Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I got home a little early today and the wife and kid was out so I logged on to run my random.  I ended up getting CoS and we went through it a bit slower than my more recent groups.  No one besides me was particularly geared well.  I don’t mind that though because the older instances are so boring.  There was one ret pally that must have been a recent 80 because I out damaged him by simply mind searing the groups some times

I still felt like healing and figured I didn’t have any time for a raid so I thought I’d do some of the ICC 5 mans and see if I could get a hilt to drop.  I mean I haven’t done them tons of time, but I have never seen that damn thing drop!  So I ended up in Forge of Souls.  It was fun and a little challenging.  I really need to do these more I think

After that I went again and ended up in Pit of Saron.  That went pretty well, but I managed to loose someone on the first boss thanks to stupid line of sight on those boulders.  I always forget that and people are so careless I lost the boomkin. The rest of the instance went well.  Except the leader had us do this sort of what I would call a cheat, where if you mount up and run fast enough you can by pass like 2 of the first waves of mobs going up the hill.  You know how I feel about bypassing content, it usually causes more trouble than its worth!

So by this time the family gets home so I never did get in an HoR.  Oh and still no Hilt dropped!

Something interesting did happen later.  Apparently Blizzard is getting the PTR all setup for a run.  People got extra excited because one of the servers was called Blizzcon server.  They believe that it might be Cataclysm beta, but the previous betas were always done on separate PTRs than the normal ones so I don’t think its that.  It is probably just the next content patch, which is cool too!

I have been reading the WoW forums more lately despite the usual headache it can give you some times.  I ran across a post in the Cataclysm forum that Zarhym replied too. The title was Cataclysm: WoW Killer.  Now when I first read that I thought it could be both a positive or a negative post, of course this is the WoW forums so I knew it must be negative.  But I’d like to take a second to argue the other way.

World of Warcraft has been the number one MMO for quite some time now.  From the very beginning they managed to bring an audience that no one dreamed possible.  Since those early days many MMO’s have come out to try and recreate the success of WoW, or to some how take some from it.  Every time a new MMO is about to release there is all sorts of forum posts about how it is the next WoW Killer.  Warhammer Online was one such game which everyone was sure would bring WoW down, as was Age of Conan.   These games would always show some limited success but WoW lived on.  All the things that makes WoW great, they just couldn’t match.  It was hard for them to compete against years of fine tuning that WoW has done.

My reason for bring this up is I believe Cataclysm is THE WoW Killer.  Cataclysm will finally be the one game to one up WoW.  You might say to yourself, well “Laneer Catalcysm is WoW.”  However if you have been following the info coming you can see just how much they are changing.  Yes there will be some aspects of our old game there, but everything about WoW is pretty much changing.  They are modifying nearly every item, changing quests, the landscape everywhere, spells, talents, trade skills.  Nothing in this expansion seems to be escaping the great cataclysm.

Now this is just my opinion, but I think this is all for the better.  Admittedly I am a Blizzard fanboy, but I think the success of this game speaks for itself.  I am very impressed with all the refinement coming in Cataclysm.  I admire Blizzard very much for taking on such a monumental task such as this.  I am not sure that any other company would have been gutsy enough to try and do so much at once.    I have enjoyed WoW going on 6 years now.  It has come a long way from those early days with each expansion building on the next.  Cataclysm seems to be a compilation of all the lessons learned from each stage of WoW.  So without a doubt I believe we finally have a WoW Killer.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

The WoW Killer!

Had just enough energy for a quick 5 man tonight.  Though 5 mans these days are so boring if it isn’t any of the 3 new ones.  On occasion I’ll get in a group with a poorly geared tank that makes it more interesting but usually I stand around lol  So today I thought I’m going to see if I can beat any of the DPS.  So in between healing I used every trick in the book to do some DPS as Disc of course.  I managed to beat the hunter, and came close during the instance at beating the Warlock, but in the end I couldn’t do it.  I was proud of myself at managing to do 15% of the damage WHILE I was also healing

Also wanted to make a quick longer comment on the new badge changes that Blizzard has posted for Cataclysm.  My first thought was about time!  It seemed the current system was getting ridiculous and if they kept this up we were going to have all sorts of crazy named badges hehe  Its also a pain if you want to get a different item and have to down convert your badges like 3 times for heroic stuff.  It seems like a well thought out plan.  Especially how each time they release a new tier of gear they convert your uper tier badges to lower tier.  This will keep people from hording and get you spending!

It is quite amazing at how many systems they are changing.  I’m really excited and just a tad worried.  My worry lies only in the fact that so much is being changed that testing of it all has got to be a nightmare.  I imagine that there will be a lot of tweaking, more so than normal even when Cataclysm goes live with this many changes.  It’s all good though!

I managed to get on yesterday only long enough to run a quick random.  I was totally worn out from being up till midnight the previous day after being called by work.  It was an interesting run actually.  We had a bear tank that had the highest GS rating I’ve ever seen, and over 60K HP.  He made a mad dash through that instance and we completed it faster than I thought possible.  He skipped the first boss which never even occurred to me They brought down Mr Drake ride immediately too, I was impressed

Things have been very interesting since the announcements about the upcoming raid changes to Cataclysm.  So much whining it is unbelievable, actually I think it is believable because the vocal community is a bunch of whiners   I wonder if Blizzard predicted this or not?  I’m guessing they must have assumed a certain amount of vocal disagreement.  Some of my favorite arguments are:

• It will destroy my guild
• No one will ever do 25 mans anymore
• Why even include 25 mans
• Blizzard is just catering to casuals

The funny thing is the last time they change raids they said the same things.  Just like they said Cataclysm will be the death of WoW, and all previous expansion were going to do that as well   Anyways the most interesting part is everything Blizzard is changing is save guilds if anything.  Lets you do the content you want, with the people you want.  You don’t feel forced into trying to make 25 mans work, and if you have the people for 25 mans you can do it, and gear more people up faster.  I don’t see the issue, and find it funny people can’t see it benefits everyone casual or elitist

As I mentioned before my favorite part is first that you can do the raids you like, I prefer 10mans over 25 by a HUGE margin.  The 25s are just not fun for me, I don’t care how good the gear is.  Second I kind of like the shared lockouts myself.  You don’t feel compelled to have to do both to try and get extra badges.  People will have time for their alts now   It is obvious they had to do that if they were going to make the gear the same.  The other thing that kept coming to mind is that they intended to try and make the difficulty of 10 and 25 man as close as possible.  So the elitist shouldn’t complain they are catering to casuals because they want it to be equal.  Obviously getting 25 people in sync is still always going to be harder than 10, so they are doing a few things to help with extra badges/gear.

Things are really getting exciting with Cataclysm now as this new information comes out almost daily.  Come on Blizzard, I want more!

I was very excited to read the new proposed raiding changes for Cataclysm.  As someone who really enjoys a good 10man raid, and really doesn’t for 25 man it is good news!  The problem I have with 25 mans is it marginalizes my contribution to the overall victory.  I can see the effect of my healing when I am one of 2 or 3, but not when I’m one of 5 or 6.  I also hate all the slowness that comes when dealing with 25 people over 10.  Having 10 is much more manageable and is always more fun to me.  For me anyways it has never bothered me that the gear was slightly lower in level. I still wouldn’t care either way, what I like most about it is they are not making people feel like they have to do 25 anymore.

If they make it to where you can do the 10 or 25 bosses depending on what you have on an encounter basis, that will be even nicer for certain guilds.  I’ve recently been able to participate in some guild 10 mans and had a lot of fun.  Yesterday I joined in the end of a 25, and well didn’t.    I applaud Blizzards decision to go in this direction and look forward to these changes in Cataclysm!

A little goblin in everlook was the final quest giver to get my Loremaster.  I tell you towards then end there it was pretty difficult to find all the quests I needed.  I was really scraping the bucket!  In the end the last quest I did was ‘Are We There, Yeti?’ quest series that got me, though I had a few other possibilities in my quest log.  My quest log is mighty empty now!  Come to me expansion!

Of course now for my next pointless goal, I intend to probably work on my 40 exalted achievement.  I’m only 3 away, and the goblins seem like good targets for that

So I was doing some questing (almost done with LoreMaster) when I heard some guildies talking about EoE which is the weekly raid.  I have only tried this fight once with the Texas Mercenaries.  I’ve never go the achievement which I wanted.  Plus I wanted more frost badges   So I joined in the conversation about starting up the raid and off we went.

It is a bit frustrating because of  the drakes you have to use in phase 3.  In fact he would go down like nothing if it wasn’t for that lol.  Thankfully I think the vehicle scaling is working in them now too.  I remember at least if he targeted you before and you didn’t put up the shield you died, but now it really didn’t matter.  It was mainly the way you had to move around in a circle I found confusing and avoiding the lightning which was the really damaging part.

In the end on the 3rd and final try 4 of us managed to survive the 3rd cycle and take him down.  I  mostly concentrated on healing and the other 3 dps’d.  In the end when we got close I DPSd a little too, and we won by a hair with the last person up when it ticked over and killed him.  I’m glad I can cross him off my list and I’m not sure I want to do him again though LOL

I got on today and ran my usual daily random for frost badges then jump on my Mage Laneir.  We were about half done with the Nexus when they were saying in guild chat they were short 1 DPS for ICC and did anyone want to come.  I didn’t notice it at first but spoke up a few minutes later and they still needed someone so I dropped out of my random and got on Laneer.

I haven’t raided as DPS much, and I was a little worried about embarrassing myself, but it was with the guild so hopefully no one minded   I don’t consider myself an expert Shadow Priest by any means yet, but when I took it up again seriously 6 or 7 months ago I think I finally got it.  Pretty much everyone in the raid totally out geared me, they run raids far more than I get time to do, and was grateful they brought me   I had not seen past the first boss besides what videos I’ve watched when it was on the PTR.  I wasn’t even friendly yet with the faction, I took my break at the time people did rep runs and such so I’m behind there too.  We did the first boss super easy and then moved onto the second one.  They explained the fights well and I wasn’t doing too bad, no one even died and there were no wipes till we got much further in

I picked up a few items a long the way.  I got a new DPS offhand which finally got me to the hit cap I needed for raiding.  In fact now I’m a little over it and could afford to loose some if an option came up   We did really well on Saurfang, I tried to pay attention to the healing parts of the fight too so I knew what to expect if that was every my job   In this fight I did some person best on DPS, doing 5400, scoring 3rd or 4th in the raid I can’t remember.

We had two tremendous boomkins, that totally destroyed the trash with their AOE’s.  I felt very inadequate when we did trash, first because stuff died so fast that right now I don’t have the tools to deal with that because of the way SP have to ramp up. Second because my AOE wasn’t even close to matching anyone elses LOL.  I think maybe if I was better geared, I always heard positive things about Mind Sear.

The guild made everything look so easy though, we had no deaths or wipes really up till we go to the plague area.  Man the stuff in this area is super UGLY!  We did both these ugly guys successfully.  We wiped twice on Festergut, but got him down.  We one shot Rotface, but lost I think 2 people in the fight.  I can’t believe how complicated these fights get.  You have to keep track of a lot of stuff during the fights.  Being a dot class came in handy on Rotface because of all the moving that goes on in the fight.

Everyone was ready to call it a night at that point but we decided to go see the Professor before we did.  They haven’t downed him yet but they explained the fight well and we gave it a shot.  There is a lot going on in this fight too.  I was extremely thankful for getting the invite and being able to see this much of the dungeon.  I had a really great time DPSing too which I don’t at this level that often.  I found it  relaxing not having to worry about everyone else and just play   I ended up with a few items too, including getting over half way through friendly and picking up my faction ring.  Getting stuff was neat because it is hard for me to find upgrades for Laneer anymore anyplace else, but just the opportunity to finally go and see that much of the dungeon was the real treat for me!

After doing my Frost badge run on Laneer I got out the mage again today.  I was chatting with Inien on the phone while I ran a few instances.  I started asking some questions about when was best to use this or that and managed to increase my DPS quite a bit after that.

Some of my problems are silly, like I totally forgot I had the Mirror Image spell  I’m even glyphed into the thing too! Which I was told isn’t the DPS maxing glyph but it is still fun to have so many of me  Now I just need to remember to use it.  I used it on Loken and it actually worked quite well.    It was at the very end of the instance I remembered I had it though

Inien also talked to me more about how to more efficiently use my rotation.  Suddenly I was always full mana now LOL  I also totally forgot that Arcane Blast goes to 4 stacks, I kept wanting to stop at 3.  I was pretty pleased at what I learned the evening.  I even scored another achievement or two for Lanier.

Speaking of Laneir, I’ve decided to name him Seun when I convert him to a Dwarf.  I hope Blizzard doesn’t make us wait long after Cataclysm comes out to do race changes  I had a Dwarf mage in beta, and was sad when they took them out.  I kept trying to convince Inien into being  a Dwarf, but he didn’t want to be short hehe  They took it out and that was that.

Sorry for the lack of Screenshots today, I totally forgot to take some again.  My son was all over me while playing today and with talking to Inien too I was a bit distracted LOL

Jumped on Laneer to grab my frost badges and see what the weekly raid was.  I was a bit distressed to see it be Eye of Eternity.  I’ve only been in that instance once with Texas Mercenaries ( I miss raiding with them) and it didn’t go spectacularly   My Nexus run was some what cursed as we actually wiped to the mage lady because they got her with a bunch of mobs that kept silencing me   Then we lost our tank after we killed her.  I convinced the DK we had to tank for a while clearing and he actually did fine till a tank popped in finally.  Got it all done and decided to go Mage

Got on Laneir and started some randoms to see if  I couldn’t get me another piece of T9 tonight.  I got in some pretty fun runs with no one over geared.  I don’t have as much fun when I’m with a super geared person I have no hope of beating   I didn’t end up with getting any gear replacements but I did manage to store my Robe which seemed like the best upgrade to take.  I picked up my Khadgar’s Robe of Conquest and got it gemed tonight.  I’m not buying epic gems for him though because he doesn’t deserve the extra costs   So 50 more badges and I can get the pants and I’m good to go there.  Probably will go for the badge hat after that