Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I was entertaining my son yesterday and I turned on the iPod tuned to my play list and song “The Great Kodo” starts playing. I’ve talked about this song before on my blog way back when I first found it. This was made back when Tauren were not aloud to ride anything but Kodo. Even though they look rediculous on anything else, Blizzard eventually caved in to the whiners and yet another bit of uniqueness in WoW was snuffed out. If you’re anything like me this song will make you want to get a Kodo, and it sticks quite well in your mind Alliance finally can get one from the October fest event but it is a random drop. I managed to not get one last year

The video is put together by Brandon M. Dennis of Oxhorn Brand Movies. He also is part of a site called WeGame.com which is dedicated to machinima movies.

Anyways I wanted to share the video again linked from Youtube:

Also if you want to download the song I managed to find the MP3 some where on the authors site a long time ago. Here is a link to the file The Great Kodo.

I realized as I was about to go to bed I managed to not take any screenshots so I snapped a photo of me in the alliance tent   I spent most of my play time tonight on the Tournament stuff.  I did some of the quest with Inien and we had a pretty good time.  I forgot to take a screenshot of us exploding the tournament dragon again!

Inien got enough tokens though to get the epic caster sword from the tournament, so grats to him.  I don’t have any interest in any of the gear, just the pets.  I’m shooting for the Ironforge pet first.  It takes 40 tokens though so it will be a bit before I do that one.  I started work on getting access to the human vendor.  I think the sheep is an awesome non-combat pet (though people have been complaining about the alliance pets).  The Ironforge bear is really cool too.

Inien and I dueled for the Argent Tournament achievement but were having issues with it messing up.  It kept dropping us out of combat.  I even had it happen to me when fighting an NPC which was really annoying.   We finally gave up and just killed each other as fast as we could without shields hoping we’d beat it before it bugged

I haven’t been healing enough lately.  I keep looking for an OS or something when I get on but must keep getting on too late or something.  I hope I can get something this weekend that gives Valor tokens.  I would still like to get new pants!

I noticed a small patch yesterday morning when I started up WoW (forgetting it was Tuesday) and didn’t think much of it.  It didn’t show any new patch notes, I assumed it was fixing some insignificant thing.

Just before bed I happen to browse the healing forums on my blackberry and noticed it wasn’t insignificant, it was a stab at the Priests…Boo!  It consisted of 3 nerfs to the Priest class.

• The effectiveness of the Priest spell Divine Hymn has been reduced.

This seems unnecessary to me for because of the cooldown on Divine Hymn.  Yes it was powerful but it also had a 10 minute cooldown and significant mana costs.  A lot of priests would avoid the mana costs with Inner Focus, but still you had to make a choice to hold on to Inner Focus for this spell.  In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t effect me a whole ton because I haven’t been using it much yet, but I did think it was fine.  Oh well

• The Priest ability Soul Warding now only reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by 15% instead of 30%. The tooltip for this spell will be updated at a later date.

This nerf is exactly what my title is referring too.  When we first got the ability to remove the cooldown a lot of people said it was the new circle of healing.  That Priests were indiscriminately spamming shields on everyone.  Partly this is because of the incredibly lame way the new Rapture works, the other because they could. Ghostcrawler said:

“Power Word: Shield is a really useful tool for Disc priests in particular. We want them using it. However, its utility is balanced by a high cost. If we get to the point where they are spamming it constantly to the exclusion of other spells and without it ever being a decision, that suggests mana regen is still too high.”

So basically people disregarded what he said, and continued to spam because they could, so they decided to nerf the reduced costs.  I imagine if it continues to be a problem they might remove the other 15% I don’t think the nerf will change people’s minds much about spamming it though, we’ll see I guess.

• Glyph of Mass dispel will now reduce the cost of the spell by only 35%.

This is a funny nerf everyone has been laughing at because this Glyph was never used.  Everyone has just been saying they might as well remove it from the game.

I never got a chance to play yesterday.  I was doing too many RL life things.  I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the change.  I did sneak on just before heading to bed to do the fishing daily.  I had to parachute into WG for the terror fish.  Managed to do it and not get bothered even though WG was horde controlled.

I got on before I went into work this morning and got that last point in the tournament and because a representative of Iron Forge!  Got a few achievements just from doing that and got the nifty title “of Ironforge”.  You also get this nifty squire pet who will carry around your city flag

When I got back on later that evening I was doing my usual dalies.  I took a different route over to the basin than I normally do because I stopped in Dragon Blight to make my cloth.  On the way over I touched WintersGrasp and fell off my mount, which I really hate.  Anyways I got back on and made it over there.  I landed and began fishing, not realizing that I was PvP flagged.  The DK in front of me attacked and killed me, a Warlock helped.  I rezed in the bushes switched over to my PvP/Holy DPS build, switched gear and buffed/drank.  Ran back over to him and killed him.  I thought it was hilarious, he must have been confused or something but he ran away, never came back for revenge

After that little distraction I eventually went and continued onto my new tournament quests.  I had a good time as usual with them and now I’m finally working towards my new little non-combat pet.  I defeated the black knight who was a total wuss, and then Inian and I did this daily where you fight a dragon.  I didn’t take any screenshots likea  silly person but it was neat

Ended up with lots of good achievements today though.  After I finish with IF I get to do all the other ally cities for their pets, and achievements

I concentrated today on finishing off my Noble Garden achievements so I wouldn’t have to worry about it the rest of the week.  I’m not sure what Blizzard was thinking with these ones, because unlike all the other recent revisions to the events, this one did not make it more fun.  Basically it required you to sit in one place for a long time fighting over what eggs were spawning.  Luckily last night I was able to get most of what I needed.  This morning when I got on I had to fight with someone but I was so good at doing it from yesterday that I got most of the eggs and finished out what I needed.

One of the achievements has you putting bunny ears on the female of each player species in WoW.  This was very difficult and time consuming as well.  Mainly because they put a 5 minute cooldown on the bunny ears for some reason, and secondly because so few of the horde female exist.  Specifically I had problems with the female tauren, female orc, and female dwarf.    I eventually got it though.

The other thing they made annoying is in order to do the hard boil egg achievement you needed to go to unguro with someone else because you couldn’t turn yourself into a bunny.  This seemed needless thankfully I have guildies to bring (Thanks Cal!)

The last thing I had to do was finish planting flowers in the desert.  They had you visiting the far reaches of Azeroth planting flowers in the desert using a robe no less   Then I finally got my achievement.

I was really feeling the itch to heal, I had not actually healed in like 2 or 3 days so I noticed I had the Heroic Violet Hold daily in my quest log and decided to run that since it was fairly quick.  It went ok except we had to do the first wave over again because the tank didn’t move when we go t the etheral guy and he got exploded

After that I did my tournament quests leaving me with just 1 mark needed in order to finish the current tier and represent Ironforge!  I was super tired so I headed to bed a bit early.

I got on in the afternoon to do some questing.  My son was still down so I decided to run an AB, something nice and non committal.  It was crazy I got in this amazing group that did a 5 cap and held it till we won.  Of course the following game was almost the opposite

I came back again late late that night.  I was just going to finish some dailies and go to bed.  I remembered Noble Garden was tomorrow so I decided to park myself in Kharanos before bed.  When I got there I found out it had already started.  Not everyone had realized it yet I think there was not a lot of people.  I camped out a good spot and managed to get quite a bit done.

After that I still couldn’t get enough so I took my bunny rabbit, which I luckily looted from an egg and ran off to get the bunny some love.  This shot was as I was making my way through Darnasus.

It turned out to be a crazy evening I had totally not anticipated.  I think I was up till like 1am getting chocolate eggs

After giving up on Shadow I think I will still pursue leveling up Lanier for DPS fun.  I completely enjoy Arcane DPS, and the Mage class in general.  Though he will never have as much as Laneer it would still be fun to have and play him.  I got him out this evening to see if I could get him to 77.  I continued with my questing in Sholozar Basin.

I ended up getting asked to go on a Gundrak run which I did, and enjoyed myself   Instances are always better for Exp when you have rest   There was an 80 mage with us who barely had more stats than me.  At the end of the run I had done 3% more damage than him lol He had a 18/34/19 talent build which Inien said was weird.  I  thought it was funny because he casted Arcane Missiles a lot hehe

Then we decided to do VH after.  The whole group went and we had a good time again.  This time I beat the 80 Mage by 7% of over all damage.  Think of the damage I would have done if I was 80! lol  Anyways I enjoyed my break

I was think I’ll have to go to a targeting dummy and see what my DPS is on Laneer with my holy dps build

I was dealing with some RL issues this evening so I didn’t have any time to get on and play.  Just before bed though I jumped in just for a few minutes to do my cooking and fishing dailies.  Convientently they were both in Dalaran which got me to bed faster.  We have been getting the fish for jewelry daily quite a bit lately.  There is still one fishing daily we haven’t had yet too.

If you read yesterday’s post you know that I abandoned Shadow and gone back to a Holy DPS build for my second spec.  Now there isn’t enough talents to use for all Holy dps (it isn’t a serious spec) so I’ve also spec’d for PvP survivability.    What I ended up with is this.  I managed like I mentioned yesterday to squeeze in Body and Soul which is fun, and the poison cure turned out be very useful   I also squeezed out a point into Spirit Tap.  This seems to be more than enough to make my questing mana issues not an issue

I tested it out while collecting stone for the folks at the argent tournament.  The little robot guys get in your way and I was happy to smite them!  The smite glyph is totally fun, increasing the damage of smite by 20%.  What is even cooler is the reflective shield which can crit, happens to  proc SoL!  So I was back to dpsing like I used to when I was holy and enjoying it.

While I was doing my Tournament quests I did get a tell from one of the good folks at Texas Mercenaries inviting me to do 10man Mally with them.   Now I’ve wanted to see this fight for a long time but it is a chicken or the egg thing.  No one will let you go to any Mally run unless you have already been on a Mally run.  When he asked I simply replied I haven’t been yet, and his reply was “ouch!”.  So there was a long long pause, I’m assuming they were talking about it.  They told me that I was a really awesome healer and they would teach me the fight.  It was fairly late though, and I was pretty worn out so I decided to reluctantly decline.  I let them know I would study the fight and if they want to invite me next time I would totally be up for it.  So I’m going to have to go practice on the Drakes by the Nexus, and doing some reading/video watching on the fight.  Having done all the quests in relation I really feel I owe it to Mally to kill him

I also tried my first Strand of the Ancients tonight.  I have to admit I didn’t really know what to do I know it involves destroying walls, sort of a mini winters grasp I think.  I did well though, even though I have no PvP gear it was quite difficult for them to kill me without bunches of people.  I can’t say I really enjoyed this one though, I would have more fun with a AB or WSG I think.  We didn’t win though so just for the achievement at least I am going to try to win won   I did get some sort of kill achievement in there though.

Before I logged off I realized I could rearrange some of my DPS and healing gear to get me some more crit.  I wanted to maintain some hit though because when I was wearing just my Disc gear smite misses too much.  Inien told me that all I needed was 4% or as close to it as I could get and what I found is I could have just a tad under 4%, and have 27% Holy crit   I think that will suit me fine, and if I can ever pick up some more crit for my Disc gear maybe I can get more hehe

I got on today and started doing my tournament quests.  The server was still having issues after today’s patch and was pretty laggy.  I was having an issue getting them done, this was early too.  My son was in a late nap, I managed a few quests then they were rebooting and I logged.

I later got on and the server lag was even worse.  Trying to put in talents was painful.  It was so painful I accidentally put an incorrect point in my shadow build and had to fix it.  When I went to the city I noticed they still had not fixed the minimap graphic glitch like they said they were going to.  After I reset my stuff again someone turned me on to that new feature where you set everything THEN you learn it.  OMG this is a life saver when the server is lagged to hell because you don’t have to wait for the database every time you click a talent.

After that flub up I went with a group on the daily Heroic CoS.  I really enjoy CoS, and originally I was going to heal it but they invited another healer and I ended up as dps.  This is where the trouble began.  I really only dps’d an instance one other time, it was are super amazing heroic obsidian sanctum.  I didn’t do nearly as well in this run, doing about 2300dps over all, and a rogue completely owned me on damage.    I’m still learning the rotations and such so that didn’t bother me as much as the fact I just didn’t find it fun.  I suddenly came to the realization I don’t like Shadow dps it isn’t fun to me at all and that I’d much much rather be healing.

So I made the decision to give that up, I thought well maybe I’ll waste some more gold and spec into a Holy DPS/PVP build as my secondary.  Well just after that I switched to Disc mode and it forgot all my Shadow Talents (which it isn’t suppose to do anymore).  Of course I was like awesome!  You might laugh but I created a really fun build to quest in, and maybe do BG when I want to   So with this build I ran around and did what quests I could in the horrible lag, then gave up eventually.  I don’t know if mana will be an issue, I might have to some how work spirit tap into it.

Before I went to bed I just had to try it out PvP.  I of course have no PvP gear anymore really but if anything I’d just do BG anyways.  I was amazed at how well I did, I had a blast too, with a slighty more beefy shield, like every damage reducing PvP talent in Disc/Holy I actually had a tiny bit of survivability   You can see me here as I ran the flag back.  I knew they were about to cap so I hid in there room for a minute or two and as soon as it was back ran all the way back.  A frost mage tried to stop me on the way who failed, as did a DK

I don’t know if it was a fluke, but I did pretty good and managed to really have fun   I got 4th on the healing meter without even really trying.  That was all almost entirely through Prayer of Healing   Then when I got out and was heading off to bed I realized I wasn’t technically even using any glyphs.  Going to have to check out what options I have.  I also remembered that I had forgot that you can flash heal instead of smite with surges now   I really missed SoL

Anyways I’ll see where is takes me.  Looks like Laneir my Mage will still get to be my DPS, because I DO enjoy arcane DPS