Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Hey guys!  Yes I still live   Though I’ve been on a bit of a WoW break (first in 5 years) I still have been keeping up with the news.  Looks like Cataclysm stuff is coming in slowly now, but at least it is something.  I find it funny here we are in March already, and I recall people in November saying we’d be in the expansion by now   Maybe it will be here by Christmas!

So first we had the stat change discussion, pretty boring nothing to exciting there.  But yesterday we had the post on mastery!  Now that was exciting and very interesting in deed.  One of the most interesting things is when they gave examples, they used the Priest class which seemed like a first for me!

Holy Priest
For each talent point spent in the Holy tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.

• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent from the Discipline tree, which many Holy priests consider to be a “must-have.” Regeneration will also probably be determined by whether you are in or out of combat, and not the “five-second rule.

• Radiance – Adds a heal-over-time effect to direct heals, such as Flash Heal. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

Discipline Priest
For each talent point spent in the Discipline tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.

• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent.

• Absorption – Improves the amount of damage absorbed by spells such as Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

They describe later on in the post you only get the bonus from the tree you spend like 50 points in.  I guess part of it is still up in the air.  The interesting thing about the two healing trees is that Disc gets a static healing buff just like holy.  Though that doesn’t mean they are going to be the same.  We have never got much generic healing bonus in the past though that has always been a complaint of many Disc whiners.  I like the Disc Mastery talent, truly what our tree is suppose to excel at.  Though I found the Holy one slightly amusing, a HOT to every heal spell sounds neat, but HOTs were never Holy’s specialty, I mean really Priests have only one HOT   I guess “More Healing” wouldn’t have been very exciting though

The blues in the thread (Eyonix and Ghostcrawler) stressed that we do not have the whole picture yet and there is more to come that will bring it all together.  Interesting they will not be back filling with Mastery stat, it will only be on the new gear we get in Cataclysm. Suppose to be more news to come soon hopefully.  This kind of stuff is what gets me jazzed about the game again.  Here is an interesting quote from Eyonix:

I’ve never been more excited about this game with what’s to come (and I’ve been playing for over 8-years), than I am now. I cannot wait to share more information with you, and I can’t wait for you to experience it first hand.

Of course Eyonix used to post this kind of stuff in the Priest forum about Priest changes that never turned out to be what the community wanted, or expected and was ultimately a let down.  Though I guess we will wait and see what else is in store for us.

I must admit even though I’m on a break, cataclysm has me as excited for the game as I was over 5 years ago before WoW came out

I had a lot of fun tonight being a terrible dps moocher.  No epic gear for him yet, but I have picked up a few more blues!

Been super busy and a bit burnt out lately.  I found some renewed enjoyment yesterday when I decided to play Laneir my mage and get him to 80 and maybe gear him up a bit.

Yesterday I managed to get one of my missing crocs, and today I got the last one!  So  have all 4 now, and that brings me up to 111 pets.  I thought that was exciting enough to come post

Finally got to a make another attempt at ICC but not how I wanted.  I ended up joining some guys 25 man PUG.  I really despise 25 man raids because I just don’t feel like I contribute enough.  Plus getting 25 people to do the right thing is a lot harder than getting 10 people to do so

We did fine on the trash leading up to the boss.  The traps were well dealt with and we didn’t have any deaths.  The DPS was good overall but we had a few people that were pretty under geared.  Like the Hunter wearing greens and a few blues and then the tier 9 pieces

Eventually we started on the boss.  Lost a few times then people start leaving, we wait around and replace them.  Loose a few more times, then more people leave and we replace them.  I think we did 3 or 4 rounds on this.  They kept blaming the healers in the end.  We had 3 tanks, but only two tank healers, a Pally and Me.  Then we had 3 druids and a Shaman.  People kept throwing up healing meters, I was like 4th of course, but I’m a Disc priest   Only the raid leader seemed to understand that everyone kept talking crap about me too.  I never bothered to point out that the tank I was assigned to heal was the last one alive EVERY time.  Actually the tank I was assigned too stuck up for me as well as he kept saying he was fine.  It was a DK I was healing too.

Eventually we gave up and split up the group.  After that I went and did my random for the day and went to bed.

Took a quick break to check out MMO-champion to see what was up and saw Blizzard upgraded the Armory.  They added some neat features, including a 3D view of your character modeled with all your gear along with a RSS feed of your recent activity.  It shows stuff like Achievements, or Achievement Criteria, Boss Kills, and when you aquire an item.  This seemed like a pretty neat thing to put on the site so I added it under my armory profile.

It is nice to see Blizzard continuing to develop the armory and is surpassing anything any of the other MMOs were doing, and used to charge you for even!

It is probably asking for too much but it would be nice if it showed things like when you aquired a pet, or mounts since these are things people collect and are proud of as well.

Went through my web stats and found all the WoW blogs currently linking to my site and returned the favor in the Blog Roll

So I finally get logged in tonight and what do I see, but the Stormwind croc fishing daily!  What did I get even though there is a 70% chance for a croc supposedly, I got rusty metal…  What is up with that!

Anyways after doing that and betting on a pet in the AH I went to get in the random queue and got a group instantly.  Unfortunately my luck for really fast dungeon runs finally ran out and I got HoS.  The tank was great, and we had a Mage that did 46% of the damage.  Between the Pally tank and the Mage they were doing almost 70% of the damage, so you can imagine how stellar the other two dps were   It was a bad rogue, and one of those terrible DK alts everyone has.  I think we were rolling up to the second boss when Snookered was talking about how time consuming it was to solo Heroic Underbog and I told him I’d join him when we were done.

I wanted to join him because Heroic Underbog was all I needed to finish the BC Dungeons achievement.  We finally finished and I join him just as we were coming up onto the 3rd boss.  Of course then I get a call from work that some disaster was happening so I go afk and try to figure it out and eventually come back to help while he is killing the 3rd boss.  Not long after that we get to the final boss, I get held in the air almost the whole time but I have enough stuff to smack him with + my dots that we got him down pretty damn fast.  Then I got my achievements!

So as far as the title of this post is concerned, the sad part was I just realized it was my first Achievement of the year   Almost two weeks exactly into 2010!  I should do some achievement runs this weekend too.  What I really need to finish is my loremaster, and of course get in some damn raiding!

First Impressions

I thought I’d write down what my first impressions are of the magazine now that I received it and had a chance to go through it.  The first thing I thought when I saw it was WoW this looks like Nintendo Power…  Now I know this is being produced by the same company, but they kept making a big deal about the quality and such that for some reason I expected a little more.  Not to say there is anything wrong with Nintendo Power, I subscribed to it for years and years in fact back in the day.

The biggest problem with the magazine of course though was that it was late, very late in fact.  This is the Winter 2009 edition, and you can tell by the way things are wrote in the articles that they were written a while ago.  If Blizzard is going to treat this like one of their game releases and the magazine is going to end up this late each time then they may have an problem.

The Art

The artwork in the magazine is excellent!  The cover which they gave us a preview of before Christmas in the form of a desktop background is awesome.  If they continue that level of artwork I hope they make it available as a background as well in the future!  Throughout the magazine you’ll find page after page of concept art, in game screenshots, and custom graphics.  I remember one of the selling points they were pushing that it would be like an art book and you can definitely see that. Some of my favorite was the Deathwing art on page 9 where they began the Cataclysm preview, and the Lich King on page 36 for the article on Icecrown Citadel.

The Content

The content in the magazine is there, and good but it isn’t exclusive enough I think to draw in subscribers yet.  Magazines have it hard I will admit, even harder than a Newspaper.  They take longer to produce and the information gets old.  The thing here though is they have direct access to Blizzard so I was expecting more first hand information.  So far my favorite parts of the articles have been the lore they put in.  Now I’m sure this information is written down somewhere else but it is nice how it is integrated into the information being dispensed.

My biggest complaint about this issue in particular was the lack of any new information about Cataclysm in the magazine.  They had a nice article, but it little to no new information.  They had some charts describing leveling flows for the revamped old continents I don’t remember seeing before anyways. I was hoping for more information, any thing really, but maybe there isn’t anything new to give or Blizzard is being hush hush about it all still   That said the article is very well written and a good review of all the goodies we are going to be getting in the expansion.

The other thing I found interesting and this may be because of the delayed release but there was a nice article about ICC, but mostly about the lore and what was in ICC. Not any detailed raid info or the like but they did have a detailed article about the ToC Raid.  Again the magazine was suppose to come out before 3.3 was put live which is why it ended up that way.  It is too bad they couldn’t have got in like a profile of even the first boss in there or something.  I haven’t read the entire ToC article yet but it looks good, and I look forward to reading one on ICC

Conclusion

This is the first issue so you can cut them a lot of slack I think.  They are only doing quarterly issues so I hope they can get them out on time from now on.  Overall I am pleased with the magazine.  I can complain about it being late, or not having the information I wanted to be in it, but Blizzard is involved in it so I should and will probably have to expect both of those   The artwork is awesome to see.  They have access to Blizzard so interviews with the devs and executives is going to be great.  There is something for everyone in this magazine.  They have quite a bit of PvP content, most of which I hadn’t read yet, about Arenas, and Battlegrounds and the like.  They have the stories and lore we all enjoy.  They even had a section over Blizzards card game version of WoW.  I liked the sections on Healing, Tanking and DPS as well.  It also seemed like they had player interviews and opinions throughout the magazine again which was a plus to me.  Finally they had fun things like the article on warcraftpets.com and cooldown which had some amusing abilities/items you’ll never see

I look forward to first quarter 2010 issue which I hope to be full of great ICC and new Cataclysm information, as well as actually arriving in first quarter

You know, the time, the energy?   I was totally wiped out today again, by the time I can login the energy level isn’t there.  Maybe I need to be a two Monster a day kind of guy instead of just one

I found out something interesting today reading the WoW magazine, that the Alligator pets only come from the quest that sends you to stormwind to fish one!  That means I don’t have to do it every day just when that quest is up.  I also found out I’m TERRIBLY unlucky, as it says you’ll get one of the pets 70% of the time!  I have got 2!  No more no less, and it isn’t that I haven’t been trying   More on the WoW Magazine later.

So I checked my fishing quest, went and made some cloth then headed into the random queue to at least get my frost badges for the day.  With no raiding I got to do something for progression…  So I got my random nearly instantly and ended up in the Nexus.  Not a bad one, pretty quick anyways.  Ended up in someones guild run from another server.  It went smoothly everyone was pro thank goodness because I didn’t have the energy for anything else.

I got to find some time to do some raiding though.  I noticed the weekly raid was the first boss in ICC again.  I haven’t stepped back into ICC raid since the very first time I went with the Texas Mercenaries way back last year before I went on vacation!  If I can’t actually get in an attempt I’d at least like to get in one of those faction farming runs…  I guess such is life for a Network Systems Admin of a metropolitan newspaper company with a wife and a son.

I got on hoping to get the Weekly Raid done before it resets tomorrow but it didn’t look good.  There seemed to be very few people trying to do any raids at the moment.  Inien was on attempting to do the same thing.  I put myself in LFR then went and did the fishing daily and then afs (away from screen) looking at some forums checking back fro tells.  Sure enough I got a tell from someone and joined up and got the last position.  It was a 10 man group and we end in and did it in about 15-17 minutes or so.

That went so well I decided I might as well stay on long enough for a random dungeon daily as well.  Of course Inien was still looking for his weekly raid group and was cursing me that I beat him!  He was wishing a long painful instance with crappy dps!  I laughed because I got Azjol-Nerub!  Certainly one of the fastest to run.  We had a Elemental Shaman pulling about 4500 DPS that made up for the other two sub 2k DPS we had.  The run went smoothly and I managed to log out with time left on my food, no deaths, under and hour

This was great because I was so worn out but still enjoyed my time.  I have been swapping back and forth trying to decide if I liked my Ephemeral Snowflake more than my other regen trinket.  I think I sit around in regular instances so much I get a lot more mana back from the 54mp5 than I do from the 11mana per heal.  While I was in Naxx I think it was useful.  In a raid situation where you are constantly casting the whole time I think it makes more sense.

I need to take some time to finish up my loremaster here soon too.  I’ve got quite a few quests completed in my log to go turn in right now actually.  I’m not that far away from completing my goal anyways.  Then I intend to farm goblin rep to complete my 40 exalteds