Fishing

I've been very busy on Solidfaith for the last week, partially because of the Argent Tournament dailies but also because of fishing.
I've always liked fishing in WoW, starting from when I started playing my first character, Solidstate. I can still remember trying out the small pools in Elwyn Forest and the first time I stood on the dock in Tanaris, fishing with the setting sun glowing in the sky and making the water all sparkly :)
I find fishing not just a relaxing alternative to grinding but also a very useful skill to have, giving me access to all the buff food I could use.
Still for a long time I resisted leveling fishing on Solidfaith. I figured having one character who is a max-level fisher is enough. The problem is, I haven't had the time to level Solidstate to 80, so his fishing oppurtunities were limited. The problem really started to bug me when I started getting closer to 450 cooking on Solidfaith. The only recipe currently at 450 cooking is the Fish Feast, which is a great raid buff food. However it requires fish which really require a character with a flying mount to get.

For this reason I decided to level fishing with Solidfaith. What really helped me decide were the recent changes to fishing, which made it much easier - and less boring - to level. Thanks to the fact that you can now fish anywhere, I could level my fishing while still sometimes getting useful fish. In fact I'm now sitting at around 310 fishing but thanks to +100 lures and the Kalu'ak +30 fishing pole I can fish succefully all the fish I need for the Fish Feast - made 5 of them last night :)

Another reason I decided to level my fishing was to be able to do the new fishing daily quests. I find the daily cooking and fishing daily quests to be a great source of a little gold, usually not much but fast to get and fun too. Also if you get lucky you can get a nice bonus, for example I got one time in the reward bag a gray item which I sold to a vendor for 100g :)

Leveling my fishing to 450 is not going to be fast but thanks for the new ability to fish anywhere I am not dreading the process nor am I in a hurry. I can take my time and simply enjoy a few minutes of fishing per day - exactly, I think, the way fishing is meant to be :)

Flame Leviathan (10 man) Fight Notes

First of all when you go into Ulduar you'll see a big area with vehicles around it. You need to talk to the big NPC in the middle in order to activate them.
You jump on and the fight starts when you go down to the big area where the Storm Pillars and trash mobs are. You need to attack the pillars and the big mobs, pretty much ignore the dwarfs (your bikes can take care of them). Make sure to focus-kill the big giants, they hit hard.

We cleared 2 of the 4 elemental towers before getting to the repair pads - not sure if it has to be done like that or you can just clear to the pads and repair even before taking down the towers. Keep your distance from the tower while killing the big guardian spider as the combination of spider and tower will take your vehicle's life down quickly.

The boss fight itself is covered well in guides such as wowwiki. However I will say what I think are the keys to the fight:

• The Siege Engine which is not kiting should stay close behind the boss and use interrupt when possible. The turret operator should spend most of the fight firing anti-air ability on the floating pyrite ammo as this is where the DPS is.
  
• Demolishers should keep distance from boss and pick up any pyrite ammo which drops to the ground and use it - as I said, this is where the DPS is.
• The 2 people who get catapulted onto boss should read up on that tactic and be aware of what they need to do. It is not hard to do but it is very important, otherwise boss becomes too fast to get away from.

A fun fight, very different from anything else I've done so far. Not hard once you do it properly. Should be interesting to do this in hard mode :)

Patch 3.1 Impressions

• I love the UI changes.
• The quest tracking is still primitive but any improvement is good.
  
• Wish I had a better computer to see the prettier graphics :(
• The fishing improvements (being able to fish anywhere at any level fishing) are great. You still won't be able to catch higher-level fish but at least it doesn't matter where you skill-up.
• The new fishing daily quest is lots of fun.
• Speaking of the new fishing quest, it sent me to Sholazar Basin. To get there from Dalaran on a taxi would usually take you in a wide arc, but it has changed - now it seems all flight paths are direct. Taxis are now much more useful :)
  
• The Argent Tournament is great :) I can't wait till I unlock more quests but already I can do 70g just from the few daily quests I have there, and with a fast flying mount doing them is relatively fast. I haven't tried doing a mounted duel yet but it seems like it would be fun :)
• The duel-spec... hmm mixed impressions. One DK in my guild had a serious problem with all of his talents resetting all the time and I had a problem with just 2 talents resetting for some reason. So slightly bugged, at least for DKs (has not happened for my priest). The new "put points before you apply" option is great to have. I wish however the talents trees and glyphs were all like the wowhead talent calculator instead of 4 seperate tabs, the current UI is a bit clunky. Of course just having the option to duel-spec is great, being able to do the daily quests on my priest in Shadowform is just such a huge improvement over trying to do them as healer. Kind of weird though that all your mana resets to zero when you change specs, I hope this is a bug...
• Ulduar... looks great, and we had fun with the vehicles and trying out the trash before the first boss. However we had 3/10 guild mates locked outside the instance and when we died no one could enter. The instance was just overloaded like crazy, after I rezzed and went back to the entrance the amount of people there trying to enter was just crazy. I really wish Blizzard had prepared better in terms of hardware, it was not nice being locked outside.
• There were 3 server crashes on the day of the patch. Very annoying and I hope not something that continues.
  

It has been pretty hectic, trying to respec Solidfaith and Solidstar with their 4 specs, get new gems and enchants, try out new content. I've certainly been kept busy :)

Overall, I very happy - having new content and new ways to do it is always good. There were a few bups on the road due to Blizzard hardware problems, problematic addons and bugs, but I think this patch deserves a rating of about... 8/10 :)

Priest Builds

Thinking about my priest builds, I've come up with this 55/16/0 Discipline build and this 13/0/58 Shadow spec. Will be interesting to test it :)

DK DPS Build

I need a DPS build for my DK, but I'm not sure what will be a good one. Maybe this Unholy based build: 11/0/60.
Doesn't really matter at the moment as I don't have the gear to do proper DPS yet :(

Oh and the new WoWHead talent calculator is really nice, especially the glyphs feature :)

DK Tanking Spec Post-3.1

Death Knight talent trees are taking a massive change after patch 3.1. For this reason and due to the new duel-spec system I need to take a look at the new talent trees and think about where to put my points and which spec to use for tanking.

Looking at the latest PTR talent trees on wowhead, it looks to me that neither full Frost nor full Unholy offer any compelling benefits in terms of tanking, compared to going for a mixed build. So after thinking about it for a while I came up with this 45/5/21 Blood-heavy build.

The 21 points in the Unholy tree are for Unholy Blight. That talent is something I've really fallen in love with and when building my new spec I decided I must have it.

As for the points in the Blood tree, I chose as many talents as possible which would allow me to either heal back up or reduce damage - in any case increasing my Time-To-Live as a tank. Of course straight mitigation would have been nicer but as a second option I think this isn't a bad spec at all for tanking. Of course only time will tell and the 3.1 live talent trees can still look different, so I'll just have to wait and see...