Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I got on this evening and eventually ended up in a ICC group.  It was a PUG and turned out to be great.  It was my first run with the 30% buff.  The weekly was Lord Marrowgar so that was  a bonus.  Even got an achievement off Marrowgar   Everyone was well geared and the things went very well right up to Professor Putricide where we lost a tank.  We almost split right there but someone found a tank eventually.  We almost got him first try, but the second try we completely owned him.  I was so excited to finally get him down and complete that wing.

From that point on it was all new territory to me.  I hadn’t seen anything beyond him and was looking forward to it!  The next fight we did was Valithria Dreamwalker.  This was a really neat fight where I had to heal the dragon.  Since we only needed one tank one of the paladins joined me in healing while the rest dealt with all these adds.  when we got the dragon to full we won.  It was a really neat fight and I had no idea something like that existed in ICC.

We did good up to the blood queen where we had some issues with all the coordination but eventually got it down and defeated her!  That is an interesting fight too, not terribly difficult once you get down all the things you have to do.

We lost one of the tanks and everyone was ready to call it but some of us, me included wanted to just see Sindragosa.  So we went ahead and got her and gave her one shot.  Someone got their wife to get on who was a tank to help just once.  We did one run on it and got the gist of it.  I look forward to finishing that one some day I hope!  It was exciting I got frozen first off

Gear wise it wasn’t too exciting.  I was glad to get the badges though.  Only DPS cloth dropped and a lot of plate and a bit of mail.  In the end I did roll on a wand that did have hit on it but was still good.  Also one of the guys gave me some dps pants I might use in my healing set too till I can complete my 4 piece.  Getting new things was fun too, though now I have to gem and enchant some pants   Really enjoyed the group though and got a good run on rep!

This week has been crazy for me!  I’ve been going into work early(even for me!) doing some upgrades to prepare for a big upgrade next week.  So even though I was stressed and could really use some WoW time I was too tired usually to play   I got on tonight though and played a little, talked to Inien on skype.

I did my random first thing, Inien had just finished so I went alone and ended up in someones already started UP.  It is interesting how you get dropped right on the group now, I don’t know when they changed that but it is convenient.  I’m going to guess the other healer left because they couldn’t deal with healing the tank.  At first glance I couldn’t tell who was the tank by HP because we all had about the same amount.    It turned out a really poorly geared Feral DPS Druid was tanking in a Cat spec, and Cat gear

This of course made things interesting to heal but I didn’t have a problem keeping him alive, I am after all awesome   The Shaman in the group was asking me if it was hard to heal him, and I just said it was “interesting”.   The Shaman seemed impressed with my healing ability and kept asking questions about my spec and gear.  We made it through the instance though, no one died and I got that out of the way.

I then went to my Argent Tournament dailies which I’ve started doing again.  Inien was doing them too and we did some of them together.  I was able to get enough seals tonight to get my 25 Talbard and get that achievement!  I found out after I did that one of the guildies has been trying to catch up to my achievement score, I have the second best in my guild and the only reason I’m behind is because I don’t raid as much   So now I’ve got to step it up to hold my 2nd place   Going to have to try and knock out some of the easy ones I still have in general and maybe PvP and Fishing.

Ok,  now onto my big worries.  Inien kept reminding me nothing is close to being done, and I realize that but I see too much thought behind the new Disc tree to not be worried.  It looks to me at first glance they have refocused the tree back towards PvP again!  You can see the talent preview over at MMO-Champion.

I’m talking of course of Atonement, Penitence, Evangelism, and Arcangel.  They are great names, and even cool talents they allow you to do some damage and be healing as well. It is unclear to me if this is thought it will work in PvE or not?  It could be interesting but I don’t think they have ever mixed those two things for PvE before.  Atonement could be interesting letting you heal the tank and melee dps with some of your damage.  The more I thought about it after talking to Inien the more I began to see it as modeled after the damaging healers in some of the MMOs that have come out recently.

So basically now I’m more fascinated than stressed out about it and wish I had a beta invite to try it   With the changes to Disc and Holy, it is possible to get all the new Damage talents in Holy and Disc, all the way to the increased range.  So now I’m thinking you could go with a Disc build that looks like this and it might be an interesting PvE build where you would be tossing out damage and heal/shields.

BETA, where art thou!

So I started off this day but helping some guildies get tickets to Blizzcon!  My family and I were about to head out to the park and noticed it was about 20 till 10.  I got on and asked if he wanted help getting tickets.  So my wife, my friend who was over and myself tried to get tickets too.  I ended up with a 1063 queue position, a guaranteed ticket buyer!  So when I got through the queue, I logged in with their account and switched it to the 4 they wanted and bingo!  They eventually go through on one of their attempts and got some other guildies tickets so it will be a major reunion of Shadows at Blizzcon this year!

I got on later in the evening to maybe run something with Inien.  He got a tell for Sykotic, the leader of Wrath of Vengeance that we will some times raid with asking if we wanted to do 25 man ICC.  So we joined up with them, I still never get a chance to do it, and needed the rep, and badges

We did all the way up to the two ugly guys, Rotface and Festergut.  This was their first Rotface kill on 25 man, so that was neat to be a part of that   Not much caster get dropped at all, just two DPS pieces I believe.  I was just happy to come a long and get rep and badges.   25 mans though are not my favorite as I’ve said before.  I really feel like I’m playing whack a mole, like the old 40 man days but not as bad   I also never feel like I’m making a very big impact on what is happening like I do in 10 mans.  Fezzik and I talked about that a bit, he is one of wrath’s healers and he feels the same way.

Still by the time we finished for the evening I came away with a good chunk of badges, and now well on my way through honored.  I got my honored ring now, yay!  Helped some guildies get tickets, that was exciting too.  Will be fun at Blizzcon with 8 of us!

Got on a little earlier today and ran my daily random and managed to stomp out the weekly raid.  I even managed to get an achievement in my random I didn’t have.

I got back on later that night and Inien helped me visit Zul’Gurub to do some farming for the baby raptor I don’t have.  We reset a few times but it was kind of late when we started so we gave up for the night and killed the raptor boss just to try for his mount.

A nice end to a good Birthday

I got on this morning for a short time, was just doing a little goblin rep farming and low and behold, the Hyacinth Macaw drops!  I was floored! I didn’t think I would get it while I was doing this the drop rate on it is so stupid.  After I did that some one came and screwed up my spawns so I ended up doing my random which was HoS.  Went ok, though I thought it was funny the tank with almost a 5400 GS had never been there before and didn’t know where to go lol.  Inien got on and got that random too and he actually wiped on protecting Bran.  Don’t you love PUGS?

Anyways so happy with my parrot, that made my 120th pet too! What an honor!

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