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 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 had the day off today so I started off the morning right by finishing all the questing I needed in Zul’drak.  Well before I went onto raiding the only thing I had left was a Gundrak run.  I enjoyed the remaining quests, and I earned about 400g and tons of enchanting mats too.  Doing the Tiki quests really made me want to buy the Troll Argent Tournament pet, they are so cute

After that questing run I ended up doing a 25 man Naxx.  The funny thing was the raid leader was a guy Inien kept teasing me about who stole my name.  It is a DK named Lanaar   I never said anything to him about it hehe  It started off a bit rough, we wiped to Patchwork whom we started with 3 times before we beat him.  We lost several people in the process.  I never did understand why that happened.

After we beat him we one shot everything else quite easily.  Again I have no idea why we did so badly on patch ;P  We stayed with mostly the same core group loosing a dps here and there along the way.  They had sort of complicated but fair loot rules.  Taking into account Tier pieces, main and off spec rolls, and how many epics you got.  Basically though they said make sure if you are rolling on something you really want it.

So a few upgrades dropped here and there for me, but they were supper minor.  This paid off well for me because something I really did want dropped.  One of my guildies had got it earlier in the week, a staff called Damnation. This is a perfect staff for a Disc priest I think   It is the baby brother to another staff I liked in Ulduar called Rapture   I rolled on the staff, and won based on my luck, but because everyone who rolled against me had already won something I would have got it anyways   I haven’t had a staff since Classic WoW.  All through BC I used Mace/Offhand combo.  It is kind of refreshing to change again.

We continued to do well through the rest of the content and I actually got the few 25 man bosses down that I hadn’t got yet to finish out my 25man Naxx achievements.  So hurray for finishing!!!

After we finished I decided that it is unlikely I’ll get another great weapon for a while so I threw the best Staff Spell Power enchant on my new staff.  It is quite glowy now, in fact it almost hurts to look at lol  I finished off the evening by doing a Heroic Gundrak to finish that last Zul’Drak quest.  So now I can either pick Storm peaks or Icecrown to work on next.

Thanks to those of you who clicked on my mountain dew banner and signed up I appreciate the extra points.  I’m putting them in for the Blizzcon tickets just in case   Also remember by signing up the rumur is you will get this in game pet.

I managed to get on early this morning and did some questing before my son got up.  I managed to knock out quite a few I still had left in Zul’Drak.  Mostly following the chain involving this big kitty spirit.

I also got infused with Bear spirit seen here, and eventually got around to doing that quest everyone loves where you run around lifting up the tails of cats and bear looking for females lol.  I ended  up getting closer to finishing off this instance I can’t remember how many quests I did but I do know I made around 275G from questing

Later that night when I got on this guild (who’s name is escaping me ATM) Inien often groups with and I’ve tagged a long a few times invited me to go finish their 10man Naxx.  Feeling like doing some healing I was up for it, especially when there are a few pants upgrades to my current pants even in a 10 man!

Had a good time, we had no wipes at all and that is always exciting to be with skilled folks.  We didn’t do too well on the dance, however I survived like I usually managed too (even though I am terrible at it) and kept about 5 of us alive despite being the only one removing diseases, and almost always having the guy too close to me so I relied on instants to do everything because casting slow   Thankfully I can Renew, Shield, Abolish Disease and Prayer of Mending with no cast time

Here we are gathering to do Lotheb.  This one is always interesting for the healers but I have some good tools to deal with it.  I would time Prayer of Healing, and toss a Penance out if someone got really low.  Plus I have the shield which isn’t effected by the debuff.  We also had really good dps which got him down so we didn’t have to do that for long

The night was fun though I ended staying up really late because the next boss kept having something that I wanted (pants) but I finally bowed out after Gothik the Harvester.  It was good fun, especially because we just had 2 healers, the only time naxx10 is fun for me.  We even had one of the dps warriors leave before Thaddius and we still 9 manned it the whole time.  It is a nice change to group with Quality people, it doesn’t happen often enough for me.  I can never cate the guild raids, and the only time I ever am in a good group is when I catch another guilds run like tonight.

Still bummed about my Blizzcon tickets though   I hope I can manage them on May 30th.

Got on for just a little bit late this evening and got a tell from a guildy wanting me to run Naxx with them.  So I decided to do just that, they only had 1 wing left but I didn’t really care anyways.  This was the first time I saw the new warning they put in letting you know the instance is used.

We went in and did patchwerk easy enough which was good considering the last time I did patchwerk mind you in a 25 man we failed so so miserably.  He dropped the Blade of Dormant Memories and though I’d loose a bit of int, and a bit of regen, I’d gain a bunch of haste and crit.  No one wanted it so I rolled on it to see how it works out.

After that we went after grobbulus, that went pretty well, we wiped once but got him on the second try.  By this time people were getting tired and we were thinking about turning in.  I was glad because I had a LONG day with early Mother’s Day celebrating and all.

We made one pretty good attempt on Gluth, we lost it at the very end just as he was about dead.  Too bad too maybe he had some new pants for me!  I really do need new pants lol  After that one wipe we went ahead and called it and off to bed I went.  It was a nice distraction and though we didn’t do many bosses I enjoyed myself.  We did have 3 healers though and I still think in a 10 man Naxx anyways that is 1 too many.

I found the healing numbers interesting by the end of the raid I had healed as much as the Pally with a 3rd less over healing, and respectfully more than the restro shaman.  Of course if you count absorbs and damage prevention I did much better than either of them.

Yes I finally completed Naxxramas last night, well early this morning.  I saw someone who needed a healer for Naxx10 and joined up, still looking for a pants upgrade.  My initial plan was to only stay like an hour maybe, I started close to 10:30 so it was already late.  Well it was going so well that I figured they had a chance of going all the way.  I ended up saying on till 2am just to be able to say I actually defeated Naxx

Not much caster gear dropped, I did pickup a slight different wand, more of a side grade but I got some more crit out of it.  I lost a few rolls on some other nice crit upgrades.  I did win a nice back for my dps set though.  We got mostly set pieces for shaman/hunter which we had only 1 of each, and DK’s.  Plenty of plate too! (of course cause I’m there)

Oh and before that I ended up with the pants from HoL finally.  So I will be using those in my DPS set also.

Well I had some of my usual bad bad luck in choosing groups tonight.  I put myself in LFG for Heroic Naxx, OS or Vault.  I noticed the dailies were for both UP so I figured I’d do that if someone needed a healer.  I eventually saw someone that needed a healer for UP so I joined them.  Then after inviting me and we got there they made me leader and told me none of them had ever been before.  They were also all fresh 80s.  To make matters worse they were horrible slow to respond AND didn’t listen to me. After we wiped on the first boss, with me dying to the sword I actually left the group…I don’t do this very often but I was in no mood to be wiping in UP all night.

After that I went back to Sithillus to turn in my head.  This got me my nifty new Cenarious title and only 48 rep away from exalted with the Brood.  I also noticed while I was there they have a quest now for the head of broodlord and everyone can pickup the head which means I need to do BWL again

Next disaster was Naxx 25.  They said they had the Military quater, the silly dog boss, and the end guys left.  I joined them of course they didn’t mention they had been wiping to Gluth a lot before I joined.  We wiped to him again after I got there, some how with tons of mages they still were not able to aoe the adds down before they got to him…  So we wipe and like 6 people leave, then they are trying to replace them and people start saying they are going afk for 20 minutes.  At that point I just left the group I don’t have  a lot of play time to spending waiting.

After that I noticed my wife was up and I’d rather go spend time with her than mess around with WoW so I logged for the evening.

Well it has been many years since the first time I stepped into Naxxramas.  It was a different game back then and a different raid.  On Friday and Saturday I did a full run of Naxx with a PUG group.  Nothing special, but good competent people, who didn’t even use vent (yay).

It was a partial guild run, I think 6 of them were from the same guild, we were mostly plate with 5 Paladins, 2 Deathknights, 2 Warlocks and Me.  We had 3 healers which was the disappointing part of it.  I still enjoyed the run though I don’t really need anything from Naxx 10 aside from some pants upgrade would be fine.

We finished off a lot of bosses many PUGS I had tried before could not.  So as you’ll notice I finally got some achievements.  After many years of wonder I finally got to see the end of Naxx as well.  Though the end is slightly different, than then of course.  The fight with Sapphiron went well, we killed him first try.  It was pretty neat, and with my frost resist gear and the pally aura, I didn’t have to worry much about anything but everyone else.

Of course the final boss eluded me though we just couldn’t kill him.  We gave him one more try last night, after 3 wipes many of us had to go to bed.  Basically we didn’t have enough DPS.  In both the case of last night and the previous 2 nights we only had 2 people who could touch 2k DPS so it was not stellar.  Basically once the adds come out we couldn’t down him fast enough before the adds got too buff and started killing everyone.

To me this is another case where too many healers hurt the raid, even if we had somewhat low DPS if we had one less healer we may have been fine. Dual spec would have come in handy here because I would have just pushed shadow and helped out.  So sadly I did not get to kill him.  I hope before Uldar comes out I can get in the tail end of a Naxx raid and take him down I just don’t have the time or the energy to even be doing what I did this weekend

Speaking of 3.1 looks like we were winding down on the changes.  The last few patches have been small incremental changes.  The Priests are whining because they increased the cooldown of Divine Hymn to 10 minutes from 6 and doubled the mana costs.  Many people don’t recognize how truely awesome it is now.   I don’t really care much about the increase in cooldown, it is sort of an emergency spell anyways, and well I would almost certainly be coupling the spell with Inner Focus so who cares about the mana cost

I had the day off today and my idea was I’d try to get in a full run of 25 man Naxx and actually see the whole dungeon.  I’ve had this plan a few times and it hasn’t worked out yet

I’ll start off on a light note   I was cleaning out the bank some more and found a bunch of those toothpicks from the Halloween event.  I took them out and just played with them through out the day to get rid of them.  I discovered something I never noticed before, or they got bugged cause I could swear they didn’t do that before.  The sparkle is no where near my mouth (admittedly covered by my beard) would be.  It is smack dab in the middle of my nose!  Just a bit disturbing

This Naxx run is the one I should have never gone on, I should have trusted my instincts from the begining.  The first indicator was the raid leader who was trying to invite me was on my ignore list.  I think it was because he had previously kept bugging me some time in the past to do Naxx from random tells.  I thought well maybe I shouldn’t hold that against him.  So after getting tells from other people in the raid I joined.

This raid had TONS of Priests, I have never seen so many Priests, and throughout the ordeal we actually kept getting more Priests.  Priests were apparently the only healers on.  The DPS in this raid was good, I mean we had at least 10 people who were pulling 3-5k dps no problem.  The healing was Horrible, and the tanking was sub-par.  So the problems I usually have were reversed, and it made things go just as bad   We had between 5-6 healers during the raid, but all the healing was being done by 3 of us.  There was a ret pally in the raid who had done more over all healing than some of the healers.

Ok so I got stuck with a bunch of horrible players, if this wasn’t bad enough they were also horrible people!  Just listening to them in vent made me sick.  There was a woman (one of the horrible healers) who was always going afk.  A conversation got started when she said let her know when we are pulling and she will stop feeding her kid.  I was like WoW, a few people cringed most laughed.  Then a conversation got started between her and a few other “parents” about what OTC drugs work best to put your kid to sleep.  She was saying benadryl, another guy was saying NyQuil, and then they got into a list of different kids of alcohol to use.  I was blown away on what horrible people they were.  Then later someone said something about duct ape in jest ( I hope ) and she said her husband won’t let her, but she followed with “but he is alloud to hang them on the wall”.  Oh and she had to go on smoke breaks too, so ya amazing lady :\

In the end a battle broke out between a bunch of them in vent where they were cussing each other out all of the place.  The main tank that had left came back into vent to mock everyone and it was quickly getting ridiculous.  I left shortly after we wiped to North the Plaguebringer for the 6th time.  That guy is a bag of loot and we couldn’t kill him.  The mages had apparently never decursed anyone before, and then after we finally got them to do that right the off-tanks we had couldn’t control the adds.  It was so horrible I must say I lost a little faith in Humanity.

After I finished that disaster I did the rest of my Dailies for the evening and looked for a normal Heroic run to do.  I ended up joining this group and doing Heroic UP, UK and HoL.  They were a great bunch of people, good players, and we did real well with no wiping.  They got me to my achievements of finishing off my Northrend Factions, and getting my 250 Emblem of Heroism achievements.

I did end the night on a low note, and drug poor Inien into it.  Someone wanted to do H VH so I join, our tank goes LD just before the first boss, the water guy…We wipe of course.  The DK says he can tank he has taking gear, I’m not sure but I take his word for it.  I grab Inien and we give it a go but he was just too squishy, not to mention he didn’t appear to know what he is doing.  We managed to kill the first boss but everyone died but the fury warrior and when we got back in we didn’t get to loot so nothing gained from all that.  Lame ending for the night though

After several failed attempts at a 25 man Naxx today I did finally make it into one that stayed together and seemed capable of killing a boss.  Some how I managed to not take any screenshots while I was there but it went well.  If you look to your right you will notice that I got a few upgrades.  I managed to make out pretty well on this run   I came away with a new hat, a new ring, and a new robe.  This to go with the new cloak I also made myself today and the gloves I got in yesterdays OS run.

None of it was huge massive upgrades, of course at this point in the expansion there really aren’t any massive upgrades.  I did managed to bring my everything up a little bit with the combo of things I got including my crit which I had been trying to get higher.  Of course while the 25 man Naxx run was pretty successful, I remember exactly why I hate 25 man instances…  TOO MUCH WAITING.  I did a considerable amount of standing around which to me is not fun   I also feel like I contribute a lot less in a 25 man and there for find the 10 mans more interesting.

I mess around with Laneir a lot through the day too working on 75 and trying to get some of my rest exp used up   I ended the night staying up later than intended because I did one last instance to push me to 75

Just when I logged off Inien had joined a 10 man Vault and they still needed a healer.  So rather than have him wait around for one I got back on to help.  I hadn’t actually ever done a 10 man Vault before.  It of course was stupid easy as the 25 man, the big bag of loot hehe