Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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

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!

I got on hoping to get the Weekly Raid done before it resets tomorrow but it didn’t look good.  There seemed to be very few people trying to do any raids at the moment.  Inien was on attempting to do the same thing.  I put myself in LFR then went and did the fishing daily and then afs (away from screen) looking at some forums checking back fro tells.  Sure enough I got a tell from someone and joined up and got the last position.  It was a 10 man group and we end in and did it in about 15-17 minutes or so.

That went so well I decided I might as well stay on long enough for a random dungeon daily as well.  Of course Inien was still looking for his weekly raid group and was cursing me that I beat him!  He was wishing a long painful instance with crappy dps!  I laughed because I got Azjol-Nerub!  Certainly one of the fastest to run.  We had a Elemental Shaman pulling about 4500 DPS that made up for the other two sub 2k DPS we had.  The run went smoothly and I managed to log out with time left on my food, no deaths, under and hour

This was great because I was so worn out but still enjoyed my time.  I have been swapping back and forth trying to decide if I liked my Ephemeral Snowflake more than my other regen trinket.  I think I sit around in regular instances so much I get a lot more mana back from the 54mp5 than I do from the 11mana per heal.  While I was in Naxx I think it was useful.  In a raid situation where you are constantly casting the whole time I think it makes more sense.

I need to take some time to finish up my loremaster here soon too.  I’ve got quite a few quests completed in my log to go turn in right now actually.  I’m not that far away from completing my goal anyways.  Then I intend to farm goblin rep to complete my 40 exalteds

I only ended up playing during my sons Nap today.  I managed to just do my cooking/fishing dailies then head out for the heroic daily.  I got in a group with a very geared Pally tank, and DPS warrior.  The Tank had 42k HP and was very good.  The DPS warrior was doing on average 5200 DPS though there were fights where he did over 7k!  To think I used to laugh at DPS warriors at the beginning of WOTLK.

We did Azjol-Nerub so fast that we went and did ToC afterwards.   The DPS warrior brought his Elemental Shaman though and said he would swap back in his warrior for the last boss.  I told him it didn’t matter but he kept insisting we would need his amazing DPS lol  Eventually I convinced him I managed to drag people with worse dps than his shaman through the instance before.   We won and defeated the BK, but the Enhancement shaman, the worse DPS in our group complained because he died standing in the middle of all the exploding ghouls.  There wasn’t a lot I could have done about it, I can’t heal stupid as they say.  They were all in one place and he had to stand on them when they exploded lol

Just another adventure in the day of a Dwarf Priest

I got on this evening hoping to catch the tail end of someones 25man Naxx or something.  Hopefully for the chance at some gear, and also for more valor badges.  I am still on course to get some new pants finally soon Anyways I was fishing in WG for the daily when we won WG which hasn’t been happening much lately. Two people were starting a 25 man VOA.  One required the achievement for emalon, the other did not.  I tried to convince the one that did to take me anyways, it is a dps fight but ended up going with the other group.  We could not kill emalon, in fact we wiped to the trash in front of him.  For once though we went and killed the other guy since it was late Monday night.

This was Inien and I messing around in town after our respective raids.  He drank a lot of pygmy oil, with a small feast, and baby spice!   Me I’m just on the baby spice and feast!  Shortly after this I got in a Azjol group and they needed dps so I got Inien to come.  It was a good group, between Inien and the Destruction Warlock we were cruisin.  Inien even got his 500 heroic badge  achievement while we were there.  I’m still a little ways away for mine, about 65.  I decided I want to trade my gloves in for the healing version ever since they change regen around so I need some more badges anyways.   I am just not lucky enough to win the ones off OS25

Of course the reason I am short on badges is I started up Fesstir again.  I thought it might be fun to play the ol’ warlock so I got him ready and took him to northrend.  I was level 68, quickly 69 and half way to 70 now!   Was a good day.

I had a very long Saturday that didn’t seem much like one.  I was in to work before 4am, I was up at 3am.  After I got home around 8:30 I played with my son and various house hold stuff then around 1 it was time for a rest.  I couldn’t fall asleep so I decided to relax a bit and get on.  When I did so I made the bad choice to do a quick Heroic Azjol-Nerub run.  Oh what a great group I ended up with   Besides being terrible and wiping 4 times on the first boss, we wiped on the spider boss too!  This is because it bug (no pun intended) out, I have seen this before.  On the second time he did it again, but this time I didn’t have 5 or 6 adds on me and I was able to keep everyone alive and we won, getting the achivement of course

Needless to say there was nothing restful about the experience and I passed out on the floor shortly after for a much needed nap.

Then when I get on later also not intending to stay long because of tomorrows festivities I decided to try for an OS group.  I got into a OS25 run and while I was waiting for it to come together I did some rat fishing   I had great concerns about this group when the leader asked how many healers you need   Then later after we get 25 he asks who wants to be leader he doesn’t want to be he was just starting the group …  I was amazed that we won actually.

Of course being the crazy guy I am I stayed around for the OS10 the guy wanted to do.  He had to lead it himself but we all just did it so it shouldn’t be so hard to remember what we did.  On the first drake we nearly wiped as you can see in this shot   Then on the second drake again we nearly wiped.  The 3rd drake I think we only lost 1 person.  We managed to not loose anyone on Sartharion some how.  It was also the longest OS10 run I’ve ever done and was soooo ready for bed afterwards

I got on this evening with the intent of getting in some of the quick raids like OS and Vault.  I managed to quickly get into a 25 man Vault just after I got my cooking quest finished.  It didn’t take them long to fill up, the healers were the only thing in short supply tonight it seemed.

We all got there and started up.  Things looked ok DPS  wise but as we started and the fight was dragging on I thought it seemed like people got lazy or something.  Sure enough we wiped to him…  This has only happened to me once before, that is how much of a  wuss he is you know   We came back though with a vengeance and defeated him.  I was the only Priest in the raid and guess what dropped, yes Valorous Raiments of Faith.  So of course I had no problem winning it   Perfect for my Shadow set!  Though currently my i214 robe is still more than good enough for my shadow set, I am trying to get my hit up and this will definitely help that out.

After that run I couldn’t find another raid that was starting except for a bunch of Naxx10 which I didn’t feel like doing.  So I got put myself up for Azjol-Nerub to make another run at that wand just for the hell of it.  I ended up going with a pretty good group and we tore through everything pretty fast.  We did wipe on the last boss because he glitched and appeared way far away from where he was and pounded, killing me  and 2 others.  The hunter that was with us says he sees it all the time, but that was my first.

While we were finishing the last boss off I get a tell from a guildie if I wanted to do Old Kingdoms.  It is about 40 minutes to bedtime, and apparently I didn’t at all recall how long the instance ran and said if everyone was pro I’d go.  So I joined right after I finished azjol then someone was already there and we summoned.  We were quickly in the instance but I forgot how big of one it was.  I didn’t get to go to bed till about an hour later.  On the bright side guildie needed the epic bracers that dropped off the last boss.

The last boss went very interestingly though, all the dps died to shadow players and it left me and the tank to finish the boss which we did.  The boss is a wuss the only hard parts is fighting your group.  Usually I don’t even fight them I just fear them and wait for everyone else to come help me.  I actually ended up having to kill mine so I could go help them

I’m not going to lie I’ve been fairly down lately.  I haven’t been playing much so maybe it is just stress build up.  WoW is really my only release at the moment.  I got on tonight with some reasonable play time available and went off questing but what I really needed to do was heal.

I had put myself in LFG for Heroic Azjol-Nerub because I’m still after the silly wand that drops there. There was like no action in LFG channel so I had little hopes.  I got invited to a group though eventually that was full and ready to go.  Thank god it actually had decent people in it, because though I wanted to heal I didn’t want to repeatedly wipe because people suck.

We tore through Azjol no problem, of course the stupid belt dropped again and we headed out to Utgarde Pinnacle.  That went pretty fast though we did the silly spear farming method, I prefer to just run the gauntlet myself it’s more fun but whatever.  No mount from the guy, never seen that mount it must have a stupid drop rate.

Finally we headed over to Gundrak.  I considered going to bed, but this enhancement shaman really wanted to go and I figured I’d be fast.  It was a quick run too.  The shaman didn’t get what he wanted though.  He was probably the best Enhancement shaman I’ve seen.  I almost thought there was no such thing, he was pushing around 1800 dps and he just turned level 80 so apparently there are a lot of bad shaman around.

We ended up with 10 dream shards, and 2 crystals which wasn’t a bad hall.  I must say I was a bit rejuvenated by the playtime.  I’m glad I found that group and got in some fun stress relieving runs.

Got on and did a Heroic Azjol run for the daily.  I ended up with a group of people that actually NEEDED the gear from there.  So needless to say it was not smooth

Then I went around and did my dailies.  I really like how big my chains look on these giant undead guys

I’ve been running over to Fjord to do the one and only repeatable way to currently increase your Explorer’s league faction

As you can tell my recent Achievements I also did some cooking and fishing.  I was working on my Northrend Gourmet and I managed to finish out my 450 fishing

I did a lot of farming of mammoth meat too for my cooking.

Today I managed to do something I’ve never done before.  I got into a PUG raid where they DIDN’T take too many healers.  I did a 10 man Obsidian Sanctum because I knew again I would miss the guild one Sunday (middle of the day).  I was shocked when I realized that the only other healer was a restro Druid.  I actually got to do something and make a meaningful impact!  With 3 healers in a 10 man you are almost fighting over who gets to heal the people.  I don’t understand why people do that, it just makes everything go slower, it doesn’t make it safer   It was the first raid I’ve done in WOTLK where I felt I contributed something if you can believe it or not.

I don’t know what the optimal fun number of healers would be for a 25 man, maybe 3? 4 tops probably.  I think every 25 man I’ve done has had 5 healers.  It is always too many and again I feel worthless.  Mostly because everyone has tools to often get to everyone before me.  I don’t have much raid healing ability at the moment besides PoM.  The Shamans, Druids or Holy Priests get to everything before me.  Most of the time I give up and just do crappy dps till we get to a boss I can be somewhat useful on.  With less healers I actually get to do something and it becomes more fulfilling, and challenging.

After that satisfying run I went and did my oracle dailies and ended up watching LFG looking for my 25 man vault.  That never ended up coming but I figured I wanted to do something else so I checked the Heroic Daily was Azjol-Nerub.  So I checked out LFG and noticed a Prot Warrior sitting in there and just asked him if he wanted to start a group.

He was all over it and we quickly formed a group and went over there.  Everyone turned out to be pretty good quality and we had no problems.  No one died till the very end where the Feral Druid got caught in the pound.  Other than that it was super smooth.  A good way to end the night!