patch 2.4 first impressions

Yesterday was a bit hectic for me, I have too many impressions to write about - suffering from a bit of information overload :)
At first I logged in with my mage after removing my WTF and addons folder and started setting up my interface. Slowly I started adding back addons that I consider essential and after about 30min I had those addons and their settings configured back to what I am used to.
After a few minutes online I joined a guild group headed for the new 5-man instance. I took the flight from IF and after a brief loading screen got to the new island. It was hectic and laggy there with hundreds of players running around, exploring, doing the quests and setting up groups. At first I found it really confusing but the place is pretty small so after a few minutes I mananged to find my way around.
The 5-man didn't go too well, our first healer kept going DC and we wiped a few times, finally after a few wipes on the 2nd boss he excused himself saying he can no longer play due to the lag and we got another healer. She did slightly better (although she too was laggy). We got to the 3rd boss but by then the guys had to go get ready for a raid that was scheduled for that night so we called it before we managed to down the 3rd boss. A nice run in all, I would say the new 5-man in normal mode is not too hard :)
I continued doing daily quests and enjoyed myself a lot. I was a bit unlucky with the fishing daily, had to make a lot of casts till I got the baby crocolisk but otherwise it was okay.

More updates to come... :)

150 Badges yey :)

Solidfaith, thanks for a couple of guild heroic runs yesterday, got to 150 badges.

The quest for even more badges continues... :)

Badges Update

The good news is, I've passed the 125 BoJ mark with Solidfaith.
The bad news is, I was wrong about needing 100 BoJ for the new main-hand healing mace - it's 150 BoJ. Which means I'm 25 BoJ short of the mace itself and 50 BoJ short of the mace and the wand.

Back to grinding heroics...

Priest "Badge Gear" Upgrades

What gear can I get for my Priest with Badges of Justice (post 2.4) that is better than my current items (armorylite link in-case armory is down)? Going CCW starting at the head slot:

• Head - None (I have better).
• Neck - Necklace of Eternal Hope - small upgrade. 25 BoJ.
• Shoulder - NA.
• Back - Kharmaa's Shroud of Hope - small upgrade. 60 BoJ
• Chest - Gown of Spiritual Wonder - great upgrade, even considering the loss of the proc from my current chest. 1x Red gem slot. 100 BoJ
• Wrist - Wristguards of Tranquil Thought - upgrade. Give up a few stats for more spell crit, +9 healing and more importantly a yellow gem slot. 35 BoJ
• Main-hand - Gavel of Naaru Blessings - major upgrade! Lose 11 MP5, but get +42 sta, +28 int and +237 healing! 100 BoJ
• Off-hand - Tears of Heaven - side-grade. Lose some mana and MP5 and get some more +heal. 25 BoJ
• Wand - Carved Witch Doctor's Stick - upgrade (with proper gem). I'm ashamed of myself that I didn't get this sooner, definitely not going to wait till patch 2.4 to get it ;) 25 BoJ
• Trinket - Essence of the Martyr - small upgrade or sidegrade, depending on the slot I chose to replace. Hard choice... 41 BoJ
• Finger - Anveena's Touch - a nice upgrade to either of my current rings, probably will replace the Karazhan one. 60 BoJ
• Feet - Slippers of Dutiful Mending - great upgrade, especially with the 1x red gem slot. 75 BoJ
• Legs - Adorned Supernal Legwraps are a clear upgrade (100 BoJ) ; Achromic Trousers of the Naaru are a side-grade (75 BoJ), I will only take them if I get other spell haste gear, since it seems to me that spell haste will be much more beneficial for the longer heals and only if it significantly reduces their cast time.
• Waist - None (I have better).
• Hands - Light-Blessed Bonds - upgrade. Assuming the same gems I will lose the gem bonus but that still leaves me with +28 healing, which is nothing to sneeze at. So although I lose a little int and sta I think this is overall a nice upgrade. 60 BoJ.

That's it. A few points:

1. If I take all the above, including small upgrades and side-grades, we are talking 706 badges. At 5 badges per day, that's 142 days (~5 months) of doing the daily heroic each and every day. Even taking only the good upgrades into account that's around 400 badges.
2. While certainly good, many of those upgrades are a far cry from the quality of raiding drops (all the small/side-grades) so that BT/MH raiders, at least the holy priests, are under no threat from badge rewards, at least not quickly.
3. My big problem with several of the "upgrades" I listed above is the lose of mana and MP5 or the lack of any additional such stats. So I guess if I want more mana and MP5/spirit I'll have to get them from someplace else (as opposed to badge gear).
4. The main hand will be the first item I get post 2.4 (hopefully), as even with the lose of 11 MP5 it is still the best upgrade of the bunch in terms of sheer healing bonus. The wand I'll get as soon as I have 125 BoJ, since it will be both an upgrade for healing and a plus for soloing.
5. I'll look at the mage in another post. For the hunter I have no time for heroics so he's out of luck with respect to gear.

A Mixed Evening

I had a mixed evening yesterday.
On the bad side, it started when I asked to join a guild Zul'Aman raid that I thought was just starting. But it turned out this raid was actually a continuation of a previous raid that had already cleared the first 3 (and easier) bosses. So while I did join the raid, it was a complete wipe-fest, we completely failed to take down the boss we tried. After 2 hours of wipes, a couple of people had to go and the RL called it (to my relief).

On the good side, I asked who wanted to do the daily heroic and quickly got a group together. For DPS we had a mage (me), a warlock and a rogue and for tanking and healing we had a warrior and druid. The daily heroic was SV and we did a great (no wipes) run which was very quick (I think less than an hour). It actually could have been faster but due to having only a druid as a resser we had to corpse-run several times when people died. After the run ended and due to the fact that it was so quick the tank suggested we do heroic SP and everyone agreed to stay do we did that too. So I got 8 (5+3) badges last night for my mage, which is great.

Losing BGs

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one consistently losing BGs to Horde. Seriously, PvP sucks on my server as alliance :(

Small Updates

Not much has been happening since my last post.

The new guild is taking time to get started, basically no raids started or scheduled yet except for some Kara runs we did last week and a single ZA run scheduled for tonight. I don't like it, I was hoping to start 25-man raiding ASAP but it looks like the GL and officers are waiting for something, maybe for a guild website, maybe for for people to join the guild. I just hope they don't wait too long or this guild will crash and burn before it ever gets off the ground, so to speak.

Did a fun normal-SL run with Solidfaith last night with 4 guild mates. Since I have heroic+ gear on Soldfaith healing in a normal run was a piece of cake, especially as the others also had good gear so mobs went down quickly.
We didn't even worry about CC, just pulled whole groups. Our group was composed of a prot paladin, a feral druid, a fury warrior, myself and an elemental shaman. So between the paladin with his AOE tanking and the druid going in bear form for most fights and the warrior grabbing the odd loose mob, I was almost never attacked by mobs, and I didn't even have BoS on me. I used Prayer of Mending a lot and with 3 melee taking agro it was a fantastic way to heal them and save mana and not get agro at the same time.
Craziest pulls - once in the last 2 groups (each of 4 mobs) before Grandmaster Vorpil where you have a static group and a patrolling group. In every SL run I've ever done we would let the patrolling group go back up next to Vorpil and then pull the static group back, kill them, rest till the patrol got back down and pull them as well. This time the guys decided to have some fun and pulled the patrol at the bottom, naturally pulling the static group as well. So an 8-mob pull :) I had to do some hasty healing but no one died. Then, just when most of the mobs were down, a runner managed to run away without anyone noticing back to Vorpil and pulled him. So without getting ready we were suddenly in a boss fight. Trouble? No way :) We continued to kill the remaining adds and pulled the usual way (South, North, South) and the warrior cleared a few adds who were too close to the boss (and would have healed him) and we got him down, again with no deaths.
Second crazy pull was before Murmur, where you need to pull the mobs carefully so the middle mob doesn't get pulled and pulls the next group as well. Of course the guys were not careful but it didn't matter we still pawned the mobs :)
So flawless run? Alas no, we wiped once on Murmur. No idea why tbh, I think someone had the debuff next to the tank and didn't run out in time. But never mind, the Shaman self-rezzed, rezzed me and after we were ready we took him down, this time without a problem.
So overall a really fun run :)

I did a full Kara run with Solidfaith I think on Wednesday and got a bunch of badges but as usual no real luck with gear, I did get a small upgrade but nothing major. Solidstate spent several hours farming BEM Bloodmaul Geomancers for the Enchant Bracer - Spellpower recipe, but no luck. I did however get about a ton of Netherweave cloth which is always nice for a tailor/enchanter :)

So like the subject says just small updates, nothing really exciting. I really hope raiding starts again in the new guild...

Changes

In RL, after 2.5 years at my current workplace I finally got my nerve up to go job hunting elsewhere, passed the interviews and got a job offer. So I'm leaving my current workplace, not without some regrets and worries but mostly happy I'm leaving a place where I don't feel I like going to any more and hopefully going to a better place.

In a case of "online mirroring offline life", my guild, with whom I have spent the last 2.5 years, has broken up. So in the online world too I am making a big change. To be precise most (all?) of the officers and many key members split to form a new guild which I joined, and the former guild is left barren and probably will be disbanded by the GM, although I don't know for sure as the GM has not decided himself.

In the case of the guild move, as in the workplace move, I was filled with a mix of worry and anticipation. The new guild will I think be harder for me to be a full part of since it will be (more) focused on raiding, unlike the previous which was casual-friendly. As I have a hard time raiding (due to my duties as a parent), I am not sure how much I will fit in. Right now I joined as a raider and am taking a wait-and-see approach.

Be Imba! analysis of my chars

The Armory must be behaving well now since the Be Imba! site I wrote about yesterday is working. So without further ado, here are the results for my characters:

Solidstate
As my main I didn't expect many surprises, and I am happy to report I was right.
There was one warning about my Terokkar Tablet of Vim being a low level item, but if I give that up it will have to be for a really good upgrade, something with a significant DPS increase on equip (not just on use). Otherwise I give us quite a bit of spell hit rating for nothing.
My talent build was estimated to be better for PvE, lucky for me :)
Finally according to the Gear-O-Meter, Solidstate can get gear upgrades from SSC/TK/ZA and is well enough equipped for BT/MH, which is interesting in light of the attunement requirement drop in 2.4 for BT/MH.

Solidfaith
In terms of gear, I have one un-enchanted item (my gloves) and two green gems (instead of the better blue ones) in my shoulders. Now that I've finally got my Hunter's epic mount I can concentrate some effort on improving gear and this is one area where I don't mind expending some gold, since as an alt I don't replace gear as often on this char (very little chance of raiding with him).
Again my talent build was approved for PvE, of course my build is fairly standard cookie-cutter so no surprises there.
I was surprised that the site thinks Solidfaith is good enough geared to heal in SSC/TK. Frankly I have mana issues even in Karazhan, and have never healed in Gruul or ZA, so I doubt very much I can heal SSC/TK. I wonder how the site reaches its decisions about gear-vs-instance level...

Supersolid
Gear-wise the site gives the warning "probably caught in PvP gear". So true, especially as this is the only gear Super has :)
I have almost no gear enchants (no plans to do anything about that, too much money for gear that is too low level), 1 low-quality gem (I actually forgot about that :)) and many "low level items". Well here actually I don't fully agree, sometimes those items are hard to replace outside of Kara or Heroic Badges and frankly I put the effort there on Solidstate and Solidfaith. Poor old Super will have to remain in PvP gear... :)
My hit rating is too low, I need 95 more till the hit rating. I think I'll get more hit rating from gear and maybe I'll respec to get Surefooted, haven't decided yet. But more hit rating is definitely something I do want to look into. Actually it depends on how much I continue to PvP, frankly I'm fed up with losing BGs all the time (maybe win 1/10 games), so am thinking of just letting it go and using Super for fun grinding/questing/instance-runs. We'll see...

Be Imba

Found an interesting new online tool via a post by Full time WoW addict. The tool is called "Be Imba!" and it is described as:
"the first online character auditor for the World of Warcraft MMORPG featuring: WoW character audit, WoW guild audit, PvE hints and tips, talent tree checks, talent build checks, talenting hints and tips, item quality checks, gear quality checks, socket and gem checks, enchant checks, melee ranged and spell hit checks, tank defense checks, instance suggestions."

The only problem is of course due to the Armory being down 90% of the time, I'm currently getting an "Error fetching data". Bah :(

Hopefully I'll be able to check it out at a future time and post what I find about my chars.

5 Mages in Arena

http://www.gametube.org/htmlVideo.jsp?id=O/3nxP6Adv9C_zQbT3a6idf2lYmA=

Epic fun :)

A Nice Weekend

It was a nice weekend for all my chars :)

Supersolid finally bought his epic flying mount, making him my second character to get this mount. I think most of the gold came from questing, although a hefty chunk came from sale of ore and leather (Super is a miner/skinner). As soon as I had the epic flying mount I started the Netherwing Ledge quest-chain. I didn't believe I would finish the chain in one evening but once again a BM hunter proves to be a lean, mean questing machine :) For the last 5-man quest, I got 3 guild-mates and a random to do the quest and it was actually pretty easy, boss died soooo damn fast - the gear in our guild must be much better than the days when I did this quest with my mage... or Zuluhed was nerfed... probably a bit of both :) So now Supersolid is all set up to do daily Nethering quests too for yet more gold, which is nice.

Solidfaith did the daily heroic which was Heroic Underbog (on Friday I think). This got him to exalted with Cenarion Expedition and unexpectedly to Honored with the Consortium (due to the rep you get when you turn-in the daily). He also got exalted with Aldor thanks to some Fel Armaments sent to him by Supersolid, so some really nice advancement on the
rep front for Solidfaith.

Solidstate did a daily heroic (SH) for another 6x Badges. I also managed to finally (after a long time) get to do the required 10 Arena matches for the week with my 3v3 team. Our rating sucks but the important thing is to keep doing these so as to get the points, and it was a shame we've missed so many weeks.