My WOW year in review

Wow a lot has happened in the last year in WOW. I only wrote 39 posts in 08 but this year I've already done 116 posts. It almost seems like a different game at this point being in a new guild and raiding and thinking I've got a real shot at killing Arthas. I'm gonna break it up into sections and see where the last year took me.

January: I had only been 80 a short time and I was still running the regular instances to help gear up for heroics (right, who does that anymore, lol). I had my one 80 and was running with some of my friends who were still leveling up their toons to 80. Mostly January was me running regular Halls of Lightning and not getting the defense trinket.

February: I finally got that stupid trinket on my 16th try of Halls of Lightning that was probably the highlight of my month. I started running heroics with some guildies and worked on leveling a bunch of my alts (who now mostly sit on my old server abandoned). I was also deciding what my dual-specs were going to be for my toons.

March: This month was a really weird one for me as my account got hacked and that was an awesome experience, I also joined up with some friends to do the Arena Tournament which was actually alot of fun. Other than that I just leveled alts as my guild wasn't really doing much

April: The Corsairs finally stepped into a raid as a guild even if it was to 9man Voa and Sarth but at least it was something. We also started working on Naxx a little bit and got through Spider Wing and I thought we were on our way to start raiding, finally.

May: We mostly spent May wiping on Heigan. He was our nemesis and not being able to consistently down him was the beginning of the end of our raiding team. We did finally bring in a ringer to get us through Heigan but it was the beginning of the end. I also got layed off at the end of the month.

June, July, August: I'm lumping these together as I didn't really do much during this time but level my alts. We tried Gluth a couple of times as a guild but couldn't get him and a few people just decided they didn't want to raid anymore, or at least that's what it seemed like. I was layed off all summer so I basically just searched for jobs and played WOW when I could. A group of my guildies at the time had started leveling up horde toons on a different server and so our guild never seemed to have anybody on.

September: This was my triumphant return to blogging and working. The Brewfest event was going on so we killed ol' Coren Direbrew til I couldn't stand it anymore. I debated dual-speccing my priest Holy/Disc which I did and worked out well. This is also when I found out you can't skin low level rabbits anymore. I am still very perturbed by this.

October: My new beginning, as I joined my new guild. I was raiding, for real, I finally saw the inside of Ulduar and ToC. I learned alot and started having fun in game again and have been making a ton of new friends. We downed Sarth +1 a couple of times. We cleared through Naxx in record time a couple of times. Our most frustrating fight was Ignis because we trying to find a strategy that worked for us.

Novemeber: This was a month of learning new encounters as we failed on Malygos a couple of nights but had a victory over Onyxia on a different night so at least we keep working together and having fun while doing it. I also got my 6th 80 (mostly thanks to a summer of being layed off much easier to level alts in short amounts of time).

December: Its been a blur mostly with the holidays and seeing old friends and the new LFD giving me so many emblems they burn a hole in my pocket. We had a interesting first go against a overpowered Marrowgar and made even more progress through Ulduar. We did have on failboat night on Ony but you can't win them all. I even missed last nights run because a friend of mine from California was in town this week and it was the only night we were going to be able to hang out at all. I should be sporting my 4piece t9 for tanking tonight so maybe we'll see what we can do and kill some more raid bosses. I have also been running with a friend of mine on a different server and we have been running horde as of now we have 2 72 toons working on Northrend and being really tired of UK it seems to come up alot in LFD at level 71.


So there you have it another glorious wall of text from yours truly. I am so looking forward to the new year and having a lot more fun in game and meeting even more friends and writing more blog posts to entertain and amuse.

K Out!

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas

Mine turned out pretty good except for having to shovel part of my parents driveway so everybody could get in to park. Iowa has been having a really fun winter this year, not. I also went to see Avatar over the weekend with my cousin and have to say it is pretty good. I would definitely recommend it if you're curious. I did get in some WOW time as well and am slowly but surely building up a collection of Frost Emblems with which to start upgrading my gear. Hopefully we'll have some luck in ICC10 this week and maybe get some of those bosses down. We haven't had a chance to get back over there since our first trip so I am looking forward to dishing out some payback. We went after some of the Heroic achievements this weekend and I am down to 14 left for my Red Drake. A bunch of those are Occulus though mostly because I hate the place. It has been fun and I have been having a lot of fun in WOW lately and it is nice to see so many people on. Gotta say the LFD tool sure has been good to the game in that respect. I have to say the Anomuls achievement in Nexus kind of sucks so I am glad we got that one done.

LFD: Tank vs. Dps

Last night I logged on long enough to do a random dungeon for some emblems and thought since I was still in my dps spec I'd just queue up as dps. Well if you have done this already you know there is a huge difference in wait times for a tank vs. a dps. Its not like it took forever or anything and I did get to do a little mining during the wait which was good as I hadn't done any for a while. I also was in a run with some uber geared dps, it doesn't take much to knock you down a few pegs when you think your doing alright and thought you pulled some good numbers on a fight and look at yourself in third on recount. I was pushing between 3.5 to 4k on some pulls and these guys were way ahead of me like 5-6k every fight. I really tried to buckle down and push it as hard as I could and I may have done some of my best dps ever but those guys just stomped me. so any illusions of me being super dps went away real quick. Thankfully I do a pretty good job of tanking and don't need to worry about it. I did get to see how other people handle certain pulls and groups so that was definitely a valuable experience to have. I hope we get a good weekly raid quest tonight and can push into some other stuff afterwards. This post has a lot of random thoughts, sorry.

I used to like the holidays

My Mom goes crazy around the holidays and so every year I get guilted into helping her decorate and wrap presents. She is a fanatic and does hundreds of little stocking stuffers from the dollar stores and clearance sales from throughout the year. So I have had the great pleasure of wrapping a ton of that stuff. My WOW time has taken a hit. I think I logged on for a little while Friday night but that was about it. I will just be happy when it is all over honestly. I don't even know whats going on this week in our guild. I should be able to run Tuesday and Wednesday so hopefully we'll be running something on those days. At least this only happens once a year :).

I brought my dps gear out of the bag for the first time in weeks last night.

When you are a tank its nice to have a dual-spec but if your like me you really don't use it very often. because rarely if ever do you get asked to go anywhere as dps and running dailies is usually faster in tank spec because you can just grab more bad guys and take down large groups of mobs to speed up the process. Well last night we went into Ulduar to work on some of the bosses we hadn't done yet and we took out Hodir and Thorim which was pretty cool. Our raid leader had brought in another tank to help show us the ropes and since Hodir is a 1 tank fight I got to go ret and even rocking the 4 piece t7.0 set and an assortment of 200-219 level epics I had gotten randomly I pushed out 3500 on our Hodir kill which surprised me since I don't usually do well on movement fights and that fight is all over the place. I actually upgraded 4 pieces of gear last night for my dps set and got them gemmed and enchanted so I am kind of curious what I might be able to do now. I might just cue up some random dungeons as dps to give it a try and be one of the random faceless pew-pewers in the crowd.

What day is it?

I have been working like crazy since Friday. We moved our company to a new building this weekend. We got smacked around by Ol' Marrowgar last week. We may need a bit more gear to get by that guy and then go with 3 dedicated healers from the get go. I do have to say the trash in there is crazy. I half want to go in and just farm some trash so I can get enough rep for my ring. I have only been on long enough to do one random heroic since then because I have been too tired to do anything when I get home from work. I haven't read any blogs, I haven't even checked my email since Friday. I feel very cut off from the world. Hopefully now that we have everything moved things should be much more calm and I may not be so tired by the end of the week. Sorry I wasn't on Friday to run heroics boss I put in 14 hours at work that day and I was done. I will probably log on tomorrow night for a little bit at least get a couple frost emblems.

OK tonight we go into Icecrown

Well I know we were going to go Tuesday but that didn't work out with the servers not being friendly to everyone. I am in the Midwest and have been dealing with the blizzard here so I didn't have work yesterday and got to play a lot more WOW than normal. I have gotten into the new 5 mans and I like them but as a tank I think there are way to many casters (We may unretire crowd control on a couple of pulls). I also think they may get a little tedious with the monologues but other than that some fun and interesting fights. I am pretty happy with everything I've seen from the new patch I even got rid of some of my addons (mainly Cartographer and Questhelper) because now the game covers what I wanted from them. I didn't really have any issues with my other addons although I did have to adjust some of my game settings which was weird why was my camera control changed and my loot window location was different too, just kind of odd. So anyways tonight we are going to go into ICC and take our first shot at the new raid. I have watched the vids and read the strats and I feel like we are going to do great. I am really looking forward to it. I hope everyone else is having as much fun as I am with all the new stuff.

The Ashen Verdict Quartermasters Location

He is inside the Raid Instance, Just go to the right once you are inside he is next to the tier vendors.
K Out!

I'm on

I finally got to log on. Now I can check out some of the new stuff :)

Looks like I'll be tanking Lord Marrowgar tonight!!

Well as long as the servers are up anyways :). I am hopeful though and I have been doing my research and I think I am ready for the fight. As long as we can work together I think we stand a good chance at taking him down. I do want to try out the new 5mans too sometime soon so if the raid doesn't work out maybe we'll jump in those. Also have to do the random dungeon daily and find out what the raid weekly quest is. Wow there is a lot of stuff to do. I am really looking forward to this and I think we are going to have a blast tonight. I hope everyone else is as excited as I am to try out all the new stuff and good luck on whatever you are working on.

Getting in that comfort zone

When I'm tanking I have different mindsets depending on what I'm tanking. I am also a bit of a perfectionist so if I screw up a pull or somebody dies on my watch I can get a bit frustrated. Tanking in a raid is different from tanking a heroic. When I am raid tanking I am prepared for wipes and dieing and frustration and repair bills, I expect these things and try to keep an even keel and come back from every wipe focused and ready to kill the boss. On the other hand I sometimes get a little lackadaisical in heroics because I've "been there, done that" and I don't really need anything from them. Now that's not to say I don't enjoy blowing through one once and a while, and I am always willing to run if some of our guildies need to go. Now last night we ran a couple heroics and I was finally in my zone where I felt comfortable and just rolled through ready to blow stuff up. It may have helped that we did CoS first as I really like that one because the timer is there to keep me on the ball and focused. I made a point to learn how to destroy that place with my old guild and was able to get everyone in our guild a Bronze Drake. It was something I really wanted to help them accomplish and was glad to do it. It doesn't hurt that the place is full of undead and as a pally I am well equipped to handle the undead. We destroyed the Nexus after that too. I had a lot of fun even though we didn't get to raid and I can always get some more Boa gear for my new army of alts because its a little to expensive to transfer all my toons to the new server and I really do like leveling. I got my new hunter to 12 last night before we started the heroics up. Leveling is so much more fun than dailies

Question: If the patch is next week what do we do?

Now I am not in charge of our guild (thankfully, Swan is way better at it than I would be) so its not my decision to make, but I am curious as to what you think our guild should do if ICC comes out next week. We are not a hardcore guild but we do have a regular raiding schedule and we do a pretty good job for where we are in my opinion. We haven't killed Yogg yet (in fact we are still working on the keepers) and we got, I think the word is roflstomped, by Faction Champs the one time we went to the big room of raiding. Now I am a big fan of Ulduar actually (except Ignis that fight is dumb in my opinion), and I would like to finish it out, but it would be cool to be raiding the actual current raid tier with everyone else, as I have never had a chance to really do that before in game. We do have some well geared quality members in our guild and raid team and I think I do pretty good job as a tank so I think we could actually put in some legitimate attempts on the new raid almost right away, especially since everything will be dropping triumph badges and everyone in your raid can be in tier9 gear in a week or two with a little heroic grinding, and the crazy new gear out of the new 5mans. For me, honestly I am good either way because I just want to kill bosses and have fun with my guild. There aare a couple ways of going about it that seem to make the most sense to me. The new gear will help us push through what we are working on now even faster, and would give us all good feelings of moving through content or we could try bashing our head against the new raid for a couple hours a week and fall back to other stuff if that doesn't work out. So faithful viewers what do you think we should do? Either way I will defer to our fearless leader I was just curious of your opinion

So yes we killed Ony last night and 6 bosses Ulduar tonight!

Happy post is happy. It took us a little while but we did down the dragon last night and tonight we did some good work through Ulduar and are going to punch through some more tomorrow. Woot!!

One of my best friends quit WOW

I haven't posted for a while because I wasn't sure what to write. My friend is having some money issues and had to cancel his account. Its weird because he's been playing since vanilla and was one of the main conspirators that convinced me to sign-up. Lately we have even been leveling up a couple of horde toons in our spare time to see the storyline from that side of things. We just got our Warrior/DK combo to 70 2 weeks ago and were plowing through the Howling Fjord. Now I don't know if I want to wait until he comes back to level that toon up because depending on certain things he may not come back at all as he's got a new house and a new girlfriend and his family life keeps him busy. Now I'll still get to hang out with him and we'll play games over xbox live and stuff so its not like we won't be friends anymore but after 2+ years of playing WOW together its now something we don't have in common anymore. It will be something to get used to for sure because it was something we have spent alot of time doing together. I still enjoy the game and my new guild has been great so I don't see myself quitting anytime soon, but I can tell I don't play nearly as much as I used to. I hardly logged in at all over the holiday weekend just getting a level on my warrior alt and another on my shaman alt. I really haven't felt like logging in nearly as much lately at all. I thought it was just because I was waiting for the new patch to come out because I am really excited for the new dungeons and raids, but it may be because I am not spending as much time with my friends as I used too. Being in a small guild of friends where everybody knows everybody and talking in vent all night and going over to each others houses and just hanging out kept us all logging in almost every night I've noticed, now that some of us have kind of splintered off, that my old guild has really fell off where there's usually only 1 or 2 people on at all. I know its not all my fault but I knew that there would be some fallout because I used to basically drag alot of them through stuff and without me there to "drive the boat" so to speak it seems like nothing is going on there anymore. I am very driven most of the time and I like to accomplish goals and in WOW that makes me want to tackle more difficult encounters. That's what led me to transfer to my new server and its what makes wiping on boss fights not such a pain because I can see how everybody is trying to work together to reach that goal. Well this was kind of a downer post so tomorrow I'll have a much more cheerful post about our much smoother Ony kill tonight and whatever other adventures that come our way.
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K Out!

It may have taken us a couple hours, but we killed Ony woot!

Our group got together last night to take down Ony last night and since we had never been there as a group we had some learning to do on the mechanics of the fight, or how to avoid deep breaths lol. It's always funny how it works out where you struggle and struggle and then when you get it everybody is alive at the end. Some loot was passed out and fun was had by all or at least by me I guess I can't speak for everyone.

Weekend Update: Not much WOW actually

I actually spent the greater part of my weekend reading and catching up some TV (by the way TV on DVD and streamed on the Internet is the only way to watch TV. The only thing I actually watch on TV when its on is football and even that's very rare lately). I did play my horde toon on Friday night that my friend and I are leveling together. We are both 70 now and pushing hard through Howling Fjord. I did play a little Saturday morning but just a few dailies. I think I actually played Gears of War 2 more on Sunday then I did WOW this weekend. I felt like getting on the XBOX a bit after my friend brought his copy of Assassins Creed 2 over. I wish I wasn't broke because that game looks like a lot of fun. Maybe I'll ask my folks to get it for me for Christmas hahaha. Actually I'd rather they get me a microwave since the buttons on mine are going out(Do you know how annoying it is when you can't press the 1 on your microwave.) I didn't mention yet though that we made some really good progress on Ulduar last week. We finally killed that jerk Ignis and also got Auriya down to. We did kind of a peek at the Hodir fight which didn't go too bad actually I think with a little practice we should be able to take him out with a few more tries. So thats going well. I probably should have gone into Naxx this weekend with them I just was not really into WOW and needed to recharge the batteries. I have been pushing hard at WOW since the big server move and while its definitely been awesome I am now for the first time feeling the stress of being a raider. Its just something to get used to. I do think though that this move has given me the best chance I could ever get at killing Arthas and that's really going to be awesome. I may be the only guy on the Internet who is not pissed about the gating thing they are doing in Icecrown but this actually gives our guild a shot at going into Icecrown Citadel and keeping up with everyone else. I think we are basically geared enough to go in when it comes out, and while we might take longer to get the fights down with it being slowly released we will actually have a good shot at keeping up on our limited raid schedule. So hooray for false barriers I guess. I do understand what the other people are complaining about though and I don't think they are wrong in their opinions either. I am just trying to enjoy the game for what it is rather than what it used to be.
Wow I really need to watch it or all my posts will be giant walls of text.
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K Out!

The Tick is 80 woot!

He was even lucky enough to get a Spirit Beast thanks to ESN Rare, a handy little mod that will put out a warning when it scans a rare mod in the area. I also did some planning ahead and thanks to the Tournament and 2 runs through reg Toc at 79 had him one trinket away from the Superior Achievement and with 7 epics. I really missed having my hunter maxed out and I had a real debate when the expansion came out who was gonna be my first 80 my Hunter or my Pally, well then the great BM nerfbat came out that really turned me away from my hunter for a while. He is really fun though and I am really glad I got him leveled up. I guess the question I need to ask is what do I do with him now?

My Road to WOW

Jaded Alt did a post last week about what their road to WOW was and I thought I would give it a whirl myself.

I can remember the first video game I ever remember seeing, it had a plumber and he kept running to his right to try to save a princess. Yes Super Mario Bros. was the first video game I remember ever seeing when Nintendo first came out my cousin got one for Christmas which was at our house that year and we hooked it up and the whole family squished goombas and picked flowers for a couple hours. I myself didn't get a Nintendo until I bought one myself which by that time my cousin had gotten his genesis and they had gotten the Sega channel but thats neither here nor there. My first video game machine was a Commodore 64. It had a place to stick cartridges in the back and a disk drive. I had like 7-8 games I think but the ones that got the most play were Centipede because my Mom was good at it and I played a very deep RPG called Mars Saga. You could create all kinds of characters and you walked around maps exploring areas and you would combat random groups of bad guys, It also used a casino as a way to help you make money in game (I think that's why I don't like slot machines because I used to play the slots in that game all the time) If all of your group died you basically had to start over and begin from scratch it was kind of hardcore You had all kinds of skills and equipment and weapons. It was a really entertaining game and I understand now why I have always liked RPG's so much after getting into that game so much. Eventually between my cousin's my own and the neighbor I played a bunch of Nintendo games Castlevania, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear, Super Mario Bros 3 being the most memorable, and I played a ton of Tetris, don't know why just really liked it.

When we got a PC I played a couple of strategy games I think came from the same company Masters of Orion and Masters of Magic which were very similar to original Warcraft in that they were build up groups of troops and buildings and go clear the map of everyone else type of games. They did have alot more race options and there was even diplomatic options, but it usually came down to destruction. I don't really remember too much about them actually, although I did play them quite a bit. A couple of my friends had Warcraft 2 and Starcraft so I played them a little bit but mostly just custom modes. When I moved out to go to college I really wasn't playing any video games, my roommate had Warcraft 2 and would make custom maps as hard as he could and see how long it took me to beat them but that was really rare. But my other roommate had a friend who needed a place to crash for a couple weeks and he brought his PlayStation over with him and had Final Fantasy 7. Now this was a totally new experince for me. I saw that first cutscene in FF7 and I was blown away. Well I was officially turned back into a video game junky at that point. I bought a used PlayStation and started accumulating games as I could afford them. I must have put in over 300 some hours on FF7 that game was on so much at my house that even still a bunch of my friends know the music you hear after winning a battle (dunna duh na dun dun-na, either you know what I mean or you now think I'm a crazy person). I was also a huge fan of Resident Evil 2, Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Gran Turismo. I ended up playing a ton of FF8 through FF10. I was a huge Final Fantasy geek. Moving up the video game food chain I had preordered my PS2 and got it right away although I ended up going through 2 of them before it was all said and done (I never thought of it before but that means I had more of those break than Xbox 360's which I've only had one Red Ring Of Death on). I actually ended up having an Xbox, a PS2 and a Gamecube (hey mariokart and super smash bros were awesome party games and were 4 player right out of the box, and well everybody I knew had Halo so if I wanted to join in the fun I had to get it, I think I had 3 Xbox games total compared to the 30-40 games on PS2) like I said junky. I think I tried almost every RPG that came out on PS2, but I gave up on Final Fantasy when 11 came out. I just didn't think it was right to pay a monthly fee to play a video game (hahaha that sure changed) Well when it was time to decide what was next I sold all three of those systems on Ebay to pay for my Xbox 360 and although now all I have it for is to watch instant Netflix I still think I made the right call (I sure am glad I didn't buy one of those HD-DVD addons though, lol, I was waiting that out to see who won). Well I guess that about gets me to my WOW story.

I had known a few of my friends who played WOW over the years and I had watched them play a bit and I never really thought I would like it the graphics didn't impress and I had become such a console fanatic that all those buttons and keyboard shortcuts just looked like too much work. Well my neighbor (who coincidentally was my also my roommate back when I was introduced to the PS) had gotten talked into doing the free trial by one of our friends and was having fun and a bunch of our friends were all playing together leveling up and stuff so he was like just do the free trial if you don't like it just quit. Well I thought alright I can handle a free trial so I loaded it up and this was about a month after TBC came out and I started an alliance pally (which was probably a good thing looking back as they have so few buttons to push as you level up) on the server they were all on and well of course got really into it, the on rails design of the quests and the constant reinforcement you get from leveling up was really fun and having people to hang out with and talk to on vent while we played was really cool. What got me into the WOW bloggosphere actually was looking something up on Thottbot and not finding it so I googled it and found WowInsider (WOW.com now) All of the sudden I was hooked and started reading it everyday and when BRK said he had his own blog I started reading it too well then I started reading a ton of different blogs and now I have people who actually read my little blog about WOW. It seems so weird and I never could have predicted it but here I am and I don't see the end in sight anytime soon.
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K Out!

Invasion

Well Swan was nice enough to say I could invite some of my old guild members over to the new server if they wanted to come and wouldn't you know it I have a few who are already on the way and my roommate ran the H daily with them last night. We may even have enough people to start running 2 10 man teams or a 25man team. I know that Swan would like that because she hates leaving people behind. I totally understand that. It will be interesting to see how things progress from here but I'm sure everyone will get along great my new guild is full of awesome people and I have been having a blast raiding with them.

You may have noticed..

I didn't post a glorious post of our awesome defeat of Malygos. Well theres a good reason for that. We spent almost 2 hours cruising through phase 1+2 and then wiping in horrible fashion on phase 3. I am all for trying to learn a new challenge and I was hopeful a couple times but I am starting to not be a very big fan of that fight. I am hopeful though that sometime soon we will go back and get lucky and kill the big blue dragon. I guess tonight we will have to go into Ulduar and blow up some bosses in there. That should be fun.

Faction Champs Explained

There is a great post up at Maintankadin (great resource for pally tanks). It explains the basic mechanics behind the faction champs fight. Check it out here.

So how was Maly you ask? Well

Actually not too bad we got to phase 3 on every try and we got him down to 10-11% on a couple tries but we really just need to work out phase 3 but I think we are close to getting it down. We just need to stick together better and move out of the lightning balls faster. Except for one try we made it to phase 3 with everyone still standing every time (I tried pulling Maly away from a spark and killed my raid leader on the other one, sorry Swan). We are going to go back tonight and finish him off. I am confidant we'll get him down first or second try actually as long as we get everybody back. It was actually a pretty fun raid even if we didn't kill him.

So I'm gonna tank Maly tonight

This will be new. I have never been in yet and haven't even watched a vid on it in a long time because my old guild quit raiding, so tonight I will watch a refresher. I do know the basics of the encounter with the 3 phases and all the movement and the dragon riding at the end. I usually do pretty good in the vehicle fights (lets not mention that FL from a couple weeks ago alright). I am pretty excited actually and hopefully we'll get a bunch of people their Champion of the Frozen wastes titles tonight (better late then never right). I didn't actually get in very much gaming over the weekend as Saturday had my uncles birthday and Sunday helped a buddy move. I have gotten my long forgotten hunter about halfway through 78 and I am really enjoying it. It took leveling one hordeside to make me remember how much fun playing my hunter really was. Its really weird because he was my second 70 and now he'll end up being my sixth 80 (hey remember laid off over the summer played alot of wow). I don't know what I'll do with him at 80 but I'll figure that out. I am starting to level a few alts on my new server but I am starting to consider maybe transferring a couple of my 80's over because it would be nice to have some full grown alts to help me out. I just am not sure what I want to do honestly. I guess I'll just see how it goes.

I missed last nights raid

It was about 15 min before I got out of work that I started getting a headache. I went home and it wasn't getting any better. I took a couple Tylenol and went to bed for a couple hours. I really enjoy raiding with my new guild and they really are a great bunch so I hope they got going good without me I just wasn't up to it last night. I don't even know what the plan is for this weekend yet so I may not have any good Wow stories to tell next week (quiet back there, I know where to find you, OK not really but it sounds better if you say that.) I am really looking forward to getting back into Ulduar and making some progress. I think we can probably get Hodir and Auriya with some practice. Maybe even start working on keepers.

I don't know anything about Enhance Shaman's but..

If you do or are curious about the mechanics behind them I just read a very interesting post over at Big Hit Box about weapons that was really surprising to me.

In other news, we finished our Naxx from Thursday last night and steamrolled through the last wing and Saph and KT like nobodys business. I couldn't get enough people interested in a Voa though so I called it a night after that. There was a group of people going through Gnomer instead for the lowbies.

It's Monday again??

I'm tired, but that's not that unusual. We ran a couple of raids this weekend. We did an aborted Ulduar on Saturday which with a bunch of Halloween stuff going on involved just 3 bosses, but I just have to say I suck driving the siege engine. I have been driving demolisher's the last few weeks which is no big deal and I think I have a pretty good handle on that. Well trying to be bait for the boss is a whole new ball game and I don't know what to do I get targeted and I try to run away but I get blown up in super fast time. I can't get away from him I am just getting destroyed super fast. I died all three times in very short order. Luckily the rest of raid knew what they were doing without me so on the third try they got it down no thanks to me. I may have to watch some vids on that because I r failboat at that part. XT and Razorscale seemed to go pretty smoothly on my end but somebody else may have had another opinion. Sundays ToC was a exercise in slow learning. I had watched the vids through Faction champs because I was pretty sure that's as far as we would get because that's the kind of fight I usually would say is a struggle to learn. Well I was right we made it that far and thats where we got stuck. Unfortunately it took us a ton of tries on Northrend Beasts and a couple wipes on Jarraxus to get that far. I was a little disappointed actually because since I had switched over we had really done a good job on most fights and making good progress on stuff we were trying to learn. Well Northrend beasts really took the heart out of us I think. We had to make some roster changes early and went to a 3 healer setup and we made incremental progress. It was a very slow learning progress but we finally got them down. I'm glad we got in though because at least now a bunch of people have seen it and we should have a much easier time the next time we go.

Last nights raid and the Icecrown Radiance thing

First off last nights raid was kind of a pushover. We rolled through 3 wings of Naxx like we know what were doing, well because we kinda do. My favorite part was tanking the adds on Gluth because I'd never done that before and rounding up Zombie Chow is actually pretty fun. My least favorite part was missing the jump on Thaddius 3 TIMES!! (grrrr). I felt like such an idiot. Luckily we were coasting through and I was lucky enough to get the jump finally and not wipe us all on a polarity shift but still. We DE'd a ton of stuff because not very many people really need anything out of there anymore and we might need to think about making Thursday an Ulduar night and leave Naxx as an offnight raiding thing for alts and fun runs or achievements. But I'll leave that up to the higher ups. I just go where they point and smash my shield into monsters. It is good to run though to get some raiding experience for and good practice so who knows. I really like the progress we are making and I think with a good push we could really start banging Ulduar out and run through it just like we do Naxx. We also ran the H daily which was H Toc and I don't think our raid leader knew that when she brought her priest in because she didn't seem confidant about it but other than a couple wipes on Paletress (which without a shaman can happen to anybody because of that stupid fear) we moved through it pretty good and got some upgrades for people which is always nice.
OK, Icecrown Radiance or whatever the chill thing is called. I actually am going to be in the minority on this one and say its probably a good thing. Obviously its an artificial factor to make the encounters harder but I think it has even more to do with the changes they are going to be making with stat allocations in the next expac and I think if you know what your doing its not going to effect the outcomes its just a debuff and I hope it makes the encounters easier to balance and so they are fun and exciting. Its not going to keep anybody from trying to kill Arthas so might as well just get over it and keep gearing up for the showdown.
K Out!

Old April fools patch notes are hilarious

I was reading Righteous Defenses reaction to the latest Patch Notes and he had a link to some old April fools patch notes. They are still funny even now.
3 of my favorites:
Scholomance is now spelled "Sko-lo-mance" to alleviate confusion about its pronunciation. In addition, a sound file has been added outside the instance portal which will phonetically sound out the name upon zoning.
Edwin Vancleef will occasionally shout "Hey you guys!" as players fight their way through Deadmines.
Additional grass areas have been added to the enemy faction's zones. This grass is exceptionally green

Link for tanks of all ages

Veneretio posted a back to basics post on his blog. I think everyone who has ever or will ever tank should read it because even though he is giving warrior advice most of the stuff he talks about will help any tank (except maybe bears but some of the stuff is good for them too). I really liked the last paragraph of his post because I really think its the most important part.

You haven’t really talked about Gear
You’re right. I haven’t. Tanking is more about how you use your gear than the gear itself. So, training yourself in how to tank, how to enchant, gem and spec are all more important than how to find the loot you want. The reality is once you start raiding, you aren’t going to get exactly what you want. You take what you can get and you make the best of it.

His blog is always a great read and very informative and has really helped me be a better tank even though my rage bar is blue and not red ;)

I gave up on a group last night

I am kind of ashamed of it and I kind of wish I hadn't but after 2 wipes on the snake boss in Gun'Drak I hearthed out and logged off. I was just not in the mood to deal with people and decided to level my shaman instead. I know 2 times isn't very much and I probably sound like an elitist douche bag but it was just a bad experience and I wasn't ready to deal with it at the time. I had a pally healer who had dual-specced and was in his tanking gear when he started the group and with 33k health I figured he at least had an idea about what he was doing. Well, both tries on the snake boss he ran right next to me and got blown up by the poison nova. I thought it was a fluke the first time because I didn't really position the boss away from the group, so the second time I positioned him away from everyone and the healer and one of the hunters ran right by me and got blown up by the snake boss again. This after the first wipe where they went in the back door to get there bodies, I should have known they had never been there before and maybe worked it out but I just got fed up and bailed. I feel bad about it now, but I just couldn't deal with it then. I guess I am too spoiled by my new guild that I forgot what its like out there.

Leveling in BG's is kind of strange

Sunday my friend and I had set some time aside to level our Horde toons up a bit and we were lucky enough to find a group willing to run some Outland dungeons with us so that was fun but burned up our rested xp real quick. So we decided to switch to a couple of our lower level toons and try the BG for XP thing. Well we had fun winning some Warsong but we still don't really know the gist of how it all works out. I don't know if you lose rested in BG's I think you only get xp when your team scores a flag and when you win. Does anybody have a good rundown of how the XP in BG's all works or if not maybe I'll keep doing it and let everyone else know ;).

Iron Council down! Ignis still kicks my butt?

We did our now weekly run into Ulduar this week. Got through the first 4 bosses we know in 1 shot. We did have some deaths and we are still learning a little bit but mostly we have them down pretty good. We gave Ignis a few tries but it is a frustrating fight for us and we gave up on him and moved on to Iron Council or Assembly of Iron or whatever lol. This fight took us a few rounds to get the hang of but unlike Ignis we made steady progress each try (except for the next to last attempt where I mistargeted and wiped us in fifteen second, grrr). We are really moving through and I think next week will be even better!

Hardcore vs. Casual its not just in WoW

I was just reading some stuff online this morning and I found a very interesting article about marathons that I feel is strikingly similar to the debate that rages on in WoW from time to time. Check it out here. Its a pretty interesting read.

Sarth +1 is down, progress is good

Yes, I know again I'm way behind the curve, but I don't care because its new and fun to me so there. Well it took us a few wipes and some reconfiguration of duties but we got the +1 down. we ended up using a 3 tank config to get it done because I was really having a hard time getting the drake and all the adds and avoiding the flame wall. Once our dps warrior switched to tank and he took the Drake I gathered up all the adds we took it done easily with no deaths. Its funny how you can got from total wipe to easy clear with a slightly different strategy. I think I have couple ideas to get it done with only 2 tanks I'll have to talk to Swan about it though to see what she thinks. We also took a couple groups to HHM and Shima was lucky enough to get the mount so gratz Shima!! Looks like were going to Naxx on Thursday again and we are starting Ulduar early on Saturday so we can try to make good progress on some new bosses. We should be able to clear to Ignis pretty quickly and hopefully make quick work of him this time. We think we have a good strategy in place. I am looking forward to it and am really glad to have found a group that is so fun to work with.

Just a quick note

Saw this post linked today at one of the blogs I read and I have to say it is definitely not one to miss, check it out you won't be disappointed

Well, now that was a fun weekend!!

So this is what everyone has been talking about for the last year lol. I have found the perfect guild for what I want to do. We are running stuff on a regular basis and moving through content like I've never seen. I finally got my tank all the way through Naxx and am now one Maly kill away from being a Champion Of The Frozen Wastes. Now I know, yes everybody else has done that already but I was trying so hard to get my friends interested in raiding and geared up that I never got a chance to, you know, actually raid. So, now I am in this awesome guild with people having fun learning new encounters and piling up boss kills, it has been a blast. In my first week with them we downed OS, full clear of Naxx, and downed 4 bosses in Uld. This is more progress then I made in almost the last year, especially since last year at this time my old guild was barely getting into Kara and made only one run into ZA. We never even got into the Military wing in Naxx and I stepped foot in Uld for the first time this week. We are gonna take down Sarth+1 on Tuesday which I've never completed and maybe we'll throw down Vault if we have time as well. I'll have to see if I can ask them to do a Maly run sometime too so I can learn that fight and get the title. I've never had a title like that and even though its old now I think it would still be cool to have. I also got asked if I was interested in running with the group that's working on Heroic dungeon achievements, which is great because that's one of the things I thought I would miss out on leaving my old guild because we did have a good group for that going and had made some good progress on it. So anyways I looked at some stuff on the Ignis fight and we've talked about it some more and we think we can get that down this week. I think we might be running Uld on Thursday to clear out the bosses we know so Saturday we can work on learning and downing the bosses we don't know. I am just having a blast right now and I can't wait to see how we do this week

Important Note

If you are running around getting the candy from the inns. The Shattered Sun Offensive does not celebrate Hallows End. Just thought everyone should know.

Important weekend post, Ignis killed me lots

I normally don't post much on the weekends I am usually to busy having fun actually playing the game or busy doing other stuff. Well I sucked at tanking Ignis. He wiped the floor with us and I really struggled tanking him. I think I gained a false sense of confidence since we pretty much breezed through the other guys up to that point with I think 1 wipe on Razorscale and maybe 2 on Kologarn. We had a couple people who had been in before so that helped alot. I actually think I was doing pretty good up to the Ignis mess. At least I have now been in all the Wotlk dungeons minus Ony and Maly. I'm probably just being to hard on myself. Don't think I wasn't having fun either, learning some new fights in Ulduar was awesome and I was having a blast. I don't even mind wiping as long as I'm learning the fight and we are making some progress which is what happened on the other bosses. Too many people just hadn't seen it yet one wipe to learn it and then boom down. We one shotted FL and XT and some people got some loot. I even got a new sword. I will have to work to get some defense to cover it but its nice not having to use the Red Sword of Courage that I've had since the first time I ran H UP.

Prequel Post on trinkets

I am working on a post on tanking trinkets. So far I have setup a wowhead comparison on all the tanking trinkets I could think of.

Trinket Comparison

I am planning some analysis, we'll see how far I get ;)

I started another alt lol

I know, I know I'm crazy but I can't help it. I started Iamthetick on Alleria. He is level 4 but I am going to wait until I can get him some heirloom gear before I start working on him again. I am going to do some research and see what I can get from the 3 different ways to get heirloom items and see what the fastest to get and which items are best for him to get. It should be a fun ride because leveling hunters are pretty OP as it is with a bunch of heirloom gear he should really scream through the levels. I may even do the pvp leveling thing to give it a try. We'll see hahaha. So heroics and WG and Argent Tournament here I come.

Sometimes things do work out

Well ran with my new guild again last night and it was great! We had OS/Voa on the schedule but we lost WG about 20 min after we got done in OS so no Vault though, and what a smooth OS it was, we went no drakes but are probably going to try 1+ next week. We went around the circle killing the drakes and trash mobs in no time flat (although I did lose one of the tall wandering guys in a pull because we got them early and I wasn't sure which one was mine but I grabbed him quick before he did any damage ;>.) Sarth was a cakewalk I was running around grabbing adds as quick as they spawned, Nobody got hit by flame walls that I saw!! dps would help burn adds as I rounded them up and Sarth went down like a sack of Potatoes. Quite possibly the smoothest OS I have ever seen. This group is good at what they do and have fun doing it. Every time someone gets an achievement there are gratz all around and everyone has been really cool. Wanted to also put a big WOOT!! out for Grimmtooth for getting SDI last night (Gond'ria the spirit beast). He has been on the hunt for it for quite some time and its really cool he was able to get it. So all in all a good night for the Bunniez all around.

I am Attack Bunny

Enough Said!

Fun Times

Well my tank is now a proud member of Ordo Cuniculi Vorpali. I got to run some with them last night and it was a lot of fun. Just running around killing stuff hanging out and being goofy. It was a good time. We even ran H UK with pumpkins on our heads most of the run :>. I think I need to work on my threat a little bit because I lost a mob or two on that run. Its probably mostly because I really haven't run much with him lately as my old guild was barely getting 4 people on at a time and I was spending a lot more time pugging on my Boomkin and Priest or leveling my alts. Its really weird not having any alts on a server. I am so used to having 8 toons over 70 with maxed professions to cover my bases, to just have the one guy is kind of strange. I will probably just start leveling some alts there because I am a big fan of the leveling game. I also will work on leveling my 75 warrior to 80 back on my old server so I can help out my old guild if they need a tank and I am available. She won't be anywhere near as geared as Mister K anytime soon but at least she can help out if needed. I am really looking forward to the raid tonight, it should be a blast and I am glad to be getting back into the raiding game.

A few things that happened....

Well I have transferred my tank over to the new server. He got to keep his name so that's alright. I thought I would run a quick heroic just to see how the lfg is on this server quickly got in a H HoL run and man was that group geared. I had to really push to keep threat off the fan of knives spamming rogue. He did other stuff too, but he did awesome damage. It was a battle to keep threat the whole time but a quick easy run was had by all. The thing that shocked me the most though was standing by the stone and this blood elf was standing there and he was blue, not red. I was like WHAT?? then I realised I had just moved to a PVE server. Its really weird after having been on only PVP servers for my 2 main servers for the last 2+ years. It was really odd. I don't know if I'm used to it yet even. I have my trial run on Tuesday so that should be exciting. I will definitely be posting about how that went on Wednesday. Back on Nath, I ran the Heroic daily on my boomkin and a friend of mine got me in a vault 10 run and that went really smooth although I am still just pushing barely over 3500. Note to self Need More Gear. I need to get into a few more H ToC's but its been no dice lately, I fished for about an hour while I was in lfg and made 20 gold enchanting somebodies weapon but no dungeon run, oh well maybe next time. Actually the majority of my weekend was working a couple of my horde toons up a bit. my buddy and I have decided we want to see what the storyline is like on that side and so we pushed through Hellfire into Zanger with our Warrior DK combo pack, which really wasn't all that different but did have a few interesting quests. We also started a couple blood elves to see how their starting area goes. We are running pally, priest (keeps dieing to a minimum). I wish everybody had a faction like Tranquillien to help gear you up and kind of introduce you to the way endgame is. I think that is a very cool feature that they have and hope that all the starting areas get a similar treatment in Cataclysm. Also low level hunters are seriously OP. I had been playing a hunter over there and at level 13 the difference in killing between a hunter and a ret pally is night and day. If I had known that when I first started playing the game long ago I probably would have had a hunter main instead of my pally. This is only the second pally I have started since my very first toon and it so weird because there is just so much downtime at the low levels for a pally, judgement, auto attack, rinse and repeat. You don't do anything else until 16 when you get Hand of Reckoning to pull with which is totally awesome and really speeds up the process. Well that's probably enough for today I will now let you get back to your regularly scheduled slacking off
/end walloftext

My quest begins

So I have unguilded my Moonkin and am starting the great pug adventure. I decided on him because I have found that since raids have more dps spots then anything else it is easier to get a spot as a dps then as a tank, and also its not nearly as much pressure as trying to heal a run for people you don't know. I will probably follow suit with my priest too shortly as healers are a valuable commodity. I got in a 25 Vault run and my 3-3.5k dps was at or near the bottom of that run. I guess all the good dps run that on Tuesday lol. I also did the heroic daily and H ToC as well. I will basically be sitting in lfg from now on and maybe asking a few of the people I know that if they are short on dps in anything to let me know and I will gladly come along. I am going to go through my gear and get a list of upgrades I can get and where to get them, and I am going to do a slight change to my spec as I had him setup for mad aoe dps but his single target dps suffered a little bit so I am going to adjust that to give me better all around numbers. I also found a a good post on what a raid leader is looking for. I also wanted to thank Shy and Smashie for their advice and encouragement. Thanks alot!

How does one find a new guild?

I want to raid.

I want to see content.

My guild of friends doesn't raid.

So what I want to know is what do I need to do to find a guild that is at my level of progression. I am at the point where I would like to start working on Ulduar and ToC on a consistent basis. The problem is you can't get into and Uld group without having done it already. I am stuck in the vortex of I can't get experience because I haven't been there, I can;t go there cause I don't have any experience. I don't even have a preference on 10 or 25, I just want to find a good group of folks who is just starting or still working on Ulduar so I won't be holding them back. I would like to be a contributing member of the group. I have 3 toons who are basically ready for Ulduar level content and I can Tank/dps with my pally, Range dps with my boomkin, or heal with my holy/disc priest. It has just been a hard thing to come to this decision since I am friends in RL with everyone in my guild and I really hoped when everyone got to 80 we would be able to push through some real raiding. Well, it didn't really work out that way It took some of or folks a while to get to 80 and some got to 80 really quickly so they started pugging and when the others finally caught up they didn't want to go through the same stuff again and some of our folks are just not really that into raiding so its not fair to push them into something they don't want to do. So here I am ready to raid, even if I am behind the curve a little bit.

So, any ideas?

Toon Update

It has been quite a while since I did a toon update so I thought I would give an update on what I've been up to lately.

Mistrk 80: Still tanking and I have a fairly decent ret set now so I can pump out pretty good dps if need be. I don't play him too much though because we have effectively stopped raiding and I don't know when it will start again. I am content with where he is just in need of something to do besides a weekly Koralon pug.

Newguy 80: My third 80 is now my best geared and most experienced toon now having at least cleared Naxx25 multiple times. He is ready for Ulduar and is now dual-specced Holy/Disc to be able to cover almost any role needed. I just need a chance to show people what I can do.

Chowyunfat 80: Still in need of some gear upgrades. I really never get to run him in anything because I am always stuck Tanking or Healing. I do enjoy playing my Boomkin alot and he can really lay it down even being undergeared. I really just need to get him into H ToC to cover a few weak spots in his gear and then I could start pugging Uld with him.

Septictank 80: I have actually fallen off in my pvp for a while got him to 80 and was doing really well then 3.2 hit and the Heroic grind started and now I barely get him into WG once a week. He is about half PVP epics and half crappy blues hopefully sometime I get a little more motivated and get into the mood for some pvp and finish gearing him up and get back into Arena.

Psychostick 80: He was really busy for a while and I pushed him to 80 fairly quickly but as my resident free agent he was supposed to be my gateway to testing out a raiding guild and I joined a guild for a little while but it never really got off the ground and after I left that guild he has kind of sat in his mishmash of gear and kind of became my new AH grunt. I have no idea what I want to do with him now.

Iamthetick 75: My second toon to 70 and my former pvp toon is now being leveled again. He is another one of my friends guilds that he wanted to try to get into raiding but it never really took off (hmmmm.. sounds familiar). I have seen some hunters doing insane damage and I have really started to miss my hunter so if I log on to my alliance server he's usually who am I on.

Warriorbarbi 75: My other tank has gotten some play of late and got all the nice trinkets from Coren direbrew so that's a plus. I might just lever her up so I can tank with her so I might be able to use some drops in the Heroics we run.

Happymadison 72: My mage I leveled to 71 so I could learn the teleport to Dalaran and that's where she sits. She basically levelled from 71 to 72 just on the cooking, fishing (jewel of the sewers only), and JC dail quests. It is nice to have two JC and I may level her sometime because mages do do insane damage.

Surething 45: My only toon left to level on this server and I usually put a bit of work in on my shaman because its just fun. Have a bunch of the BoA gear and it makes the leveling super fast. I basically just run until I'm out of rested and then move along.

Septicktank 61: this has been one of my 2 main Horde side projects. I have been playing on my horde server alot lately since our guild really isn't doing anything. I leveled herbalism and inscription all the way to Outland levels before heading out there and then my friend got his warrior ready to go so we are now plowing through Outland and will be pushing into northrend to experience that side of the game

Ibeatarse 28: My lowbie hunter part of the reason I started playing my alliance hunter again. It made me remember how much I liked playing a hunter. I also wanted to experience all the low level questing on the horde side before cataclysm so its really been a fun experience.

I also have a ton of low level alts on my horde server that I am just kind of working them up when my hunter is out of rested or my friend is not on to level with me in outland.

How do you heal as Holy?

So I did it, I bought my dual spec and specced holy. My spec is probably not very good. Newguy. I jumped in a group to do H Toc to test it out since its got some good aoe damage to deal with. Well we went through with no wipes but I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. What do I do, I have been disc for like a year and its so easy to just pop bubbles, PoM and penance and that's like all I do. With Holy I was just throwing everything out there CoH, Greater Heals, free flashes, PoH, PoM, and binding if I was taking damage. I was totally confused. Any tips would be appreciated

Check out No More /cheer

I know I don't have a huge following but if you happen to see this check out a fairly new blog No More /cheer. They have been kind enough to post constructive comments on my blog and have some great posts that I find entertaining and informative. So check it out, alright. Its easy I even put a link in. So go already!

Tired of Coren Direbrew

I know the mounts are cool and all, but we spent the entire night shuffling in alts killing him. I might not log back in until next week just so I don't have to waste another night killing him over and over again. I just don't think the fight is all that fun and the drop rate on the good stuff is so poor, we have killed him repeatedly on 4 different occasions pulling in everyone's alts probably to the point we have killed him over a 100 times and we have seen 3 rams 1 kodo and 2 remotes. You can't even sell or DE the useless stuff he drops, at least if you could vendor the stuff it would be worth it because then I would be making some cash during this. Maybe I would have a different opinion if I won one of those things hmm, lol. Oh well I'll probably never know.

No raids, so alts it is

So while everyone else is burning down Ony and ToC my little guild can barely get enough people on to do a 5man. Its to the point one of our members pulled their druid out to join another friends guild just to be able to run things. I have been debating that strategy myself but would feel like I am abandoning my friends so I have not jumped ship yet. So while I mull that over I have been on another server leveling my Horde toons. I have been playing on that server for a couple years but never with any regularity until lately. I have gotten my hunter up to 26 and have been leveling Inscription on my Death Knight and making a nice profit from that. My DK is ready to go in Outland and am kind of waiting on my friend who has his original main on this server but rerolled on our current server when a bunch of us all started at the beginning of BC his warrior has been 56 for like 3 years. We are going to jump into Northrend together and experience the Horde side of Outland and Northrend. It should be a good diversion until we figure out if our guild is gonna do anything.

I was perturbed by this

Did you know you can no longer skin rabbits anymore? I used to skin rabbits on my low level skinners all the time but my friend was leveling an alt yesterday and he couldn't skin a rabbit and so we tried a few others and sure enough you cannot skin the rabbits anymore. I know this is not a game breaking change or anything but why after all this time would they do something so minuscule as that?

Do I need to dual spec Holy?

Lately I have been having a harder time getting into groups on my disc priest. Every pug I see is looking for Holy priests. Now I don't have anything against Holy priests. I leveled 1-70 as Holy and have had plenty of great Holy priests in runs I have done. I just know that with so many Holy pally's out there the need for disc priests is limited and I have had a hard time getting groups. I just don't know whether I want to do that because I really like disc healing. I know I will probably never go shadow I tried it on the ptr a couple times and have never really enjoyed the process it doesn't feel very intuitive to me. I feel I could probably get into alot more groups as a holy priest because raid heals are very sought after all the time. I just don't know if I want to get stuck in that niche.

Coren Direbrew was easy

They clearly didn't want anyone to have a challenge in this years holiday boss. We were 4-manning him because that's all the people we had on at the time. We were kind of waiting for someone to log on but they never did so we just 4 manned it a bunch of times and kept bringing alts in until we ran out. We've still never seen a mount drop from him this year or last but we did finally see a remote so that was cool. I got my tank one of the stam trinkets until I can get my mits on the Black Heart it will do. I hope we can get in some attempts at Ony here pretty soon. Should be a fun encounter

It's true

I again am part of the working world. Back doing my IT thing. That is why I do not have anything new to report. I have not even done anything Brewfest related which I feel kind of sad about because its one of the Holiday events I like. Have I missed anything really cool? I know our guild is really struggling with attendance with barely enough people to even run the Heroic daily most days. I wish we could get back into to running some content, but I know with our limited numbers we just have to take what we can get.

Umm yep

Still here. I don't know what to say about all the stuff going on so I haven't posted anything. Cataclysm sounds good in theory and I will enjoy making a Goblin Shaman hiding behind his totems but other than that we shall see. We did make a run at 10man ToC but we had a little trouble with the beasts. The Worms debuff switching was messing with some of our members and we wouldn't have enough people alive to get through.

The new Patch

Well, its been an interesting week to say the least. Emblems of Conquest now rain down like water from the sky. Having 2 max level JC's has been really great for epic gem cuts. I am really of two minds on the new 5man. I like it because its actually kind of challenging, but at the same time its almost to much for some of the people I run with (and they have a habit of being easily frustrated). This new dungeon really displays the skill disparity between some of our guild members and is causing some issues. There were some pretty heavy repair bills on a run I missed. I have tanked and healed it on Heroic and its actually really fun to tank, and annoying to heal but it is a good challenge. Also I have made sure to do the H Daily on my priest everyday and trying on my tank and boomkin as much as I can. I have already gotten some nice upgrades on my pally and he is almost geared with all new epic gems. Also I have been working on my horde server fairly regularly leveling my hunter and DK. Its quite a change from alliance side on the low levels. I will also have my 5th 80 by the end of the week as my warlock hit 79 Saturday. He's a free agent currently and I will be crashing heroics like mad with him when I hit 80, I am thinking about putting him in a different guild from my other mains as kind of a trial run to see if I would want to be in a raiding guild. We'll see hot it goes. Still looking for a job too, the prospects are few and far between right now.

As requested :)

Yes, I am still alive. I have so far been unlucky in the job market but as I am still on contract layoff from my previous employer it is not a big deal (for now). I was hoping to make a blog post trumpeting my triumphant return to the workforce before now but you can't get everything, right. I have spent a good chunk of time applying and and searching for a job that I want. I can afford to picky right now but, if it gets to the point that I can't then I will take what I can get. Well you can't be looking for a job all the time you say and you would be correct I have gotten some Wow time in as well. I've found that pugs during the day are much smoother than primetime for the most part but if you want to do Naxx wait until late at night. I have finally gotten to see all of Naxx, although not with my guild and not on my tank. My priest Newguy is now nearly fully geared out in Naxx gear and has done 2 full clears in pugs in the last 2 weeks. I now feel more confidant taking my other toons into Naxx and will probably try pugging into that a little more as well. I am now starting to think about trying to get into Maly and maybe try to get into Uld, but if you don't know the fights its really hard to get into those fights. I will just have to hope that the people I've been running with see that I have the skill to handle those fights and trust me to learn on the go. I will read up on the strats and probably watch some of the fights on youtube if I think I'm gonna get a shot. Well that's mostly what I've been up to. I did get my DK to 80 and an grinding BG's for gear because I am really tired of heroics lol. I really only bring my tank out to tank Emalon it seems. Oh yeah, a bunch of our guild has rerolled on a pve server to get kind of a fresh start with some friends and family so our guild runs have died out our last three scheduled Naxx runs have not gotten enough people to sign up. It is summer and that's part of it but I know some of it is frustration on the lack of progress we seemed to be making. Well hopefully we can regroup soon and get back to downing bosses and having fun. I don't know when my next post will be but I will try to update a little bit typeatyalater

Our new raid night was fun until...

Until we got to Gluth, hahaha. We are still working out a zombie kiting strategy. Our mage/hunter combo was kind of having a hard time staying alive. We did coast through Patch and Grobbulus though so that worked out pretty good. Also wanted to note my posting may be a little more spotty for a while. I used to post regularly at work but I was layed off last week (not because of my blogging, lol) so now I am out hunting for a new job, so posting to the blog is kind of on the backburner. Hopefully I can pick up a new job soon and get my schedule all figured out and get back to posting more of my misadventures. Typeatyalater

We finally got him! but...

Its true, we finally got the dancing machine down. It was a great feeling watching the last bit of his health fall off. A big cheer over vent and a happy guild. We did have to bring in a ringer though. One of our guildies has been in a few other guilds and knows quite a few of the top raiders on our guild and has already cleared Naxx10 and 25 on both her 80's and has started working in Ulduar pugs. So as our main difficulty was our healers not making it through the dance she jumped off her mage main and brought her Resto druid in to carry us through. It worked really well and we had 6-7 people standing at the end so the group has really gotten much better at the dancing. Loatheb was pretty much a cakewalk after that and our other resto druid got the tier shoulders(gratz Drusky). We are probably gonna start working Abom quarter now as we slowly work our way to getting a thorough knowledge of all the wings down. So congrats Corsairs, 2 wings down 2 to go!

Where does all the gold go?

I got my DK to 77 over the weekend so I figured I should get him his flying mount. Well I hadn't done any of the training yet, nor had I bought him a mount so after 800 for regular flying training, 900 for the Ebon Blade mount and 1000 for cold weather flying lets just say I'm gonna need to spend some time working the AH for a few days to rebuild my funds. He is a gatherer so I will want to get him Epic flight so I need to get that next 5000 gold saved up. Ugghhh. Oh well, I guess the Goblin was right you do need more than 5000 gold on hand all the time. I am usually content with about 2500 between my toons, that covers almost anything I can usually want and I usually only spend about an hour on the AH a week that usually nets me all that i need. I will probably get the DK to 80 by next weekend giving me 4 80's and 3 more above 71, guess I'll have to start working my mage (53) or shaman (24).

Grizzly Hillz ZZZZ......

Don't get me wrong I like the zone I like the whole return of the worgen thing going on. I was excited to see the Westfall Brigade too, but the questing in that zone is just set up horribly, you can never work on more than 2 quests at any one time, all the quest givers are on the edges of the zone and all the objectives are all over the place. Running back to Amberpine Lodge after every 2 quests is not my idea of a fun time. Then the massacring trolls for mojo's that seem to drop off of every 7th or 8th guy gets old really quickly. I like the concept and all but the place just screams grind to me every time I go there. This is only my second go around the zone because of that and if my DK wasn't a skinner I probably woud have gone somewhere else but Grizzly Hills grinding quests give lots of opportunity for leather so at least I get something out of the deal. There is one upside to having a dual gatherer besides just the money you could make auctioning their stuff (I feed my alts so thats not really working for me). You are not spending all your cash leveling your professions. It really adds up when your not spending 12-15 gold on every recipe from the trainer.

WOW Equipment Manager, Yes it works!

Just a quick post on the new equipment manager. First you have to turn the option on in your interface menu, under the control tab. This will put a button on the top right of your character screen. The easiest thing to do is get a set of gear on that you want to change to quickly. Then save it. Put your next set of gear on then save it to another button. I have found it to work very smoothly in my limited testing last night. I can switch from ret to prot in less than 5 seconds with just 2 buttons pushed. I find this to be a great new tool built into the game. It won't do all the extra stuff you will get from some of the mods out there like outfitter but if your just looking for something simple that works for easy quick gear changing it is up to the task. Next time I might even post screen shots lol

Another tuesday.....

Well I can say we are making progress on him but for some reason a few people in our group are really struggling with Heigan. Our biggest problem is that our number one healer has yet to survive a phase 2 once yet. With our tree down so early in the fight it puts a lot more pressure on our pally healer and our elemental shaman that will off-heal if it gets rough or we lose the pally. I am not sure what to suggest and maybe its just gonna be one of those things where we just need to run it a whole lot of times to really get the spacing down. We only raid one night a week and on a progression fight like this we maybe get 4 or 5 attempts and then we have to call it. Now I am not perfect and have made a few mistakes on this fight myself but I am fairly confidant in my ability to get through it as 4 of the last 5 trys I haven't died until there were no healers left (I went to far and blew myself up the other time), we usually have 4 or 5 people standing at that point due to not dancing well or the disease getting some people cause they get to low on health during the dancing. I am hopeful next week I will have a great post up about how we blew the bastard up but until then we get to stew on him for another week, grrrr.

Quick update

I have not been posting much lately, not giving it up lol just been under the weather and not doing much of anything but, I have been feeling better the last day or 2 so I should get back to posting my semi-regular rants and failboat storys. Thanks

At least I got to farm some herbs

The last couple of nights have been kind of eventful. We did our Tuesday raid on Naxx and came upon the Heigan roadblock again. This is just an encounter where we are going to have to keep trying it until everybody has the spacing down. We are barely getting into our second phase 1. I have gotten alot better at it usually being one of the last to die, mostly because none of our healers have been able to get past phase 2. I think on all of our attempts last night we may have had 1 healer get through phase 2 one time. That really scuttles any attempts when you have no healers. Our last attempt was pretty close our healers got hit hard by the disease at the end of phase 2 and got cut down but at least they survived the dancing. Last night I was gonna try to do a Naxx25 with my druid but after about an hour and a half the group fell apart because they were being all selective and elitist, not wanting any more melee, and some guy didn't want anymore elemental shamans it was totally ridiculous. I'm sure I'll get in on some pugs eventually but if everybody has that attitude about it I don't think I'm missing too much. At least while I was waiting I got to farm up quite a few herbs which is something I had really been slacking on for a while.

Grouping before 80

I've been seeing alot of people talk about how theres alot of people at 80 that seemed to skip a bunch of the content coming up just to get to 80. I can see some of that going on but I also have seen a ton of people running dungeons from 60 to 80 and I see this as a really good way for them to get used to there class and learn how to work in a group. I have been leveling my Warlock and DK alot lately as I have fun just blowing stuff up and even though I had to tank some runs on my DK to get them going I have been able to get in to both Nexus and UK and both AN and OK and will probably get in VH pretty easily too. I have had alot of fun with it and on my warlock I have had him in all the low level outland dungeons and a Nexus run as he got to 70. Almost all of this was on pug runs with both these guys. I have met a bunch of great people leveling up and have tried to build a small list of healers I can trust leveling up and to help out in dungeons. I have had a great experience grouping as I am leveling up so if you are out there on a lower level than 80 toon don't be afraid to jump in LFG and see what can be found. One note, dungeons in the old world besides Stocks, VC, and ZF are usually pretty hard to get runs for and the dungeons themselves are very long and will be less worth it to try to pug. If you want to try please go ahead but you might have an easier time getting a runthrough from your guild if you have found one yet. So go forth and run dungeons and kill bosses and get some nice gear to help speed up that grind to 80.

I've been blogging for a year

Wow (irony I know) I just realised I have been blogging for a year now. I started this as just a way to chronicle what my guild members and I were doing and my first post was just a simple armory post about my main. Also looking back theres a note about looking up my priest in my small leveling guild, which he's no longer in that guild, having been promoted to our main guild quite a while ago. Its funny how much changes in a year that you wouldn't even think of. We had not even got into Kara yet at that point and now we are raiding Naxx. I am glad to note we have almost the same team together from that time though. I am glad we have been able to mostly stick together (Shir your temporary dalliances with other guilds not withstanding lol). I think we have a strong team going forward and will only get better as we move forward into the more challenging content. More fun will be had and more blogs will be written so your all stuck with me since I've kept at it this long.

Learning the Heigan dance (I failed)

So what happens when you take 8 people into Naxx and only 2 of them have seen the Heigan fight? Answer, a lot of wiping lol? You only learn so much from reading about it you have to see it for yourself. I finally figured out I needed to back my camera all the way out and look at it top down so I could see the whole pattern on the floor and know where to move to. I usually was going to far at first because the lines are crooked and I have bad spacial awareness when I am backing up but the top down view helped me alot and I didn't die from the dancing on our last try, there were only 2 of us left though with no healers so I crumpled pretty quick. Hopefully we can get a few more trys in this week to help learn the fight a little better. We did kill Noth on the first try though so that was pretty good. A very intense fight with only eight since I was on the adds I had to hold quite few of them for a while. Hand of Reckoning helps out alot on that fight because they come from so far away and I usually already had some on me. A fun night though even with the wiping

Short on Raiders

We had a Naxx run scheduled for last night that we rescheduled for tonight that I am not sure we are going to be able to get going tonight either. When you only have 11 people in your guild who can raid you don't have alot of options if 2 or 3 of them can't make it. Now theres a many reasons behind this, one of our raiders computer crapped out on him so that sucks but nothing you can do about it. Another one had to work late and then another had to work early and then one of our members didn't sign on so we were stuck. Oh well, we will try again tonight but I know one of our group has to work tonight so we'll see how it goes.

Is a tank all that I am?

I have been playing my DK quite a bit lately as I played one on the tournament realm and had a blast with him. He is specced Unholy dps and does a serviceable job in that role. I know from experience that any plate wearing class with the right gear can tank a regular dungeon at their level so I have been keeping tank gear just in case its needed, I like to help out. So I have been working him in Coldarra a little just to get the quests for the Nexus because they give out some pretty good rewards and I get asked if I am a tank. I say that I can tank and get invited to a group. Now I don't really mind but I already have a 80 pally tank who started as Ret and a 74 warrior tank who started out arms. I don't really want or need another tank, but both the dungeon runs I've done with my DK have been as a tank. I know at 80 it won't really be an issue because in Heroics, spec really starts to matter and I would have to totally change up my talent scheme if I was going to tank with him. While I will probably keep this option open as I like to tank and have been told by a few people that I am pretty good at it, sometimes you just want to melt faces you know what I mean?

So now they want to raid lol

Now that we've started jumping into the ten mans it seems like anytime we have at least 8 people they start talking about getting in a ten man. We had to let them know about the raid lockout since we had just done VoA and OS on Tuesday we have to wait until next week. So we decided to get a jumpstart on Naxx and got a little work on the Spider wing. We probably could have finished it but I was having major issues with my PC locking up on me and having to log back in. It seems like everytime there was a mass of Aoe it would just DC me, i had already lowered my settings way lower than uusual but it wasn't working so I reloaded my UI altogether. That wasn't cool. I didn't even bother resetting up my addons as we were already inside Naxx I just moved some buttons and keybinds and played mod-less. We were able to get Anub and Grand Widow even with me slowing us down. We 9 manned it as well. We really do a good job once we learn the encounters I am really looking forward to Friday to see if we can really make some progress.

Good raidng (for us anyways)

Well, we have pretty much got OS with no Drakes and Archavon down to quick runs whenever we have at least 8 people on. We 9manned both encounters last night with no deaths in less than an hour, which is somewhere I never thought we would be at. Where we can just say hey lets do OS, and go do it like its just another 5man. Of course everybody else has already done that for months but I am going to enjoy it since I am able to do it with my uber-casual friends and family guild. I know the hardcore out there probably think that's just another nail in the Wotlk is to easy coffin but we actually have some pretty skilled members in our guild who would probably all be in Ulduar if they wanted to be but are sticking with us because we are all friends. I'd love to say we got a whole bunch of sweet loot but we ended up sharding the stuff from Vault because we didn't bring a rogue. Also I don't know about anybody else in the guild but unless its something really specific I've been trying to get or something really sweet I don't really care about the loot. I just want to kill more bosses lol. I will note however we have gotten the timed run in Culling done twice now, and I actually got the second one (yeah me! ok so maybe I like some loot, hahaha). I am going to work hard to get everybody one and get a screenshot with our whole guild on bronze drakes. Should be a good time.

Note to self

Get Druid in Heroic UK and VH for new Chest and Headpiece and get 10 more emblems to get the offhand

Progress and crappy pugs

So our very small guild (11 actual people with 80's) got together to do 10man Naxx on Friday, It was a little bittersweet because our OT told us at the start he could not stay on late so we only had time to do one wing. Only 2 of our dps had been in before at all so we just did Spider wing. It went really well with only 2 wipes one where we didn't space properly for the silence effects on Anub'Rekhan and I died not understanding the whole not able to do anything aspect. But second time no problem. We one shotted the Grand Widow , luckily we had the dps to burn her pretty quick because we miss timed killing one of the adds. Maexxna took us 2 tries because the first attempt not everyone was in the room when I pulled her and they got webbed out. Hahahaha, lesson learned there. That was where we had to call it but it went really well for us and we plan on trying Plague wing this week, if we have enough people on. I am thinking if we work it right we might do 2 wings if plague doesn't go to bad. I also got in a pug Vault25 on Sunday and in bad form they decided to kill the easy boss first which was cake. Got my first 25 man kill, no sweat. Then we went to get ready for Emalon and had a mispull on the first trash guy and he wiped out most of the raid, well of course 6-7 people bail because we died, not even considering it was a mispull on a high health enraging trash pull, so of course our raid fell apart and when we tried to salvage a 10man we had no healers so I called it a night. Oh well, maybe next time.

New one on me

Last night I was trying to do a little bit to level my priest so I figured I'd pug a dungeon run for some quick xp. I got in LFG saw there was a tank and a dps in for VH and grabbed them figuring 2 dps no problem. HA! The dps didn't want to head back to Dalaran and bailed (after being in LFG for VH.. that's a whole other issue). So I was sitting there trying to find dps for VH, and I got noone. Its Violet Hold!!, you don't even have to leave Dalaran and it takes 15 minutes. But no, I had to pull 3 80's from my guild to bail me out and get it done since I had found this tank already. I know everybody is in Ulduar but come on.

What does Blizzard have against fun?

/Rant incoming
Ok I wasn't going to make a big stink out of some of these things but adding them up has made me a little irked. First why did they make the War Mammoth a regular mount, I loved having it as a siege vehicle and the first thing I did when I got it was jump out of the sewers of Dalaran to the ground with passengers on to freak them out and not die. This was not some huge game changing maneuver but it makes the mount less special to me because of that. Also I know that the more ghoulish aspects of Death Knights was making them OP in PVP and Arena but taking away the ability to turn into a ghoul when you die, I thought was a class defining roles. If you wanted to balance it make it so you can't use it in Arenas but don't just dump it because some people complained about it. Also turning into a ghoul after you die was pretty epic and one of the more fun parts of being a Death Knight. Then hotfixing pallies with this ninja nerf to Exorcism for PVP, I mean come on yes we do alot of burst damage but once the bubble is gone we are mincemeat. Pallies rely on burst to stay viable in PVP if you take away the burst you take away the viability unless your going to make some major changes to give more throughput and damage over time to our other abilities or added abilities because without exorcism we have 3 melee attacks (judgements, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm) and one aoe spell (consecration) that's not alot of options or variety. Yes I know there is a post about this nerf and they are looking into what to do but that doesn't mean I can't bring it up its my rant. I also miss the old warlock talent that was in the place of nemesis. I don't remember if it was called nemesis I don't play my lock a ton. It use to give you a buff that increased your shadow damage now it just reduces cooldowns. Buffs fun, cooldown reductions meh. alright that's all
/endrant

The Stone Watcher requires mad dps (And I don't got it)

A friend of mine invited me to a 25man Vault pug as dps. Now I usually pull around 1900-2200 dps in heroics depending on the fights, and I am still working on getting my gear up to snuff on the ret side but that fight is so melee unfriendly I was barely pushing 1600. First you have to wait until the tank establishes good threat to lay in, then you have to back away from the Novas which kills my dps then I have to run over to the other side to work on the enraged add which any time spent moving kills my dps. So if you are bringing melee dps make sure they are mad geared or just grab more ranged dps if you can. At least I saw a good tanking strategy work so the next time I try it I know what I'm doing there.

Friday Naxx run

It looks like this weeks Naxx run is going to be a go. We have a bunch of people signed up already so it should be good. I am basically just playing my alts until then because there is not much I can do unless I get a 25 Vault spot to work on the new boss. I am really enjoying leveling up my warlock and it seems like there are a ton of people leveling alts because I keep getting into dungeon runs. I am going to hit 68 before I even get done with half of the Zanger quests. which is fine by me because I will be heading to Northrend at 68 covered in dungeon blues. Makes for easy leveling. I only have a level and a half to go too. I pretty much split my time between my warlock and my DK getting them both leveled up. I want to push my priest but it just is so boring doing quests with him, so he sits halfway through 78. Oh well

Previewing Talent Points!!

Ok so I just wanted to post to let people know about how to get this. It is a very valuable resource and would have saved me lots of gold over the years because I am known as what some people call a "Happy Clicker". So anyways, to turn on this you need to go to Interface Options, Display tab, then check the preview talent changes box. There, thats my second public service announcement in a row. I should get a cookie. K out

Please don't put points in Sacred Cleansing

This is a Rant! Please do not put points in Sacred Cleansing!! I am by no means an expert Holy Paladin but please for the love of all things Holy (get it) do not put points in Sacred Cleansing. It might be the worst talent of any build of any spec of any class in the game. A 3/10 chance to give a 3/10 chance to resist a debuff. Ughhh!! This is completely worthless in PVE and not even really worth it in PVP although somewhat defensible in that aspect of the game. So please if you read this and know someone who doesn't now better let them know they are making the rest of us "want to eat a bee" (I stole that quote from Ferraro of Paladin Schmaladin). Thank you /end rant

Friday night is Raid night

Now that we finally got into a raid a few of our members want to press forward full on. Unfortunately our guild size limits our ability to do that on a consistent basis if we can't get everyone on. Shir had scheduled a Naxx run for Friday but it doesn't look like we will have enough people on to be able to even try it. I am hopeful we will at least have enough on to do a Vault or OS, maybe try the new Vault Boss. I am going to try to get people to post when would be the best times for them to raid so we can try to find a time for everybody to get in on the raiding. We definitely have more fun when we get everybody together to run, and we really are not looking to add people to our group so we shall see. Our DK's side guild is still slow to get going as he doesn't have any max level toons so we'll see, he might not need to get it going if we can get our group into a good schedule but some of us may have to push on in that guild to get our raiding fix. We'll just have to see how it goes. I was able to get dual specs on my pally setup last night after the servers finally came back. I run a just a little off-standard 0/51/20 tanking spec and a fairly more standard ret 0/17/54 and I am pretty happy with both. I also sent my Lazer chicken up to the Argent tournament to see how that works. It seems pretty grindy to me but some of the things were kinda fun. Will probably still be mostly running my warlock and DK though to level them up as they are the toons I am having the most fun on right now.

Update: we can raid who knew

Well we had a pretty succesful go of it this weekend. We only had 9 people on on Friday but we were not gonna let that slow us down so we just headed to Vault to see if we could 9-man. Cakewalk just as I figured it would be. About half of our group had seen the fight already so it was easy enough to explain the basics and take out old Archavon. I don't remember the gear that dropped but the Mammoth did drop and I was lucky enough to win the roll. WOOT! I love it its so big I just ride it around everywhere now. Well anyways since we one-shotted Vault we wanted to keep going but since our offtank had to work in the morning Naxx wasn't gonna work so we thought lets try to 9-man OS. Luckily 2 of our group had been there before and Shir is pretty good at explaining the basics to the fights so we rolled through the place with a wipe on the last trash mob because we let the flame balls or whatever get to many people and then we 2-shotted Sarth. We let too many adds go in our first attempt and they just went crazy on our healers in the first try but after seeing the fight once and me almost wiping us right away on our second try because I forgot to have righteous fury up (grrr at me), we took him down easypeasy. I got lucky there too because the T7 gloves dropped and since I was the only one who could use them I got those 2 so now I have the 2 piece set bonus cause I bought the chestpiece with emblems. So our runs went really well and fun was had by all. We will probably try to get into Naxx here pretty soon, and while this is a far cry from every other guild out there coming from where we were barely moving through Kara before the big nerf, I think we have made some serious progress for our really small guild. Afterwards me and another member thought it would be fun to change it up and switch roles so he respecced tank and I respecced ret and we ran some heroics the rest of the weekend to have fun with that. My ret gear still needs some work but I was still pushing 1950-2200 damage depending on whether the run was melee friendly or not. I really need to enchant my ret gear so I can pug some stuff after dual-specs come out. Alright /end wall of text

Toon Update

I noticed its been a while since my last toon update, so on with my rambling about me. ;)
Mistrk 80: Waiting for raids, I am ready to raid just waiting for my guild to catch up. I will probably run more heroics to help gear people. Also have been crafting my ret set for dual specs.

Chowyunfat 80: Needs to gear up in Heroics but since we only have 1 other tank I don't get much chance to dps, might start pugging once in a while.

Newguy 78: Kind of in Limbo, I should just level him to 80 and start pugging like a madman because all I ever see is lfm need heals. I just don't feel like running him much.

Warriorbarbi 74: Mid level tank sitting there if the midlevel alts need a tank for an instance. I like where she is at, will leave her there.

Septictank 71: Has been my main focus lately after playing the DK in the Arena tournament (we got back over 1500, woot!) I just started having more fun leveling him up. Also skinning like a madman to level my leatherworking up for some nice boe purples for me and my friends.

Iamthetick 72: Has been on alot since he is my Alchemist, Leatherworker but just to do profession stuff. I think he will get some play though when the patch comes out as I mess around with the new pet talents and test out some new pets.

Psychostick 63: On a tear lately, we have a group that basically all levels and runs together and he got to tag along from like 50 to 62 so it has been a good run, they are starting to pass me up but I might be able to keep up if I keep playing him this week.

Happymadison 50: My mage is sitting waiting for when I am ready to start pushing her to outland, probably when I get her JC maxed out and need to level to move on to the next level.

Surething 24: I really want to level him up but between everyone else he sits there with his fancy BoA shoulders waiting til I get motivated.

I have even got some time in on my horde toons here and there really want to see the Outland/Northrend experience from the horde perspective, but it usually sits on the back burner, or when Nath is down, oh well.

Vault on Friday

We have scheduled Vault on Friday so hopefully we can get everybody on and not have to pug it. I am mostly working on alts in the meantime. I have almost no need for anything out of heroics for my tank and we are so short on tanks I never get to run as dps so I am just slowly leveling my alts and working professions like a madman. I will probably spend some time fishing and mining as well as I am mostly out of good buff food and I need more saronite, titanium and eternals.

Well, I got in Vault

Yes, I got in a Vault pug, finally (yes I know I'm slow and everybody else with an 80 on every server has done it already but me and most of my guild but I don't care). I didn't win the roll for the Ret chespiece but no biggy I wasn't there for loot. I was there to see the fight and see if we had a legitimate shot at clearing it with our guild. I have now posted to the guild that we should try this fight when we can schedule it because it is a cakewalk. We were in and out in less than 5 minutes.

Our High Score (Yes we should go pro LULZ!)

We worked hard to get up to that point and going basically even for the last week seemed pretty impressive too me. Honestly though I am a little tired of Arena right now.