dots the boss whenever I could but I tried to kill the adds also. Well, I was supposed to just dps the boss while N and C took care the adds. But C was still in the boss when the mobs came in, so we were kinda struggling with our roles in the beginning. But C is a much better person to take care of the mobs since he didn’t rely on his mana to hit. And after we got settled in on our roles, the boss went down quickly. Lesson: Avoid fighting in the ring and range dps such as hunter or mage are the best with the adds (some of the adds are hunter that melleeing dps won’t be able to reach without aggroing the stealthed assassins).

We didn’t end up with any phat loots this time, which always the case with our guild run. We were mostly plate and cloth wearers and the loots that dropped were always leather and mails. Blizzard hates us, I’m telling you. But we got our first Void Crystal, woo hoo! And of course tons of shards. I finished 3 of my quests and one of the quest gave an upgrade on my wand. It’s pretty sweet. Well then, we need to run this instance at least 4 more times so that C can get a new recipe from the HH faction. I like this instance and I can’t wait to run it again. Sides, I think G still wants some of the bosses’ drops.

Just realized that the sweet staff from S1 arena will cost 27k of honor points instead of 22k honor points I initially thought. Darn, 5k more of honor points to grind. I am not having a good day in WoW.

That’s pretty much generalized this weekend of WoW. That’s mainly due to the lack of play time which we mostly spent to do a couple of quests with a lot of deaths and helping P with another quest, also with a lot of deaths.  On a positive note, however, A managed to get her goal for the weekend, i.e., to be in outlands and E have gotten 226 on her fishing skills. On the later however, I’m sick of being in STV and have decided to postpone power leveling up fishing until next week.

We also started to grind for BG’s honor once again. I still couldn’t find any gear that I’m really interested in getting for E. I think it’s because they really don’t have good stats other than +spell dmg in them. I am going to miss my spirits and +spell hit rating. I am still going to get the staff though because that’s the only clear improvement on my gear. It costs a tons of honor points though
Anyway, hopefully we can get some instance time tonight. I want to get good gears !! ><

One of the blog that I read had a story where the character managed to get a head piece from an instance run and to have another character commented that she is lucky because she always gets something from the run.

I felt that most of the time I’m unlucky in this game. I never get an epic drop like A. So, far I’ve only gotten 2 blue JC recipes and 1 halloween themed bag. In contrast, P always got the gear that he wants from an instance run. That guy got a freak*n eng recipe on the first mob we farm. G got one blue JC recipe, blue BS recipe, and 3 bags - and mostly they are by coincidence. Lately, I never gotten any blue gems by prospecting adamantite ores. I’m so discouraged.

Yesterday we run ST. I was using it as “training run”. I haven’t touched V for almost a year now and I forgot all about pallies’ spells. Before ignoring V and starting with E, V was respecced to a protection. Hence, V hasn’t had that much practice in being a tanker. I think pallies’ tanking is kinda fun, especially since it allows A to go crazy with her AOE damage. I also thought that it should be easier than warriors’ tanking, but after yesterday (and today), I really don’t think that it’s much easier.

Having read a small number of articles about pallies’ tanking, I was very excited to run using V and apply what I’ve learned. Our group consisted of a warlock, a mage, a druid, and a hunter. It’s a high dps group, perfect to test if I can hold the aggro. Well, it may not be entirely perfect since I was 6 levels higher than 3 of them and 3 levels than the warlock. I tried to familiar myself with my spells and the key bindings associated to it. My regular pull usually consisted of starting with AS, SotC, JotC, Consecration, HS, SotR and repeat from Consecration. But, I’m having a hard time keeping with the aggro and my mana seems to deplete quite rapidly. The last problem may be due to the lack of healing that I need because of my high armor. I know that with warriors’ tanking, people usually wait for a while before they unload their spells, which was not the case yesterday. Mostly because we have such a high level warlock that can easily drop the mobs like flies that they don’t really wait to see whether I have gotten the aggro or not. We did finish every pull quite rapidly, however, thanks to the mage’s fire AOE spells. But I know that I still need a lot of work.

What are my problems? Well first, I think that I’m undergeared. But, that really shouldn’t be a problem since I’m the highest level there. That leaves having a bad spell rotation. I learnt today that:

1. I should start with seal before pulling using AS since I’ll be wasting a cooldown.
2. Although Cons is a AOE spell, I still need to apply S and J to each mob. That way I can retain aggro to all the mob.
3. I am kinda bad when comes to HS. I always forgot to check whether it has expired and needs to be reapplied.
4. My keybindings are horrible and I definitely need to make macro out of RD.
5. I forgot all my panic buttons, although I didn’t have to resort to using them on the last run, I think it would be useful to familiarize with them before the “real” run.

Hopefully if I can tweak these, I can improve my aggro retainment. That, and improving my gears. I want more 5m/sec gears please