The 40-50's Blues

My Moonkin druid is coming up on level 48 (just one bar away when I stopped to go to sleep last night). It hasn't been easy since level 40...

In terms of questing, levels 40-50 have always been the hardest/most-boring for me. Even on my hunter I found these levels a bit of a chore, and we all know how easy it is to level a hunter :)

I guess it doesn't make it easier that I chose to go Moonkin. Moonkin druids are a great support class and a caster group in a raid will always welcome a Moonkin thanks to the awesome +5% spell crit aura. However they are less than ideal for leveling and I've been having a hard time with some quests. I solved this by usually doing only easier (green or yellow) quests instead of doing orange or red quest as I did with my hunter, but that just adds to the boredom of these levels.

It doesn't help that this is the 4th character I am leveling to 70 and knowing all of these quests by having done them multiple times before, takes the interest and "magic" out of the process. The only point of light were the couple of levels I leveled using the new Dustwallow Marsh quests. These were well done, fun and most importantly, new :) However as I said those helped but didn't get me all the way to 50.

Still the light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer as I see level 50 approaching. I will be able to continue leveling in zones I like much more such as Un'goro Crater and WPL, maybe even do a BRD run or two. I am also strongly considering speccing back to feral, since I plan to do it anyway at 60. If it helps my leveling, why not? The only problem is I'll have to grind daily quests on my mage for a couple of days to raise the gold to buy new feral/tanking gear for my bear, but really I don't see a problem with that, it's for a good cause :) Plus my bear will be able to save up some much needed rest-XP.

I think I've just talked myself into something :)

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 :(

Progress made, badges spent :)

In the 11 days since my last post, there have been some nice updates:

• My guild downed a new boss for us, Rage Winterchill (MH 1st boss). I was there, it was great, nuff said :)
• My server finally reached 100% on the Anvil, allowing us all to mob the smith and buy brand new badge gear. I only had time so far to buy the new healing mace for Solidfaith and I feel those badges are well spent.
• Solidstate became exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive. He is now taking a break from doing daily quests, except for the cooking and fishing ones. Still want the cake recipe and cool fishing loot Blizzard promised :(
• Solidfaith is revered with Shattered Sun and will quickly reach exalted. No idea when exactly, depends on how many daily quests I do. On reaching exalted with him I hope to buy the new alchemist stone as it is a very nice healer trinket. Collecting the mats now... :)

As a random thought, I do the daily quests mainly with a warlock friend of mine. A holy priest + warlock team make a powerful grinding team as he can easily get agro and CC multiple mobs (DoTs + fear) and DPS them down quickly while I can heal him without a problem, including him life-tapping. In effect, when he is with me he has no downtime and no health/mana worries and I get a partner that helps me breeze through quests that would be annoying to do as a low-damage holy priest. So basically on quests where we have to kill X mobs, he goes in, DoTs everything, and even with 5 mobs hitting him together he has no problems and finishes the fight with full life and mana (unless he forgets to life-tap :)). Needless to say I rarely if ever get low mana due to my rapid mana regeneration.
I think this combo of healer+warlock works better than any other I can think of when grinding mobs/quests. A fury warrior or rogue would never go OOM but they are mostly single-target DPS classes and would not be able to tag and hold agro on multiple mobs the way a warlock can. A mage would go oom. A hunter would go oom and is also not a multiple-mob dps class (2-3 at most vs. 5-6 for my lock friend). Other combinations of classes would kill mobs more slowly or have downtime issues due to health or mana.
As for other healers vs. a holy priest, Prayer of Mending is a huge helper in a 2-person group if I get agro as it jumps back and forth healing us both for minimal mana cost. But in reality I don't think I have any special advantage, any healer would have a great time partnered with a warlock.
Healer+lock = PvE ftw :)

Misc Updates

Due to new workplace been too busy to blog, but here are some misc updates:

• Magtheridon down, yey! :) The only sad part is that since Solidfaith was asked to join, Solidstate still doesn't have the "Champion of the Naruu" title. Oh well, next time.
• More badges accumulating. But more slowely, since like everyone else I'm busy doing the new daily quests.
  
• I'm almost revered with the offensive with Solidstate and I am honored with Solidfaith. So hopefully I will be exalted in a few more weeks.
  
• Phase 2 on my server is progressing nicely and it looks like the new gear will be in my hands in about a week - I can't wait :)

That's it for now, more to come... :)

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.

Jail Break and Daily Heroic

What do Jail Break and the daily heroic have in common? I did both today (on different chars) and both took longer than expected.

Jail Break was soloed by Supersoid, it was not hard but a bit slow going. After I finally cleared out both corridors the rest was easy except for the part where he (Windsor) goes into the equipment room. He got a lot of agro and his health went down a lot. Fortunately he didn't die and the escort finished smoothly. However clearing the corridors took much longer than I thought it would.

The daily heroic was Ramparts which I did with Solidstate. We wiped a bit on trash at the beginning and at first boss due to bad pull. But otherwise it went okay. However due to wipes and no warlock for SS, we had to run each time, making the run a bit longer than I thought it would be.

Overall though a good evening :)

Zul'Aman - Was Kinda Hard :(

I joined a guild ZA raid last night with Solidstate, they had previously cleared 3 bosses so we went straight to Jan'alai.

On the way to him we managed to wipe twice on trash. The first time, I didn't sheep the Amani'shi Flame Caster continuosly, as I didn't know I had to. About 2 seconds after I sheeped it the mob broke the sheep and firebombed the raid. It seems you need to continously sheep the mob to keep it sheeped. Anyway between the damage from that and from another caster that was being DPS'd, I died and the raid wiped soon after. The second time a paladin forgot himself and consecrated the ground under the sheep...
After the 2 wipes I noticed the caster had some kind of buff on himself so I tried to spellsteal it. Whoa! 300 haste rating for 20 seconds! That was insane :) Needless to say, I had no more trouble keeping the mob sheeped :)

Throughout the trash on the way to Jan'alai I noticed we lacked healing (was getting healed late, long times below 50% health). The lack of healing was much more felt when we started trying out the boss, with the MT dying try after try and the raid having to reset the boss. To be more precise, we wiped one time due to bad luck - boss teleported us to middle before we could kill the add breaking the eggs, causing us to be swamped with Dragonhawk hatchlings. The other times we mostly wiped due to healing problems. Not that I was perfect, I died 2 times due to the bombs (which shouldn't happen) but a single DPS dying will not wipe the raid, while a MT dying will. In any case we finally got the boss down but the only piece of loot was Arrow-fall Chestguard which no one wanted (we had no hunter and 2 DPS Shamans who both passed on it). So we ended up sharding it :(
Of course we all got 2 Heroic Badges each from the boss.

Next up was Malacrass. On this try we had the following adds: Thurg, Darkheart, Slither and Fenstalker. This was a good mix for us as we could: OT and kill Thurg, shackle Darkheart, sheep Slither and banish Fenstalker. Kill order was Thurg->Fenstalker->Darkheart->Boss->Slither... at least in theory.
In practice, we managed to down the 3 adds but the damage from the boss was so insane the healers never had a chance, especially due to his spell pushback during his shadow bolts. The fact that two of the healers were paladins didn't help as what is really needed in this fight is party/group healing, the paladins had a hard time doing single-target healing when the entire raid was taking damage.
For me this was one fight that my T4 bonus (100% spell interruption resistance) was a blessing as I could case firebolts on him continuously even during the shadow bolts.

We gave up after 3 or 4 wipes, for a total of around 3.5 hours in ZA, 1 boss down, no new gear for anyone and only 2 Heroic Badges to show for our troubles. Oh, and a large repair bill.

Sometime raiding can be a real downer ;p

Heroic Sethekk Halls in Just Under One Hour

How to do Heroic Seth Halls in just under 1 hour?

Take a well equipped prot-Paladin and aoe-tank entire groups at once.
Take 3 very good DPS, no CC needed :)
Take a friendly healer.

Result - 4 heroic badges (2 from bosses, 2 from daily reward) in under 1 hour. Nice :)

Update on Solidstate's Cooking

I now have Dig Rat Stew, thanks to a good Horde-side friend. Yey! :)

Solidstate Does SM

In an attempt to get a low level Tailoring Recipe I don't have which is a random drop (but has a higher drop chance from some SM mobs) I went to SM tonight. I did all 4 wings, took me less than 2 hours in all - so about 30min per wing, not bad for a full clear. I don't need the recipe, just something nice to have (complete my tailoring knowledge as much as possible).

I could have been faster, but I preferred to be careful as a wipe would have meant running and more lost time. For my mage a good number (most time efficient) seemed to be around 5 mobs, 10 max. Anything more and I run the risk of dying (cloth, remember?). A Frost mage could probably have handled more, but as a Fire mage I don't have as much survivability. There were many ranged mobs that I killed one by one, those were annoying.

I got from the run in total several shards and dusts of different types after disenchanting the blue/green items I got. I also got one tailoring recipe but not what I was looking for and I knew it already. I also got an engineering recipe, lots of grey items and I think around 200 silk cloth. I vendored the grey items and I plan to AH the rest, should be interesting to see if they fetch a good price and if I get at least some compensation for the 2 hours I spent. Alas, no BoE blue item.

Over a fun time, I would have preferred to go with someone else, if only for the company. But when I asked in the guild channel, no one was interested in coming with an alt. Maybe next time :)

Solidstate Puts on Cooking Hat

In a manner of speaking...
I stopped with other pursuits for a while and "leveled" something without practical meaning but still fun - my cooking.

To be precise, I didn't level Solidstate's cooking, he's already at max level. What I did do was use a nice little mod that checks your existing profession recipes and tells you what you don't have. It turned out I had some easy-to-get cooking recipes I was missing (from around Exodar and from RFD) and also some harder to get Horde-only recipes. The recipes I could get quickly, I did. The ones from the Horde side, I asked a guild-mate who had a Horde char (level 60 mage) and he was kind enough to get those recipes for me and coordinate with me posting them on the neutral AH so I could buy them as soon as he put them up. It worked like a charm and in 30 minutes I had almost all the recipes in-game. The ones I don't have are: Dig Rat Stew, Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops and the Delicious Chocolate Cake.

The Cake I will get, it is only a matter or time. The Dig Rat Stew will be a bit harder but I'm sure I can get it eventually also. But Dirge's Chops... I need a BWL raid first and to be the one (or one of the poeple) who loots Broodlord's head. So not likely to happen :(

Still having all cooking recipes in the game except for maybe 1 or 2 makes me feel very nice. Next up for completion are Solidstate's Tailoring recipes :)

Supersolid does BRD

I was getting tired of the "WoW Journal" headings, so trying now a subject which says a bit more about the actual post contents...

Aaaanyways, yesterday I decided to start out the Onyxia chain quest, as I wrote in my last post. After doing the first quest I was derailed by an invitation to a guild run to normal SV. Since more rep is always nice and guild runs tend to be fast (at least for normal mode) and fun, I went.

Getting back to the Ony chain after the SV run (which was as predicated fun and wipe-free :)),
I did a few more quests until I got the quest to go to BRD and talk to Marshal Windsor. At this point I was talking to a friend, who was playing an alt, level 53 Shaman. I told him I was off to BRD and offered him to tag along and he was glad to.

We both had a lot of fun inside, me in killing entire packs of mobs without fear of death, he in getting some welcome blues (he was mostly green due to doing almost no instances before), runecloth and lots of vendor trash. He did die a few times due to pulling agro, as a Hunter is not an AOE class so I couldn't pull all the mobs who rushed him back to me in time. But overall we both had fun and the run went smoothly. We did my quest quickly enough and then continued on a rather round-about way until we got to Fineous Darkvire and killed him for the Shadowforge Key quest. So now I have the key to BRD as well having finished another step in the Ony chain, which is a nice extra :)

WoW Journal, 18 Feb 2008

I finally managed to get a group together for a UBRS run. The group was 2 Paladins, a Hunter (myself) a Mage and a Warlock.
Our "strategy" consisted of running, collecting as many mobs at once as we thought we could handle, and using AOE to nuke them down. For example we did something I've never done @60, which is running through the egg room in an attempt to explode every single one of them. We had literally clouds of small dragon whelps flying about, and dying too ;)

Bosses were of course a push-over, with my pet tanking initially but quickly losing agro to the mage and warlock. Not that it mattered to them, both had over 9k life and both paladins were holy... you get the picture :) Even the final boss was not a problem, the mage tanked one add, the warlock another, and I tanked the boss. the Conflagration spell was a bit of a problem but by the time both me and my pet lost agro due to it, the adds were dead and the boss was at 20% :)

The run was fast and fun, but on the minus side The Beast didn't drop Finkel's Skinner :(
On the plus side I got BWL attuned which gives me nothing except if I ever want to go on a retro-run to BWL I'll be able to do so on my hunter.
Still now that I know how fast 5 level 70 chars can do UBRS I hope to convince some friends to do another run in the near future. Also I think I'll start doing the Onyxia attunement quest chain, I'm already attuned to MC and BWL so why not complete the trilogy :)
I'm pretty sure I can solo everything up to the UBRS run (which is the before-last step). I'll do that on my next attempt to get the skinning knife :)

How did you come up with your character names?

I read on Kinless a nice post about how he came up with his characters' names. Lots of Roman/Latin and historical influences.

Nothing so fancy here:
* Solidstate - My first character in WoW. I wanted a mage name and I had always thought of magicians in fantasy as sort of the equivalent of scientists in RL. So I chose "solid-state", a physics related term.
* Solidfaith - My next char to hit 70 was a priest. When I chose his name I wanted it to be clear he was my alt and to reflect his class, so "solid-faith" was born. Also a nice play on words :)
* Supersolid - My latest char to hit 70, I knew when I rolled a hunter I had a problem, nothing relating solid and hunter suggested itself. After a little reflection I thought about how I wanted to roll a hunter because they were so super-good at farming and so "super-solid" was born. Has the added benefit for me of also being a physics term.

I have a bunch of other solid chars waiting in the wings, but I don't feel like talking about them before they hit 70, or at least 60. I rarely if ever play them so they advance very slowly.

WoW Journal, 14-16 Feb 2008

Supersolid did some BGs on the 14th, actually won an AB match and WSG match. Rare enough occurrence that I'll mention it in my blog :)
Supersolid also went to solo UBRS, ambitious considering it was a 10-man instance back at level 60. I cleared up to Pyroguard Emberseer's room (no wipes but it took some time) only to find out you can't activate the room without at least 3 people. So wasted some time, but it felt good to know I can solo 5 level 60-61 elites without any significant problems. I need to get some guild mates to help me out...
Yesterday I took a few minutes with Supersolid to help out a friend who had a quest in Hinterlands, to get the Mallet of Zul'Farrak. When we got to the alter he attacked the horde npc there (which isn't needed) and since I helped him kill it we got both pvp on. He also had the Ancient Egg quest so we went into the cave and in no time got to the egg. At this stage I was asked to come to Kara on my mage so told the friend I was HSing out and relogging to Solidstate. He started to run out of the cave but some Horde who were also questing in the area, including a level 64 warrior (my friend is level 52) attacked him and killed him. So I stopped the HS, ran out, 2-shotted the level 46 or so Horde priest and attacked and killed the level 64 warrior who had killed my friend. That will teach them to pick on low level chars :)

Solidfaith did some farming in The Dead Mire, got a couple of Fel Lotus from plants he harvested and lots of herbs from both plants and giants harvested, as well as a total of around 6 Primal Life.
Solidstate did a daily heroic which got him 5 heroic badges and a partial Kara run which got him another 10, so 15 badges in all over the last 3 days.

Not bad, considering I didn't play all that much :)

WoW Journal, 13-Feb-2008

My first goal today was taking my Unforged Seal of Ascension and doing the quest to forge it. Soloing Emberstrife with my pet tanking was a piece of cake. Alas, when I tried to MC Emberstrife, I got an error that I couldn't control him since I already had a summoned pet, doh!

So I called a couple of guild mates (a tank and priest) and together the three of us did the quest without a problem. FYI the level 70 druid tank probably didn't really need the healer ;p

Tomorrow I'll go back into LBRS and turn in the forged seal to get the UBRS key. Looking forward to that :)

I had to logout after doing the quest and when I logged back in I was asked if I wanted to join an SSC raid as the guild were a few people short. I joined and we went straight to Lurker and downed him on the second try. The good and the bad of the run:
* The good - starting from the trash clears, I made it my goal to maximize my damage as much as possible. With a Shaman using Wrath of Air totem in my group, I was able to make it to 2nd place in the damage meters, 3rd after the Lurker takedown. As a mage, I was *really* happy about this. I was too far from the Shaman during the Lurker take-down to get the totem buff, which is why my damage went down.
* The bad - the first Lurker try saw us wiping at 2%. That's right, only a bit more and we would have done it. What went wrong? People dying due to Sprout which shouldn't happen. Almost entire raid have been in Lurker in the past, that people are still dying due to Sprout is just... noobish... :(

After the Lurker we went back to Hydross to try him out, however it was an almost immediate wipe at the first transition due to the tank dying. We were out of time for another try before respawns and a couple of people had to go or DC'd, leaving us short-handed. We waited for a while at the platform at the beginning before the first trash group but when it became clear we were just wasting our time, one of the rogues, egged on by us, did a Leeory Jenkins and pulled the first trash group, wiping the raid. What I call "going out with a bang" :)

After the raid I did a few of the Valentine's Day quests and collected some SW Pledge Cards etc., but those are frankly a waste of time, I don't think I'll continue with the Darnassus and Ironforge ones.

WoW Journal, 12-Feb-2008

I've decided to keep a steady WoW journal, because I keep thinking "I'll blog when I have something really interesting to write about" and I never seem to find that something interesting. So at that rate I would have had one post per month or something...

Maybe a daily or semi-regular journal of small non-interesting stuff will add up to a real WoW blog :)

Okay so here goes.
Last night I logged in late and of course my guild were already in the middle of a TK run (they managed to take down VR again which is good, both for gear and morale).
So looking for something to do, I decided to go on Solidstate and look for a heroic group.
While hanging around the LFG channel I noticed someone asking for an LBRS group. A quick /who showed me a level 55 paladin from a well known raiding guild, so I figured this was no idiot. I've been wanting to go to UBRS with my hunter to try and solo (or duo) The Beast, so for that I needed LBRS and to get the key for UBRS. I relogged to Supersolid, /w the paladin and joined his group (which was full with me). All the rest were below level 60, I was the only 70.

We started the run and I quickly took over, the rest were new to the place (no idea how strange that is for me, I feel I know the place like the back of my hand :)). Plus, as a level 70 hunter, it was easier to let my pet and me get agro, mobs didn't have a lot of chance against me, even in melee.

Our one wipe was when the warlock we were with didn't watch where he was going and we had 2 groups of mobs on us instead of one. Not being an AOE char I couldn't take them down fast enough to save the rest and when all the mobs attacked me I decided not to FD, so the others wouldn't feel bad about dying :)

Apart from that it went smooth, at the first boss I forgot to ask people not to roll on the gem and lost, afterwards they were nice enough to pass and I got the other two gems.

After the run I reset the instance and went back in with another level 70 hunter and we cleared the mobs and killed the boss without any problem. In retrospect I could have skipped the low level pug. Oh well, live and learn...

So now I have the Unforged Seal of Ascension and I just need to do the quest to forge it. I'll try to solo it and if I can't do it I'll get a guild friend to help, but as a hunter it should be doable. Then, UBRS, here I come! :D

Hmm that was a long post. I'll think I'll make them shorter in the future... ;)