Sheesh Blizzard. Way to be a tease!
Apparently the event is a three phase release of the NPC we all are dreaming of.
5 days for one stage. Given variance, let's say it takes a week.
Stage 1-2: 1 week
Stage 2-3: 1 week
Stage 3-unlock anvil: 1 week
3 weeks seems about right for high pop servers.
shucks. oh well. more time to horde badges!
I got to try out Sunwell Plateau 5 man instance Tuesday after the Kara raid.
My first impressions is that it's a very ornate instance aesthetic-wise (we're not used to that on alliance side). The instance is fairly short and simple. The only real danger is the amount of spread damage your group encounters without one to two cc players.
We finished the instance in about 45 mins. My beef is definitely with the distance of un-guarded territory between the FP and the instance. On our server, the horde out-number alliance 3:1 almost. It was a heck of a gauntlet trying to get to the instance and forget about doing the dailies around there. I had swarms of swat teams all around just waiting for alliance to leave safe grounds.
It's very much like this in front of kara every night as well but it's not as bad because it's such a concentrated area. We just never get to use the summoning stone is all.
I checked yesterday and we are 88% complete with the Sunwell rep to spawn the 2.4 badge loot NPC. WOOT! Can't wait to get my new gear!
Patch 2.4 is live and dedicated in memory to Gary Gygax!
Here are my highlights. I can't wait for the servers to go live so I can test the new stuff out. I already know of one crazy jewelcrafter who is going to obtain every new recipe possible ASAP. It's too bad we have Karazhan tonight or we could try the new Sunwell instance!
*Holy Shock: The healing, damage, and mana cost of this spell have all been increased.
*Enchanting recipe to shatter a Void Crystal into two Large Prismatic Shards.
*Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use
*Queue times for arena matches have been reduced. Players will now be able to enter matches faster than previously.
*Increased the chance that Felweed, Dreaming Glory, Ragveil, and Flame Caps will contain a Fel Lotus
*Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped
*A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers
*Players will no longer need the Master’s Key to enter Karazhan. The gates to Karazhan will still require the Master’s Key to be unlocked
*The friends list now has a notes field per friend. Click on the note icon to add a note for a particular friend
*Players can now opt out of looting for group loot, round robin and need before greed looting styles. If a player turns this on, they will not get a looting turn in the loot cycle. This can be turned on from the right-click menu on your own portrait
*Players may now inspect players of the opposing faction while they are not flagged for PvP
*When both flags are held, the flag carriers will receive 50% increased damage done to them after approximately 10 minutes and 100% increased damage after approximately 15 minutes. Flag carriers can now be tracked 45 seconds after picking up the flag
*Players will now be able to purchase level 70 Superior quality PvP items from reputation vendors
*Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Manna Biscuits at a time.
*Primal Nether are no longer Bind on Pickup!
*Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
*Cyclone range is now 20 yards, down from 30.
*The benefits of drinking out of combat have been delayed while in the Arena. It will now take four seconds before the full benefit of the mana regeneration will come into effect. (OUCH!!!!)
(amazon.com jinx t-shirt)
I love my new paladin t-shirt. I couldn't decide which class to get at first. This past year I've had so many "mains"....and with the rebirth of my druid, I wasn't sure. The paladin class has never seemed a "perfect fit" for me...especially since she's a dwarf...but the over all game play...I'd say has been superb for me. So she's my unofficial "main" at the moment.
Who knows, maybe I'll buy a mage, rogue, druid, and priest t-shirt as well so I can have one for every day of the week.
At the guild get together this past weekend, one of the guildies asked me if I was wearing like 5 of those shirts at one time. I was like "you know, I should, that way I can be ready for whatever class we need" LOL. I think you need a mage for BBQ though....conjured mana biscuits and brisket. YUMMM.
Profile of the Irresponsible Raider
1. Only signs up for major raids (never to be seen in heroics or kara)
2. Shows up in green gear with less than 6k HP unbuffed (good sh*t like [Shadow Council Tunic])
3. Usually either less than 500 bonus spell damage or less than 1000 healing bonus
4. ZERO enchants
5. Probably has no mana or health pots.
6. Most probably doesn't even know what flasks are
7. Has no clue about the fights
8. What gems??
9. Has no clue about gear (often rolls on down grades because they are epic)
10. Has NO clue how to play class and doesn't bother to ask.
Sometimes I wonder if I should stop trying to be a compromising GM and be the a-hole I probably need to be so some people can get perspective. I'm already at the point where I can't cast a heal without pissing someone off. :D It's so fun....not.
How cool is this???
Hmmm. Maybe if the price went down a little, I'd consider making myself an Alachi figurine. :)
http://www.figureprints.com/
I think it's a very cool concept. You can chose the gear you want displayed, disable cloak and helm if wanted, and chose your pose.
My problem would be deciding which character is my main. And if my main is my paladin, then do I really want a figurine of a dwarf? Maybe....maybe if they let me have the flying pigtails.
A really cool pose would be my druid casting life bloom. Dang. Do you think they'll take 100g instead of $100???? hehe.
For my Druid
1) [Gavel of Naaru Blessings] 150 Badges of Justice
2) [Shroud of Nature's Harmony] 100 Badges of Justice
3) [Grovewalker's Leggings] 100 Badges of Justice
4) [Oakleaf-Spun Handguards] 75 Badges of Justice
(Total Needed: 425 Badges, Current Total 174)
For my Pally
1) [Greaves of Pacification] 100 Badges of Justice
2) [Waistguard of Reparation] 75 Badges of Justice
(Total Needed: 175 Badges of Justice, Current Total 109)
Wowhead New Badge Loot
You remember the wonderful Spurlock from that amazing addiction story? He sent me this awesome post on Craig's List he found.
Date: 2008-02-25, 9:48PM CST
If this is flag-worthy, sorry; I don't know where else to post it.
I am planning to quit (no easy task, right?) WoW and would ideally like to
redeem a fraction of the money I've put into it. This is my own account,
played on and off since August 2005.
I don't have super-uber gear or anything. One level 70 character, an undead
rogue, on a PVP server. Other high-ish levels are a 54 paladin on the same
server and a 59 PVE night elf druid.
The PVP server characters have about 3000G between them. The PVE toons have
about 500G. They also have random items including The Night Blade (epic, NOT
soulbound), blues, crafting materials etc. in the bank which you get as
well.
Obviously the characters can be transferred to whichever server you play on,
and we cajavascript:void(0)
Publish Postn add that cost to the total you pay. I'm throwing $150 out there
but willing to listen to offers.
Otherwise I'm just gonna have to delete everything so that I don't blow off
sex for battlegrounds ever again.
I tried out feral tanking a few weeks ago and did not enjoy it very much because my gear was so low. I felt completely ineffective. Supposedly when my gear improves, I should find tanking more feasible.
However, I really enjoy healing as usual. My usual build is full resto....treebeard and all. The HOT dance is really dynamic and fun....as opposed to the usual static heal drone you have to be as a holy pally.
I'm definitely not saying that druid > pally heal for sure. I'll take easy mode holy pally healing in raids any day of the week. I'm a big proponent of max healing paladins in the raid over holy priests. It was something I didn't understand about my old raiding guild. Why take a fleshy OOM bot over a energizer bunny mana pally?
And by prefer...I mean having 3 paladins and 1 priest over 1 paladin and 3 priests. I still think Holy Priests are very crucial to raids. Fort buff alone is painful to live without.
So back to the druid. I really wanted the druid up because I'm hoping to do more progression with JAE in the 25 man sector. One of the things I felt we lacked was significant rolling HOTs on the tanks.
For fights that require a lot of movement. I really favor having a balanced raid with great mana efficient flash heals mixed with HOTs mixed with impressive 8k Greater Heals. I call it a perfect symphony of healers. Put the right combination together and it's poetic.
And while I've been gearing up my druid, I've mostly been full resto. However, quite recently, it hasn't been as straight forward. The raid and party needs fluctuate a great deal depending on who is currently present. We had a pretty big influx of level 70s in our guild lately. It's hard to predict if I should bring dps or healing.
So last week, Taint suggested I go Dreamstate Moonkin. It was on the fly but I agreed and tried it out. My main concern was if I'd still be able to main heal fine without Swiftmend.
Two doubts I encountered right away. 1) NO boomkin gear at all 2) My normal reliance on Swiftmend in my HOT cycle
What I found was that in Resto gear, thanks to the last patch, I still have about 400 base spell damage. So I was actually able to do decent dps....not good or great...but decent. It actually ended up not being a problem at all. I have already begun to collect boomkin gear. My base spell damage now has gone up to 539 unbuffed in just the last 3 days. (thank goodness for old unfinished quests and heroics)
After I respecced Dreamstate for Kara, I was quite concerned about my ability to main heal. However, I did a heroic Ramparts afterwards and it seemed okay. I did find that I have to use my Nature's Swiftness/Healing Touch Rank 13 macro more often. Also, I'm forced to use Regrowth more often as well. But not having Swiftmend seems doable now that I've gone a week without it.
Also since, then I've solo healed Heroic SP, Mechanar many times. My current opinion is that this spec is quite viable. And with even better gear (my bonus healing is only 1300) this spec will be even more viable.
In fact, the more time I spend in this spec, I start to think this is a truly viable spec in the right hands...meaning you really have to know the two trees well enough to make up for the handicaps.
Also, it's just amazing to be able to have ONE spec and two modes of play.. NO RESPEC! It's great. For example, tonight we lost a rogue 7 bosses into Karazhan. We ended up picking up a disc/holy priest for the last three bosses. I was able to switch immediately to boomkin gear and dps for the rest of the raid.
Another huge bonus is with heroic instances. This build now allows for another healer to fit into our party easily without anyone needing to respec to make the instance work.
I'm currently working on tweaking my dreamstate build to accomodate my play style more. The one I'm using now was thrown together super fast.
Here's the one I've built this week that I might switch to:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0t0rdicsRuZZxLfLcq
(the mana dance)
Mana regen with Dreamstate is great. When I was farming Beads in Nagrand to get the [Kurenai Kilt] I never had to drink. I just did a mana dance every now and then and poof, I'd be full again.
Been sitting on a new episode for about three weeks now. I hate that I can't establish a regular schedule. It's frustrating for sure. I always feel guilty...like I haven't fed the cat in three days or something. lol.
I just get so caught up in WoW is my problem. Like this past month, my obsession has been getting my druid reputation and gear, getting the guild into SSC, and getting Sad's lock exalted with Aldor.
Sometimes I just set my mind to it and then nothing else matters. Like this past week, I've been obsessed with farming the AH for Sunfury Signets to get Taint exalted with Scryer on his shaman.
There's also this great site we discovered that also adds to my shopping list for gear.
http://www.maxdps.com/
Not only does it help you find you the obtainable gear for your playing accessibility, you can also input your current stats and it will show you what your max dps should be.
I have a hard time with a lot of players that underplay their character. All dps classes should use this site to find out if they are on under or over par with their character's dps.
Granted, your dps will probably be 100-200 lower than the stats because those are MAX stats. Meaning you are standing still and have free reign to DPS.
I plan to do that with my druid.
This past week, something truly strange happened. Taint's totally green 70 shaman came to our kara run and almost obliterated our COMPLETELY EPIC'd out Hunter. It was MIND BLOWING. I was like WTF???!!!
He did have a lot helping him though. I was spec'd boomkin on my druid, he had 5/5 misery from the shadow priest, and there was no warrior to apply sunder armor to the mobs.
However, still.. jeeze. Are you kidding?? GREEN @ss 70 shaman beating out our TOTALLY Zul'jin geared hunter. It totally blows my perspective about how I've been making assumptions about DPS.
I'm going to use max dps to help me get a clearer picture.
I checked out one of the newest factions Blizzard posted for the Lich King, The Tuskarr. They're quite cute. I'm going to enjoy collecting 10 clams for 75 rep or One baby seal for 200 rep. LOL.
It doesn't appear to be a playable race which is good because we all still have our fingers crossed for a new Worgen race. Ah yeah. 
Peeps in our Karazhan group alway fight to get the [Torment of the Worgen] from the Sealed Tomes off the ground. Would be pretty cool to finally have a formidable looking race on the alliance side.
JAE downs Zul'Jin
For awhile, a few guildies have been asking to clear ZA. We had cleared up to Halazzi no problem within the first three weeks of release....but then tapered off because we were still scheduling weekly Kara runs. I didn't want to push progression that much because I hadn't yet figured out a way to create a static party without stepping on toes.
With the announcement of Patch 2.4, it really started to sink in that we should have already cleared Zul'Aman by now. So this past week, I made a post on the guild website that I wanted to create a static team to push ZA. I picked our most seasoned raiders and we started progression on Thursday night.
Surprisingly, the most issue we had was on the trash pulls heading up to Jan'Alai. I thought for sure on Friday when we picked up the second night of attmepts, we wouldn't be able to down Zul'jin. If you've watched the fight on youtube, it looks totally complicated. It was actually the easiest out of the last three bosses imo.
Anyhow, what was funny was that hunter loot dropped from the sky and our hunter got everything! hahaha. It was so uncanny, we re-named the instance after him.
[Tuskbreaker], [Arrow-fall Chestguard], [Jin'rohk, The Great Apocalypse]
So now we're ready for Sunwell. hahaah. yeah right. I think it will take us another month to get ZA down to farm. But I was very happy that we finally cleared it.
After ZA, which was about 1:30am, a priest in our guild said he had a kara he ninja'd from another guild. They had gotten to Nightbane but couldn't down him so they called the raid. He was saved to the instance so he was able to invite us to the raid. (yes, we're jack-@sses) Anyhow, we didn't have a lot of people online so we 9-manned it. Actually we 8-manned the rest of Kara because our rogue kept dying for stupid reasons.
He had been playing horde hunter on another server for the past month and had all but abandoned his rogue so he was very "scrubbish"...so he kept doing really dumb things like running in and trying to tank the mob. Luckily for us, Kara is a joke now so we mostly laughed seeing him get wtf pwned. We literally did Netherspite 8 man because he died in the 1st second of the pull cutting the red beam off from the tank (always run in front of the beam, not behind it!)
What was hilarious was that we downed 7 bosses to complete Kara and he literally picked up loot from all 7 bosses! hahahahahah!! No one needed anything and he was so under-geared that he got everything that dropped...and it was all rogue gear! Lucky SOB!
After we were done with Kara, he went into Trade Channel and was like, "7bosses, 7 epic loots, 1 run, dead for most of the pulls, apply to JAE"
hahahahah. I was crying I was laughing so hard. That's what happens when you raid til your brain shuts down . :D
