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?