I had a bad headache this afternoon and ended up lying down for a while.  I was up so I thought I’d try to do something entertaining.  No raids going on or anything so I ended up continuing my midsummer fun.  I finished collecting all of the northrend flowers(and gold) and that put me over the top!

When we esentially got to double our flowers due to the reset I figured I’d be able to afford both the Captured Flame and the Brazier of Dancing Flames.  I didn’t have any interest in it till I actually looked it up on wowhead and saw how cool it was.  Not only does it look nifty, she responds to your emotes.  I needed another item to keep track of like a hole in the head but she was just too cool to pass up.

Right when I logged in I threw myself in the 25man OS LFG and got an immediate invite for a raid that just wanted one more healer.  Why I don’t know they always take way too many healers to OS.  We tried one drake up and to my disappointment we didn’t get to do it.  One of the guys I knew was in the raid and he was telling me our DPS was just too low.  After we killed Sarth he dropped a staff I had never seen him drop before.  It was the Staff of Restraint, and I was currently using Damnation. Now I haven’t made many big mistakes on loot in my life, but I rolled on the staff because when I hovered over it I read rating buster shows a small loss in HP and crit, but a gain in mana and regen, I read the regen number wrong though.  I thought it said 20, when in fact it was 2 :\  I didn’t notice this till much later in the evening, after I enchanted the thing too.  Funny thing was, under the old regen model it probably would have been that much of a difference.  I was the only roller, but an offspec might have been able to use it.  Just so I feel better I’ll assume no one wanted it I’d say they are pretty close to even, but to be honest the Staff of Restraint looks more priestly, less evil :)  Oh well you live and learn

After that I did my fire dailies, I almost have enough for the braizer now.  I also watched some horde make a run at our fire.

Then I talked a few guildies in going and doing Ahune.  It was just 3 of us, so we got 4 attempts but no pet of course.  Curse him!

Didn’t do much exciting tonight.  I wanted to do some healing but there was just nothing going on when I got on.  I dunno if people are already in a holding pattern for 3.2 or what?  Maybe it was just an unusually slow night.  I ended up continuing to pursue my gold running around to all the fires for a second time.  I’m just about done with the old world, then I just have to take care of northrend.  I am also hoping to get in a few more Ahune kills but Inien hasn’t been on lately either, and no one is running him anymore.  I think I’ll have enough flowers by the end of all this to get me the fire dancer.  Just another thing to use inventory space but it is pretty cool none the less

I continue to follow the discussions on the healing forum about all the changes in 3.2.  Particularly the Nerf to Penance which really sucks.  I’m not sure if anyone is changing GC mind or not.  A lot of them are playing right into his hands, others have good aruments.  I don’t think it is the right change personally.  I would rather have seen the spell left the way it was, and the glyph changed to something else.  I liked the idea of it giving crit, but GC is saying we are generating too much shielding so they probably wouldn’t want it to do that.

I hope to squeez in some raiding this weekend.  I’d like to run Ulduar if possible.  After I finish up my Midsummer stuff I need to get back to my Argent Tournament stuff.  I’m sitting like one set of quests away from having the gnomes done so I can start working on the next race, probably Dreanei.  I’m still debating on if I should save up the 100 tokens for the squire upgrade, or if I should get my next pet.  It sounds like there will be more opertunity for tokens in 3.2 but I still may way on the pets because the squire thing is too cool

I was looking something up in the best resource on the net, Wowhead when I realized I hadn’t acknowledged them on the site for a bit.  So I wanted to say

Happy Birthday Wowhead!!!

Their site is such a pleasure to use.  They have nifty tools like the ones I use here to provide the mouse overs on items.  The fun and exciting contests and by far the best talent calculator on the net.  World of Warcraft would certainly be a different game without wowhead and I appreciate all the work of the guys/gals over there.

I haven’t had much time to play lately.  I did get on for a bit last night and was farming a bit of gold out of the fire event.  Since they reset the event after I had done nearly all the tributes/desecrations I was able to go back and do them again :)  Still have quite a bit left to do, but I did redo outlands and about half of Kalimdor.  I need some more gold to make up for my recent pet purchase.  I bought the Emerald whelpling recently, which completes my collection of them.

Speaking of pets I managed to pickup the spirit of the fire pet the other day but never posted it.  Given my level of time lately it is doubtful unless I am really lucky that I will end up with the other event pet :(  However my collection is still growing strong!  I am up to 77 pets now, hopefully will be getting more of the tournament pets when there is more ways to earn tokens in 3.2.  I’ve purchased one of the horde pets, I’d like to get the Broom next.

Speaking of 3.2 I’ve not logged onto the PTR yet but it looks like it is shaping up to be an interesting patch.  I am excited at the opportunity for new 5 man adventures :)  The only sucky part of 3.2 is them nerfing Penance.  They are really really trying to force me to respec, but I’m not going to do it!  I just find Disc more interesting, of course they are making it less and less interesting.  I’ll wait and see how things play out I guess.

Oh and since it looks like all my chances to get Blizzcon tickets have failed this year I went for the online streaming option.  I like to make myself feel better by reminding myself all the money I’m saving but watching it in a browser instead of going there

Got on late tonight, but wanted to get some stuff done.  For the dailies that work for me I did them, apparently they haven’t hotfixed the issue if you did something last year you couldn’t do it this year yet.  I expect they will probably be doing the hotfix tomorrow during the regular maintenance time.  I was doing some of the fires south of stormwind when Inien got on.  I needed to kill Ahune and so we decided to do it together.  We went ahead and even did it on heroic because we are that good.

After we finished Ahune we went ahead and finished slave pens because Inien needed that for his BC dungeon achievements.  It happened to be one of the ones I actually had already.  I still need to finish quite a few of them, and pick up some of the enchants I missed along the way :)  Speaking of which I got Ahunes enchant, yay!  We downed the rest of SP pretty easily.  We do make a good team, most of the time I go fully healing mode, and Inien does all the damage.  I can keep him alive pretty much through anything that doesn’t one shot him :)  PoM always comes in handy bouncing between us when we are duoing crap like this too.

I managed to almost finish the fires, and hope to complete all the midsummer achievements tomorrow.  Then go around to all the northrend fires and get enough for the pet, gota have the pet!

I logged on a few times through out the day in between things to start working on my midsummer achievements.  Inien was already ahead of me and but I managed to do all of outlands and Kalimdor anyways.  By the end of the evening Inien joined me for making a run at the horde capital city fires.  I didn’t take any screenshots like a goof but it was good fun.  The Bloodelf one was by far the hardest, I had to make several runs to get close enough to get it.

If your looking for info on the even wowhead has a great guide up.  If you are wondering like I was how in the world you juggle 40 torches in 15 seconds this video I found in one of the wowhead comments should clear things up.  It looks like it is easy, and here I thought that was going to be the hard one

I hope to have everything fished tomorrow or the next. I also hope I can get enough flowers to get the pet before the end of the event!

I got on a bit late but as soon as I did I received a tell inviting me to Ulduar.  It happened to be the very guild I went the first time to Ulduar with.  We started off doing the first boss with 2 towers up.  It was about the same but with zappy lasers.  We wiped once but redeemed ourselves on the second try.  When you do this hardmode version you get some extra gear and conquest tokens.

We did all the bosses I have done before; Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn and Auriaya.  They were still working on Ignis the Furnace Master but since I really wanted the achievement I was up for wiping.

I had actually never even got to try him before.  I enjoyed  the attempts, we got closer and closer.  Everyone was definitely at the top of their game even though it was getting pretty late.  We all knew we could do it though so we kept at it.

Being tossed in his pot was one of his “things”.  On our 4th or 5th attempt where we actually defeated him he threw me in the pot like 3 or 4 times in a row in the beginning of the fight.

We won in the end and wouldn’t have lost anyone had one of the healers computer not crashed.  Some plate gear dropped and a melee dps cloak.  I was just happy to get the achievement, and in fact got several others to go with it.  It turned out to be a very enjoyable evening!

Not getting much play time lately has been hard on my stress levels I think.  I jumped on a bit this afternoon after work while my son was asleep.  Shalalala had just got the Lil’ Game Hunter achievement when I logged in (Grats to him again BTW!).  He has a bit more time than me and farms his own farmable pets. I just prefer to buy them, I can’t stand mindless killing :)  Anyways we got to talking about pets and he doesn’t have the MGT phoenix either so we decided to do a quick guild run of MGT.  I never did MGT that much, certainly not as much as Inien did.  In fact I didn’t even have the achievement still.  So some of us went, we had 3 Priests for some great beam action :)  When we first got their someone realized they hadn’t opened up heroic yet so we did it twice once regular and once heroic.  It took about 10-15 minutes each, it was stupidly easy because we were all well geared and awesome

Of course the pet didn’t drop though a enchant that Shalalala didn’t have did.  I had it but there are some that drop in MGT I still don’t have.  Shalalala is a complest like me as well :)  We decided we would try to run it when ever we could to get the pets :)  I guess there is a mount there too for the mount collectors.

When I got on later I decided to throw myself in for a Heroic Vault.  I was invited almost immeadietly and off we went.  We wiped on Emalon once at the very end just like on my last 10 man run of it.  This was probably the most chaotic Emalon I’ve ever seen though.  For some reason they didn’t control the adds very well.  When we started they were running around everywhere attacking people.  Then during the fight we would get an add running around.    We lost 1 person on both attempts to a rouge add, but we defeated him on the second try.  He dropped 4 pieces of PvP gear, 3 of which was cloth caster gear and I lost all 3 rolls quite horribly.  I didn’t roll a double digit on any of them!  I wouldn’t mind picking up more PvP gear to go with my survivability spec, it would make me even more sturdy :)  After that we finished Archavon and went on our merry way.  I did a few more dailies but decided to turn in early because I was so worn out.

Waiting for 3.2 to end up on the PTR’s to see what kind of undocumented nerfs they have in store for us :P  We also have the summer festival starting on Sunday, and there are alot of achievements to do for that one as well.  I’m least looking forward to the torch tossing one…  We are almost done though, I think this one and the beer fest and I will have completed the holiday achievements

Just saw the 3.2 Patch notes from the PTR on MMO Champion.  Man they hit Priests a few times with the nerf bat, especially Disc Priests!  I’m not sure if the Inspiration is a buff or not.  I’m going to guess it would be for anyone but the tank maybe not.

• Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.

I guess Prayer of Healing was too powerful. This will reduce the over all healing of the glyph as well.  People have been saying PoH was too powerful, I guess they got there wish

• Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.

This really really stinks.  I don’t get it, they decided not to nerf the glyph that let us have the lower cool down, now they increase the base cool down so now you HAVE to have the glyph just to get it back to where it was before the glyph existed.  I hope this change does not go through.

• Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.

I’ve never looked at hard numbers on the current Inspiration version.  Right now it increases your targets armor from items by 25%, so I’m not sure what hat equates out to actual mitigation.  However on anyone but the tank this would be a buff because very few other classes have armor.  So you crit heal a mage being beat on and they take 10% less physical damage.

The changes to PoH and Penance are disapointing enough to override any positive from Inspiration for me.  Especially Penance which is my favorite spell.  I hope there are some more undocumented positives or 3.2 is going to be a sad Patch for the Priest class.  I would say the first change is probably a PvE change while the other two are PvP related.

• Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

I noticed this tidbit too which was basically a small nerf to Replenishment, but would effect me I’m sure.  You basically get .25% less now.