Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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

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!

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

My day had been long but I wanted to get on and do a Random dungeon for my badges real fast.  I ended up in a CoS which is fine I like this run.  The tank was a bear and a little crazy there towards then end trying to get the last boss because we were a bit slow.  Mostly because two of the party members kept going afk and we were doing it with 3 people.  I laughed at the end because the rouge that was barely there at all wanted to see the damage meters.  The tank did nearly all the damage

Anyways when we were doing the last boss I noticed this attack in the above screenshot.  I don’t recall ever seeing that.  So either the animation never worked on the Mac and they fixed it or they gave him some new ability.  Kind of reminded me of the ice thing some of those new enemies in ICC have the way it shoots out.

Even though I should have gone to bed I still stopped to do my fishing in outlands as well.  Still no croc pet! ARG!  I wonder if I will ever get them all?  Will I still be complaining about this 2 expansions from now? hehe

Need to try to get the Weekly raid in, I hope someone is doing it tomorrow.  I need those badges!  I will be keeping an eye out for some faction grinding sessions in ICC too.

I got on this evening just before 8 hoping to hook up with the guys from Texas Mercenaries for some raiding.  I hadn’t heard anything so went and did my outlands fishing daily, along with the Nothrend and made my cloth runs.  Haven’t done that in a while.  I am my wife and my son have been sick this week so I haven’t played really since I got back from up north.

While I was finishing up and starting some dailies Inien got on and I still hadn’t heard anything so we decided to go off and run the new instances.  I still had quite a few things I wanted to get from them so we decided to do that and then do a random for a hopeful 4th chance at a hilt dropping.  About half way through unfortunately Barb asks if I want to join them.  I kind of have this rule though about bailing on people though.  I think I’ve only bailed on a few REALLY terrible groups in my whole life, I usually try to stick it out.  So I ended up not raiding tonight as I usually would.  It was a bit of a disappointment for me but I’ll have to figure out a new raiding situation anyways since texas mercenaries will eventually find a guild member to heal for them.

I did have a good time with Inien on the runs though.  Half of Reflection was a bit painful as we had an undergeared, unexperience tank, a druid apparently who normally heals.  I think after 4 wipes we finally got through the waves.  What was nice though is I got the Ephemeral Snowflake which I was eager to try out.  They did eventually nerf it putting an internal cooldown on it but it is suppose to provide about 138MP5 which is pretty sweet.  The haste proc on it is scary, my flash heals go off in .8 seconds, Penance in 1.2 seconds.

Oh the best part of the runs was during Forge of Souls, and Pit of Saron I accidentally had my Shadow Gear on.  I wondered why it seemed harder than before and why I had mana problems LOL.  I noticed just before we did the last boss on Pit of Saron.  At least I realized before Halls of Reflection

We finished off the evening running a UP random run and the tanks kept dropping out for some reason. Eventually one stayed.  That went well enough and ended off the evening.  Going to have to try and find a run for the weekly raid this weekend now to get that done.  Need to get back on track of picking up my frost badges.

I hope to find some ICC Rep Runs too, that ring looks pretty damn sweet at exalted

Still off on vacation in the frozen north!  Looking forward to going back to San Diego though Plenty of things left to do in 3.3, and still have my Lore Master to finish   I hope everyone had a good holiday and cotinues too.  You might also notice that I switch Laneer back into Shadows.  It was a bit too quiet in Texas Mercenaries for me.  I enjoy raiding with them, and all of them are awesome but most of the time I was on either by myself or maybe 1 person and for an MMO I was a bit lonely LOL.  So I told Barb I was going to go back to Shadows and if they still wanted me to raid with them that would be great.  I joined up because it was the only way to get a more firmed up spot raiding but that isn’t the only reason I play.  All’s well that ends well, no hard feelings between anyone involved anyways.

I’ve been super busy and playing when I can but that’s why posts have been sparse lately.  I was cleaning up getting ready for my trip when I decided I better get in and at least do my random dungeon.

I got a instance almost immediately, and almost as soon as I loaded the group leader, a warrior named Jerrard says something like “Do you have a website?”.  I thought wow, Yes I do.  He was certainly the first random person to recognize my name from my site.  Even more interesting I noticed they were from Deathwing, my old server.  We started up the fight and then I realized they were all Costa!  I remember that guild from the OOOOLLLLDDDD days.  In fact I was a member of them very briefly.  I don’t remember why I left but I ended up in Witch Hunters right after that.  I looked them up and Fate is still the leader and everything.  That has got to be some kind of record for a Deathwing guild I think every guild I was ever in on Deathwing ended up dissolving at some point.

I mean talk about all the luck though, I know deathwing is in our battle group but I have only grouped with 1 Deathwing person since the system.  To run into someone that knew the site, a guild I recognized, that was just a trip

I’ve got a lot of interesting things done yesterday.  If you check you my achievements you’ll see I finished off my eastern kingdoms lore master, AND finally got that 49 faction with Brood of Nozdormu I have needed for like a year.  Inien, Kymer and I did ALL the bosses in AQ20, it was actually pretty fun   Especially the last guy which we really had to work for hehe

Just been doing instances picking up stuff for my Worgen warrior, questing for Loremaster and working on some factions.  Right now I’m getting the laptop ready with classic WoW so I’ll be able to pick up presents since I won’t be back in time to do it.

What a week!

It has been a while since I posted for some reason.  This time not that I haven’t been playing just so much other stuff going on I never made it back to posting.

In the past week I’ve made use of the new Dungeon system quite a bit, and done plenty of the new 5 man.  I think I’ve not missed a single Frost Emblem yet!  Last week we tried out hand at ICC after we did ToC.  We had a few crazy issues with setting off some traps that made getting through the trash difficult for a while.

We had some good attempts on the 1st boss.  We got him down to just past 50% but we were all so tired at that point we didn’t finish it.  I’m guessing that we’ll get it tonight because we were planning on doing the raid weekly and going straight for it.

I managed to get my Perky PUG after a lot of Pugging this week.  He is so cute   One of my favorite parts was the mail message he came with.  I thought I’d share this in case you haven’t seen it yet

Looking forward to the raid tonight, will be my last one for  week because I’m going on vacation with the wife to the in-laws for Christmas.

Managed to get on tonight and do my random heroic again.  I’m trying to keep up with at least getting that for the Frost badges.  I was looking at the frost badge gear, all very delicious looking but also very expensive.  Everything is 50 plus I believe, I guess Blizzard wants to keep our attention for a while before Cataclysm   This time I finally got a fast heroic ending up in Violet Hold.  It wasn’t too bad except that apparently someone started it before I got in the instance and we had to wait for it to reset, and I had a frustrating conversation with a Shaman trying to tell him how to port into the instance

I picked up the Triumph badge wand for my DPS set tonight after my run.  My Disc gear for the most part works good with Shadow especially if I can keep Spirit gear over MP5.  However I am not hit capped yet so I need to work on that part if I’m ever to be useful raid dps.  For the most part I still prefer healing but I also want to be flexible if the Guild needs me to DPS or just for a change of pace some times   Shadow Priests got some buffs this patch and I need to test them out still.  My intention is to pick up a few more pieces of the Triumph gear, probably the DPS hat, and DPS Shoulders and should bring my hit to where I want it to be, and I increase my DPS capability.  I did play with the new version of VE today and it is nice to only have to cast a buff on yourself

Excited about doing the week raid questions, and trying out Icecrown tomorrow with the guild!  I will remember screenshots!

I got on today and messed a little bit with my UI, my unit frames I had been messing with seemed like I got them too small.  I grew them a bit and fiddled and decided to do my Random heroic dungeon for the frost badges.  I ended up getting a HOL.  Of course we started the instance and the tank went offline.  Then we had to wait to kick him and get another one.  Some people decided to start pulling things (without a tank) while I wasn’t around and that didn’t go well.  Then one of the DPS left just about when we got the tank.  Then we had to grab another DPS it was quite annoying but managed to blast through the instance at a reasonable rate.

After completing that instance I wanted to do the last of the new 5 mans.  Though I was still having issues adjusting to my Pitbull 4 frames, so I decided to turn back on Pitbull3 to see if I could figure out what was so different.  I did that and jumped in the queue and got a group really fast.

The start was even more painful than the HoL though.  First we had a DPS get in and go, “wait this isn’t heroic?”  then he goes offline.  I’m guessing people go offline wait for someone to kick them and then maybe they don’t get the debuff to try again?  Because it continued to happen!  Next some guy comes in and goes “oh no not <insert name>” of our tank who was not even from the same server as the tank and goes offline.  Then two more people just leave the group, then it is just me and the tank again.  Then we get more DPS.  Finally we start the whole thing (which is very awesome btw) and get ready for this huge battle.  Then one of the DPS goes offline AGAIN!  Then we wait, kick him and get one more in  just as the mobs start coming.

So far I’ve done just fine in the normal 5 mans, they have been almost too easy really, I know they are not heroic, but most people I was with out geared them.  Well now I had the benefit of being with people who not only didn’t out gear it but also weren’t very good   We wiped in the first part of Halls of Reflection 3 or 4 times before finally getting past it.  It was always because mobs kept getting on me and killing me.  I can only fade every 30 seconds, and no one was controlling anything.  The fact that I was getting agro was proof that the tank wasn’t picking things up, and the DPS weren’t even hitting it!  The stupid thing is if I wasn’t being hit I could probably have kept anyone else alive.  Even as it was when we finally did get past that part it was because at the very end of it I ended up both poping pain suppression during the fight on myself, and spamming holy nova!

This part of the dungeon is so cool.  You have the Lich King coming after you trying to stop you and Jaina Proudmoore slowing him down and trying to get everyone away. So ya, we wiped here too, twice in fact, and ALMOST a 3rd time   Though it is awfully cool when he kills you   Again they didn’t control the mobs at all, and they didn’t kill them fast enough.  By this time I was super tired too, I didn’t expect to be in this instance for more than an hour.  We got to a point where I had one a Lumbering Abomination on me, I had to resort to Pain Supression and Holy Nova spam to save myself again.  I don’t think I’ve ever faded more than I did in this run before ever.  Looks like I might need to start carrying around some Holy Nova Glyphs LOL

Terrible group aside, the dungeon was awesome.  It really completed a very epic experience of the 3 dungeons.  They were very well thought out and put together.  The quest chain you go through with Jaina was awesome.  I’m loving the new dungeon system on whole though, if going offline is a loop hole I hope they close it!  I can’t wait to get a few more of these new dungeons under my belt.  I’ll need to start doing heroic mode to get a chance at the Hilt and some good upgrades!