Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

So I finally got exalted with Tol Barad yesterday.  That makes my 42nd exalted faction!  I’m still a bit away from the mounts, i’ve got like 95 badges now.  The two mounts need tons! (like 200 each) Then there is an interesting Mace upgrade, and trinket I’d like from there too.  I already got the purchasable pet, however I’m still murdering foxes for the random drop one   It’s kind of sad I have tons more things I want from Tol Barad than I do from Justice Points.  I wish I could trade them   Oh well eventually some valor stuff will be pushed down to us lowly casuals

I’ve still not been able to participate in a Tol Barad victory.  Every time I’m on and it is in conflict the alliance is either defending and gets owned, or we are attacking and suck   I have had some fun PvPing as shadow there though.

I haven’t been posting much, but I have been playing here and there.  I went and got a new job so that has added yet another new change, and a slight change to my schedule.  I’ve also continued to have my extra house duties while the wife is still disabled from the baby.  I can definitely tell this expansion is going to be another one where I’m not raiding.  I didn’t raid in BC either because of  my son being born

I’ve slipped in some Cosain play especially after a long day some times just being the shit out of stuff with a big axe is very satisfying   Due to my lack of playtime though he has been a little shelved.  I do find him really fun and look forward to getting him higher level though!

I’ve also been playing occasionally with Seun my Dwarf Mage who is almost 84 now.  Slowly but surely getting his inscription maxed out.  I get him out a lot to farm life for cloth.  Inien has been using all his trying to get his vial of sands   It’s not too hard and I really enjoy Arcane DPS.  Again pelting people with arcane missiles is more satisfying than the slow purple death Shadow delivers.

I’ve made some good advances on my Cataclysm reps on Laneer.  I’ve got 41 now, and have some old reps I’d really like to finish especially the goblin ones.  I’ve also got some great pets recently, my collection continues to grow!  I’m finally starting to squeeze Heroics in here and there with Inien.  They are definitely a challenge sometimes.  Especially with some of the random people we end up with   I’ll try to squeeze out some more posts later!

I have managed to put in some fun time today between chores.  I managed to do some new dailies and some old ones.  Tol’Brad is very neat   I managed to go pick up a few pets and do a little farming for grubby

Did my regular instance run with Inien even.  Of course yet again no cloth ever drops for me.  I wasn’t have too much mana issues anymore and was surviving rapid pull so I thought maybe I could do a heroic.  Inien thought we could give it a shot so off we went!

We ended up in heroic ShadowFang!  Now this run wasn’t completely smooth, it was painful, but I came out of it with new shoulders, and new boots!  I am now more confident I can do heroics so I will try more often now   I also got enough JP to get a new belt, once of my greens that needed replacing   Now I just need to replace my wrists and I won’t have any green anymore.

Despite some of the pain I had a good time tonight.  I know I will pay for this in the morning though

Jumped on after a very long day today and did a round checking my 3 characters.  Been trying to AH Glyphs on Seun to get enough gold to buy epic flight   Laneer I’ve been trying to get the Arcane Elemental pet in Dalaran so I keep running around looking for books.  I’m getting close on that one!

I got on Cosain after that and finished some quests I had in Loch Modan that were about to go grey.  I did some mining and some more jewel crafting.  I wanted to get some more recopies so I headed over to Stormwind.  I was laughing looking at the portal from the train it seems like they forgot to change something.  From inside the tram on the SW side looking out is the old view of SW.  Once you go through the portal you actually go up a hill.  I wonder if they will ever fix that

Eventually I had to go to bed so I can do it all over again!

I spent a little time again yesterday playing with my alt.  Trying not to do a lot of serious questing so I don’t get too ahead of Inien when he makes his worgen, but I figure I have to get to where he will be when he pops out of the starting area   So far the questing has been great.  Awesome stories going on with the whole cataclysm so far.  Almost every quest in the starting area was different.  Well they were all different but only one was really close, picking up the gnomes tools   Of course this time he dropped them because of the earthquake while he was on his way to the newly liberated gnomeregan.    There was a cave in and the only way out of the area was by plane, how cool is that

After I got to Kharanos I got reminded about Pilgrim’s bounty.  So I decided to see how many of these I could get done this year.  Without portals or Inien around it was a little harder but I made good use of the time moving between cities by site seeing, fishing and training trade skills   It is silly how much cooking skill the holiday gives you, I feel really guilty! I got really close to the Turkyinator achievement but being level 7 the mobs slowed me down too much too often

Enjoying Cosain so far, of course he is outfit with the finest heirlooms, pets and gold   I keep leveling even though I’m not trying though just because of running into things and the PB quests hehe  Going to have to make talent decisions soon, I’m level 8 now, and man did that come easy.  Of course my heirlooms helped   I intend to duel spec him when I can and learn to tank.  After all Cosain means “To Protect” in Gaelic!

I started the day off right with a PUG run on Ruby Sanctum!  It was a pretty interesting fight and took us only 1 try to complete.  They had already done the mini bosses but those are a non-event I guess anyways.  Was glad to see that once though at least.

I followed that up with my first complete run of Black Temple.  It was pretty fun actually and that place is massive.  That must have been quite the raid in its day.  I managed to get some good rep in too!  The Illidan fight was neat, especially nice to hear him tell us we were not prepared.

The rest of the day I mess around doing various things and getting on my mage a few times.  To finish off the evening Inien and I ran some pvp randoms for some honor.  We have mounts to get still after all!  I had a good time but couldn’t settle on a pvp spec, I was just messing around and ended up trying shadow in the end.  I haven’t messed with Shadow much in 4.x.

I teamed up with the Texas Mercenaries again tonight for another round with the Lich King.  We were so close last week when they invited me I was excited when I was asked to come again.  As usual I love raiding with them and we managed to pull it off tonight.  Our defeat of the Lich King followed a FLAWLESS attempt.  No one died, everyone did exactly what they were suppose to and brought him some major pain. I was even the first person to be pulled into the sword, I wish I had a screenshot of that!  I was too busy trying to make sure I did everything right

I of course put aside my pride again for this run and spammed the HELL out of Power Word: Shield.  I had read that Disc Priests are very effective against the Lich King.  I typically won’t just spam one spell even if the masses tell me that is the most effective because it isn’t the most fun   But for the sake of getting the Lich King down I made an exception   I don’t think I would have been able to keep up with the shield spamming though after the 4.x changes without my Archangel.  I was able to use that to recover mana each time the Valkyrie would come I’d assist, then pop archangel, BAM I got 5K mana and 15% more healing.  Plus atonement is healing the whole time anyways.  Atonement was severing me well with the ICC buff smite hits pretty hard

I found the cut scene which I had watched before from the fountain, so much more satisfying coming after the fight.  I also found it very satisfying to kill the end boss of the expansion, DURING the expansion.  Though this of course is at the very end of things but still an accomplishment none the less.  I believe most people are trolling when they say he is easy.  It takes 10 people in perfect unison to get him down.  Perhaps in 25 man it is easier?  It has always seemed to me in 25 man you can stand to loose a few people but in 10 man unless you outclass the content you need all 10 people.

Other than that most exciting moment, today I spent most of the time playing my Mage Seun.  The one that was named Laneir I renamed recently.  I plan to race change him to a Dwarf when the expansion hits   I was just running around doing the cataclysm quests for gold and fun plus queuing for dungeon runs.  I also managed to do all the event bosses but I haven’t got any gear from it yet.  Maybe tomorrow?

I also hope to make some attempts at some Ulduar or BT this weekend, Still have achievements to get there!  This was a completely awesome ending to the day though.  I thank the Texas Mercenaries for inviting me.  I really enjoy raiding with them!

The wife and kid went out of town for the weekend so I got to play as much WoW as I liked.  That I did!    I continued some of the Phase 3 quests I hadn’t finished yet.

All the people standing in front of Stormwind was kind of funny.  I only searched the ladies! >:)

I then joined up with a group doing PvP kill the faction leaders quest.  You don’t seem to be able to do it for the Aliance though because Thrall is gone right now.  When we got to thunderbluff the guy was already dead too   I got two of them out of the way though and it was pretty fun.

I ended up doing some PvP after that in random battle grounds.  I actually had a good time most of the time.  Without PvP gear all it took was a stun and I was dead pretty damn fast but hey I’m wearing a bath robe   I played enough till I had enough honor to pickup another one of the faction mounts.  I didn’t remember about this and Inien reminded me.  I had enough to buy two almost 3.

Inien got on and then we ended up doing ZG for mounts.  Then his buddy from work got on and we just did all of ZG for his benefit

It isn’t too hard and didn’t take that long.  We broke for lunch and when we came back we got in an ICC run.  It took a while to get started because it was suppose to be fresh but some how they got it stuck with 7 bosses down.  After finally reforming we were good to go.  The leader knew absolutely nothing, so another guy took over.  Of course everyone left after doing the first 4 easy bosses and I was left 168 freaking rep from exalted.  Sigh….  After the ICC we took care of all our Argent dailies and doing a ToC run real fast for seals.  Still mounts to get after all   We broke for dinner after that.

After coming back we decided to do ZA again, Inien still had the quest he wanted to finish.  On our way over we did a quick UGP for the mount Inien never gets, then off to ZA. We had a lot harder time completing it this time.  I think by this time we were completely worn out.  WoW is like anything else, you are nearly as good when you are rested   After struggling with the Lynx boss we decided to head to bed.  Always another day after all!

Was a very enjoyable day in WoW though I must say   That is why I’m posing this at noon the next day lol

I spent much of my day today pursuing various achievements.  Mainly the critter loving ones This took me to some pretty parts of the world I hadn’t been in a while which is nice considering what is about to happen!

It is also easy to forget how big WoW really is when you stay stuck in the end game content because you just simply don’t go that many places.

I also managed to catch a raid group for the weekly to kill Ignis.  That was fun though we had a hard time holding onto members.  Also it appears ever since 4.01 went live no one wants to tank.  I wonder if it is really THAT bad? We did eventually get this done even though we had some fairly under geared people.

I finished out the day decided to work on some pets I don’t have.  So I figured out the whole book thing for the arcane elemental guy.  Got that down so I at least know where they should be.  I’ll try to make some after server restart arrivals.  I didn’t actually see any books though.  After that I decided to spend some time farming for the oozling pet.  I was doing it in WPL and had a pretty good time even doing it.  The spawn rate was decent and Holy Nova makes it easy enough.  I had about 10 or 12 bags drop but nothing yet.  Heck I managed to get the parrot so sure enough I should be able to get this guy

Relaxing day over all I think

Must people try to skip content.  This is kind of a pet peeve of mine because skipping content only causes me heart ache in the end usually   I felt like healing but with all my raids done and my random done I just decided to do the Icecrown instances.  So I queued up for them and ended up get forge of souls, and then pit of saron, more on FoS in a second   So the people I was with weren’t too bad, but they wanted to do that silly thing where you try to run up past through the mobs as they are spawning.  I’ve only seen this executed once successfully every other time it is a disaster.  This of course was a disaster   In the confusion I slipped down the side of the mountain but thankfully this mountain isn’t solid, it didn’t effect LOS.  So I was able to continue to heal from there.  Two people died almost immediately but I kept everyone else a live and they walked back while we were still fighting.  The group was very pleased with my healing they mentioned several times

Before this I was in a FoS group that for the most part had no business being in the zone they were so poorly geared, my favorite kind of group!   I find these groups the most fun because it is really hard to keep them all alive, and often don’t know what they are doing so it is a challenge.  The tank for instance didn’t know how to tank anything, and he was a deathknight. For the most part they didn’t say much but got a chuckle out of them when they asked if I needed to stop for mana, and I told them “Not until Cataclysm” The point of this story and I kid you not , 12 minute Bronjahm fight.  I’m sitting there going any time folks, but because it took all I had just to keep them alive I couldn’t stop to tell them what they were doing wrong.  Finally someone who knew the fight told the tank what to do and we were able to kill him.  Basically he stayed full most of the fight because they didn’t try to prevent the souls being split off from getting to him   However I can’t knock the group entirely because they managed to amazingly go through the tunnel and not get hit and I finally got that achievement

Looking forward to Tuesday, Starcraft 2 comes out, hope everyone has got their copy ordered!