I’d Rather Be Wowing!

Looking back at my old list, E has gotten most of the stuffs that she wanted. Since life in WoW without goal seems kinda blah, I decided to put new target gears for E and V. These gears are limited to my access, which in this case is no arena gear and only up to Kara.

For E

Neckpiece:

• Ritssyn’s Lost Pendant. Random drop from Kara’s trash. Will gain some stamina, 20 something +spell dmg, but losing some intellect, hit rating, and critical strike. Still pretty minimal loss since I’m hit capped.
• Vindicator’s Pendant of Dominance. Purchasable with 15.3K honor and 10 Eots marks. More stamina, int, and up to +17 spell damage if gem right. Definitely the second best choice. Now…if only I’m that excited of going PvP again.
• Brooch of Unquenchable Fury. Drop of Moroes. Knowing my luck with random drop, I think this is a reasonable alternative. Only addition +4 spell damage, but much more +sta and +int, although losing the critical strike.

Backpiece:

• Subtlety enchant. Well, just need 3 more primal shadows and then I’m good to go.

Wrist:

• Runed Spell-cuffs. 35 badge of honor. The appeal is on the spell haste, although the +spell damage is only about 3. Not to mention I’ll be losing some +sta and +int.
• Bands of Nefarious Deeds. Drop of Maiden. It’s about +6 spell damage and a slight increase in +sta and +int.
• Spell power enchant.

Finger:

• Ring of Occurrence. Drop of Chess event. I can’t believe I passed this one before. Now, I’ve never seen it drop again. Ugh.

Trinket:

• Darkmoon Card: Crusade. From Darkmoon Faire’s card collecting quest. I think this is more of wishful thinking or if I’m rich enough to get enough money to buy each card.
• Quagmirran’s Eyes. Slave pen heroic. Tough chance that I can get a group to consistent go there. Oh well.

Weapon:

• Nathrezim Mind Blade. Drop of Prince. With Orb of Souleater. 25 badge of honors. I will be seeing about +54 increase in spell damage. And the best thing, no bg

For Val, she’s still undegeared. I’ll be following this list to get her ready for Kara.

Including Monday

• Ding! Ding! Ding! V finally hits 70. She got her flying mount. I am happy to finally able to farm herbs again She also got her first taste in tanking for Shad Lab. E was originally set to go, but we couldn’t find a tank after spamming the LFG for 15 minutes. I told the pug group that V could go, but she is lacking in the tanking experience and doesn’t have the best gear yet. I was lucky to get a pug group that was really understanding and supportive. We wiped a lot of times, but not due to the same mistakes repeatedly. Actually, we wiped the most at the Inciter. I hate - hate - hate running out when Murmur. I actually suck really badly at that. I ended up staying in after failing for the 2nd try. I got good 5-man tanking pants (which supposedly will be awful after the patch 2.4 rolls around - they took out the spell dmg from it - what’s up with that !?). And two people in the group said that they wouldn’t mind being tanked by me again :0

• E is exalted with Aldor. Finally made the golden spellthread for P. I actually kinda miss farming for reps. I know, I’m weird While we’re at the topic of rep, I am at almost 9k into revered for Netherwing. It’s almost 1/2 way to go.

•  Run the ZG with our ally guild. ZG is so green and bright. I do actually love the design of the instance but I can’t help thinking that I would be lost in that instance easily. And what’s up with all the coins? You cannot turn them in until revered!? I am grateful to the idea of being saved to an instance which allows people to split their raiding hours. I can’t imagine how long it would take for a regular lvl 60 to complete that instance.

• Learn the hard lesson of not meddling at someone’s else play choice (aka the foot in the mouth moment). The newbie that rolled as ret paladin asked what would be his role in the raid. He is very excited at the prospect of joining the raid. I meant to say that ret paladin is not so popular compared to it’s two other talent trees when it comes to raid, which maybe makes it harder to get a raid spot in general. But somehow, it came out all wrong - well it’s like 3 o’clock in the morning - and I may say along the line that he may need to consider re-rolling. I hated it right at the moment I said it. Our guild was never into limiting people to specific spec just to raid with us. The only thing that matters for us if the person give it their all. My statement to him may be affected by the general perception of raiding ret pally and it shouldn’t be like that at the first place. I spent an hour afterward trying to soften my blow, and fix my wordings, and I couldn’t help thinking if only I didn’t say that. Not my shiniest moment.

After about 2 weeks of stagnation, we’re happy to finally down Prince and Netherspite - Prince in particular since we had so much problem with him. We all just brought our A game today. Although there were some mistakes, we recovered nicely.

We finally resort to using the safe spot for Prince, which coupled with good luck on the placement of the infernals for our melee-ers, we two-shotted him. Our first attempt was very well done, but infernals placing screwed us over at the 3rd phase (this is without using the safe spots). We were closed to getting him, but some of us were confused and mistaken about the existence of enfeeble on this phase, and tried to moved to a location where we can be outside the 30 yard range. The healers were moving - the tank didn’t get his heal, and we wiped at 28%.

The Netherspite’s fight was thoroughly messy. This is the first time for 8 out of 10 of us that have seen the fight. Although reading and watching videos gave me some ideas on how the fight would go, nothing compares to actually doing it. Utter chaos. First off, that beam can be tricky to intercept. When you lose the beam, it can be nervebreaking to try to get it back in the amount of time that we wouldn’t get the Nether exhaustion. I actually saw our hunter standing in front of the beam and couldn’t get the beam until he went all the way back in front of the portal. It was weird, but maybe he just missed something. I don’t think we got the fight down as we had for Aran or Illhoof yet, but just the thought that we have done it - especially in only two tries - would be enough to motivate us to do better the next time around. I’m so proud of our group
From the two new bosses, I got: Uni-Mind Headdress and Ruby Drape of the Mysticant. Also, I got enough badges to score me an Icon of the Silver Crescent. Now we just need to repeat the success and start forming a 25 man group to head to Gruul. Exciting indeed.

1. E is 1k away from being exalted with Aldor. I know that P is looking forward to that golden thread. Related to that, I’m starting to get used to do aoe grind with E. I know that I’m not up par to most of mage’s aoe grinding (I don’t know if it is possible with a shadow priest) and the mana efficiency is arguable, but it sure makes farming more exciting
The key to shadow priest aoe grinding is the psychic scream. What I usually do is (remember to keep IF up at all time):

• Put on your PW:S
• Cast VT and SW:P to one mob
• Make your way to the next mob and repeat casting VT and SW:P
• Repeat the above step up to a manageable number of mobs. That depends on your taste and the mobs (mobs that can interrupt or stun is a pain in the rear >< ). A good way to measure is by how long and how many mobs  for your shield to last.
• At this point, you should be surrounded by multiple mobs. Time to have fun and let loose your PS. Remember PS can only fear up to 5 mobs and they can be resisted and break early…a lot.
• Assess the situation, if PS held up real good, grab another mob or two and start beating on it. If not, take care the mobs that are heading their way back to you.
• Remember to redo your PW:S whenever it’s down and it’s on cooldown. If you need some healing, just cast VE on a mob or two.
• Above all things,  gauge your own capability and adjust as needed

2. Also, E finally hit revered with the Netherwing faction. I know I can be faster than this, but dailies starting to get their toll on me.

3. V is 4 bars away from ding-ing to 70. Still awfully geared. WTB: better itemization for prot paladin from quest items. Still couldn’t manage to get consistent group to run instances with.

I suppose there’s not much going on this week

I’ve been noticing lately that I could never seem to find most of the things that I need from the AH. Even when they are there, their prices seem to be higher than what I usually see (which I am suspecting due to the lack of supply to begin with).

Runed living rubies, for example, if I can find them, has now increased about 20g in price, ranging from 80-100g easily. On the other hand, the living rubies themselves have been scarce. I dropped my herbalism because AH used to overflow with the herbs that I could rarely sell my herbs without cutting down the prices. But now, it is pretty rare to find Nightmare vine and although Netherbloom is slightly easier, they are usually way overpriced. I’ve been trying to find Elixir of demonslaying for days with no result. I ended up buying the recipes and farmed for the mats instead. In several occasions, I was trying to find super healing pots and Sporefish, and there was only 1 available in AH.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I sure wish that Val can get her flying mount ASAP so I can farm for my own herbs again

I was reading Misery’s post today (it’s always good to find blog of another shadow priests) about a new tool called imba (imba = leet talk for imbalanced for those who doesn’t know it). In short, it would rate your gears and build and provide some suggestions to how you can improve it. For example, it does tell you if you mis-enchant some of your gears and provides a better enchantment for your class and build. It also tells you which instance that you should be running at your current gear level.

Note however that “imba” can only asses characters of level 70. As far as I can notice, their analysis on the enchants, gems, and builds is quite spot on. In regard for low level equipments, however, I suspect that they only care whether the gears were green or not (regardless of their stat).

After running the tool, I was surprised to find that I have 10 low level gems. I know that I have been saving money to upgrade them, but I didn’t realize that I have that many. Wow. I need to start working on updating them I suppose. If only Runed Living Ruby is not outrageously high at this moment ><

Our second try on Prince. We are missing our regular main tanker, so our off tanker step up to the plate. We are also missing our regular mage and had a frost mage instead. Our best effort got him down to 38% until we got overwhelmed by the infernals. And that was our first attempt for the day. It went downhill afterward.

Some of the reasons why we failed:

1. Our group was heavy in melee. Moreover, the two highest dps dealers were our meleers. Running in and out during the enfeeble phase really hurts our group dps. Because of that, we couldn’t get him down while the infernals were still manageable.
2. Stupid mistakes. Not running far enough, trying to play safe from the enfeeble but ended up running too far (and into the stupid infernals), underestimating the infernal hellfire range, not moving the group early enough, unlucky pull where Prince passed by the MT and killed one of the dps instead, etc.
3. Luck of the draw with the infernal dropping. We literally surrounded at several occasions.

Granted, I think without the stupid mistakes we would have more chances. I think we just need to start Prince early enough when people would still have their best game to bring. It is very disappointing. In my mind, I kept replaying the mistakes that I did and banged my head against the wall (not literally-of course) for doing them. I mean, if we can 9 man him until 38% without our 2nd highest dps, I’m sure we can do it again. The encounter was just not clicking for us yesterday, but I hope that nobody loses their spirit over this. I know we can do this. We just need to get our act together.

I don’t know how you put up with the position.

I had my first taste on being a raid leader yesterday. It’s so very stressful. And it’s amazing how much different the raid experience was. From people being late to log, which sent you scrambling to find a way to contact them; To people who without any warning decided to forego the run and needed to be replaced. From apologizing to the guy that was subbing for your group’s tanker position for not starting the run at the promised time; To making the decision whether or not we were going to wait for the healer who would be running 1/2 to 1 hour late. From being nervous the whole entire run whether the new group’s composition will work or not; To being an ornery SOB that keeps reminding people to give salv buffs instead and misdirects because of the tanker’s borderline threat generation. From having to call out debuffs and making sure that the raid warnings were turned on (and people were paying attention to them); To calling out for battle resses and strategy shuffling when things were falling apart.

Give a hug to your raid leader today. They do so much and often subjected to many shitty behaviors. Yet, they are willing to do it week per week for no reward whatsoever other than the love for raiding.

A slight rant post.

I have a fair share of pugging. Ever since our guild started on Kara run, we very rarely run any other instances. Since I am a completist, I like to run instances for rep, recipes, and for badges. So, I start to do pugging whenever I can. Most of the time, I run into very competent pug, and we did the run much better than even our guild’s run. But other times, the puggings were so bad that it steered me away from pugging for days. The last pug cost me 30g with zero badges.

When pugging:

1. You’ll end up with different group make up than what you’re used to. Most of the time you’ll end up with a non-ideal group make up. Give people a chance and make it work. So what if you don’t have a mage to sheep. I did a pug in SL with no sheep and did fear bombing instead and that’s the most successful run in SL that I ever have. Similarly, so what if you have no warlock in Mech. In one run, we did it in such a way so that we only pulled 1 demon group with a route that ignore the rest of them. The run ends successfully too. It’s very irritating when after you wiped repeatedly in the same encounter, the group “leader” refused to change the strategy because it works for him in the past…in his guild run. Or people who insisted a certain way for another person to do something because he/she can do it perfectly even seeing that other person was not able to do it successfully. People’s gears are different. People’s specs are different. People’s play style is different. Group make up is different. Listen to other people’s suggestion. Be flexible and work with what you have. Groups that is willing to do that are usually rewarded.

2. Don’t be selfish. It’s good to look out for your own benefit. But don’t take other people’s feelings lightly.

(/rantmode on)

In one of my bad pug experience, we have a rogue who kept telling the tanking warrior to pull. He even went further by saying, pull or I pull. He was oblivious to the fact that the warrior was waiting for the healer to get fill his mana bar. The worst of it all, he usually waited until got rezzed instead of running back together. And he never bother to fill up his health on his own after he was rezzed.

While we are in the topic of rezzing, just because in your guild, someone always run to rez your sorry behind, don’t make a random stranger you just met do the same thing. I was in the semi-pug where 3 of the members were from the same guild. One of them was a holy priest, the group’s healer. Apparently, when they say “I’m gonna be lazy” to each other - especially to the priest, that means that they are going to wait until they are being rezzed instead of running back themselves. We wiped multiple times and most of the time, 2 out of the three members, chose to be lazy. And one of them is always the priest. So guess what, I ended up rezzing the groups (except the warrior, which wasn’t from their guild) at each wipe while the holy priest never bother to run back. Not a single freaking time. The same priest never buff the group for fortitude either.

(/rantmode off)

3. Be generous with praises and be discreet with criticism. In fact, if possible, don’t critique. You can, instead, ask them questions to why they chose to do something in a certain way. In a sense, give them the benefits of doubt. There’s nothing better than praises to lift up your group’s mood. You’ll be surprise to see the difference in your pugging experience with a group that constantly cheering each other than in one that constantly blaming each other. On the other side, when criticize, take it and try it when they are relevant and refuse it gently when they are not.

Pugging can actually be great. You can learn new strategies from others and adapt it for your own guild run. You can improve your play style by observing a good player that you group up with. And at the end of the day, at least you have stories to tell…like the time when you grouped up with a holy paladin and he kept on spamming flash light to the tanker…even before (and during) the tanker started the pull (aggro fest, oh yeah!)…*grin*

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.