Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

After my usual cooking quest I headed out this evening to do my Explorers Legaue daily.  It is the other daily I’ve been religously doing in addition to the cooking.  It is fast and I have my hearth over there so I can get there quick right now.

Since I was over there I decided to head up and get some glacial salmon for my cooking skillups.  It didn’t look like on the PTR that they made it any easier to get 450 like I thought they were going to so I just decided to go for it.  After getting two stacks of salmon I headed over to the Basin for some nettle fish.

While I was fishing there Inien got me into his 25 man vault he joined.  I figured I could get it out of the way.  I didn’t manage to get two full stacks of nettle fish before I had to head over though.  The run was easy as usual, he is just a big bag of loot after all.  Only interesting thing of note is there was one other Priest and he was Disc even!

Before bed I decided to run through some of the cooking and unfortunately I ended up skilling up really well with what I did have and that left me 1 skillup short of 450!  Totally bummed I decided it was time to go to bed though.  Tomorrow is another day!

Logged on for a short time tonight, my son was trying to avoid bed again.  I had a nasty headache but felt like letting off some steam.  I ended up joining a OS 25 man group which usually doesn’t take too long and isn’t stressful.  The guy actually only got 3 healers so I actually had something to do.  There are still a few things from this guy I wouldn’t mind, mainly a nice cloak, and possibly some wrists, though not ideal.  The valor tokens are also quite nice

Everything went down without a hitch.  I at first thought 3 healers wasn’t enough but it was just because on the first drake everyone kept standing in void zones

You also might noticed a new feature to the site.  I’ve got a twitter account especially for my WoW persona and will allow my WoW related thoughts to ooze out onto it, in addition to some more real-time blabberings.  This is partially an experiment with Twitter, and another way to feed content into the site. We’ll see how it goes.  Perhaps some people will prefer the twittering over my much more longer winded neanderings

Yes I finally completed Naxxramas last night, well early this morning.  I saw someone who needed a healer for Naxx10 and joined up, still looking for a pants upgrade.  My initial plan was to only stay like an hour maybe, I started close to 10:30 so it was already late.  Well it was going so well that I figured they had a chance of going all the way.  I ended up saying on till 2am just to be able to say I actually defeated Naxx

Not much caster gear dropped, I did pickup a slight different wand, more of a side grade but I got some more crit out of it.  I lost a few rolls on some other nice crit upgrades.  I did win a nice back for my dps set though.  We got mostly set pieces for shaman/hunter which we had only 1 of each, and DK’s.  Plenty of plate too! (of course cause I’m there)

Oh and before that I ended up with the pants from HoL finally.  So I will be using those in my DPS set also.

Well I had some of my usual bad bad luck in choosing groups tonight.  I put myself in LFG for Heroic Naxx, OS or Vault.  I noticed the dailies were for both UP so I figured I’d do that if someone needed a healer.  I eventually saw someone that needed a healer for UP so I joined them.  Then after inviting me and we got there they made me leader and told me none of them had ever been before.  They were also all fresh 80s.  To make matters worse they were horrible slow to respond AND didn’t listen to me. After we wiped on the first boss, with me dying to the sword I actually left the group…I don’t do this very often but I was in no mood to be wiping in UP all night.

After that I went back to Sithillus to turn in my head.  This got me my nifty new Cenarious title and only 48 rep away from exalted with the Brood.  I also noticed while I was there they have a quest now for the head of broodlord and everyone can pickup the head which means I need to do BWL again

Next disaster was Naxx 25.  They said they had the Military quater, the silly dog boss, and the end guys left.  I joined them of course they didn’t mention they had been wiping to Gluth a lot before I joined.  We wiped to him again after I got there, some how with tons of mages they still were not able to aoe the adds down before they got to him…  So we wipe and like 6 people leave, then they are trying to replace them and people start saying they are going afk for 20 minutes.  At that point I just left the group I don’t have  a lot of play time to spending waiting.

After that I noticed my wife was up and I’d rather go spend time with her than mess around with WoW so I logged for the evening.

I got on last night and meant to get back to questing but I saw someone shouting to start an AQ rep run.  We ended up getting only 4 people and decided to do AQ20.  We went through that pretty quickly.  Then we decided to try AQ40.   The guy managed to secure about another 8 people and we went through that.  It really wasn’t enough people over all but I am so close on both Cenarion Circle and Brood reps I was dieing to finish them.

In the end it was very late, and they appeared to not be smart enough to kill the twins (where we left off) and so I gave up and went to bed.  I have the head of the AQ20 guy to still turn in, that will get me Cenarion, but I’m going to be something like 38 rep short on Brood   Look for my Cenarion title and achievement in my profile tomorrow!

I’m not going to lie I’ve been fairly down lately.  I haven’t been playing much so maybe it is just stress build up.  WoW is really my only release at the moment.  I got on tonight with some reasonable play time available and went off questing but what I really needed to do was heal.

I had put myself in LFG for Heroic Azjol-Nerub because I’m still after the silly wand that drops there. There was like no action in LFG channel so I had little hopes.  I got invited to a group though eventually that was full and ready to go.  Thank god it actually had decent people in it, because though I wanted to heal I didn’t want to repeatedly wipe because people suck.

We tore through Azjol no problem, of course the stupid belt dropped again and we headed out to Utgarde Pinnacle.  That went pretty fast though we did the silly spear farming method, I prefer to just run the gauntlet myself it’s more fun but whatever.  No mount from the guy, never seen that mount it must have a stupid drop rate.

Finally we headed over to Gundrak.  I considered going to bed, but this enhancement shaman really wanted to go and I figured I’d be fast.  It was a quick run too.  The shaman didn’t get what he wanted though.  He was probably the best Enhancement shaman I’ve seen.  I almost thought there was no such thing, he was pushing around 1800 dps and he just turned level 80 so apparently there are a lot of bad shaman around.

We ended up with 10 dream shards, and 2 crystals which wasn’t a bad hall.  I must say I was a bit rejuvenated by the playtime.  I’m glad I found that group and got in some fun stress relieving runs.

Well it has been many years since the first time I stepped into Naxxramas.  It was a different game back then and a different raid.  On Friday and Saturday I did a full run of Naxx with a PUG group.  Nothing special, but good competent people, who didn’t even use vent (yay).

It was a partial guild run, I think 6 of them were from the same guild, we were mostly plate with 5 Paladins, 2 Deathknights, 2 Warlocks and Me.  We had 3 healers which was the disappointing part of it.  I still enjoyed the run though I don’t really need anything from Naxx 10 aside from some pants upgrade would be fine.

We finished off a lot of bosses many PUGS I had tried before could not.  So as you’ll notice I finally got some achievements.  After many years of wonder I finally got to see the end of Naxx as well.  Though the end is slightly different, than then of course.  The fight with Sapphiron went well, we killed him first try.  It was pretty neat, and with my frost resist gear and the pally aura, I didn’t have to worry much about anything but everyone else.

Of course the final boss eluded me though we just couldn’t kill him.  We gave him one more try last night, after 3 wipes many of us had to go to bed.  Basically we didn’t have enough DPS.  In both the case of last night and the previous 2 nights we only had 2 people who could touch 2k DPS so it was not stellar.  Basically once the adds come out we couldn’t down him fast enough before the adds got too buff and started killing everyone.

To me this is another case where too many healers hurt the raid, even if we had somewhat low DPS if we had one less healer we may have been fine. Dual spec would have come in handy here because I would have just pushed shadow and helped out.  So sadly I did not get to kill him.  I hope before Uldar comes out I can get in the tail end of a Naxx raid and take him down I just don’t have the time or the energy to even be doing what I did this weekend

Speaking of 3.1 looks like we were winding down on the changes.  The last few patches have been small incremental changes.  The Priests are whining because they increased the cooldown of Divine Hymn to 10 minutes from 6 and doubled the mana costs.  Many people don’t recognize how truely awesome it is now.   I don’t really care much about the increase in cooldown, it is sort of an emergency spell anyways, and well I would almost certainly be coupling the spell with Inner Focus so who cares about the mana cost

Or are you?

I yet again didn’t get on in time enough to do an instance (and I’m really itching to heal) but I did continue my preparation for 3.1.  I’m sure I’m not the only one too.  Of course the main focus of my preparation has been to create  a set of gear ideal for my upcoming Shadow mode.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Shadow Priests as well.  Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never been one ever, and from my play on the test server they are more complex than the two buttons I use on my mage

I started off evaluating my gear from the shadow priest sticky over on the priest forum.  The good thing I found was a lot of what I had would work great.  A few items were not ideal but certainly good until I acquire something else, my head for instance.  My weapon seemed very much out of place but luckily there was a crafted alternative. The Titansteel Guardian was suggested as the pre-raid alternative for the SP main hand.  I was intending on buying the DPS badge offhand so this will go good with that.

When I got on today I went to AH and looked up what the Titansteel Guardian was going for, and that was about 900g.  But I knew we had some BS in the guild and asked to see if anyone could make it hoping the mats would be cheaper   Thankfully someone could and they were.  I have tons of Frozen orbs so it was really just the cost of the Titansteel.  I think over all it was just 550g in mats to make and one of Sydnie’s alts made it for me (Thanks again!).

I copied over the most recent Laneer to the test server to check out some things, mostly trade skill stuff but I’ve got some things I could play with on the SP too like my Illustration of the Dragon Soul. I need to test out the new fishing daily too!  I want to buy a few of the badge items though and see how it goes with my current collected DPS gear.

I know, I know for someone who was totally against the idea of Dual Spec I sure am going through a lot of trouble for it   I figure though there is no reason to deny it, we are getting it.  I know it WILL change everything but there is no reason for it not to benefit me.  I see the opportunities it will bring, and will allow me to enjoy more of the game with less time wasted.  I don’t have much play time as it is, if I concentrate everything on Laneer then I should be better off

Ok unless they nerf it our level 80 spell finally got useful!  Given all the other classes got really awesome spells, and ours well was so lame I was really hoping for something like this.  First of all it is now a Heal, not a horrible poor mans CC/heal.

Divine Hymn – You recite a Holy hymn, summoning the power of the Divine to assist you in your time of need. Heals 3 nearby lowest health friendly party or raid targets for 1 to 6 every 2 sec for 8 sec, and increases healing done to them by 15% for 8 sec. Maximum of 12 heals. The Priest must channel to maintain the spell. 35% of base mana, 40 yd range, Channeled, 6 min cooldown

I didn’t have access to a bunch of people to fully test it, I’m sure someone will though soon.  I did play with it and found out yes it can crit, and yes it has an awesome spell coefficient.  In my tests it was ticking for 8500 on the first tick then each additional one was about 9600 (because it increases healing by 15%), with crits of 14k.   Even more awesome is if you happen to have Grace on  a target (if your Disc) you’ll have even more healing   The other thing to note is at least according to the spell tool type the range is 40 yards.  Given the way the spell is cast I’m assuming it is a 40 yard circle around you.

What I haven’t been able to test is if the smart heal evaluates each tick or not.  I’m assuming it does, as this would make the most sense.  It would also make this spell very awesome, usable, and would be the reason for the 6 minute cooldown.  This would mean Blizzard succeeded in creating a new unique heal for this expansion and I thank them!!!

Hymn of Hope – You recite a Holy hymn, restoring hope to those in despair. Restores 3% mana to 3 nearby low mana friendly party or raid targets every 2 sec for 8 sec, and increases their total maximum mana by 20% for 8 sec. Maximum of 12 mana restores. The Priest must channel to maintain the spell. 40 yd range, Channeled, 6 min cooldown

Hymn of Hope on the other hand is a bit weird, it is applying nearly the same idea as Divine Hymn, works raid wide, only effects 3 targets, also assuming it switches each tick if necessary.  The weird part is the mana increase, it increases your maximum mana by 20%, and you actually get that mana, it is not just empty space. So in my case I got like 4K mana, but in the end it takes it away, so I guess if you had no mana to begin with, things are horrible you cast this people are going to have mana for immediate use.  Only after the 8 seconds that extra mana is removed.  Again it seems like an emergency mana spell for everyone else, you’ll be too busy channeling it to use it

I dunno how useful Hymn of Hope will be, but I look forward to having Divine Hymn.  I occasionally actually use Hymn of Hope now, so maybe I’ll continue to at least use it as much as I do now.  I like the Hymn idea though, kind of a unique Priest ability idea and I hope they continue with it.

I have not had the energy to play much recently.  The time change really through me off I have not recovered from it yet.  Been going to be early, waking up late.  Yes I am a mess

Anyways I have managed to eek out the energy for a few dailies every(mostly) night and I have finally finished off my WOTLK reps.  Well till we have more access to the few we can’t finish   I finished both Sons of Hodir, and The Oracles.  I was really shocked there is no Achievement for the Sons of Hodir, especially since it was such an annoying grind.

As you might notice in my achievements that those 2 factions also equaled out my 30th exalted!  Of course I still need to come up with 10 more to get the title I believe.  Given the recent changes to how you get rep it should be possible to finish off some older reps I’m close on.

I’m very close to Brood of Nozdormu less than a full AQ40 run from exalted.  That would also net me Cenarion Circle which would also net me another title and achievement for having both Cenarion factions   I haven’t checked MC since the change but Hydraxian Waterlords might be possible to finish now, with only faction from the bosses it would have taken like 50 runs to finish!  Been doing mount runs to ZG fro Zandalar Tribe faction, Inien and I can grind that one now too.

Other than those it would be a lot of slow grinds like the goblin factions and such.  It is doable now though.  Maybe some day if I get my energy back I can work on all that