Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I got on this moring while the wife and son were out and managed to get in a group for Utgarde Keep. One of the guys in the group had the item from the trading card game that makes vanity pets big.  That must have been what they were testing that time on the test server

Token giant dancing murky shot!

My first up close view of these proto dragons, eventually saw them outside too.  Man they are ugly!

The first boss comes after you kill all these guys at the table.  It was a caster and relaitvely easy at this point anyways

This was the last boss at the top of the keep.  I was so sad because I didn’t have the quest to kill him yet.  When I found it later I discovered the reward was for a ring that was way better than one of my current ones   The first upgrade I have seen.

You know how usually when you save someone they either disappear, or run away, or stand there.  Well now they run around and help you!  One was a mage and frost bolted the enemy, another I got was a Priest who casted Prayer of Fortitude on us all and healed us too.

This spirit quest was confusing me at first.  The Lich King was a red hearing.

He pinned me to the ground then when it wore off I died   Then I was stupid enough to get too near him again and he said “You are either Persistant or stupid” and killed me again

I ran through like 100s of undead and managed to live to see this.  Of course it was a quest item for a quest I didn’t have yet.  I eventually found that quest and he puts a buff on you that keeps the undead at bay.  But hey I got here by myself before that!

I got in beta today with the explecit goal of doing an instance.  I sort of succeeded

I have been seeing this since the day I logged into beta but hadn’t shared it.  There is a graphic glitch that occurs when your mounted to anything.  You randomly tilt back like this and look goofy

On my long run to Azjol-Nerub I saw these polar bears.  The mobs are even more animated and seem to do more than randomly path now.  It is neat to see the one with a baby

I made it! Everyone had to run we couldn’t use the stone.  I thought initially it was broken then I find out this is a 72-74 zone.  The first boss is a wave sort of attack.  All the mobs in this instance are really creepy.

This was standing over by the second boss which we never killed.  I don’t think it was level or equipment, all the players were in like sunwell level gear.  The tank was just not listening.  We were trying to figure out how you deal with them.  Basically you kill mobs while your standing on this web and a big giant spider comes closer and closer.  The boss attacks some of the mobs and I think you wait till he gets to the middle but the tank kept running to him agroing tons of mobs.  I kept everyone alive surprisingly long time.

This instance looks like it is going to be a blast though

I decided I wanted to try the Howling Fjord questing area instead of Borean Tundra which I had been in.  I like Howling Fjord better so far.  For one it is the dwarf settlement   Two the music is awesome!   It is sort of scottish sounding

The ticks for holy nova have the fire bolt animation now as one part of its upgrade.  The 1.5 second cast you get with talents is awesome, not to mention all the extra damage it does.

I was exploring when I ran into this area with shipped wrecks and undead giant guys.  It had this cool earie fog effect while you were there.  Very spooky!

I copied over Mage Laneer at Inians request (he still doesn’t have his beta invite) to test something he heard.  That the AOE’s could crit now.  I tested it out with this spec, and it was pretty awesome.  The mobs have a 85% snare on them, and frostbite procs so much they never got to move.  Another change was they removed the nerf way back when making the ice break easier.  So stuff stays still even if you crit it!  I took some videos as well.  Don’t laugh at me though I’m not a awesome mage, nor did I have my UI or any macros/keybindings set   (Movie1,Movie2)

I went back to playing with things.  I so far have liked the new light well.  Though I never thought I would say this, I think I’ll make it part of my spec.  I think it will find all sorts of uses for it.  I’ve even been using it in an area I’m questing in as a way to heal myself without stopping what I’m doing.

If you kill animals now in the expansion you get bloody.  This makes some new druid group that hates nessing hate you.  A stupid rogue snuck up on me and slayed me after I had that debuff on me so I got a blood red angel

I hope these are place holders, because the model is the same as outlands. Anyways I thought the process number was funny.

Ran down into this really neat area where this level 69 giraffe was.  But I ended up turning back because there were packs of level 69 wasps running around too hehe

Things have been pretty interesting so far.   The server has lots of trouble, world server crashes a lot, but then that is why we are all here to crash the world server!

I had a very long, fun and tiring day today so I didn’t get on much but did sneak into beta to take a peep.  The first thing I did was of course fill out my talents.  I went with this level 70 build because I knew I would be wanting to level and heal the instances.  I have more than enough money to spec many times so I’ll probably play with a lot of specs

I went over to stormwind, I was very interested to see how they fit a port in it.  I remember the first time I read that I was like stormwind doesn’t have a port!  The map looks way different.

The harbor looked pretty amazing, and wrather huge too.  There was one problem I encountered.  The boats don’t pull up close enough to the docks.  I ran right up to the boat and didn’t notice and fell right into the water.  Then the client crashed, yay!  When I got back in the boat was still there but that crashed me again.  Then the northrend world server went down, no boat that time   Finally I was able to head out to northrend, you have to jump on the boat from a log

This side looks a lot different from where we were during blizzcon.  I can’t even remember the name of this area, like howling something I think.  It was fairly desolate looking and the little city here looked heavily under construction

The interesting part about the city is that it was constantly under attack by the lich kings armies.   I think this definietly sets the mood.

I tried many of my mods, but just like Inian had told me, they broke nearly everything.  Everything but one mod, THANK GOODNESS…   If I can have one mod, this would be the mod   Clique, my click casting mod still worked!

The achievement system looks really fun!  This is going to be something that they can update and do all sorts of things with.  A blue on the forum said it has no limitations. The statistical information it is going to track about your character is awesome too!

I look forward to being able to do a few quests tomorrow hopefully.

The download was complete this morning.  After a lengthy install it then had to do another 50meg patch.  Then I did a quick login just to see Laneer had been copied over and he was!

Surprisingly the first thing i noticed, well other than the cool login screen was my weapon had an enchant graphic.  Although you can’t see its entire coolness without animation it is a nifty wavy holy looking thing. Woot!  More tonight when I can play around more.

My Blizzcon key paid out in full today when the WOTLK beta invite arrived in my mailbox at 5:03 pm. I did all the signing up, copied over Laneer and Mooku for now, and am downloading the client as we speak.  The download is a large 1.88GB download so it is taking its time.  It has about an hour left but it is time for bed so it will have to wait till tomorrow evening for a looksee.

Of course stay tuned for all my adventures and feedback from Beta.

Sorry for the lack of posts. Blogger was hassling me again and I hadn’t had time to catch back up. But I had to get in a post today.

Well there was an update yesterday and we got nerfed! Of all the things the Priests need addressed they decide to play with the 3 piece bonus of Trans… They removed the 15% mana regen while casting and replaced it with 20/5 mana. There is a thread already going over what this means, but for most people wearing trans, myself included this is a nerf.

Someone also mentioned the healing Tailoring Specialization patterns were in and they have a set bonus of Allow 5% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. The healing on this set is pretty nice 286 for the 3 pieces, no stats though. Has a few sockets you might be able to get something good on it with. The biggest issue is it needs 46 pieces of Primal Mooncloth to make the 3 pieces. That is a 184 days to transmute that much. If I want to make that I’ll have to start day 1. I’m not sure the set is worth 6 months of transmuting though :b

I did my first run of Auchenai Crypts today and it was quite interesting. First thing of note it is how you get Lower City faction for Shattrath. It is a chaotic zone all the fights get a little nuts it seems, much like Scholo can get. This boss seen above is one of 2 that is in the instance. He is the first and was quite evil. The one guy who had been here before neglected to mention that he has AOE that stacks up to 5 times that ends up slowing casting 200%. This was insane but some how after regaining my composer I managed to save myself, the tank and 1 of the DPS.

There are some scary pulls in this room as you head to the last guy. There are piles of these non elite skeletons that are occasionally accompanied by a very annoying elite caster. We wiped once in this room because the hunter pulled a the same time as the Druid, two packs is 1 too many :b

We beat the last guy who was much easier than the first one. I liked this zone, it is very short, but crazy which makes it fun. Also a good source for Lower City faction, though I don’t know how useful that faction is yet. I’m not sure what wonderful things drop here but I’m sure there might be a few things I’ll want on one of my characters

Not much that I’ve seen changed for the Priest in today’s beta patch. They added Tier 4 bonuses and finally a Mana Loom.

The Tier 4 bonuses were not very exciting to me.

Shadow
(2) Set: Your Shadowfiend now has 75 more stamina and lasts 3 sec. longer.
(4) Set: Your Mind Flay and Smite spells deal 5% more damage.

Holy
(2) Set: Your prayer of healing spell now also causes an additional 150 healing over 9 sec.
(4) Set: Each time you cast Flash Heal, your next Greater Heal cast within 15 sec has its casting time reduced by 0.1, stacking up to 5 times.

Of course the most exciting thing is the Banana robe which comes from the Burning Furnace is now a nifty new color!

I guess the last BC patch messed up Mana Tombs. It is unfortunate because it was perfectly fine so you got to wonder how you break something that had no problems with a patch As you might can tell by this image, there were quite a few killer cubes in the zone. Cubes are very annoying to fight because it is hard to tell they are attacking you or that you are hitting them. Not to mention we couldn’t crowd control them! Whenever the Mage sheeped a cube, the cube just became a killer sheep. It was quite amusing. Made for an interesting run anyways. May no one ever have to fight a cube come BC’s go live date though!