I’d Rather Be Wowing!

Vambraces of Courage dropped from Attumen yesterday. A great upgrade for Val’s current wrist.

Val finally get enough BoJ to get herself the Libram of Repentance. She’s finally uncrushable with HS. Need to redo her raid tanking set to see if she could have more spell damage.

Pattern: Girdle of Ruination dropped for one of the guildy. Although being told that he could have sell the pattern for a hefty amount of g (he would probably set on his flying mount with the money), he insisted in giving the pattern to E. It’s gonna make a mage and two warlocks in our guild happy, provided that they grind enough mats for it On the other hand, I’m still debating whether this is a decent upgrade to my Voodo-woven belt. I’ve been losing some spell hit rating with my recent upgrades. If I swap the belt, I would need to put some spell hit gems to still being hit-capped. Then, I’d gain only +8 spell damage while still losing some crit and int. Does it worth the mats? Difficult decision indeed.

1. Spirit shard. Exchange them for items at a vendor (spirit sage) in either Allerian Stronghold for Alliance or Stonebreaker Hold for Horde. You can get rare resilience-based head gears (18 spirit shards) or epic rings for casters and melee-ers (50 spirit shards) with the turn ins. For 8 spirit shard, you can purchase a unique-equipped meta gem, which again seems to cater for the PvP-ers. For the non-pvp-ers , you may be interested in healing/mana pots equivalent to the “super” kinds for only 2 spirit shards each. Spirit shards are dropped by any of the Auchindoun instances only if you have Blessing of Auchindoun buff on you (which usually means that your faction is controlling the PvP towers in Terokkar Forest).

2. Apexis shard. Many things you can use with this shard. First, it is used by at least two dailies over at the Ogri’la. Two, you need 35 shards to summon various mini-bosses at Ogri’la (which in turn drop apexis crystal). Third, you can use them to purchase some items and gears through Ogri’la Quartermaster (there also the healing/mana pots available here), Aether-tech Adept (for Bashir’s landing event), or two kinds of “vending machines” for unstable flasks. Finally, you can use them to “charge” the various depleted gears and items which are random drops around the area. Most notable used is to charge the depleted crystal focus (the depleted crystal is not BoP but the charged crystal will be BoP) which is something like a permanent Warlock’s cookie. Apexis shards can be obtained from apexis shard formation, doing quests, and drop off mobs in the area.

3. Oshu’gun Crystal Powder sample. Turn 20 of them at the Halaa Quartermaster for one Research Token. In turn, the research tokens can be used to get various items, gears, and mounts (the later two usually require Halaa Battle Tokens as well). Nonetheless, with just 8 research token, you can get a unique 18 slot bag. For jewelcrafter and alchemist, there are two resilience-based recipes that you can buy using the research tokens. Oshu’gun Crystal Powders dropped off any mobs in Nagrand.

4. Holy Dust/Arcane Rune. Turn them to Aldor’s inscriptor (holy dust) or Scryer’s inscriptor (arcane dust) , who are usually spotted at the Aldor and Scryer’s banks respectively for some nice shoulder enchants. There are two level of enchants. The regular kinds can be purchased when you are honored with Aldor/Scryer, while the greater kinds can only be purchased when you are exalted. You get holy dust and arcane rune from turning in Fel Armaments and Arcane Tome for the faction repeatable quest.

Things that I’m excited (and not so excited) about in Patch 2.4.2. For the full list of the currently known documented and undocumented changes in this upcoming patch, check here and here.

Yes, please!

1. 23 hour cooldown profession becomes 20 hour and 4 days cooldown becomes 3 days and 20 hours. Not fancying the small amount of reduction, especially on the 4 days cooldown, but I remembered how annoying it is to having to wait for the exact time I did my last shadowclothes and how this time becomes later and later until it’s late enough to waste another day of not crafting.

2. All the jewelcrafting changes. I always forgot that a forge is needed to craft brilliant glass until the message “Requires Forge” pops up. Less time to travel to a forge is definitely great. A chance to create an epic gem, you say? I’m being optimistic and say awesome, even if I don’t know how small that chance is
3. “Fixed an issue where chain damage spells were chaining to critters”. I wonder if it applies to Avenger Shield also? I hope so, it’s so annoying when the “jump” of the AS killed is wasted on a critter.

4. “Priest Spell: Power Word: Shield now has the correct sound associated with it and can no longer be heard from large distances.” The sound change didin’t bother me as much as it bothers everyone else. But being able to hear the shield sound without knowing where it came from, now that’s annoying. I’m glad they fix it!

5. “The dragons in Blade’s Edge Mountains will no longer instantly knock you off your mount.” Thank goodness! I’ve died from this way too many times and finding your body back is not exactly the easiest thing.

6. All the new mounts from the undocumented change list. I know that most people don’t like this, but I hope that it’s a rep based rather than a small random chance of dropping. And I know I’m being selfish *blush* but random chance never seems to favor me.

Noooo !!!

1. “Creature versions of the Polymorph spell no longer heal the affected target.” Hard to say how this will change our Aran’s fight, considering that we seem to always get him to poly/pyroblast us. I hope it’s not wipe-inducing change. But I wish they are being consistent on how the spell works when casted by player and mobs.

2. Naaru Ration is now BoP. Well, it’s not that annoying only the fact that Val rarely does the dailies in the Isle of QD and relies on E to supply her with Naaru biscuits. I just don’t understand the necessity from it. We still need to be friendly with the faction anyway.

3. “The Quest ‘The Multiphase Survey’ no longer gives a Shattered Sun Supplies.” This is from the undocumented change list. I really hope that this is not the case. It’s one of the few quest that Val, being a prot paladin, does everyday.

How about these ??

1. The bug in the quest to get Polymorph: Pig spell. Ast and I have been wanting to get this. I hope this will be fixed shortly.

2. I remember reading the player’s death event is not currently logged (or maybe even exist). I miss this information when reading my WWS report. I read that they are supposed to fix this on 2.4.2 patch but I didn’t read any information of this in the forum.

Many of my guildies seem to have problem in understanding how gemming works or what gems are available for them to use. This guide was originally written for our guild’s website, but I thought I’ll put it here as well. The purpose of the the guide is to provide general knowledge of the gem. If you are interested in the list of gems and their stats, there’s a link at the end of the page to a nicely done reference sheet.

General Socketing Rules

1. With exception of a meta socket (looks like a white gem socket) which can only be socketed with a meta gem, you can put any gem to any socket regardless of their colors.

2. However, you can only get the socket bonus if you match the color of the sockets with the color of the gems.

3. A socket can be re-gemmed as many times as you’ll like. However, the previous socketed gem would be destroyed. And, you cannot take out a gem from its socket once you click and confirm the socketing action.

4. For meta gem, although you can freely socket it into a meta gem socket, it would only be activated if you’ve met the requirements of the meta gem. For example, Chaotic Skyfire Diamond requires that you have at least 2 blue color gems socketed in any of your equipped gears. The text in the meta gem, when viewed, will be grayed out if you don’t meet the requirements. I put emphasis in the word “you” because, when viewing other people’s socketed meta gems, the requirements of the meta gem visible/shown to you actually depends on your gear and not theirs. So what appears to be inactive to you may actually be active for them.

5. Gems are stackable with enchants.

Gem Quality

Just as with any gear/weapon, gems have their equivalent white (common), green (uncommon), blue (rare), and purple (epic) level gems.

Common gems are available for sale on any gem or jewelcrafting supplliers. There’s one Hellfire Peninsula, Shattrath City, and Netherstorm. Uncommon to epic level gems are generally crafted by jewelcrafters, with exception of several PVP and unique-equipped gems (available from PVP item vendors such as from Halaa or Alliance’s Champion Hall), gems rewarded from quests, gems dropped in heroic instances (these tend to be BoP).

Meta gems are also crafted by jewelcrafters. What makes it different, however, is that the ingredients to make a meta gem comes from gems that are transmuted by alchemists. There are two kinds of these gems: Earthstorm diamonds (transmuting recipe from Cenarion Expedition:Honored) and Skyfire diamonds (transmuting recipe from Honor Hold/Thrallmar: Honored).

There are also, what are called, prismatic gems. These gems are crafted by enchanters, match all socket colors, and only has 1 stat - resist all.

Gem Color

There are 6 gem colors, excluding the meta gem. They can generally be divided into two categories.

1. The primary colors: Red, Blue, and Yellow.

2. The secondary colors: Green, Purple, and Orange. This mean that each color is produced from two primary colors. Green is from Blue and Yellow. Purple is from Red and Blue. Orange is from Red and Yellow.

If you notice, the colors of a socket is either red, blue, or yellow (or meta socket), i.e., the primary colors. This means that the socket can be matched with any of the gems that contain the primary color corresponding to the socket color. I.e, a red socket matches red, purple, or orange gems. Similarly, a yellow socket matches yellow, green, and orange gems.

Respective to the meta gem requirement, secondary color gems fulfilled the requirement of both if its primary colors. In other word, a socketed orange gem count as socketing 1 red gem and 1 yellow gem. For meta gem that requires more red gems than yellow gems, socketing a red or purple gem would fulfill this requirement while socketing the other gems (including orange) wouldn’t satisfy the requirement.

Gem Stats

Generally speaking, the primary colors gem will have “pure” stats while the secondary gems will have the “combination” stats of their two primary colors.

Red gems: The stats that red gems carry are attack power, strength, agility, spell damage, healing, dodge, and parry. I think of red gems as the “pure damage” gems (with exception to doge and parry which I think correspond to agility).

Yellow gems: The stats that yellow gems carry are hit rating, spell hit rating, critical strike, spell critical strike, intellect, resilience, spell haste, and defense. I think of them as the “enhancement” gems.

Blue gems: The stats that blue gems carry are stamina, spirit, mana per second, and spell penetration. I’d like to think of blue gems as the “sustaining” gems but spell penetration kinda throw it off
From these, you can derive the stats of the secondary color gems, where you just combine two “relevant” stats of the two primary colors that make up the secondary color. An example, an orange colored gem may have both spell damage and spell critical strike. Naturally, the spell damage that an orange colored gem has will be less that the spell damage that a red colored gem has (assuming they are equivalent in level).

Gem Names

There’s a great reference site listing all the gem names broken down by their level and color courtesy of Banana Shoulders. Look it up here! Another good reference is in WowWiki.

While we were waiting around for everyone to be ready for the run, G, being G, likes to “inspect” us and ask us for our non-obvious choice of gems, enchants, or talents
Yesterday, AL, our BM hunter, was the target. When questioned why he is not getting a better leg armor, his excuse was he never does anything else with this character except for raiding. I couldn’t help being puzzled with his answer. I know that he’s leveling his paladin in the mean time, but he raids at least 3 times a week on his hunter. Aside of that, he does his share of arena time with the guildies as well. First, what the heck does he mean by he doesn’t do anything else except raiding? What other things that he wants to do that we didn’t do? Second, shouldn’t be because he raids that improving his gears as much as he can should be the goal on its own? For what other purpose other than raiding (and arena pvp) that he “needs” the better gear?

I’m confused.

Since we cleared Kara in a day last Thursday, we ended up at ZA instead yesterday. Like G said, last night turned out to be a 100g run (well 60g for me) from the repair bill and the flask. But I haven’t had so much fun from a challenge for quite a while.

We managed to start the encounter with the bear avatar with 1 min left in the timer. Although we didn’t get to one shot him due to various problem with healer being DC-ed and threats problem, it was clearly an improvement from our first ZA run. I’m sure given a couple more runs, we would be able to get him within the timer. We were still getting owned by the gauntlet, although we engaged with the Tempest a couple times before we called it a night because one of us had to leave. Too bad really, I’m sure we could have at least try the bird avatar given a few more tries.

Last night our group make up was: warrior MT, druid OT, enh shaman, BM hunter, MM/Surv hunter, fire mage, shadow priest, holy priest, resto druid, and holy pally. Quite diverse right, but more importantly, notice that we don’t have much AoE action.

For myself, I had a share of fun doing MC on the last pull to Nalorakk. We had 2 warbringers accompanied by two medicine-men. We tried to burn one of the medicine-man fast using the enh shaman as the tank. That didn’t work out so well as the shammy went down awfully fast. Because of that, emergency MC was employed and it worked like a charm. The medicine-man has 2 spells that can be used when MC-ed: chain healing and lightning bolt. The chain heal has a cooldown while the bolt can be spammed. I love em. Since our tank get enough heal and no dps suffered any damage, I just chain lightning to assist the MT. When the warbringer dismounted, I immediately changed my target to the bear and grab aggro from the MT. What I wanted is to have the bear kill the mc-ed medicine-man, but I didn’t have enough time. During the middle of the attack, MC expired and now I have two mobs on me (remember that the threats done by your mc-ed mob transferred to you). O.o. But freeze trap saved me from the bear while I feared the medicine man. I re-MC the medicine man, grab aggro back from the bear, informed the tank when my medicine man was downed and tank grabbed the bear from me (while I run toward the tank hoping that taunt didn’t get resisted ). Good stuff, I love when MC ends well.

MC is generally risky. Whenever I used MC, there are several things that I usually do to prevent my premature death. One, make your MC target your focus so you can re-target them easily when your MC broke. Two, check your MC timer regularly. And let your tank be aware on the time left as well so they’ll be ready to pick up your “mess”. Three, whenever possible, park your MC-ed mob so that your MT is between the mob and you. But remember that MC will break if you are too far away apart. Four, utilize your other CC-ers when they are available. I always remind hunters to drop trap in front of me (it’s generally easier to do that than asking them to look for my mob and drop trap in front of them). When I don’t have hunters available, I ask my paladin healer to stun them so I can do my MC. For casters, I ask mage to counter spell them. And finally, fear is a good last resort to use. Generally, all MC-ed mob is vulnerable to fear as well. I feared, shielded, repositioned myself so I can pick up my MC target when they are making a bee line straight toward me. It also gave time for the tank to decides whether they want to pick up the target instead.

Remember that we were light on AoE? We had so much problem with the gauntlet runs and we wiped so many times. The general problem was that we couldn’t down the elites fast enough to move along fast enough to not get overwhelmed by the birds which we couldn’t down with our aoE power. Also, our OT got “played” by the Amani Warriors, which kept repeatedly charging and stunning him and run toward the healers. We tried ignoring the birds, but targetting things in the middle of 15 and more birds didn’t work out quite so well. At the end, we resorted to this strategy that consistently reached the Tempest: (1) Always burn the wind walker followed by the protector. (2) Drop freeze trap on the back for one of the warrior. Also, we kept one of the hunter “below” the druid so that the warrior would charge the hunter instead. (3) For every “wave”, we try to focus fire to burn down the warriors and thin down the pack of birds before engaging forward. If you have any strategy, I’d love to hear all about it.

Well, during our last wave, a hex stick dropped and during the middle of chaos, I simply pressed greed and didn’t bother to check who won it. When we called it a day, after I zoned out of the instance upon ressing, G reminded me about my hex stick. It turned out that I’ve won it. But as I was heading toward the “frogs area”, I realized that couldn’t find my hex stick. Yes, my hex stick disappeared upon zoning out. Shucks…that’s so sad No Mojo for me

Well, I posted that I am getting the Shattered Sun of Acumen neckpiece, which I did on Wednesday. I swapped Ritssyn’s Lost Pendant, hence losing 14 spell damage on equip. What I have been curious about is how often the Light’s Wraith actually proc during a run. Is it better to swap Ritssyn back for some fight?

With the help of WWS report, here’s my proc during our last Kara’s run:

1. Attumen - 150 sec - 0 proc.
2. Moroes - 192 sec - 3 proc.
3. Maiden - 91 sec - 1 proc.
4. R&J - 188 sec - 3 proc.
5. Nightbane - 424 sec - 3 proc.
6. Curator - 161 sec - 1 proc.
7. Illhoof - 267 sec - 3 proc.
8. Shade - 211 sec - 1 proc.
9. Netherspite - 276 sec - 2 proc.
10. Prince - 221 sec - 1 proc.

So, that’s a proc every about 121 sec. The nightbane’s fight may skew it the number. And I’m assuming that I’m constantly casting offensive spell (my priority is VT, SW:P, MB, MF, and when appropriate, VE (usually after VT), and SW:D (usually after MB)). I’m really surprised that there’s no proc during Attumen and a very low proc times on Curator. Those were the most constant fights (where I don’t have to move) that I did.

Another number that I have is 15 procs for 32 minute dps time during last Sunday’s Gruul. And 42 procs fir 81 min dps time for overall Kara (including trash). So, the proc rate varies quite greatly, from once every 90 sec to once every 2 min. Don’t you think the proc rate is a bit low? Is it better to have the constant steady damage that Ritssyn bestows, especially with my spell rotation?

Gruul’s run

No Gruul again last weekend. Again, we improved in term of DPS, although some of our dps-ers were still below 500dps and our MT kept going down on the 10th growl. The closest that we get him down to is 4%. Not too bad, but clearly some improvement is needed.

We are still unable to one-shot HK Maulgar. We had a change in our Warlock’s roster - one has never been there before. Most likely, that’s the reason for the hiccup.

Someone asked how our group tanks Kiggler. So far, we always use two hunters to tank him. They both stand on the opposite side of the cave far away from Krosh and kite him from one side to another. One of the hunter that I asked said that there’s really no special trick needed. Since Kiggler would proceed to polymorph one of the hunter and turn to the other hunter, and there’s nobody else is attacking him, the only thing that they have to worry is getting higher a threat than their healers.

Lem’s journey

Lem has a good leveling time this weekend. She got to 48 and still love being able to take down elite all on her own. She also ventured to ZF along with C, although the drop’s guardian didn’t favor her at all Since C doesn’t have the Mallet, no carrot on the stick for her either.

All in all, pretty un-eventful weekend.

1. One more day of SSO dailies till Exalted. Shattered Sun of Acumen, you’ll soon be mine! Note: Remember that the bonus damage from proc only happens if you are Exalted with Aldor or Scryer.

2. Seven of Furies is finally spotted at the AH. Although there was no buy out option available on it
3. The blessing deck is only 2 cards away from being completed - Ace and (another) Seven of blessing.

On another, entirely random note, I just find out that the enchanting skill to break void crystal to 2 large prismatic shards, although is learnable at 360, requires the skill of 375 to use it. Furthermore, there’s a 24 hour cooldown (this one is expected). That’s good to know, since I was trying to power level my enchanting just to learn the skill. That explains why the price of void crystal is still lower than 2 large shards combined.

Inspired by The Simple Life post in Zen Habits. I thought I needed it after not a such pleasant yesterday.

• Fishing in general, but in Nagrand especially.
• Doing my herbing loop.
• Leveling in Desolace (because it’s so void of people).
• Flying with my Netherwing dragon over Zangarmarsh, spotting mushrooms on top of mushrooms.
• Trying on my pretty dresses, zooming in to admire the details, while taking a bunch of screenshots.
• Lurking in trade channels.
• Farming voidspawns in Nagrand while chatting with friends and guildies ( love the way the voidspawn vanishes).
• The rain and fog in WoW.
• Being buffed and buffing the passerbyes.
• Hugging people’s cute pets (especially the Pandas).
• Watching Druid dances in cat or bear form.
• Showering people with snowflakes or rose petals.
• Cheering guildies in their 5v5 arena fights.