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...

Sartharion + Shadron Down

Until now my guild has only taken down Sartharion + Tenebron. However we are planning to try for Sarth+2D and in preparation we went today to try and down Sartharion+Shadron, as Shadron is considered the harder add.

The fight was indeed hard, however after several wipes we managed to fine-tune our strategy and down Shadron, after which taking down Sartharion is a walk in the park :)

The final stratgy that worked for us was to have one DPS (a hunter) stay outside and DPS/Mis-Direct the spawning fire adds so that they left the 2 tank healers (myself and a paladin) alone. Meanwhile the rest of the group (including the 3rd healer) went inside the portal to down the disciple inside.

Our DPS wasn't very high and it took us time to down Shadron but really this fight was about focus and execution, high DPS would have made it easier but was not essential.

For our 2-drakes attempt next week we're planning to fight Tenebron + Vesperon. We probably won't be able to down Tenebron before Vesperon lands so fight could get a bit messy, but we'll see. I expect our main problem to be healing since keeping the tanks up is hard even with one drake up. With 2 up, I shudder at the damage spikes...

Well, we will cross that bridge when we get there. For now I'm happy with the accomplishment, a new Sartharion add taken down in one night and after only a few wipes. Left us enough time to go heroic UP with my DK tanking, I got revered with Wyrmrest Accord and got a nice new chest, huzzah :)

Slow going till Ulduar and "has WoW peaked?"

A combination of RL keeping me busy and slowdown in WoW have kept me from blogging much. My guild has slowed down raiding although we hope to start some OS+2 tries soon, if we get enough guild mates online and interested.
I've spent the time leveling up Faith's Hodir rep, doing the daily quests on every day that I could. Between that, the odd heroic run (still not exalted with Ebon Blade) and the occational raid I've managed to stay fully occupied without even the time to play on Solidstar or even level yet an alt /gasp :)

I spent one fun evening going with 4 guild mates and doing 9(!) BC heroic instances in one evening, for achievements. We had myself (healer), 2 plate-wearing DPS (warrior and paladin), and 2 hunters. We did manage to wipe here and there when people got a bit crazy with the pulls but otherwise it was no problem, didn't need a tank at all :)

Like everybody else I'm looking forward for patch 3.1 but I do have a feeling that WoW has peaked, barring Blizzard pulling a rabbit out of their hat and re-engaging current and new players. WoW is over 4 years old now, and long-time players, even dedicated ones, are starting I think to feel a little burned-out. Contending with annoying PuGs and lack of raids due to lack of interest and apathy brought about by the lack of new content vs. ease of exisiting raids has meant current level 80 players are losing motivation to login. Although Dalaran is as full as ever, there are many people just running around not doing anything.
Meanwhile new players have to deal with leveling 80 levels in a mostly empty world.

I don't know this for sure but looking at how long Ulduar is taking and considering the scope of the problem and that Ulduar is just a single instance, I would say 3.1 will help people for a while but will soon run out of steam, leaving raiders with the options of grinding Ulduar till the next instance is released or trying "hard mode" encounters which are just the same content made harder.

In my opinion while on the surface it seems Blizzard is still investing heavily in WoW it does seem like design and content is being added very slowely, maybe teams were taken to work on more "exciting" projects such as Diablo-3. Maybe Blizzard see WoW as a stable cash-cow without the need to invest as much in it as in a new game. Or maybe they have simply given up on WoW...

Personally I still enjoy WoW and will enjoy it for a long time to come (I hope). After a long day I'm not looking for too much hard-core action, either PvE or PvP. A bit of grinding, a bit of instances/raids, fishing, gathering, fun with friends. I'm not a Darkfall type :)

But if the world becomes too empty, if people leave in droves for other games, WoW will be a lot less enjoyable. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there...

Solidstar Dings 80, Turns Unholy Tank

Last night I finally dinged 80 on Solidstar, having taken my time about it since I played so much on my priest :)

I did it while still questing in Zul'Drak and in fact Solidstar is close to the 100 quests achievement there. Unlike my priest who found it difficult in Zul'Drak, none of the trolls there could even slow down Solidstar, who with his blood spec had zero downtime while questing and if wearing tanking gear could even solo 3-man quests (rather easily I might add). I'm glad I stuck to this area this time instead of jumping ship for the Storm Peaks like my priest, it let me complete some interesting quest lines involving troll gods.

I think that (assuming I have the time) even though I am now 80 I will continue questing with Solidstar, as I am sure it will be still easy even though he is no longer specced blood. The reasons are as you might imagine, it is good gold and it is more interesting than grinding daily quests :)

As for my level 80 spec, I will miss being a DPS but I missed tanking too, I always had a lot of fun being a tank on my druid and I am looking forward to it on my DK. I chose an unholy 7/11/53 spec which is not a "classic" Frost tanking spec because frankly I tried out frost tanking while I was leveling and it was very boring and I hope unholy will be more exciting and fun.

I am a bit worried about mitigation, but I have seen a DK tank all through Naxxramas so hopefully it will work out. Of course I will have to play around with the spec due to patch 3.1.0 but I'll cross that bridge when I get there :)

Enchanters on Strike

Pugnacious Priest has an interesting post up about Enchanters and DE (Dis-Enchanting) BoP drops from 5-man runs. The question is, should enchanters stop doing DE for free (or at all) in 5-man runs? The usual example given is that miners/herbalists/skinners don't share items they loot inside an instance run.

For the first 2-3 years my main has been my mage and one of his professions is Enchanting so this is an issue I can relate to from the enchanters' side. I remember how hard/costly it was to level my enchanting and how many disappointing PuGs I was in where I DE items and didn't even win the roll on the shards - as the person providing the ability to get the shards, this was annoying.

But I think the idea to stop doing a DE service in PuG runs is not the solution. To explain why, I will first quote a comment made on the above blog:

I don’t get this campaign. Based purely on probability, enchanters are going to get the same number of shards for themselves either way.

True. But if the "campaign" catches on, there will be less shards on the AH and more people needing to buy shards (since a lot more stuff that would have been sharded gets vendored). This will drive up the cost of shards on the AH.

On the one hand this will be good for enchanters who have enough shards that they are able to sell the surplus on the AH for a bigger profit.

But in my eyes most people, including many enchanters, will lose out from this when all is said and done. Taking a large number of possible shards out of the economy will make it harder to enchant yourself, your guild mates and your friends (with the exception of hard-core raiders and people adept at making gold). I just don't see this as a good thing. So really, stopping DE BoP blues in 5-man runs will help the "rich" and hurt the "poor" and this is true for both Enchanters and other people.

Enchanting is not a gathering profession and should not be compared to one. However it is also unique as a crafting profession - except tailoring which has the same problem - in that there is no gathering profession directly related to it. This is why enchanting and tailoring are so often taken together.

As for those claiming Enchanting is a money sink - this is also true for other crafting professions, although it depends on the amount of time and effort one is willing to put into it. I've heard of people making lots of money from enchants - but they spent a lot of time on trade channels for that. To some extent enchanting should be less of a money sink these days with scrolls available to recoup some of the cost from doing enchants just for leveling up.

One possible solution would be to make Enchanting more attractive by beefing up the benefits from being an enchanter. E.G. better self-enchants, or a skill so that enchants which enchanters do an enchant on their own (soulbound) gear have a lower cost of mats compared to enchant done on scroll or in trade window.

But I think a better solution would actually be to take a look at the sister profession I mentioned, tailoring. Tailors have no lack of mats since tailoring mats drop from all mobs and so are readily available for farming. Furthermore being a tailor gives you an edge when farming cloth in WotLK as you get more cloth drops.

So what I think is, enchanters should get en edge where if they farm mobs they get a higher chance at getting green items and the DE table for green items should be changed to allow a greater chance for dream shards and even higher-level shards. This would make leveling enchanting much easier, provide enchanters with the ability to farm their own mats and solve the original problem with DE BoP drops - since with these changes enchanters will no longer be as pressed for shards, at least not for themselves.

Heroic Nexus Achievements

Tonight some guild mates were asking for a healer for heroic Nexus while I was playing on Solidstar (who is level 77 BTW and now can fly again - forgot to post about that :)). So I said "sure" and logged Solidfaith.

When we started the tank asked if we would mind doing achievements and since none of us minded we went for it :)
First up was Split Personality, we simply bunched up the images and AoE'd them down so that they died together. We did this both twice and easily got the achievement. I was a bit worried a couple of times when the time stop prevented me from healing the tank when he was low on health but we pulled through.
Next up was Chaos Theory, this was significantly harder. We basically followed the tactic on the wowhead comments and kited the boss, but there must be something not mentioned there because in all of our attempts we were swamped by adds. Finally after several wipes we got the kiting speed just right or something and managed to get the boss down before the damage got too much.
Finally was Intense Cold, I already had this from a previous Nexus run and for the others it did not prove difficult to get - just keep jumping. I had to be quick on the dispelling of the Crystal Chains but otherwise an easy fight and the others got this one easily.

Till now I've never been a big fan of achievements, it seemed to me to be a system for making you jump through hoops and artificially making content harder than it was.
Well this is still true in my opinion and I still don't think I'll actively go chase achievements for their own sake.
However, heroics lately have been getting very easy when running with guild mates due to our much better gear, and the challange of doing these achievements, especially Chaos Theory, added a lot of spice and fun. Suddendly we were wiping, discussing tactics, laughing and happy when we managed to get a boss down - things I haven't done in a long time in a heroic run :) So it felt good and we I get a good guild group together for another heroic instance I might actually suggest going after achievements, you know, for challange and fun... :)

OS+1D

Last evening I went to OS with my guild in order to try Sartharion with one drake up. The last time my guild managed to do OS+1, I was not in the raid and they had a tank from outside the guild tank for them.
This time it was an all guild run and after a few learning wipes we managed to do it and I got the achievement :)

At first we had some tries where we tried to clear the whelps from each portal before DPS-ing the mini-boss or even go into the portal to kill eggs, but those tactics didn't work well. Inside the portal the eggs are spread out so it is hard to get all or even most of them down in time. Outside the portal, the OT had his hands full with the mini-boss and the whelps proved to be a bit of the problem to take down - hunters would shoot only to get agro and get a face full of whelps, therefore being forced to melee. We had a mage who died several times when he tried to AoE and go agro. Whelp agro on clothy = dead clothy :)

The way which finally worked for us was to nuke the mini-boss as fast as possible, before the whelps became too much. We wiped once when DPS was a bit slow and the OT healer didn't manage to keep him up but the second time we tried we managed, including a quick heal from me on the OT (I was MT healing). Once the boss was down the tank could concentrace on the keeping agro on the whelps (without dying from the combined DPS of too many whelps + mini-boss) while the DPS were free to AoE them down.

Of course once the mini-boss and whelps were down the fight becomes trivial and we quickly got Sartharion down as well, to the sound of much cheering :)
I even got lucky and won the 22 slot bag - pretty soon everyone in the guild will have one :)

From a healing standpoint, our Shammie healer had his hands full healing the party (they were taking quite a lot of damage) as well as helping with the OT, while trying not to die to the whelps and fire adds. I think his job was the hardest, I certainly didn't feel very strained in healing the MT although I had to be on my toes - either because he is a DK or just because of the nature of the fight, damage on him was pretty spiky and his life could quickly go down if I missed a heal (e.g. when I tried to help with the OT).

As a group we still need to practise the fight, sometimes people still get cought in the fire walls. Once we do the current mini-boss a few more times we'll be ready to try out a harder mini-boss or even OS+2 which will be really hard :)

Solidfaith, Champion of the Frozen Wastes

Last evening my guild downed Malygos again and this time I was there. Finally I can remove that silly Jenkins title and use the much better Champion of the Frozen Wastes one :)

OS+3D

Wow, I haven't blogged in a long time have I? :)

Well TBH nothing much has been going on. I've slowed down leveling Solidstar and instead have been busy doing heroics and daily quests with Solidfaith in order to get his reputation with the various factions us. It's a slow process and there's nothing much to tell about. I usually do the heroics with a paladin tank from my guild who is a really good player - his character on our guild is actually an alt of his. His main is a druid tank on one of the best 25man guilds on our server, one of the (very) few who have managed to down Sartharion-25 with 3 drakes up. More on that in a bit...

On the guild front things have also been slow. Now that we've cleared the content I can't really post about new boss kills :) We are still suffering from a tank shortage - our remaining tanks are good enough for Naxx but not really up to Sar+1D. So we're not doing much except re-clearing Naxx every week. This is good for gearing up (Solidfaith now has the complete T7 outfit) but is a bit boring.

Now to the subject line of this post and the reason I am writing today:
Last evening I was not raiding (got in a bit late and the guild had the 3 healers they needed) when I got a whisper from my friend's main, the druid I wrote about above. It seems he was organizing a PuG to go do OS+3d and wanted me to come heal.
Now, the very idea of a doing a raid in a PuG is usually something I avoid like the plague and the thought of even trying to do the hardest raid in the game in a PuG mights seem laughable. Only in this case my friend was bringing in people from some of the best raiding guilds in the server (I was by far the least geared and experienced raider there). Basically he had a few friends here and there, they looked up people from their own guilds and friends list and pretty soon we had a run going.

Considering how hard OS+3 is it is not amazing we wiped and did not manage eventually do to it. What is amazing is how long the raid lasted and how pro all the people were about it. We must have been in there for 3 hours straight and there was not a single AFK. Wipe after wipe everybody would simply release, run back in, quickly get health and mana up and be ready. I'm sure we did easily over 20 attempts, and the repair bill for even cloth wearers like myself was over 150g easily. People owned up to mistakes, tempers did not flare up and everyone was focused on getting the fight done.

That raid, for all the wipes and the fact that we didn't manage to do what we set out, was one of the most intensive and fun nights I have had in a long time in WoW. I'm not sure I'm up for that 4 times a week - but as a one time deal it was pretty sweet :)

Solidstar Dings 74, Malygos Down

So Solidstar dinged 74 a few days ago, following a few quests in Dragonblight.

Leveling as blood vs. frost feels significantly easier and since I've learned the trick to use Dancing Rune Weapon and follow it up with Death & Decay I can down groups of mobs insanely fast as 2x(D&D) on mobs takes down their health like you wouldn't believe :)

Malygos 10-man has been downed by my guild, again I missed the raid :( But I'm happy for the guild and really it was only a matter of time as we were taking him down to below 10% on a regular basis so it was really only a question of getting slightly faster on phases 1+2 and doing the tactic of phase 3 correctly, all of which are just a matter of gear+practise.

Now that my guild has cleared all the 10-man content all that remains is to do the harder versions of OS+2/3 and gear up in preparation of patch 3.1.

Solidstar Dings 73, Sarth+1D Down

Well it's been an interesting week. Solidstar has dinged 73, still in Borean Tundra. I've actually gotten the achievement for doing N-quests there (can't post link atm :( ) so I'm done with BT - time to move to Dragonblight. I'm still leveling Frost and it's not bad, can kill mobs and my damage-in vs. self-healing from Death Strike ratio is low enough so that I don't have downtime (or rarely do).

However it's boring and the few PuGs I've done were not much fun, so I've decided to go back to my favourite which is full blood. This should help me level a bit faster :)

In guild news, my guild downed Sartharion with 1 drake up. This is big news and a hard achievement for a 10 man raiding guild and I've very proud of the guild for pulling this off. I was not in the raid that day - the cost of having to get only 10 people together for a raid is that there are always a few spare left out. Since I had been raiding a lot and there were 4 healers online I passed on my spot.

However the MT in that fight was a druid from one of the best 25-man raiding guilds on the server, who came to help as his alt is in our guild. Without him I am not sure the guild would have managed, and in addition we are losing our paladin MT in 2 weeks for a period of 2.5 months as he is going for an extended trip in South America. That will leave us with no real good MT, as our current other tanks are either not as geared, not as good/experianced players or currently can't play (we have a druid tank with a dislocated shoulder :( ). We need a good tank quickly...

Hopefully our tank troubles will be solved and we'll keep the positive momentum we got from downing Sarth+1D. Keeping fingers crossed :)

No Real Update, Not Upset At All

I haven't blogged for a week so I'm starting to feel I should write about something, but there really isn't anything solid (hehe ;)) to write about. Sure I've managed to level Solidstar's alchemy a bit but he's still not at 450 so nothing to brag about. In addition he's still level 72, I've had little time to play him (or WoW at all) in the last few days.

It's interesting though and I actually happened to talk about it to a guild mate this evening. He told me it must be a bummer to have little free time to play WoW. Times was, I would have agreed with him.

But if truth be told I'm not feeling that way. WoW tends to suck you in and drink up every bit of free time you have. It really wouldn't matter if I had even more spare time, I still wouldn't manage to do all the in-game things I would like to do. So, given that fact, I've reached the conclusion that it is actually better for me to have only a little free time to play. That way I am forced by RL to play less, which is healthier and stretches the available content more. I'm certainly not distressed about Ulduar coming only in patch 3.1, who knows how many weeks from now. I have herbs to farm on my main and Malygos to take down, Naxx to farm, alts and their professions to level up. I do whatever feels fun and enjoy raiding with my guild and I have no problems about new content being far off. Heck I can always try to grind achievements if I want to :)

So I guess I would suggest to people who play WoW a lot - if you don't have a busy job or kids or another reason that forces you away from your computer and WoW, go find that reason. In the long run, you'll feel better for it.

Solidstar Dings 72

In between raiding and playing on my main I've managed to also get some play time on Solidstar and he is now level 72. I've been leveling in Borean Tundra but also doing instances as a tank.

I've had (surprisingly) mostly positive experiences with the PuGs I've done. Not perfect by far but I've managed to tank most of Nexus, all of Utgarde Keep and most of Azjul-Nerub. The Nexus run I had to leave before the last boss, sucked for the people in the PuG but what can I do, I didn't notice the time when I started the PuG and I was signed up for a guild (Malygos) raid so had to go. I did a couple of other Nexus runs but I was DPS in those, not tank. UK was easy, I actually dinged 72 at the beginning of it so did most of it as a level 72. The DPS did a good job and we basically tore through the place. No wipes, no ninjas, good feelings all around :)

AN was a suprise. I was invited in a /w to tank it when I was level 71. As the instance is a level 72-74 instance I thought I was too low and told the person /w me so. However I was willing to try and he invited me. Turns out the group was rather strange. There was myself, a (DPS) shaman who was the one who invited me, 2 paladins and a shadow priest. It turned out both paladins were healers. Furthermore after only a few fights it became obvious that the shadow priest had a DPS so low I could probably get better DPS with my mage's wand. However the 2 paladins and the priest were all from the same guild and barely spoke English. Not willing to break the group yet I tried. At first we wiped on the waves before the first boss and I was sure we were wasting our time (we basically had only 2 DPSers - including myself). But we made the others realize the importance of breaking the webs around people and pretty soon we were at the first boss and then past him. The second boss was actually easy (although the trash before him were a bit of a challange). I think having 2 healers helped since I was 3 levels lower than the bosses and some of the trash so I was taking huge amounts of damage.

However at the last boss we wiped a couple of times, the shaman who was the party leader went AFK and never returned and one more person had to leave so I decided to call it a night. So not a perfect run by far but I think tanking AN first 2 bosses at level 71 is not a bad achievement :)

Misc. Small Updates

I've been a bit too busy in RL to update this blog but there are various updates as I have been playing:

• Solidstar has dinged 70, yey :) Of course I've been playing in Northrend since level 68 so nothing much changed.
• Actually one thing did change for him, I went already and got the epic flying skill and the DK flying mount. It pretty much pushed me down to a big fat ZERO gold on all my chars but hey what's gold worth if you don't spend it right? :)
• My guild has cleared Naxxramas 10 man and in fact we're quick enough now to clear all 4 wings in one night. Solidfaith is getting better gear all the time, even got Hammer of the Astral Plane from Kel'Thuzad which is just about best 10-man 1H mace for healers. However...
• Sapphiron is still giving us trouble, we've downed him twice so far and both times he required multiple tries before we got it right. Then last night we went with a 3rd healer who was not as good as our regular healer and just couldn't stop wiping. Not just his fault both myself and the other regular healer made mistakes which killed us and of course the raid (since such massive healing is required in this fight). Well I'm sure we'll do better next time.

Well that's pretty much it for now. I hope we do Malygos 10-man soon so I can update on that fight, it sounds like an interesting fight :)

A Good Heroic

Well I promised an update on running heroic with disc spec and here it is.

The verdict? Pretty damn good :)

I managed to find a PuG for heroic UP. The PuG was between reasonable and good, out of 3 DPS one (a boomkin) had a bit of lower personal DPS but made up for it with a nice party buff and decent AoE. The tank has 25k health unbuffed which is good for a PuG.

Basically the run went very smoothly, the only wipes we had were on Skadi. Even there I feel it was a matter of knowing the tactic, coordinating it and executing it and not a problem with my healing.

On one other boss fight - Gortok, I went OOM, but that is a difficult fight due to the amount of AoE damage from some of the mini-bosses before and having little or no time to drink between the mini-bosses.

Basicallly during the run I had little trouble in keeping the tank up and I never felt my mana was an issue, even though the tank kept a good pace.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the disc spec and I intend to keep it for now. Hopefully Blizzard won't nerf it for some reason too soon :)

Solidfaith as Disc

Well my last post had a little mistake, I linked the wrong build when I wrote about the Disc build I was considering. But that's okay because I've settled on a slightly different one which is this 57/14/0 build.

Basically the main issue was taking 2/2 Renewed Hope so that I had only 1 point to spend on Improved Renew. With my current gear every shred of crit counts and because crit is so central to the disc build I thought it was worth it even though my renew would tick for less. It's just a hunch since I haven't gone through any number crunching, however...

What I have done already is go to a Naxx raid with my guild as a disc priest and I'm finally feeling that my mana can last in long fights and I can be an effective healer. Of course my healing according to the meters is lower but even my friend who tanked the place and so usually sees mostly just the boss on his screen commented on all the bubbles that were popping around (thanks to Divine Aegis of course) so I know my influence was seen and felt :)

In fact in one fight which is the Loatheb fight I actually pulled ahead of the other 2 healers. I was assigned to heal the ranged group among whom I was located. So during the fight, 1 second before the healing window opened I used Prayer of Healing, which meant I got it off just after the window opened, and followed that by a Holy Nova which is instant cast. As a bonus due to the spore buff I got even more crits than usual which meant bubble goodness all around :D

I have to be fair though and admit that a Naxx farming run is not a real test of the build. The real test will be when I do a heroic PuG... I guess I'll see then if this spec can really pull its weight... :)

Changes To My Chars

I've now officially added Solidstar to this site, his picture-signature is now added to my other chars. It's true he's only level 68 but he's already in Northrend and I've had so much fun leveling him so far, I don't see myself stopping till he's level 80.

Blood spec has worked great for me so far and I intend to continue leveling with it till 80, at which point I'll respec to a Frost-tanking build. Thanks to the self-healing from Blood talents I've managed to solo every 3-man group quest in Terokkar Forest that I've come across and so my leveling has been very quick. Last night I finally dinged 68 and made my way to my new home, Borean Tundra. I did a few of the quests in the immediate area of Valiance Keep before going to sleep and already managed to replace 3 of my pieces of gear. Of course this is not surprising as I'm basically wearing low level Outland greens, not even level 70 ones so it would be surprising if I could not find upgrades from Northrend starter quests.

Another big change to my characters is for Solidfaith. I've specced Solidfaith as a holy priest ever since he dinged max level and I've never looked back. However WoW changes and so must we who play it. At level 80 as a holy priest life is very different for me than as a level 70 holy priest. Mana effiency is a major concern for one thing, no more ability to chug mana pots. Add to this the fact that CoH, one of our best spells, is going to get nerfed soon. Finally other healers have gotten serious boosts to their healing while at the same time having much less mana worries, for various reasons. This means that it is much harder for me to compete in pure healing output, which was my strong point as a level 70 holy priest.

However... a Discipline priest, a.k.a. disc-priest, brings much more to the table at level 80 as compared to a level 70 priest. So while still not able to compete in the pure healing department, at least I can much more strongly complement and enchance the raid.

Based on my performance as a holy priest in initial Naxx raids I've currently respecced to this mixed 36/35/0 disc/holy build. My intention was to still keep a strong holy tree but get as many int/spi enhancements from disc. This actually worked pretty well in the sense that I now have, with raid buffs, a much larger mana pool and mana regen while still having a large amount of spell-power. At my current gear level, this build makes a lot of sense if I want to be able to put out large healing numbers while being able to sustain myself in longer fights.

However I've talked to a raider from a 25-Naxx raiding guild who swore by a full disc build, especially for 10-man groups. So taking a closer look at a possible disc priest I think this 55/16/0 build looks very interesting. Huge PW:S damage reductions, more damage reductions from talents like Grace and Inspiration, yet more shielding from Divine Aegis... as wowhead comments say, such a disc priest should make an uber MT-healer. I'll miss the group healing abilites of full holy build though... :(

Kel'thuzad Down

It's been a while since my last post, mostly due to RL issues (work pressure) keeping me busy. However my guild has continued to progress in 10man-Naxx and I'm happy I was there for most raids since it was a lot of fun.

So finally 2 nights ago we got to Kel'thuzad and started attempts on him, at first we wiped some due to not understanding tactics 100% and later due to some player errors. However we kept perfecting our execution and getting better until we got him to 9% in the last try. However it was very late and people were getting tired so we called it. Then last evening we went on him again, wiped once to "warm up" and finally got him down in the 2nd try :)

Kel'thuzad is an interesting fight and one where you really feel every player has to play perfectly in order to succeed. Of course the better your gear is the less that is important but for our gear level it felt that way.

Phase 1 is deceptively easy, just nuke the incoming adds fast enough. On all attempts we always had some adds, mostly the banshee-type, still alive when Kel'thuzad was released at start of Phase 2, but those were quickly nuked down by the ranged. So basically phase 1 is about DPS and control and not very challanging. Our main tactic there was to assign one ranged to cover ~1/3rd of the circle (we had 3 ranged) and each tank covering 1/2 of the circle. So tanks would pickup Abominations as they came in from their half (with 2 melee helping with DPS on those) while ranged would shoot skeletons and banshees before they got to the circle. Healers can also help with DPS here as there is usually very light damage on tanks.

However once phase 2 started the fun really began. First every player needed to watch his/her positioning - the 10 yard spacing between players is absolutly vital in this fight, not something "nice to have". Kel'thuzad's Frost Blast was the main challange for healers but for all players it was important to watch out for the Shadow Fissures and we even wiped a few times due to tanks not moving out from those. Even tanks get 1-shot by those :(

Phase 3 is again a healer challange as now you need to heal 2 tanks, one of whom takes increasingly more damage. So another challange is for the DPS to really nuke this phase and get Kel'thuzad down as fast as possible before it becomes impossible for the healers to keep the 2 tanks up. In addition Kel'thuzad keeps doing his abilities from phase 2, including Frost Blast, so healing is pretty tough at this point. Yet it is vital to keep up DPS as well since a dead DPS = longer phase 3 = more chance of wipe.

Our takedown fight was by no means perfect but enough few individual mistakes were made to make the fight doable.

Our guild challanges are now to down Malygos 10man and continue farming Naxx 10 since we by no means have all the fights down, some bosses we still need more practise on and will probably fight. Many people are still missing T7 gear and other possible gear improvements from drops.

My First WotLK Raid

For the last few weeks I've been playing very few hours each day, logging in late and managing at most one instance run, usually with a PuG, or leveling my alts a bit more (Solidstate hit 71 and Solidstar is almost 65). Because I logged in late each day I missed the chance to raid with my guild.

Last night however I managed to login before raid start time and as it happened they were missing a healer, so I got in. I should mention, my guild is small and does only 10 man raids currently.

First we went to Sartharion which was the first time for the guild there. Because this was the first time we first downed all 3 drakes before taking him on. I found it pretty hard (and confusing) to heal and watch the incoming lava wave, I got hit by it many times but managed to heal myself (or got healed by others) untill almost the end of the fight when a combination of adds + wave + low mana killed me. Better gear and more experience and I should be much better at that dance...

Speaking of dances, once Sarth was down (1-shotted in spite of it being a new encounter and several people dying during fight), we decided to go to Naxxramas and continue clearing it, as previous guild raids have gotten up to Heigan and wiped on him. This time we wiped the first time but the practice must have done people good because the next time we got him. Once I understood the tactic I managed to stay alive quite a long time but died to to a little lag causing me to get him by a wave in the nature phase.

Next up was Loatheb and this was truely an interesting fight for healers as the 3 second healing windows meant I had to be on my toes and really use every tool I had to keep the people up. Pre-casting Renew and Prayer of Mending just before and of course spamming CoH during the window itself. We wiped the first try since one of the other healers didn't understand the fight and kept trying to heal during the 17 seconds no-healing period, but the second try we got the boss.

Gothik was next up and he proved to be a pushover, going down on the first attempt. The fight itself was fun, we split up - 4 people for the living side and 6 for the undead side. I was on the undead side and all the people took a lot of damage - there was a lot of continous AoE damage going around. However this meant that Prayer of Mending could really be used to full effect and together with CoH and of course together with the other healer (a paladin) we had no problem keeping the people us. DPS was also sufficiently high and once Gothik himself joined us he only had a chance to stack his debuff 5 times and teleport twice before we downed him.

Alas no loot for me but the fun of being once in a raid was reward enough :)

Good Heroic UK Run, New Gear Too :)

Well the title pretty much says it all. I got a guild group, tank and 3 decent DPS with me healing and we went to heroic Utgarde Keep which I was told was the easier heroic. Indeed the run went very smoothly (no wipes) although the spikiness of the damage on the tank surprised me, I'm used to him having a huge amount of mitigation at 70 and suddenly even though he's got 27k life his gear isn't so great, so he gets hit harder and more often.

Still I managed to stay on top of things by using Renew, Prayer of Mending and of course Greater Heals. Mana was tough in the boss fights but I used my shadowfiend and all was well there too. I will however need much better gear for Naxx, if I ever hope to join my guild in there (they are starting this Wednesday if all goes well).

During the run the BoE Cracklefire Wristguards dropped from a random mob. This being a guild run and my bracers being not as good, the people were nice enough to allow me to need on it so I got a nice upgrade there. Lost some haste but I'm really perfectly fine with that.

Then the 3rd boss Ingvar was kind enough to drop the Breeches of the Caller which were a great upgrade for me. I used one blue quality and one green quality gems to socket them as I didn't want to go overboard investing in pants which will likely be replaced very soon. However I also took the time to get a shoulder enchant from Sons of Hodir, enchants on my weapon and bracers from a friend and a head enchant from TBC. So now I have 1.5k spell power when I have Inner Fire on (since I've taken the Improved Inner Fire talent). It's actually quite annoying to have to keep refreshing it due to the short 10min duration, I hope Blizzard add a glyph sometime that extends that to 30min or an hour.

Ding 80

It took several hours of questing in Sholazar Basin, including doing the Nesingwary chain quests, but Solidfaith finally dinged 80. I actually dinged just as I returned the quest Post-partum Aggression which ends the quest line so I got both the level 80 achievement as well as The Snows of Northrend achievement.

I actually could have leveled faster but Sholazar is such a heaven for herbalists, I just had to stop every 2 seconds to pick a flower. I managed to get my Alchemy skill up to 415 thanks to these plants and plants I picked previously in The Storm Peaks. For now I'll take it easy in terms of leveling the rest of the way, I'm not planning to power-level my alchemy and really I don't have a reason to do so. But it's nice that herbalism seems to be much easier (faster) than in BC.

Once I hit 80 I respecced to Holy (I chose this 13/58/0 build). I'm not too sure about either my build or gear choices as I seem to have very low spirit, leading to low mana regen. On the other hand I don't really have the gear to allow me to have both high spirit and spell power. So my next task is to find such gear :) I will also think about repseccing away from CoH and taking the Divine Spirit talent, although I am relucntant to do this - I really love CoH.

Ding 79, and 400 Alchemy too

Level 78 came and went in storm of questing. Along the way, thanks to my flying mount, I managed to pick a lot of plants, resulting in being able to level my Alchemy to 400. I haven't been in a hurry to level my Alchemy and so I'm pleased with my progress so far :)

Among other things I also dinged exalted with the Valiance Expedition, which means exactly squat as this faction doesn't have any quartermaster or rewards. Still it's nice to have dinged exalted with a faction even before level 80 :)

I also did the quest line for the Frenzyheart Tribe vs. The Oracles. I started it rather randomly but what happened was I started as a "slave" to the Frenzyheart, quickly progressing in status with them until I was honored. At this point I was given a quest by the head honcho to grab a wounded Oracle from nearby, so he could be "poked at". Imagine my surprise when the quest led me to being friendly with the Oracles and hated with my former allies :) Not only that, I was happily greated in villages where just minutes ago I had been killing villagers left and right in the name of the Frenzyheart...
This rather medium length quest line finally led me to a cave where a I was asked to kill a lich called Artruis. This is a 3-man quest but luckily some guild mates of mine could come and we quickly too him down to 30% where he becomes immune and you have a choice of killing either a Frenzyheart member or an Oracle. As I've set my sights on the Mysterious Egg I killed the little "puppy-man" and let the Murlock-man live.

I'm not sure what exactly I will focus on once I hit 80 (hopefully today), will it be gearing up my priest or leveling an alt. But I'm sure I'll have fun :)

Ding 77, I haz wings back :)

Yep, I finally dinged a couple of nights ago and immediately hearthed to Dalaran and got rid of a tidy 1k gold :)

It's a great feeling to be able to fly again, and a good thing I have an epic flying mount since Northrend is so large.

The day after I dinged 77 I started the Sons of Hodir reputation chain. This is one of the most fun series of quests I've done in WoW, involving (among other things) being transformed to the likeness of a tall warrior woman, riding and using war-bears, killing level 80 elites with my own small army of mobs under my control (now I know what multi-boxing feels like :)), riding dragons (always an enjoyable experience) and even riding a huge sleepy giant :)
The entire chain, plus some extra quests and a few Hodir dailies I managed to do once I got to friendly with them, brought me after 2 days to the status of honored with them, which I'm very pleased with.

I'm also close to level 78, between all the quest XP I've been getting as well as XP from killing level 80 mobs.

Ding 76, flying mount Real Soon Now :)

I pushed myself this weekend and managed to get from 74 to three-quarters of the way to level 77. Only 25% left till a flying mount! :)

I leveled almost entirely in Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills and I enjoyed it a lot. The daily quest which involves riding a dragon and doing aerial combat with enemy NPC dragons was a blast and I will definitely be returning to that and not just because of the rep :)
It does however make me wish Blizzard had put in aerial PvP with dragons in Wintergrasp and not just between planes - well here's hoping they add that as well :)

Initially after finishing questing in Dragonblight I thought to continue directly to Zul'Drak, however after 10 minutes of questing there I decided I didn't like it. The area is very dark, almost perpetual twilight. This isn't something I enjoy, it just makes me squint more and want to increase the gamma setting. In addition the zone simply doesn't look very good to me.

Grizzly Hills on the other hand is a beautiful wooded area, with streams and mountains and interesting places everywhere. There were a ton of quests and one in particular that I very much enjoyed. It involved a twist on the escort quest. Instead of walking/running next to the NPC, you get up on a horse (acting as a vehicle) with him and use the vehicle pet bar to ward off attackers as you make your way to safety, while they attack the horse and slowely take down its health bar. The speed of the chase and the excitment of trying to ward off the attackers while your horse makes its way to the destination made for quite a rush and ultimatly a very enjoyable quest.

I'm pretty sure that between doing a few dailies and finishing all my quests in GH I will ding 77, after which it will be time for exploration-XP-fest :)

Ding 74

Solidfaith dinged 74 last night after a furious evening of questing. I started out with a couple of daily quests, for the rep. I then continued questing in Dragonblight, having finished all of my quests in Howling Fjord.

In Dragonblight I started doing quests along the shore for the Tuskarr, earning Kalu'ak reputation. Soon though I moved inland to Wintergarde Keep and spend the rest of the evening questing there. It's an impressive place, and the dark forbidding Naxx floating high above the fields outside the keep with all of the undead running around outside really ties in the whole feel of the place, of war between the Alliance and the Scourge.
I had a lot of fun, the quest to save villagers from the back of a gryphon was a lot of fun as was the dialog between a certain cleric and an undead mayor :)
There was one short chain where I had to go down to the shore and get stories from some undead humans followed by showing them an orb which shows them how the young Arthas was the one to betray them, burning their ships and thus stranding them on the shores of Northrend. Apart from the cool factor of seeing young Arthas, I thought it was a fair reproduction of the Warcraft III plot (not that I remember that too well having played it several years ago). I thought this was a nice touch on the part of Blizzard.

I also got some group quests there, luckily I quickly found a group and even though I am Shadow specced and the tank was not protection specced, we still managed to kill Kreug without a problem. The other group quests naturally were also quite easy.

All in all I'm quite happy with Dragonblight, there is a huge number of quests to do and a wide variety, some are a bit less interesting in essence but I try to read the quest text and enjoy the story lines even when the quest itself is not so interesting. I'm sure I will ding 75 in this area although not yet sure about level 76, will have to wait and see.

Solidfaith Dings 73, Solidstar Maxes Professions

Solidfaith "ding-ed" level 73 last night, an event which I promptly celebrated by going to bed :)

I'm still only questing in HF and still have a lot of quests there so plenty left to do. However I am not sure if they turn green what I will do since I don't want to level even more slowly, I'm behind most of my guild as it is.

Solidstar got to level 62 a couple of days ago, still doing Zangramarsh quests. More importantly I found the time to level his Alchemy to 375 and Inscription to 350 (there's no reason to level Inscription beyond 350 before Northrend). So my profession goals with him are currently achieved and I'll continue leveling him whenever I find some spare time, or just feel like having fun with an uber char :)