Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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

Admittedly I did do a quick group run for fun to start, of course Blizzard saw fit to stick me in a Halls of Lightning

Eventually though I ended up in a Black Temple group.  I kinda had a feeling it was doomed from the start but I went anyways.  Over half the people were level 70 and we didn’t have a full raid, just 15 people.  We had only 2 healers, and I was the only 80, and we only had one real tank   I think we did two bosses before all hell broke loose because someone didn’t listen.  When the one real tank left I decided to leave too.

While I was in outlands I stopped by and bought the rest of the nether rays just for the hell of it.  I also picked up all the gryphons I didn’t have for more variety.  Now that my riding skill makes every mount 310% I can fly and ride with plenty of variety!

After that I ended up joining a Sunwell group.  This group at least had no 70s in it.  We still had a serious issue of having people listen, or the raid leader knowing what he was doing   He just thought being 80 made it so we would just win lol  So he kept looking up the strats and did keep winning even if it would take us a few tries.

Despite a lot of set backs and wipes everyone stuck with it quite surprisingly.  Well not quite everyone but a lot of us, we were down to 15 people in the end after starting full.  Also the last boss turned out to be easier than any of the other ones we did

Everyone watched as the little story played out afterwords.  It was pretty cool, bet this was one amazing raid to have done in its hay day

After that I bathed in some pure goodness and went to bed!  A fun night of WoW indeed!

Well got on again for some more fun tonight even though I continue to be exhausted.  Got some more addon updates, yay!  I still fear many of my addons will never be updated so I’ll have to find replacements soon.  Eventually Inien, I and a few guildies ended up doing a Heroic CoS.  I’ve always enjoyed this instance so it was kind of fun.  The interesting thing is they added something to the script.  Just before you go inside after the second boss a crowd appears outside with Arthas and there is a bunch of chatter going on from that.

I had a pretty good time in the instance, especially since Atonement worked this time.  They must have fixed it with the hotfixes they did today.  I was able to lean heavily on it because the content was so easy, I don’t expect to do this though in cataclysm till we outgear the content again.  I did a total of 12.5% of the damage, exactly inline with the tank.  My top healing spells that run was Atonement, PW:Shield, followed by Penance.  Archangel is extremely awesome, and will likely be very useful when we finally have to start worrying about mana again in the expansion

Before I logged off I did a few quests in my healing form just to see how easy it was, and it was pretty easy I must say    I also must say that WoW is a lot more pretty

I kept trying to get a shot of the lightning reflecting in the water and failing.  But the water reflections are pretty awesome

So far I’m pretty pleased with my new spec except I totally messed up and didn’t get Soul Warding so I had a cooldown on PW:S.  It is funny I didn’t notice it last night but I noticed it tonight.  I think because HoR was more chaotic than CoS.  I’m very pleased with how Holy Nova, is working now, I’m also excited that rewnew crits.  Everything seems to be properly giving Divine Aegis bubbles.  The Mastery Stat is awesome, I went and removed the rest of the spirit where I could for now off my gear and put mastery for fun.  I don’t seem to be having mana problems so I can handle it I think.  I’m hoping to try a raid this weekend to see how that is

Though exhausted I continue to get on at night to see what is going on   I managed to find a guild jewelcrafter on thanks to the new nifty guild screen and get some gems cut.  I had to replace 8 gems!  All thanks to Blizzard making all my yellow gems red   Well technically 2 of the new yellow gems were for my new boots I just made   I went with a combination of Int/crit orange gems and yellow haste gems.  Mainly because thanks to the talent changes I lost tons of both

So I got my gear fixed so I got all my bonuses and my meta working again   Had to fix Clique again because the update wiped out all the settings I did yesterday!  Also got some more addon updates that made things better.  My UI is still a mess but finally playable!  So I wanted to go try to heal an instance with my new spec.  You’ll notice I am trying to go with the mix it up Disc Smite build   I’ve been dieing to really try it out, I never did in a real setting on the PTR because of the addon issue   So I was about to join the dungeon queue when Inien gets on.

I check to see if he is up for a run and he had a few things to do.  He was talking about reforging and I forgot I wanted to try that.  I have bracers with Hit on them and was going to convert to crit.  When I got at the reforger I remembered mastery stat.  So I tried it out, it was only 10 gold and I think I got like 15 mastery rating and it increased PW:S by 65.  I thought that seemed pretty good and since I have so much regen still I converted some of my spirit to mastery as well.  Ended up extending the Shield by over 500

So anyways we join the queue and get in, of course of all dungeons it had to be Halls of Reflection.  This dungeon can still be a pain some times depending on how well geared or badly played the group is.  Well what fun it is, everyone is in new specs, and just about every class plays completely different as of yesterday   So anyways we go for it.  I did pretty good, that first set of bosses can be pretty frantic, I tried to use my new abilities but I did keep falling back into my old ways.  I kept think the whole time it doesn’t seem like atonement is working.  After we were done I checked, sure enough no healing from Atonement.  I could of sworn I saw it work yesterday, but now it doesn’t.  So it might have been easier to get into that flow if it had worked

I hope to get on again tomorrow and give it another go.  I’ll try to include screenshots next time, I didn’t think about it with everything that was going on hehe  It was definitely a trial by fire though!

So wanted to really play this evening but after working like an over 11 hour day, come home and run ragged by the kid, give him a bath and get him to bed there wasn’t much left in me to have fun   I got on anyways to make my daily deposit of frost badges but that is all I could muster even if I should be doing some rep and gold farming.  Not to mention I have a 25 man VoA left to do.

Hoping to pull some time on Friday for some ICC.  Going to take the day off, though that still leaves me with just the morning to get something done before everyone gets home.  Very pleased with the site update this morning.  Will have to see if I can do some sprucing up now.

Got on a little early today and managed to get the weekly done.  It was razorscale this week so it was back to Ulduar.  When I walked it I was a little shocked, I don’t know if it is because of the higher quality or the PC just renders different but Ulduar is very pretty   Something seemed more pretty to me anyways hehe

Of course I had to highlight this little shot as well.  After all I don’t think I’ve ever had a computer that could actually render shadows of any kind without dying   So it was kind of neat to see Razorscale’s shadow  over us as we battled.

Ok here is where my “Why Me” comes into play.  I got back on after I got my son to bed, which took too long of course.  I wanted to do my random and what do I get?  HoL… I get this damn instance way too much.  Of course I come into it just as they are about to do the 2nd boss.  Of course after a few minutes I realized the previous healer must have killed himself or went for a walk or had “connection problems” because well the tank had no idea what he was doing.  He was barley geared in blues which I don’t mind but he was terrible to boot!  Then we had a ret pally in greens that some how managed to always get agro from the terrible tank.  We had a hunter which was the only one who knew what he was doing and a terrible cat druid.

So I spent the whole instance frantically trying to keep them all alive.  Failing once loosing the druid and ret pally.  I’ve never used pain suppression so much in my life hehe  So not only did I get silly HoL yet again but I got the group from hell yay.  The terrible tank was a DK which seems to be pretty easy to be terrible at.  I did end up making it through the instance though

After that finished I was just about to log but before I did I saw a tell for VoA10.  Since I’m trying to get as many badges this week as I can I stopped to get that done and out of the way.  Now I just need to get VOA25 and try to squeeze a few ICC runs in and I should get my pants The VoA run was almost fail too but thankfully we had a few really awesome people to make up for the lack luster ones

Managed to get on and run my daily tonight.  My son came over and sat on my lap watching and got really excited.  He really liked all the cool looking “bad guys” in Azjol   After I finished that which went really quick thanks to the group I was with I was trying to find a weekly group.  Wasn’t having any luck so I went and bought the remaining mounts from the main alliance factions I didn’t have.  I had been buying them up just for the achievements.

Just about the time I finished up doing that I saw someone forming a weekly group and joined up.  My son was really excited about Naxxramas because of the large number of “bad guys” I think   He sat and watched until we finished then I had to take him off to bed.

After I got him to sleep I finally managed to get around to getting my Mac keyboard driver loaded on the new PC so I can take screenshots again yay!  So my blog will be pretty again come next post.  In fact it should be even more pretty given how nice the game renders on my new card   Got to love ultra settings + 8x anti-aliasing

Got on to do some more badge farming this afternoon just to get my daily and weekly done.  I doubt I’ll have enough energy to do anymore raiding than that.

Got the weekly done but SC2 is always pulling me back right now I have a hard time wanting to go into WoW. 

Really looking forward to my new computer.  I hope to see it shipping this week!

Did a fast run this evening of H-VH just for the badges of course.  I notice this week we have the easy razorscale I’ll have to try and get that done this weekend.  I just did another quick shot so I could go try and play some SC2 again   The single player campaign really drives you to move forward, the story is really good and the missions are quite unique and fun

The other thing I really need to get done is get the site on WordPress 3.  I have a customized template and such so I haven’t been looking forward to trying to do this upgrade but 3.0.1 just came out so I guess I better get with it.   So expect that to happen this weekend too.

I also received word my new computer is being built, hopefully I will have it some time next week!  This would be good because SC2 doesn’t run so hot on my Mac   Based on the screenshots of Cataclysm I have a sneaky suspicion that neither would it.

I jumped on when I got the chance just for a quick badge run.  Inien was in SC2 playing the single player campaign and thanks to the new realid system I was able to chat with him while I did my instance run

Of course one of the real reasons I got on was to see my new pet mini thor   You all know how much of a pet nut I am and this pet is exceptionally cool I must say!  The model is very well done and he is highly animated!

He constantly kept jumping up and flying around me and shooting stuff!  I kept him out during my Azjol-Nerub run   Definitely made the CE worth it for just him alone!

Of course the other big news of the day was my decision to finally re-get my gaming computer.  I kept going back and forth on if I should upgrade my Mac or just buy a gaming PC.  My Mac still does everything just fine and you are really limited on video card choices with the Mac as well.  As you recall late last year I tried to buy one but then it got back ordered and then delayed and eventually I just canceled it with the intention of ordering it again after the first of the year but it got delayed a bit

I decided to skip SSD right now and just stripe some really fast HDs, went with the Geforce 470 as it seems to edge out ATI, and grabbed the i7 930 as it is the sweet spot on price and seems to be very easily over clocked to 4Ghz

• ASUS P6X58D-E Mother Board
• Intel® Core™ i7 930 Processor (4x 2.80GHz/8MB L3 Cache)
• 6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1600 – A-DATA Gaming Series
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 – 1.5GB – EVGA Superclocked
• 600 GB WD Velociraptor HARD DRIVE — 32M Cache, 10000 RPM, 6.0Gb/s – Dual 600GB Drives (1.2TB Capacity) – RAID 0 High Performance
• 875 Watt — Thermaltake Toughpower XT TPX-875M Power Supply
• Thermaltake Element G Gaming Case – Black

This should last me for a while and I’ll be able to hopefully try out some other PC games I haven’t been able to play without a lot of pain in dual booting.  I ordered this from ibuypower again mainly because I don’t think I have the patience to build it myself anymore hehe  Their custom built machines are pretty reasonable, and they have good build quality.  I’ve known quite a few people who have got some good quality machines from them.  I don’t know when it is coming in yet, but I will probably take that week off work to play with it!