Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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!

Maybe it is because I haven’t done one in a while or because I have so little time anymore but my goblin rep grind seems slower than normal.  Even though I know it couldn’t possibly be as bad as when I did the Timbermaw 1 rep at a time before they changed the system all the way to exalted.  That rep had the occasional turn in item do as do the water waste guys I’m doing now.

I got DK as my heroic daily today which I hadn’t done in a while.  The group had lost their healer but I joined them still at the first boss.  The tank was well geared but all the DPS were recent 80s I can tell.  I never mind not overgearing and instance, in fact they are way more fun that way

I finished up the DK run which didn’t take much longer than usual and then started my quests in icecrown for the argent tournament.  I put myself in the looking for raid system for a 25 mana voa, Inien was finishing something else and mentioned he did the same.  I continued my quests in icecrown and then got a VOA25 invite, they were full though, and had apparently been wiping

I thought oh boy but stayed with them, a bunch of people left and I got them to invite Inien.  I told Inien what he was in for and finally after a long wait we went again.  I could tell the issue was their healers were severely under geared, but they had insane dps but then they wouldn’t switch to the frost thingys when they went up.  Anyways we didn’t wipe but a considerable number of people died and in the end the of this story Inien got the mage pants that dropped from this boss with a roll of 25 against 2 other mages, and it completed his 4 piece set!  Grats to him   One guy even offered him 6k gold for them hehe

After all that Inien and I finished up some tournament quests and I think we might have done a ToC in there some where too.  We went over and hit up ZG to try again for my silly baby raptor pet and for some more mounts for him.  Of course none of it ended up dropping.  We did about 3 tries for the pet.  It is a good distraction anyways

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 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

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

I just jumped on tonight to do a quick random when I got Heroic CoS.  The changes they made to speed it up really seemed to help because that didn’t take nearly as long as it used to.  You didn’t have to wait through all the stuff in the beginning and you never had to way for Arthas to get his butt in gear!

Since that went so fast I went and completed a few quests for my lore master before bed.  Man I’m started to get low on quests now I’m going to have to go hunting.  I have just about 50 quests yet to complete too!

Got to jump on again and sneak in a few quests working towards my Loremaster achievement.  I wasn’t that far off from it and I have wanted to complete it now for a while.  I wanted to get it done before Cataclysm just in case things change.  I managed to fly around and turn in a bunch I had done and even complete a few more.  Still have plenty of quests, haven’t run into any hard spot yet.

Well see ya next weekend WoW!

I think anyways.  I have been getting the “urge” back and was reading MMO-Champion today and thought man I want to play.  I came home from the mall, my son was asleep so I got on Laneer.  I wanted to heal so I jumped in a random daily and got smelly DK.  We blew through it really quick!  After finishing I got hooked up with the weekly raid which was razorscale.  So I got a lot done on my first real day back.  I was feeling very good with all the warm greetings from the guildies too

Man and right before I go on vacation for 3 days   Ahh well it is to Disneyland, yay

Things have gone on in WoW since I’ve gone on my break as one would expect.  I logged on Laneer the other day finally after getting him unstuck.  I had got disconnected in a random, not logged back in for like 2 weeks, logged in when the server was having issues, but never got loaded, gave up and that resulted in him stuck in the abyss some where   Anyways the first thing I see is this statue.  The cut scene attached to it is awesome.

I have logged on recently for a few questing sessions with Fesstir.  I really like the sound of the new warlock changes in cataclysm so I thought I would work him to 80 when I could, though I dunno if I will make that before it comes out hehe

I took advantage of the new mount changes to get him his flying skill super cheap   So now he has his flying and I happened to have just enough fel iron to make his flying machine.  Though he of course can’t fly in northrend.

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!