Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

So wanted to really play this evening but after working like an over 11 hour day, come home and run ragged by the kid, give him a bath and get him to bed there wasn’t much left in me to have fun   I got on anyways to make my daily deposit of frost badges but that is all I could muster even if I should be doing some rep and gold farming.  Not to mention I have a 25 man VoA left to do.

Hoping to pull some time on Friday for some ICC.  Going to take the day off, though that still leaves me with just the morning to get something done before everyone gets home.  Very pleased with the site update this morning.  Will have to see if I can do some sprucing up now.

Did a fast run this evening of H-VH just for the badges of course.  I notice this week we have the easy razorscale I’ll have to try and get that done this weekend.  I just did another quick shot so I could go try and play some SC2 again   The single player campaign really drives you to move forward, the story is really good and the missions are quite unique and fun

The other thing I really need to get done is get the site on WordPress 3.  I have a customized template and such so I haven’t been looking forward to trying to do this upgrade but 3.0.1 just came out so I guess I better get with it.   So expect that to happen this weekend too.

I also received word my new computer is being built, hopefully I will have it some time next week!  This would be good because SC2 doesn’t run so hot on my Mac   Based on the screenshots of Cataclysm I have a sneaky suspicion that neither would it.

I’m not sure what the odds of this happening are but I was doing my random for the day and got VH.  The first portal opened at the spot on the left side looking out from the entrance then proceeded to do each portal moving left to right.  I wish I would have taken a video because you probably wouldn’t believe it hehe

Later that evening I got in a PUG 25 man ICC.  They asked for healer with a DPS off spec but I mostly ended up being DPS the whole time.  We did the usual easy bosses, and tried the Dreamwalker but were never successful.  The people were well geared in the group but didn’t listen very well.  There were also a few people who were not very well geared and were even lamer at listening.

It was nice though because we got the quest again which meant another batch of frost badges for me.  By the time we were done I had more than enough to get my hat.  Now I only need one more piece of my 4 piece, yay!  First time completing a set bonus for me since vanilla.  I usually don’t try, but thought I’d try it out this time

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

Managed to get on tonight and do my random heroic again.  I’m trying to keep up with at least getting that for the Frost badges.  I was looking at the frost badge gear, all very delicious looking but also very expensive.  Everything is 50 plus I believe, I guess Blizzard wants to keep our attention for a while before Cataclysm   This time I finally got a fast heroic ending up in Violet Hold.  It wasn’t too bad except that apparently someone started it before I got in the instance and we had to wait for it to reset, and I had a frustrating conversation with a Shaman trying to tell him how to port into the instance

I picked up the Triumph badge wand for my DPS set tonight after my run.  My Disc gear for the most part works good with Shadow especially if I can keep Spirit gear over MP5.  However I am not hit capped yet so I need to work on that part if I’m ever to be useful raid dps.  For the most part I still prefer healing but I also want to be flexible if the Guild needs me to DPS or just for a change of pace some times   Shadow Priests got some buffs this patch and I need to test them out still.  My intention is to pick up a few more pieces of the Triumph gear, probably the DPS hat, and DPS Shoulders and should bring my hit to where I want it to be, and I increase my DPS capability.  I did play with the new version of VE today and it is nice to only have to cast a buff on yourself

Excited about doing the week raid questions, and trying out Icecrown tomorrow with the guild!  I will remember screenshots!

Man I can’t wait for this project to be over.  Yes I have no time to play WoW because I’ve been working too much.  I have been trying to keep up by watching twitter and browsing the forums on my blackberry occasionally though   I did get some time to login today.

First order of business, check my mail.  I had a few things, some Auctions from earlier.  I also had my brew of the month.  Interestingly enough it made me sick, LOL.

After that I noticed that the Heroic Daily was Violet Hold.  I figured I had enough energy for a run of that and so I through myself in LFG and had a group in a couple of minutes.  It was good, not painful at all.  Had a 3.3K Warlock and Warrior competing so things died quickly   I wish I had time for more though, I really miss playing.  Especially since WoW is my stress reliever, and boy am I stressed!

I was a bit excited about the new pets they added to the Blizzard store.  I wondered when they would tap that well. LOL  At least they are not gouging you, $10 is something I’d pay, especially nice when 50% of the money for the panada goes to charity.  It won’t take many sales of those pets to pay for the art and programming on these and then they become pure profit   I was a bit sad though because I haven’t been able to buy them yet.  I don’t know if it is the store, or my account but when I try to buy it tells me that it failed and to contact billing.  I emailed them, we’ll see what happens.

My wife was out of town this weekend so my son absorbed all my time this weekend.  I snuck on a few times while he was napping though.  I have started work on my next great achievement, Loremaster.  This is one I wanted to complete before BC but never got through it before wrath ended up coming out.  I think this time I will have time to complete it though, I’m getting very close!  I started off the latest round of old world quests though by finally going to get my Sprite Darter pet.  I knew this pet quest chain was out there but had never taken the time to add him to my family.  Now this colorful little guy joins my growing army of pets

Just before my son woke up I joined Inien in a Heroic Violet Hold group.  It was the daily heroic and I thought it would be quick enough.  Just as I was getting there my son wakes up.  Usually he is groggy and doesn’t want to do much after he wakes up for a little bit so rather than disappoint I try to continue.  Well he had me running out after every boss to do something for him, but we managed to complete the instance.  We had a very strange Pally tank that made things difficult.  I almost wonder if he was being played by not the original owner.  He was extremely well geared, he had like 42k HP.  However the two main DPS Inien, and another Arcane Mage, who Inien pointed out have 40% less threat on arcane kept pulling aggro!  This happened through out the run which seemed awfully strange.

I got back on for a little bit just before bed after my wife got home.  I did a few more quests in Aerie peak I had, including the robot chicken one I picked up.  This is another quested pet I’m missing!  I need to do the Feralas chicken as well I believe.  While I happened to be passing through Ironforge I checked the pets and found the Tauren baby plainstrider was up for 1500g.  There was only one and from that guy I mentioned a few days ago put up like 6.  He must have lowered the prices to sell them.  I went ahead and bought it as it was my last Horde pet I needed   Of course I had not replenished gold supplies from the last purchase so I’m as low as I’ve been in a long time at just under 3K in reserves.  I still have plenty of time to rebuild capital before Cataclysm gets here though.  Though there are still a few little raptor pets I need to buy >:)

In some wowpriests.info news you may have noticed my site is running faster now.  I’ve actually switched from using wordpress stats to google analytics. At first I thought it was my imagination, but it really is faster.  Plus analytics is really neat, I wish I had done it sooner!

I’ve not been playing much lately as you  know but the game continues and now I’m a bit behind.  I got some time today to really enjoy myself. As you may have seen on my twitter, I am now revered with the Explorers League.  I wonder if Blizzard is ever going to give another way to earn this faction   I managed to agro like ever spawned gargoyle in this shot

I quickly ended up in a group in a regular ToC guild run,  a few people had never done it before.  It went a little rough, but then we got the groove and heroic ToC which was actually the daily went much smoother   I picked up some new shoes for my Surge set on that run, though I still need to enchant/gem it I never got around to it.

Shortly after that I ended up doing Heroic Violet Hold with the guild as well.  I am after badges for some new pants.  There is a nice upgrade for me on the conquest vendor.  None of the tier gear was exciting me much.

To finish off the evening I went over to Storm Peaks to finish my needed questing there.  I finally ran into the mine thing I heard so much about but had not seen   While I was there I spent the time to get the achievement.

You got to love the goblins, asking me to blow up a Mammoth LOL

Finished all the quests over at K3 then hopped on the rocket to the next questing hub and started there.  I did a few quests before my wife got home and I went ahead and retired for the evening.

My plan is to finish out the Northrend quests then go back to Eastern Kingdoms and start questing.  I am the closest to finishing that achievement and I figure I should start now and not wait to the last second since everything is going to change in the expansion    Plus I know a really great place to start, STV.  I spent the first 4 years of my life on a PvP server (Deathwing) and that place was NOT fun.  So most of those quests are not done.

I concentrated today on finishing off my Noble Garden achievements so I wouldn’t have to worry about it the rest of the week.  I’m not sure what Blizzard was thinking with these ones, because unlike all the other recent revisions to the events, this one did not make it more fun.  Basically it required you to sit in one place for a long time fighting over what eggs were spawning.  Luckily last night I was able to get most of what I needed.  This morning when I got on I had to fight with someone but I was so good at doing it from yesterday that I got most of the eggs and finished out what I needed.

One of the achievements has you putting bunny ears on the female of each player species in WoW.  This was very difficult and time consuming as well.  Mainly because they put a 5 minute cooldown on the bunny ears for some reason, and secondly because so few of the horde female exist.  Specifically I had problems with the female tauren, female orc, and female dwarf.    I eventually got it though.

The other thing they made annoying is in order to do the hard boil egg achievement you needed to go to unguro with someone else because you couldn’t turn yourself into a bunny.  This seemed needless thankfully I have guildies to bring (Thanks Cal!)

The last thing I had to do was finish planting flowers in the desert.  They had you visiting the far reaches of Azeroth planting flowers in the desert using a robe no less   Then I finally got my achievement.

I was really feeling the itch to heal, I had not actually healed in like 2 or 3 days so I noticed I had the Heroic Violet Hold daily in my quest log and decided to run that since it was fairly quick.  It went ok except we had to do the first wave over again because the tank didn’t move when we go t the etheral guy and he got exploded

After that I did my tournament quests leaving me with just 1 mark needed in order to finish the current tier and represent Ironforge!  I was super tired so I headed to bed a bit early.

Didn’t have much time on tonight but wanted to get a few things done.  I logged on and noticed it was cloth day again, man it just seemed like I did that   Still waiting on 3.1 to finish out my tailoring, I need to make Inien a bunch of the new herb bags anyways.  Then I’ll start decking myself and Inien out with 22 slot bags.

After completing my cloth run I went over to do some more questing in Zul’drak.  I’m really lagging about finishing out all of my WOTLK quests.  I’m actually quite embarrassed I haven’t got around to do it yet!  I still need to finish off a bit in Zul’Drak, Storm Peaks, and Icecrown.

I noticed the daily was VH which was short enough for me to be able to do before bed.  I had been in the LFG and got invited to a group just about the time Inien got out of his OS run.  I got him invited as we actually needed an extra DPS.  Everyone was pretty pro though we did wipe on the stupid water guy on the second spawn which means we got to start over   Everyone was running around like mad men, and when he rematerialized he ran over and crit me for over 18k, right through my shield!   I still have no idea how I the lowly Priest who had barely needed to even heal the very good DK tank, with all the DPS the mages and warlock were doing got agro WITH silent resolve but whatever…

I’ve been going back in forth in my mind about dual spec actually going back on the idea of doing it or not.  I still think I will as I would like to be able to speak with more authority on the non-healing issues of Priest.  Shadow Priests also look like they are more interesting damage dealers as like Priests they have more “tools” and don’t just cast one or two spells over and over.  I’m going to completely break with what I read though and go for something like this spec. I want to see if I can really go without meditation, especially with the improvements made to the Shadow Fiend, and the Shadow Priest reduced cool down.

People say Mediation is mandatory, that doesn’t seem quite right to me since only a few DPS specs even have access to such a talent, and there are so many more interesting talents I would rather try.  Maybe I’ll eat my words, but I want to try a go without it and see.  Maybe all the Spirit Tap talents and the improved fiend can offset the mandatoriness   I’m sure I’ll be called a Noob though if someone looks at my spec.  In general though my specs are never mainstream.  I raided with a Holy spec featuring Searing Light and Surge of Light (when it had no healing benefit).  I kind of doubt you’ll be seeing a lot of Disc Priests sporting this spec either