I’d Rather Be Wowing!

It’s our second time for 25-man raiding Gruul. Tensions were running a bit high. And now I understand why people are complaining about raiding. On the upside, High King was downed again. Our first attempt on Gruul got him to 50 something %, and the second attempt got him to 60 something %.

We changed the kill order this time, killing the shaman before the summoner. First issue arose from that. One of the raid member suggested that we kill summoner first, but her advice was not taken. I’m not sure if the switch was accidental or not, because last week we killed the summoner first. But I don’t really want to make a scene since I was not sure at that point. Anyway, we wiped 3 times because of various reasons. And at the last attempt, the person who suggested the switch was downed in the middle of the fight. And she started to say on the vent that they should consider taking her advice…in the middle of the fight. This didn’t go well with the raid leader, which understandable since he still need to direct the fight and you cannot direct a fight if someone was talking on the vent. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. But we did get him, so I guess everybody just happy because of that.

Other issue that I had is on how late the guildies log in for the run. Since the run usually takes members from 2 other guilds, and I’m responsible in inviting our members to the run, I really hated to see spot starting to fill out while they were no where in sight. Ugh. Corro told me that I’m stressing about nothing. If they didn’t show up in time, it’s their fault. But I can’t help feeling bad. Also, we ended up waiting for them, which didn’t look so good on our guild’s part.

Well, ZA was canceled again I was beyond disappointment. It was nobody’s mistakes. We did end up running MgT. Bad decision, however. We pug a hunter, and it’s one of those that didn’t want to release upon death. If you think about it, he has an aspect of cheetah which is really useful to help us recover fast. But he did real decent on the trapping, which makes up a bit for it. Our GL, and our main tank, really hate that instance. He hates all the caster pulls. And I guess after the raid run today, he didn’t really have much energy for this run. He ended complaining and saying how much he didn’t want to come back We didn’t end up finishing the run. But he sounded so mad with the instance that it made me feel bad that I asked for the run.

Non Wow related - I went back to do some of my work just discover an email containing a bad news for work.

Totally not a good Sunday for me.

First off, you can fly to the island from any fly path in Eastern Kingdom. I’ve only flew to it from IF. It was such a pleasant surprise that the flight took shorter than it looks. As soon as I reached IF’s gate, I was immediately treated to a loading screen, and voila…you’re at the island. (Edit: I finally flew from SW, and you actually still fly regularly up to IF, before the loading screen came out. So…fly from IF, if you can, to save time.)

The fly back to Eastern Kingdom, unfortunately, is not as easy. Thinking that the same thing will happen, I flew back first to Menethil. This time I was unpleasantly surprised that I had to actually spent about 11 minutes on the flying mount, since instead of having an instant “teleportation”, the flight path took the traditional route. I figured that it may be because I flew to a non major city. When my hearthstone was not up on the second day, I tried to fly to Stormwind instead. Bad choice, this time, I spent 14 minutes on the flying mount. If you have any experience flying back to IF, let me know !

So, since at this point there’s no way to go back to outland through flying in a “reasonable” time, do yourself a favor and time your hearthstone correctly.

Edit: If your server has unlocked the portal from Shattrath to QD, there is a new quest called “Know your ley lines”. The reward of the quest is a one time use only scroll, that will port you back to Shattrath. Nice !

From WoW Forum’s thread:

“All player models were re-built in 2.4 to increase preformance[sic]. This resulted in slight change to the geometry of the female human face. It was decided that this was an acceptable change. “

I was staring at Val during the character selection screen the other day and could have swore that something is different. I guess I am not paranoid. Aww….por Val. She got screwed all over (incl her gear change )

Kara

Yesterday was our Kara’s night. We usually miss one of the dps, but yesterday we missed 2 of them. After scrambling, we finally get 2 mages to sub for them. Then, we found out that our OT, Mr. Drood, run out of his time card and had to go and buy a new one. Well, we don’t really mind being a little late. We actually proceed to go in, pull some trash with just 9 of us, and our MT went ahead and tanked both Midnight and Attumen. I think our healers were just overgeared that they manage to heal him through. The only thing we had to worry was aggro. And Omen was not very friendly yesterday
Anyway…sometimes later, when we are starting to pull Moroes’ trash, Mr. Drood logged in the vent and said that Blizzard’s website won’t allow him to enter the new time card’s code - server’s busy (must be a lot of people continuing their subscription for the patch). Ok…now what…we are finally able to get a pally to OT for us. Without the 3rd CC, it’s a little bit weird. But our MT also tanked one of the add, so problem was solved. Not quite yet…it turns out that Mr. Temp was not able to dish out enough threat to get put him on 2nd place comfortably. It’s the regular problem with OT-ing Moroes for our group. But things took a turn when gouge and blind came at the same time and Moroes went on a rampage toward our mages (did I mention that we have 3 mages in this run ). Ice blocks solve the problem, but then Moroes got away again during gouge, and this time we got casualties (including me). We finally switched some dps to get the other add, so that the tanks can secure aggro one Moroes once again. We got him down. Phew…we haven’t done Moroes that messy ever since our first try.

After Opera (no libram again), the pally tank had to go and we went back to 9 man team. We decided to try on Curator. O..o Boy, do we miss the dps proweness of Mr. Drood, and coupled with some loss in dps from our regular group and the buff that they bring, we had some difficulties in downing the flares. I had to move from my Curator nuking duty to flares. Argh…I hate it, especially when they went out of my MF range and I had to chase them around. But we did it We dropped him with just 9 man. For all the parts where we had to 9-man the run, I must say we did pretty awesome
PVP

After Kara, our pally healer asked us to do some PVP. I think he’s in a bit of PVP mood because of the holy shock buff and turn evil 5 of us formed a team: Ele shaman, holy pally, resto druid, fury warrior, and shadow priest. First stop AB. We lost. They just zerging us I died way to easy, so after the BG, I went to buy 2 of the starter BG set.

Next stop, AV. I think some of us still confused about the change and tried to zerg Drek. Ugh…why can’t they take a hint and adapt? We were supposed to secure all towers first so that Drek didn’t get buffed, but instead of going out to get the towers, they just kept trying and trying and trying…and kept getting one-shotted >< No daily completed today
Then, WSG. Once we got in, 5 other people that make out ally’s group was from the same server - maybe from the same guild. The first thing they said - afk game. Argh…I was fuming. Come on, there’s only 10 people in a team, and 4 of them proceeded to afk right away!?! We reported every one of them, then proceeded to exchange rants and yells. It’s not adult like *blush*, but it sure feels good I must say that this is the result of that new repeatable quest to get honors from marks.

/start rant

I think some people are just so selfish - ok just because you pay your $15 to play the game HOW YOU WANTED - it doesn’t mean that you have to interrupt people from playing their game. Get a 10/15/20 person group and afk all you want, but don’t ruin it for people that are there to do real PVP! You are wasting my time, and you just let the other group geared up faster just because you just care about your welfare gear and not anything else. When you’re in BG, just play - at least try even if you think that there’s no hope and we will lose in the end. Heck, you can get honor kills that way. JUST DON’T FREAK*N AFK!

\end rant

Anyway, we got steamrolled again and this time we head to EoTS. Much better game this time. We won the first game and barely notice the Horde’s present (I wonder if they had the same problem as we were on the WSG game). The second game proved to be more of a challenge, but we did a great defense. We actually have healers Pally, druid, and me - we just top everybody’s health up. I tossed fear bomb and mana burn every once in a while, but mainly renew and flash heal. We won it because we managed to defend all our towers and two win in a row. It’s great This is what PvP is all about ! The excitement, the blood rushes through your head kinda feeling - winning is just a cherry on top.

Phase 2 daily quest

Yesterday’s morning, I found out that our server has entered phase two. Two more quests were unlocked: killing bunch of demons and bombing quest. Demons were easy, but I can imagine that it is harder with competition. Group up And you don’t have to kill the Emissary of Hate - just put the banner if you see his corpse and voila. Smart move, Blizz! The bombing quest is okay for me, but then again, there weren’t so many people in the morning It does take a while to recognize the mobs that you need to bomb, but after you do, it’s much easier (unless when someone in front of you just killed everything you need ><).

That’s all folks…another fun and frustrating day at the WoW.

Up to what I’ve experienced so far…

The Good

• The new 5-man instance. It’s short enough to be completed in an hour to 2 hours. It’s challenging. The only thing that I would complain is how certain classes seems to be heavily favored - mage or hunter, to a certain degree paladin tank, and group healer such as priest and shaman. They should have, for example, an undead within a group of 5 mob pulls to make shackling or Paladin’s turn evil more useful. (In other words - I’m tired to be passed on for mage).
• Most of the new dailies. The respawn rate makes questing, even with lots of people, manageable. Most of the dailies is also very friendly to grouping. I love the reward that they provided. Guaranteed greenies for each Shattered Sun Supplies with chance to get Badge of Justice is just plain awesome.
• Brilliant Glass for JC. It makes the green quality gems useful again. Heck, it makes prospecting Fel Iron viable again.
• The new fishing quests. I love the reward from them. I gotten my baby crocolisk (Snarly) on my first reward. Lucky
• You can now buy a starting PVP gear set from vendors. It’s a great move to put everyone that wants to do PVP in equal footing.

The Bad:

•  Some information is not readily available. Seeing that I have to google to find out how to get to the island or how can I get to the portal to Cavern of time, that’s just wrong.
• You need to be revered to have Zephyr (in World’s end tavern) to port you to Cavern of time. Revered !?!? That just blows. I would have thought that the idea is to make people’s travel to CoT faster, and people who has lower reputation probably needs it more? That’s just my opinion. I think honored should be suffice.
• The new repeatable BG quest, where you can turn each of the BG’s mark for honor points. I have a mixed feeling about this. In one end, it’s a good way to solve the issue of overflowing marks. On the other end, it encourages some people to not even trying during the BG so that they can get out from the BG faster. Stupid.

The Ugly 

• The change in paladin gear, especially the removal of spell damage gear for strength. That just totally blows. I went from 300 something spell damage to 200 spell damage.  Some of my gears are not totally worthless for tanking. Worst of it all, it really limits where you can get decent tanking (for 5 men instances) gear for paladin. Argh!!
• Resilience heavy cape from MagTer last boss’ drop. Why is it even there >< That should be an arena reward and not from instance’s reward.

I almost gave up when I tried to look for a group to go there. It seems that not many people want to bring dps without any CC (well not counting MC). But, one tank that I knew from my past run all of a sudden messaged me and invited me to go to his group. Yay!

MagTer is so pretty It’s like the BElf starting area. Difficulty wise, we did wipe several times. Well, we are still learning about the place and that’s what so fun about it At the beginning the trash was manageable, but toward the end, each pull is about 5-6 mobs. What makes it difficult is the amount of magic damage that doesn’t get mitigated by armor. I can imagine why having a lot of CC makes the run smoother.

Trashes - The one that jumps out during the fight: BloodKnight heals. They “throws” a glaive too, which I seems to get most of the time. When hit, you’ll get stunned for several seconds. Definitely annoying. Etherial smuggler teleport and does a boatload of aoe damage. They become our priority to be cc-ed. The warlock doesn’t really hit hard and as with the case of cloth wearers, they drop like flies. There’s a robot that look like Kara’s arcane protector, but with less bolts coming out of them. The group trash is really challenging, everybody has different ability.

Bosses -

• Selin Fireheart - ocassionally activate crystals. Crystals need to be downed ASAP. When the crystal breaks, he will do some AOE damage. He is not too bad.
• Vexallus - spawn sparks, do chain lightning - just like Curator (except with no evocation ><). We actually wiped once on this guy. Spreading out really helps especially with the chain lightning damage. It can be a bit overwhelming. It really helps to have high stamina gear as well.
• Priestess Delrissa (with 4 adds) - our tank’s metaphor: it’s like doing a 5v5 arena I think we got the shaman, fury warrior, naga warrior, and a warlock for the fight. Don’t get to the water in front of the group, that will aggro them. We made a mistake in doing that and wiped because we weren’t ready. Delrissa doesn’t really hit that hard. On our successful try, we killed her first. Just stay alive, use your fear (hope you clear out the surrounding area), cc, and every survival spell that you got.
• Kaelthas - I think we wiped on him 3 times Mostly because of the phoenix. The general strategy is to kill the phoenix when spawned, then the egg. We actually have the paladin tanker tanked the phoenix. But the phoenix does explode upon death, so it may not be a good idea the tanker is low on health. Wait until the 2nd phoenix is spawned before getting Kael to 50%. When Kael reaches 50%, he would initiate phase 2 in which he took away the gravity and we would be floating in the air. He also spawns 3 orbs that, to tell the truth, really hard to see. The orbs do arcane damage that need to be avoided. But overall, it’s not an extremely hard fight. Just need a little coordination.

Completing the quest on the non-heroic mode will unlock the heroic mode. Overall, the encounters are really fun. The cutscene in the middle of the fight (after clicking the orb) is excellent. I wish I know the story a bit more. Good job Blizz

Hmm…it turns out that you cannot buy gear right away with your badges. I’m sure that’ll make some people unhappy. After reading some articles, it seems that the vendors for new gears through badges and jc recipes would be unlock later and somewhat dependent on the effort of the people in the server themselves. I like the fact that you cannot exhaust everything that the patch can offer in a day, but I don’t really like the progress is server-based - I wish it’s more of fixed time based.

Regardless, I’m really excited about the new daily quests and the new instance. I doubt that our guild will do a run today, but I’m crossing my fingers

If the drops from the bosses are really random after all? Sometimes I wonder how exactly Blizz implements their random number generator?

For example, Moroes’ pocketwatch always drop on our group - every single freak*n time - leaving our shaman sighing because he never gets his cape. So does tokens for fallen heroes (i.e., for hunter, warlock, and mage) . It really sucks because there’s usually only 2 hunters that benefit from that. These two hunters now have their t4 set (from Kara) completed. I ticked off because one of the hunter only plays with us once a week, and yet he get 2-3 loots every week just because the drops favor their class. On the other hand, we’ve only seen the token for fallen defender drops (warrior, druid, priest)…oh maybe…2-3 times in total (glove and helmet), and we have…1, 2, …, 6 people that can make use of that. How sucks is that? Being the dps in the group, I usually gave up my roll until all the tanks and healers got theirs first. Seeing that the token rarely drop for our group, I don’t really know when I would ever get mine.

I am not usually a loot whore. But this kind of setup makes me real mad. 2 healing class share the same 1 token? 2 tanking class share the same 1 token? Both healing and tanking classes share the same 1 token? How is that balanced? My pally healer always fumed after Opera fight because for how many times we’ve done that event, his libram never ever drops. I share his pain.

In our Kara’s run, we usually have one person filling in for the first half of the run because one of regular member is not available on Mondays. Whenever we try to attempt Illhoof, we kept getting comments from our subber: “Wow, you guys are crazy to do this without a warlock”. If I remember correctly, I think this encounter was much nerfed than before and now actually doable without having a warlock, but still, apparently people’s sentiment remains - that we need warlock to do Illhoof.

But, so far we never failed to down him. In fact, on our first try, we one-shotted him without having a warlock. On our worse attempts, it took us 2 tries, and that’s usually without having our paladin healer. I think downing Illhoof works with our group because our group is Melee heavy. In fact, the only casters are me (shadow priest) and all our healers. The hard part of Illhoof encounter is the casting pushback. Since meleers and hunters weren’t affected by pushback, the only dps missing was me (unfortunately really ).

Our most common wipe is actually due to pushback to the healers, especially during demon chain moment. This is what we usually do:

• Have someone lessen the burden with the imps. In our group, we have a fury warrior that deals with the imps and we have a healer dedicated to healing him. It works wonder, really. Fury warrior is like an aoe melee, without the pushback and mana issue. Perfect If coupled with fire resistance aura, he needs so little heal.
• On the subject of imps, as a shadow priest, what I like to do is to absorb the remaining aggro - whatever our fury warrior couldn’t handle. That means that most of the other imps would be attacking me. This strategy is not ideal since less mana returns and group healing, especially much later on the fight where getting too many imps mean a long cast time. But, in my opinion, it’s better for me to get the pushback instead of our healers.
• Druid and priest healers - don’t forget your hots
• Burning down the demon chain asap is completely vital. As a shadow priest, keep your burst cast solely for this. Having boss mod information really helps to know when you need to have your finger off the Mind blast button.

Points to take: never make the lack of warlock be your excuse in not trying Illhoof

Another weekend report brought to you by yours truly :0

Not much going on. Lem, my warlock, finally dinged to 40. I think they change the quest for getting the mount or something. I remember for my paladin, you actually have to take a quest, travel, and turn in the quest and voila…you get your mount. Thinking that it’s the same case with warlock, I tried to find the person that give you your mount quest, but could not find it. Then, I realize that all you have to do is just learn the summon skill from your trainer. Hah…that was easy
I checked my rss this Sunday and found out about the Easter eggs from the Noblegarden event. It’s such a small event that I don’t think most people knows about it. Anyway, one look at the Elegant Dress, I knew I just have to have it So the two person work force was deployed. I asked the help of Ast to find those brightly colored eggs. Although grumbling (she owed me from a bunch of netherweave clothes I supplied her), she proceeded to scourge through Dun Morogh area while Val, the better choice to explore due to Crusader Aura, scourge through Elwynn Forest. Well, Ast found about 10 of them, but nothing but Lollipops and Chocolate Square. Val has much better luck, fortunately, within 15 minutes, she got both the tuxedo shirt and elegant dress that I’ve wanted. Hurray!

E tried to join the heroic dailies for both Saturday and Sunday but nobody seems to wanting her But while waiting and lurking through the LFG channel, I saw a group was looking for a tank for Durnhole Keep. They didn’t seem to have any luck in finding one so I figured, what the heck. I really want to run something, and better yet, Val really needs to get geared up. So I said, sure I’ll go, but keep in mind that I’ve never tanked that instance before. I immediately got the invite and had a blast. It was one smooth run, maybe because all but one are 70s After the run, the group wanted to run for Sethekk, and asked me to tank for it again. I am much comfortable with Sethekk, and we have priest to shackle So, I said I’ll go. It ended up that we didn’t use CC at all since the druid healer was able to keep me up the whole entire time. I love it. Again, no death, the run was smooth as a butter. The group thanked me and complimented my tanking. I really don’t want to take all the credit because, to be honest, paladin tanking without CC is so easy, and I do mean when I said that it’s all good because of the good healer and dps that knows how to focus fire. Hah, the group said that I should give more credit for myself. I do really need to learn to say, thank you, and please invite me again if you need a tank Then, on Sunday, a partial guild run through Mana Tombs. Oh, I haven’t stepped foot on that instance for a looong time. I kinda forgot all about it. Another smooth run, and I got an upgrade for my shield and boot from the quest. Finally completed the escort too - even E couldn’t finish that after two tries Not too shabby.

Oh, it seems that this weekend is all about Val. Just log in as E to do all dailies - no love for her this weekend C asked Val to do arena. I think he was bored and Az, his partner, was busy doing something else. Val - do arena? I was tempted to use E instead, but remembering how squishy E is, I conceded. All V had to do is becoming the bait and annoyance If we are lucky and they targeted me, V can bubble and heal herself while C slashes them from the back. If they targeted C and ignored me, even better because V can heal. The hard part is when dealing with mana burning priest Yikes. We did pretty good, not great mind you, after all that’s a limit to what a prot pally can do in an arena.

Overall, it’s fun filling weekend