Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Jumped on this afternoon for a quick dungeon run for badges because I was going to the zoo with the family and I didn’t figure I’d be getting on the computer when we finally got home.  I was right of course   Of course I ended up with HoL which isn’t the fastest dungeon but turned out ok.  We had a really good tank,t he dps was subpar but the tank made up for it

The best part was my son came over and watch while sitting on my lap.  He is 3 now and when ever he sees me playing the game and fighting something he yells “Bad Guy!” and well you know how many bad guys are in HOL.  I also taught him what an elemental was so when we would run into them he would yell “Elemental!” in his cute not exact way   The biggest problem with him sitting on my lap of course is he can make it difficult to heal with all the jumping  and screaming and occasional “helping” hehe

Finished up the run and off to the zoo we went.  No argent tournament for me today!

Maybe it is because I haven’t done one in a while or because I have so little time anymore but my goblin rep grind seems slower than normal.  Even though I know it couldn’t possibly be as bad as when I did the Timbermaw 1 rep at a time before they changed the system all the way to exalted.  That rep had the occasional turn in item do as do the water waste guys I’m doing now.

I got DK as my heroic daily today which I hadn’t done in a while.  The group had lost their healer but I joined them still at the first boss.  The tank was well geared but all the DPS were recent 80s I can tell.  I never mind not overgearing and instance, in fact they are way more fun that way

I finished up the DK run which didn’t take much longer than usual and then started my quests in icecrown for the argent tournament.  I put myself in the looking for raid system for a 25 mana voa, Inien was finishing something else and mentioned he did the same.  I continued my quests in icecrown and then got a VOA25 invite, they were full though, and had apparently been wiping

I thought oh boy but stayed with them, a bunch of people left and I got them to invite Inien.  I told Inien what he was in for and finally after a long wait we went again.  I could tell the issue was their healers were severely under geared, but they had insane dps but then they wouldn’t switch to the frost thingys when they went up.  Anyways we didn’t wipe but a considerable number of people died and in the end the of this story Inien got the mage pants that dropped from this boss with a roll of 25 against 2 other mages, and it completed his 4 piece set!  Grats to him   One guy even offered him 6k gold for them hehe

After all that Inien and I finished up some tournament quests and I think we might have done a ToC in there some where too.  We went over and hit up ZG to try again for my silly baby raptor pet and for some more mounts for him.  Of course none of it ended up dropping.  We did about 3 tries for the pet.  It is a good distraction anyways

This week has been crazy for me!  I’ve been going into work early(even for me!) doing some upgrades to prepare for a big upgrade next week.  So even though I was stressed and could really use some WoW time I was too tired usually to play   I got on tonight though and played a little, talked to Inien on skype.

I did my random first thing, Inien had just finished so I went alone and ended up in someones already started UP.  It is interesting how you get dropped right on the group now, I don’t know when they changed that but it is convenient.  I’m going to guess the other healer left because they couldn’t deal with healing the tank.  At first glance I couldn’t tell who was the tank by HP because we all had about the same amount.    It turned out a really poorly geared Feral DPS Druid was tanking in a Cat spec, and Cat gear

This of course made things interesting to heal but I didn’t have a problem keeping him alive, I am after all awesome   The Shaman in the group was asking me if it was hard to heal him, and I just said it was “interesting”.   The Shaman seemed impressed with my healing ability and kept asking questions about my spec and gear.  We made it through the instance though, no one died and I got that out of the way.

I then went to my Argent Tournament dailies which I’ve started doing again.  Inien was doing them too and we did some of them together.  I was able to get enough seals tonight to get my 25 Talbard and get that achievement!  I found out after I did that one of the guildies has been trying to catch up to my achievement score, I have the second best in my guild and the only reason I’m behind is because I don’t raid as much   So now I’ve got to step it up to hold my 2nd place   Going to have to try and knock out some of the easy ones I still have in general and maybe PvP and Fishing.

Ok,  now onto my big worries.  Inien kept reminding me nothing is close to being done, and I realize that but I see too much thought behind the new Disc tree to not be worried.  It looks to me at first glance they have refocused the tree back towards PvP again!  You can see the talent preview over at MMO-Champion.

I’m talking of course of Atonement, Penitence, Evangelism, and Arcangel.  They are great names, and even cool talents they allow you to do some damage and be healing as well. It is unclear to me if this is thought it will work in PvE or not?  It could be interesting but I don’t think they have ever mixed those two things for PvE before.  Atonement could be interesting letting you heal the tank and melee dps with some of your damage.  The more I thought about it after talking to Inien the more I began to see it as modeled after the damaging healers in some of the MMOs that have come out recently.

So basically now I’m more fascinated than stressed out about it and wish I had a beta invite to try it   With the changes to Disc and Holy, it is possible to get all the new Damage talents in Holy and Disc, all the way to the increased range.  So now I’m thinking you could go with a Disc build that looks like this and it might be an interesting PvE build where you would be tossing out damage and heal/shields.

BETA, where art thou!

I got on this morning for a short time, was just doing a little goblin rep farming and low and behold, the Hyacinth Macaw drops!  I was floored! I didn’t think I would get it while I was doing this the drop rate on it is so stupid.  After I did that some one came and screwed up my spawns so I ended up doing my random which was HoS.  Went ok, though I thought it was funny the tank with almost a 5400 GS had never been there before and didn’t know where to go lol.  Inien got on and got that random too and he actually wiped on protecting Bran.  Don’t you love PUGS?

Anyways so happy with my parrot, that made my 120th pet too! What an honor!

I got home a little early today and the wife and kid was out so I logged on to run my random.  I ended up getting CoS and we went through it a bit slower than my more recent groups.  No one besides me was particularly geared well.  I don’t mind that though because the older instances are so boring.  There was one ret pally that must have been a recent 80 because I out damaged him by simply mind searing the groups some times

I still felt like healing and figured I didn’t have any time for a raid so I thought I’d do some of the ICC 5 mans and see if I could get a hilt to drop.  I mean I haven’t done them tons of time, but I have never seen that damn thing drop!  So I ended up in Forge of Souls.  It was fun and a little challenging.  I really need to do these more I think

After that I went again and ended up in Pit of Saron.  That went pretty well, but I managed to loose someone on the first boss thanks to stupid line of sight on those boulders.  I always forget that and people are so careless I lost the boomkin. The rest of the instance went well.  Except the leader had us do this sort of what I would call a cheat, where if you mount up and run fast enough you can by pass like 2 of the first waves of mobs going up the hill.  You know how I feel about bypassing content, it usually causes more trouble than its worth!

So by this time the family gets home so I never did get in an HoR.  Oh and still no Hilt dropped!

Something interesting did happen later.  Apparently Blizzard is getting the PTR all setup for a run.  People got extra excited because one of the servers was called Blizzcon server.  They believe that it might be Cataclysm beta, but the previous betas were always done on separate PTRs than the normal ones so I don’t think its that.  It is probably just the next content patch, which is cool too!

Had just enough energy for a quick 5 man tonight.  Though 5 mans these days are so boring if it isn’t any of the 3 new ones.  On occasion I’ll get in a group with a poorly geared tank that makes it more interesting but usually I stand around lol  So today I thought I’m going to see if I can beat any of the DPS.  So in between healing I used every trick in the book to do some DPS as Disc of course.  I managed to beat the hunter, and came close during the instance at beating the Warlock, but in the end I couldn’t do it.  I was proud of myself at managing to do 15% of the damage WHILE I was also healing

Also wanted to make a quick longer comment on the new badge changes that Blizzard has posted for Cataclysm.  My first thought was about time!  It seemed the current system was getting ridiculous and if they kept this up we were going to have all sorts of crazy named badges hehe  Its also a pain if you want to get a different item and have to down convert your badges like 3 times for heroic stuff.  It seems like a well thought out plan.  Especially how each time they release a new tier of gear they convert your uper tier badges to lower tier.  This will keep people from hording and get you spending!

It is quite amazing at how many systems they are changing.  I’m really excited and just a tad worried.  My worry lies only in the fact that so much is being changed that testing of it all has got to be a nightmare.  I imagine that there will be a lot of tweaking, more so than normal even when Cataclysm goes live with this many changes.  It’s all good though!

I managed to get on yesterday only long enough to run a quick random.  I was totally worn out from being up till midnight the previous day after being called by work.  It was an interesting run actually.  We had a bear tank that had the highest GS rating I’ve ever seen, and over 60K HP.  He made a mad dash through that instance and we completed it faster than I thought possible.  He skipped the first boss which never even occurred to me They brought down Mr Drake ride immediately too, I was impressed

Things have been very interesting since the announcements about the upcoming raid changes to Cataclysm.  So much whining it is unbelievable, actually I think it is believable because the vocal community is a bunch of whiners   I wonder if Blizzard predicted this or not?  I’m guessing they must have assumed a certain amount of vocal disagreement.  Some of my favorite arguments are:

• It will destroy my guild
• No one will ever do 25 mans anymore
• Why even include 25 mans
• Blizzard is just catering to casuals

The funny thing is the last time they change raids they said the same things.  Just like they said Cataclysm will be the death of WoW, and all previous expansion were going to do that as well   Anyways the most interesting part is everything Blizzard is changing is save guilds if anything.  Lets you do the content you want, with the people you want.  You don’t feel forced into trying to make 25 mans work, and if you have the people for 25 mans you can do it, and gear more people up faster.  I don’t see the issue, and find it funny people can’t see it benefits everyone casual or elitist

As I mentioned before my favorite part is first that you can do the raids you like, I prefer 10mans over 25 by a HUGE margin.  The 25s are just not fun for me, I don’t care how good the gear is.  Second I kind of like the shared lockouts myself.  You don’t feel compelled to have to do both to try and get extra badges.  People will have time for their alts now   It is obvious they had to do that if they were going to make the gear the same.  The other thing that kept coming to mind is that they intended to try and make the difficulty of 10 and 25 man as close as possible.  So the elitist shouldn’t complain they are catering to casuals because they want it to be equal.  Obviously getting 25 people in sync is still always going to be harder than 10, so they are doing a few things to help with extra badges/gear.

Things are really getting exciting with Cataclysm now as this new information comes out almost daily.  Come on Blizzard, I want more!

Jumped on Laneer to grab my frost badges and see what the weekly raid was.  I was a bit distressed to see it be Eye of Eternity.  I’ve only been in that instance once with Texas Mercenaries ( I miss raiding with them) and it didn’t go spectacularly   My Nexus run was some what cursed as we actually wiped to the mage lady because they got her with a bunch of mobs that kept silencing me   Then we lost our tank after we killed her.  I convinced the DK we had to tank for a while clearing and he actually did fine till a tank popped in finally.  Got it all done and decided to go Mage

Got on Laneir and started some randoms to see if  I couldn’t get me another piece of T9 tonight.  I got in some pretty fun runs with no one over geared.  I don’t have as much fun when I’m with a super geared person I have no hope of beating   I didn’t end up with getting any gear replacements but I did manage to store my Robe which seemed like the best upgrade to take.  I picked up my Khadgar’s Robe of Conquest and got it gemed tonight.  I’m not buying epic gems for him though because he doesn’t deserve the extra costs   So 50 more badges and I can get the pants and I’m good to go there.  Probably will go for the badge hat after that

So my wife got back and I finally got a chance to relax for a few and do a little WoW’ing.  I did my daily random and was about to go log onto Laneir when I see someone asking for healers for ToC10 for the Weekly Raid.  I figured I’d give it a shot though this is not something I was imagining to be much fun in a PUG   I have run this with Texas Mercenaries quite a bit so I knew the fights well.  Man I miss raiding with those guys.

Anyways the guy asks me if I think we can two heal it, and I mention we did that all the time before so as long as he gets another equivalent healer we are good. So we finally get the second tank and we are ready to go.  The second healer he got was a paladin who had a higher GS than me by quite a bit.  I think oh good, it will be just like when Redfive and I used to do this.  I go and make an assumption that the stupid high GS number means he knows what he is doing…WRONG! We start off and the guy dies in the first 45 seconds of the fight, he stood in the fire … So I solo heal it till I start loosing people once we get to the worms and we wipe it.  I don’t think anyone realizes he died first, I didn’t say anything.

We try again, he dies AGAIN early on, I solo heal the thing to the worms again, and tried to keep as many people alive as I could but eventually it is just me and the tank left and by this time we have lost everyone but the one tank, and the Rogue RL who started the whole thing.  They both told me nice heals and the rogue went back to grab another group    This time we got a Holy Priest, higher GS than me, and another DK tank.  We lost some people in the worms, the other healer wasn’t helping enough, but got to the last guy with 5 people and we defeated him.  I looked at the healing out of curiosity, not only did I out heal a Holy Priest who was better geared than me, I did so not even including my absorbs

We defeated Lord Jaraxxus just fine, and I even picked up the Felspark Bindings off him for my DPS set   I have terrible wrists actualy tempted to wear them for my healing set if it wasn’t for the loss of regen   I will say one thing, every time I PUG there is outstanding evidence that having a high GS doesn’t mean you know what your doing, doesn’t mean you will do lots of damage/heal/tank well.  I can’t be the only one to notice this so I wonder why so many people put so much stock in that stupid number?  My little Mage I’m still gearing up will often out damage people with a higher GS then him because they are lazy I can only assume.

Speaking of Laneir I did do a few heroic runs on him today.  We got stuck in Oculus which I admit is not my favorite.  No one ran away this time, and I did get the extra 2 badges for doing it they added recently   Best of all I got the epic staff that drops off Eregos, the Staff of Draconic Combat which was a nice upgrade for Laneir   Sorry I don’t have any pictures from his adventures, I forgot to take some!  I’m almost ready to get my 3rd piece of T9 on him though, yay!  After I get all 4 pieces, I’ll start grabbing some of the other triumph gear.  It is kind of fun gearing up an alt, I’ve never done it before and well now it is more fun and easier than ever!

I just jumped on tonight to do a quick random when I got Heroic CoS.  The changes they made to speed it up really seemed to help because that didn’t take nearly as long as it used to.  You didn’t have to wait through all the stuff in the beginning and you never had to way for Arthas to get his butt in gear!

Since that went so fast I went and completed a few quests for my lore master before bed.  Man I’m started to get low on quests now I’m going to have to go hunting.  I have just about 50 quests yet to complete too!