Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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.

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 haven’t been playing much or at all for the past few days.  I think I’ve been getting burned out, and part of was from too much routine stuff I think.  More recently I’ve been playing more like a job than to enjoy myself getting on doing the exact same things in the exact same order every day.  What I really needed was to take a break, rest, come back and find the fun again.  But I couldn’t do that because of this Holiday, children’s week.

I think this holiday made things worse, mainly because it had as part of the holiday meta achievement a very annoying  PvP one.  To PvP now I really have to be in the mood.  Some times I enjoy it, some times I don’t.  Being forced to have to complete some arbitrary PvP tasks in all the BGs was very annoying to say the least.

I nearly gave up on the idea to complete them.  If it wasn’t for strong encouragement by Inien I probably wouldn’t have even logged on again.  In the end I did manage to finish them last night, even had a little fun at times.

The main problem, and most annoying part I thought was the AV request.  You were to assault a tower with your orphan out.   I’m not sure what Blizzard was thinking with this one, here is your problem.  AV is an original raid instance, that is 40 people in which there are a grand total of 4 towers in which you can assault.  Even when I was doing it, at the end of the event there were always more than 4 people who had orphans out.  In the case where I was successful I ended up racing at the front of the pack, skipping the first tower and going for the second, and making it to the top this time without my orphan poofing.  Yes you know how some times if you cut corners or go up or down the pets get lost?  That happened to me on one attempt of this yesterday.

When I got on late this evening the first one I attempted was Eye of the Storm.  This is my least favorite BG.  The objective on this one is to capture the flag while your orphan is out.  So I ran straight for the flag, someone got to it before me, but the horde were distracted so I waited.  As a miracle of old, I was in a BG with people who knew what they were doing.  They kept the horde so busy the alliance had middle the whole time capping.  So I went ahead and got my cap in second.  Got that one done, although I wanted to stay and win this BG for once I didn’t have a lot of time and AV popped up, I went off to that one and failed

Next I tried a WSG, this one required you to return the flag which I was never good at because someone always clicked it before me.  This game started off horrible, the horde capped on us so fast there was no time to even contest it.  Second cap came nearly as fast.  At that point the group got serious, I helped on defense and chased down them on the 3rd run.  Despite many horde trying to stop me I succeeded at slowing down the flag carrier till some dps got to me and helped me kill him, I returned the flag yay!  I was having so much fun though that I stayed, and returned the flag many more times.  I also assisted a Pally flag run to our victory!  It is kind of funny with my PvP/Holy DPS build I can withstand a lot of crap,  depending on the situation it can take 5 people to actually stop me

The AB one I was able to complete yesterday when I had most of my frustration.  The AB one requires you to assault an enemy flag, not hard to do since there are so many opportunities to do that.  I would get to a flag and just be relentless, ignoring all they tried to do to me because of my sturdiness

In the end I think it was my frustration with the game over all that made me dislike this achievement the most.  I do think the AV one is stupid though, I’m sorry 4 towers for 40 people isn’t right   This holiday is complete and can go on with my life now

I got on in the afternoon to do some questing.  My son was still down so I decided to run an AB, something nice and non committal.  It was crazy I got in this amazing group that did a 5 cap and held it till we won.  Of course the following game was almost the opposite

I came back again late late that night.  I was just going to finish some dailies and go to bed.  I remembered Noble Garden was tomorrow so I decided to park myself in Kharanos before bed.  When I got there I found out it had already started.  Not everyone had realized it yet I think there was not a lot of people.  I camped out a good spot and managed to get quite a bit done.

After that I still couldn’t get enough so I took my bunny rabbit, which I luckily looted from an egg and ran off to get the bunny some love.  This shot was as I was making my way through Darnasus.

It turned out to be a crazy evening I had totally not anticipated.  I think I was up till like 1am getting chocolate eggs

If you read yesterday’s post you know that I abandoned Shadow and gone back to a Holy DPS build for my second spec.  Now there isn’t enough talents to use for all Holy dps (it isn’t a serious spec) so I’ve also spec’d for PvP survivability.    What I ended up with is this.  I managed like I mentioned yesterday to squeeze in Body and Soul which is fun, and the poison cure turned out be very useful   I also squeezed out a point into Spirit Tap.  This seems to be more than enough to make my questing mana issues not an issue

I tested it out while collecting stone for the folks at the argent tournament.  The little robot guys get in your way and I was happy to smite them!  The smite glyph is totally fun, increasing the damage of smite by 20%.  What is even cooler is the reflective shield which can crit, happens to  proc SoL!  So I was back to dpsing like I used to when I was holy and enjoying it.

While I was doing my Tournament quests I did get a tell from one of the good folks at Texas Mercenaries inviting me to do 10man Mally with them.   Now I’ve wanted to see this fight for a long time but it is a chicken or the egg thing.  No one will let you go to any Mally run unless you have already been on a Mally run.  When he asked I simply replied I haven’t been yet, and his reply was “ouch!”.  So there was a long long pause, I’m assuming they were talking about it.  They told me that I was a really awesome healer and they would teach me the fight.  It was fairly late though, and I was pretty worn out so I decided to reluctantly decline.  I let them know I would study the fight and if they want to invite me next time I would totally be up for it.  So I’m going to have to go practice on the Drakes by the Nexus, and doing some reading/video watching on the fight.  Having done all the quests in relation I really feel I owe it to Mally to kill him

I also tried my first Strand of the Ancients tonight.  I have to admit I didn’t really know what to do I know it involves destroying walls, sort of a mini winters grasp I think.  I did well though, even though I have no PvP gear it was quite difficult for them to kill me without bunches of people.  I can’t say I really enjoyed this one though, I would have more fun with a AB or WSG I think.  We didn’t win though so just for the achievement at least I am going to try to win won   I did get some sort of kill achievement in there though.

Before I logged off I realized I could rearrange some of my DPS and healing gear to get me some more crit.  I wanted to maintain some hit though because when I was wearing just my Disc gear smite misses too much.  Inien told me that all I needed was 4% or as close to it as I could get and what I found is I could have just a tad under 4%, and have 27% Holy crit   I think that will suit me fine, and if I can ever pick up some more crit for my Disc gear maybe I can get more hehe

I got on today and started doing my tournament quests.  The server was still having issues after today’s patch and was pretty laggy.  I was having an issue getting them done, this was early too.  My son was in a late nap, I managed a few quests then they were rebooting and I logged.

I later got on and the server lag was even worse.  Trying to put in talents was painful.  It was so painful I accidentally put an incorrect point in my shadow build and had to fix it.  When I went to the city I noticed they still had not fixed the minimap graphic glitch like they said they were going to.  After I reset my stuff again someone turned me on to that new feature where you set everything THEN you learn it.  OMG this is a life saver when the server is lagged to hell because you don’t have to wait for the database every time you click a talent.

After that flub up I went with a group on the daily Heroic CoS.  I really enjoy CoS, and originally I was going to heal it but they invited another healer and I ended up as dps.  This is where the trouble began.  I really only dps’d an instance one other time, it was are super amazing heroic obsidian sanctum.  I didn’t do nearly as well in this run, doing about 2300dps over all, and a rogue completely owned me on damage.    I’m still learning the rotations and such so that didn’t bother me as much as the fact I just didn’t find it fun.  I suddenly came to the realization I don’t like Shadow dps it isn’t fun to me at all and that I’d much much rather be healing.

So I made the decision to give that up, I thought well maybe I’ll waste some more gold and spec into a Holy DPS/PVP build as my secondary.  Well just after that I switched to Disc mode and it forgot all my Shadow Talents (which it isn’t suppose to do anymore).  Of course I was like awesome!  You might laugh but I created a really fun build to quest in, and maybe do BG when I want to   So with this build I ran around and did what quests I could in the horrible lag, then gave up eventually.  I don’t know if mana will be an issue, I might have to some how work spirit tap into it.

Before I went to bed I just had to try it out PvP.  I of course have no PvP gear anymore really but if anything I’d just do BG anyways.  I was amazed at how well I did, I had a blast too, with a slighty more beefy shield, like every damage reducing PvP talent in Disc/Holy I actually had a tiny bit of survivability   You can see me here as I ran the flag back.  I knew they were about to cap so I hid in there room for a minute or two and as soon as it was back ran all the way back.  A frost mage tried to stop me on the way who failed, as did a DK

I don’t know if it was a fluke, but I did pretty good and managed to really have fun   I got 4th on the healing meter without even really trying.  That was all almost entirely through Prayer of Healing   Then when I got out and was heading off to bed I realized I wasn’t technically even using any glyphs.  Going to have to check out what options I have.  I also remembered that I had forgot that you can flash heal instead of smite with surges now   I really missed SoL

Anyways I’ll see where is takes me.  Looks like Laneir my Mage will still get to be my DPS, because I DO enjoy arcane DPS