Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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!

I didn’t get a chance to post much but I got back late late on Thursday, very worn out   Intending to veg for the weekend I successfully managed to squeeze in some WoW here and there which was great.  Did some dailies for the first time in a loooong time, random dungeons, raided VOA, got plenty of achievements from that   Managed the weekly raid again as well.

Tried to do some HoR and PoS for some slight upgrades I was missing from there.  Of course the adventures I had in PUG HoR was never very good as illustrated here   I stuck with this one PUG which illustrates why gearscores don’t mean crap if the people suck

Speaking of GearScores, I was a bit shocked as to how widespread that is now.  I think when I started my break that mod just came out, people had been sort of doing that from websites/armory checking up to that point.  Now you see people demanding achievements, and GS of 5342 or something like that.  I find it funny because it is an odd number, it must mean something specific though   I installed the stupid addon just so I could know what mine was, it is something between 5000 and 5100 I can’t remember it at the moment.

Yesterday I took a break from Laneer (except for doing my random dungeon daily) and played Laneir my Arcane Mage   I forgot how much fun he can be to play.  Decided I’d try to gear him up a bit and and a bunch of random dailies.  Managed to pick up a few epic drops, and some high blue items which certainly helped out.  I also took the badges I already had plus a bunch more I made and got two pieces of my set, shoulders and hands. I think this is the first time in WoW history I actually got a second character to max level at the same time as Laneer and actually geared him up a bit to boot   Of course it is WAY easier now than it once was

Did a bit of questing with Laneir as well in between dungeons.  I did one in IC that has a lot more meaning to me after hearing the stories about why it was created and such from the Blizzard guys.   It is sad but such a great way to honor a person.

I had a good time on Laneir, I can’t wait to make him a Dwarf though once they allow race changes for that   I’ve also built up quite a bit of badges to go on another shopping spree for Furryous my future Worgen Warrior.

I got on this evening just before 8 hoping to hook up with the guys from Texas Mercenaries for some raiding.  I hadn’t heard anything so went and did my outlands fishing daily, along with the Nothrend and made my cloth runs.  Haven’t done that in a while.  I am my wife and my son have been sick this week so I haven’t played really since I got back from up north.

While I was finishing up and starting some dailies Inien got on and I still hadn’t heard anything so we decided to go off and run the new instances.  I still had quite a few things I wanted to get from them so we decided to do that and then do a random for a hopeful 4th chance at a hilt dropping.  About half way through unfortunately Barb asks if I want to join them.  I kind of have this rule though about bailing on people though.  I think I’ve only bailed on a few REALLY terrible groups in my whole life, I usually try to stick it out.  So I ended up not raiding tonight as I usually would.  It was a bit of a disappointment for me but I’ll have to figure out a new raiding situation anyways since texas mercenaries will eventually find a guild member to heal for them.

I did have a good time with Inien on the runs though.  Half of Reflection was a bit painful as we had an undergeared, unexperience tank, a druid apparently who normally heals.  I think after 4 wipes we finally got through the waves.  What was nice though is I got the Ephemeral Snowflake which I was eager to try out.  They did eventually nerf it putting an internal cooldown on it but it is suppose to provide about 138MP5 which is pretty sweet.  The haste proc on it is scary, my flash heals go off in .8 seconds, Penance in 1.2 seconds.

Oh the best part of the runs was during Forge of Souls, and Pit of Saron I accidentally had my Shadow Gear on.  I wondered why it seemed harder than before and why I had mana problems LOL.  I noticed just before we did the last boss on Pit of Saron.  At least I realized before Halls of Reflection

We finished off the evening running a UP random run and the tanks kept dropping out for some reason. Eventually one stayed.  That went well enough and ended off the evening.  Going to have to try and find a run for the weekly raid this weekend now to get that done.  Need to get back on track of picking up my frost badges.

I hope to find some ICC Rep Runs too, that ring looks pretty damn sweet at exalted

I got on today and messed a little bit with my UI, my unit frames I had been messing with seemed like I got them too small.  I grew them a bit and fiddled and decided to do my Random heroic dungeon for the frost badges.  I ended up getting a HOL.  Of course we started the instance and the tank went offline.  Then we had to wait to kick him and get another one.  Some people decided to start pulling things (without a tank) while I wasn’t around and that didn’t go well.  Then one of the DPS left just about when we got the tank.  Then we had to grab another DPS it was quite annoying but managed to blast through the instance at a reasonable rate.

After completing that instance I wanted to do the last of the new 5 mans.  Though I was still having issues adjusting to my Pitbull 4 frames, so I decided to turn back on Pitbull3 to see if I could figure out what was so different.  I did that and jumped in the queue and got a group really fast.

The start was even more painful than the HoL though.  First we had a DPS get in and go, “wait this isn’t heroic?”  then he goes offline.  I’m guessing people go offline wait for someone to kick them and then maybe they don’t get the debuff to try again?  Because it continued to happen!  Next some guy comes in and goes “oh no not <insert name>” of our tank who was not even from the same server as the tank and goes offline.  Then two more people just leave the group, then it is just me and the tank again.  Then we get more DPS.  Finally we start the whole thing (which is very awesome btw) and get ready for this huge battle.  Then one of the DPS goes offline AGAIN!  Then we wait, kick him and get one more in  just as the mobs start coming.

So far I’ve done just fine in the normal 5 mans, they have been almost too easy really, I know they are not heroic, but most people I was with out geared them.  Well now I had the benefit of being with people who not only didn’t out gear it but also weren’t very good   We wiped in the first part of Halls of Reflection 3 or 4 times before finally getting past it.  It was always because mobs kept getting on me and killing me.  I can only fade every 30 seconds, and no one was controlling anything.  The fact that I was getting agro was proof that the tank wasn’t picking things up, and the DPS weren’t even hitting it!  The stupid thing is if I wasn’t being hit I could probably have kept anyone else alive.  Even as it was when we finally did get past that part it was because at the very end of it I ended up both poping pain suppression during the fight on myself, and spamming holy nova!

This part of the dungeon is so cool.  You have the Lich King coming after you trying to stop you and Jaina Proudmoore slowing him down and trying to get everyone away. So ya, we wiped here too, twice in fact, and ALMOST a 3rd time   Though it is awfully cool when he kills you   Again they didn’t control the mobs at all, and they didn’t kill them fast enough.  By this time I was super tired too, I didn’t expect to be in this instance for more than an hour.  We got to a point where I had one a Lumbering Abomination on me, I had to resort to Pain Supression and Holy Nova spam to save myself again.  I don’t think I’ve ever faded more than I did in this run before ever.  Looks like I might need to start carrying around some Holy Nova Glyphs LOL

Terrible group aside, the dungeon was awesome.  It really completed a very epic experience of the 3 dungeons.  They were very well thought out and put together.  The quest chain you go through with Jaina was awesome.  I’m loving the new dungeon system on whole though, if going offline is a loop hole I hope they close it!  I can’t wait to get a few more of these new dungeons under my belt.  I’ll need to start doing heroic mode to get a chance at the Hilt and some good upgrades!