Mantle of Tirisfal

After a fairly long time where I mostly raided with my priest, I was asked to come with my mage to a TK raid. After clearing the trash fairly easily we reached VR and stopped to updated new people with the tactics.
The first try was not so good, it's been awhile since we tried VR and I guess people needed to remember the tactics.
The second try was good, we got him down to less than 20%, however too many people died.
On the third try (or was it the fourth? I don't remember...) we finally managed to get VR down again, and lo and behold 2x Pauldrons of the Vanquished Hero tokens dropped :)
An intensive round of open bidding ensued but I used up all of my DKP :) and at the end Solidstate walked away with his first ever T5 token, which was quickly converted to Mantle of Tirisfal.

I quickly enchanted it with the scryer shoulder enchant but choosing gems was a bit harder. In the end I decided to bite the bullet and spent 30 of my hard-earned badges on 2 epic gems which a guild mate cut for me: a Reckless Pyrestone and a Glowing Shadowsong Amethyst. I'm not 100% certain these are the best gems I could have got but they are pretty good and heck, I can always get more badges :) In any case I'm glad I chose to get epic gems and not the regular blue gems from the AH, while the difference is not large, I'm guessing these shoulders will serve me for a long time to come (maybe even all the way to WotLK) and so this is a long-time investment.

So now I just need to get another T5 item and I will be able to use the 2-item T5 set bonus to start blasting away as an Arcane mage and really do impressive damage :D

Boomkin!

It's bin awhile but things have been as usual for my mage and priest, raids and heroics etc.

However one interesting thing I did this weekend was to level my druid to level 40 and respec to Balance tree to get the Moonkin form (a.k.a. 'Boomkin' :)).

Playing as a Moonkin was a lot of fun. On the one hand I had some good spell-damage gear courtesy of a SM boost from a level 70 friend. On the other hand the +400% to armor from the form meant that I could stand to take a beating from mobs, unlike my mage when he was leveling. So playing the Moonkin was a bit like enjoying the best of both worlds, the survivability of a tank with the damage output of a mage :)
Of course there is always a down-side and this is that I had to stop frequently to drink. I don't mind buying water (since TBC any daily expenditure below 10g per day is small change) but the downtime for pausing to drink after practically every fight left me feeling like I was leveling a mage again.
Of course I spent some fights trying to melee the mobs but while this works, (a) it takes a long time per mob due to my low melee damage; (b) I had to spend a lot of mana at the end of each fight in order to transform back to human, heal myself and transform back to Moonkin, leaving me low on mana again.

I guess I need a better melee weapon for the times I want to melee and also when I get to level 44 (I'm 43 now) I will get barkskin which should help.

Regardless, being a moonkin is a lot of fun and I look forward to leveling him some more, at least untill level 60. At 60 I'll probably respec to Feral (tank) and try to start getting the gear and experience in order to be a tank, but that's a long way off...

Krother the Vein Ninja

Well after 3 years of playing WoW, it has finally happened to me. I met a Vein Ninja. Well, it has happened to me before that as I was fighting a mob near a resource, another player would come and take it.

As annoying as that was, what happened today was far worse. To have this hunter, Krother, come up and start looting a vein I was in the middle of taking was... so annoying I cannot describe. I mean, there was no way he couldn't see me standing right at the vein, swinging my pick. What was even more annoying was that I had no way to stop him, thanks to Blizzard's wonderfully broken system for looting mining nodes.

I wish horrible things on Krother the Vein Ninja. May you rot in MMORPG hell for ruining an otherwise perfectly fun playing session for me :(