Monday 31 December 2007

Christmas Holiday Update.

Christmas, not winterveil, nothing else...Christmas. I live in a christian country where political correctness has gone mad, so bollocks, it's CHRISTMAS. Kiss my Arse. Merry CHRISTMAS and a Happy New Year to you all.

Anyway, rant over, PS the Rogue hit 57 and has now got all 4 pieces of the craftable shadowcraft set and 2 pieces of BOE Tier Zero armour tha cost 50-60 gold a piece from the Auction House. He looks cool now. He has all the Sunken Temple quests lined up ready to go and now wants to do Scholomance as well for 2 BOP pieces of Tier Zero that don't conflict with the 6 pieces he is already wearing.

Arcanite the Mage zoomed past level 40 up to level 43 and now has a blue mechanostrider and has finished all the Scarlet Monastery quests and is now preparing for the last slog through Stranglethorn Vale.

Evilbastard is still 61 but Holy Warrior (yes I'm a dual-box geek) and TiceNits finally found the time to take him to Dire Maul and get his Dreadstead. YAY!

Once that was done he went with TiceNits' hunter and did some Hellfire quests and immediately got some nice gear ugrades.

Last Raid of 2007

Thursday 28th Decmeber 2007

We took a little trip to SSC with the intention of doing Lurker and Leo.

We got lurker down with only one wipe and a couple of nice pallie tings dropped, but not for Holy so I didn't waste DKP on them. By the time we had got Lurker down though there wasn't enough time for Leo.

It was suggested we go to Maggy, but by the time we got there people couldn't be bothered so it was further suggested that we go ZA. I passed on this and went to bed.

Sunday 23 December 2007

Alts and Crap Laptop

Was on the lappie again friday night and saturday so not a lot done due to the constant crashing.

Had 2 horrendous pugs trying to do SM Library for mage quests for my level 39 Mage, Arcanite. But a lvl 61 hunter wanted the scarlet key so I told him he could solo it easy and I went in on his coat tails :)

Got Mythology of the Titans, Mage Quest, 2 bosses and scarlet key. Then the rest of the group I was in arrived and we tried to do Armoury. The healer and I clearly knew what we were doing, but the rest were assholes.

Target Moon, sheep, re-sheep, re-sheep, re-sheep, shout athunter to get his dam pet of the sheep, re-sheep, shout at tank to attack skull not sheep, re-sheep, re-sheep, Ding 40, hearthstone out.

PS the Rogue had some fun, got some more quests in Un'Goro done and someone was asking for help with Blazerunner. I was a few steps back inthe quest chain, but he said he could carry on questing while I popped up to Felwood and back to Tanaris to get them done.

It took a while as laptop kept crashing; I'm sure it's overheating so I took it outside and did the grind. It must have been 0 Celsius. The things I do for WoW! It even crashed once outside. Well I got that done and dinged 57 in the process, I got back to Un'Goro and we took out Blazerunner. He reset at one point, dunno how, but it was lucky as I had accidently equuipped the totem instead of using it. DOH! and the level 54 priest was out of mana healing me.

HolyWarrior also got some dailies done, so thats another 100-odd gold.

He also picked up Fanblade Pauldrons the other day. So now I have to think about whether to replace Warchief's Mantle and re-gem. This may give me some more leeway with the defence and replace another +4 defence with more stamina though :)

I'll have a bit of a think later when I've got my dailies done and bought my mage a mechanostrider.

Thursday 20 December 2007

Heroic Crypts

I didn't get to go on the ZA run tonight so those that didn't go got a Heroic Daily done.

I tanked, as I was still prot and there were no other tanks anyway.

It was a pretty bad start with hard pulls but we got through to the first boss and wiped once, but once I knew the tanking strategy he went down on the second try.

By now I had the hang of tanking again and we got to Exarch Maladaar pretty easy.

We downed him pretty quick but everyone else died to his Avatar and left me tanking him and I died pretty quick. We ran back, downed him and looted our gear.

The guide I have says...
The Heroic version of this encounter has few changes, but the DPS increases make it very hard to pull off the encuonter without a very well-geared tank or a
skilled offtank to help out...


So, as we had no offtank I was very happy with that!!!

4 more Badges of Justice, Fanblade Pauldrons (a minor upgrade methinks to Warchief Mantle) and Green Winter Hat. Woot!!

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 41
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 2672/21000 Revered
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Gems and Voidy

Last night I got some of my tanking gems slotted, still need the Subtle Living Ruby to be cut and 2 Solid Star's of Elune, and I haven't put the epic gem in place yet. This will either drop 3 parry or replace 8 parry with 5 dodge

I did it one gem at a time and it's looking a little close on defence dropping below 490 and avoidance.

The avoidance should be OK, it will come down to the wire as to whether I replace the 8 parry with 5 parry or 5 dodge.

If the defence looks like it will drop below 490 then I will have to hold back on replacing one of the +4 defence +6 Stamina with a +12 Stamina Solid Star of Elune until I upgrade my shoulders or get a better trinket.

Hopefully tonight I will be able to get the final gems cut.

I took a trip to SM Cath to AoE tank whitemane again and died twice, this was worse than when I first specced prot, it maybe a healing issue with lack of mana that all my gear is now all tank based, they may only be level 40 elites but with 30-off of them pounding on you they can grind you down in the end if you don't pay attention.

We went to Lootreaver tonight, it was scheduled to be a Kara run unless enough people turned up and NicePallyClassLeader was planning on tanking Kara with 450 defence and I guess no-where near un-crushable, lol - that would have been funny!

So we went to voidy, and what with buying gems, trying to get them cut and cooking dinner I ... err ... forgot to respec holy before the raid. I was wearing my holy gear so it must have ... err ... just not clicked that I was prot specced.

Having said that I still finished 7th on the healing charts at roughly the same level as the 3 druid healers and I was up at 4th at one point.

For some reason though we wiped 3 times on him - not a good raid at all.

Wednesday 19 December 2007

I hate Leo

Back to SSC for some more tries on Leo and we had a trialst from "Fucking Tossers" tonight, Bordemn, apparently FTs have been screwing him over so he's looking for a nicer guild. No surprise there!

First pack of mobs and I went out of mana pretty fast. Guess what? Yep - I was wearing my tanking gear again - lol.

We had a fair few tries on Leo, and even got the mofo down to where he splits at 15% but a few seconds later he enraged anyway. Guess we just need a little more DPS and no-one to die.

The deaths were less frequent though, but I had to remind RaidLeader of Combat rezzes!!

I got my Inner Demon a few times, one time I didn't notice him and he was all mixed up with someone else's demon so took a while to target him, by that time I was on half health and no time and I was MC'd.

We reset and luckily I got caught on the lip of his platform or he was reset, but anyway, suddenly I was not MCd again and could start rezzing, and survived a 10% durability hit!

I managed to get back up to 2nd on the healing meters after my tank healing earlier, with the paladin with previously really bad healing in 1st spot. Maybe my subtle question to NicePallyClassLeader along the lines of "Is Kinky Ret Specced?" her reply "No, Holy" and my response "Oh, OK" prompted her to look into his healing and found it wanting.

I knocked him off top spot eventually only to be replaced on 1st spot by NicePallyClassLeader herself, but only just!!

Leo didn't die and we timed the respawns just right, with most of the raid well into their hearthstones by the time the respawns jumped us. I bubble-hearthed and the guy who always goes on about bubble-hearthing YouthClub, mistimed his and got wasted - haha

After the raid I couldn't find any guild Jewel Crafters so will have to wait to get my gems cut.

Tank Build Update

Spent some time working out exactly what to do with which gems and where to put them and came up with 2 solutions.

1. Get 4 * +4 Int +6 Stamina Unstable Periodt gems from Ogri'la for 40 Apexis Shards
2. Get 4 * +4 Crit +6 Stamina Jagged Talasite gems from AH

Well, the Ogri'la gems, it turns out, require you to complete the 10 man escort to the north of Blades Edge. Well, that wasn't going to happen in a hurry so looks like the +Crit gems for me. +16 Crit should help get a bit more threat I suppose!!

So, off to the Auction house and I could buy everything apart from the subtle living ruby and 3 Solid Star's of Elune. Onto my JC Alt (Actually he isn't yet, but he will be when I train him up!!) to find some uncut gems. He had a living ruby and 2 Star's of Elune so all I need to do is get one more Solid Star or a Star of Elune and get the a Guildie to cut them for me.

Couldn't get that done last night because it was then time for the raid and I had to do a quick 40 gold respec back to holy!

Monday 17 December 2007

Tankadin Stamina

Figures Totally Updated - must have been pissed when I was working out the figures!

Did some mathcraft on avoidance versus stamina now that I have my Aegis shield and Phalanx bracers. I have gone from thinking "loads of extra stamina" to "absolutely no point" to this afternoon's "Worth doing some additions" to this evenings realisation that almost all the defence I can remove from the gems is given by the shield and bracers. So those gems can now be almost entirely replaced with stamina. Woot!

I think its not going to be as beneficial as at first thought on the boost to stamina front, but let me work through the maths again.

I originally thought that as I had 510 Defence I could lose 20 Defence points and replace all that with Stamina.

So back to Zen Tanking for some Maths.

Quote:



At 70, 2.4 Defense rating converts to 1 Defense skill.

So the 20 Defence Skill I can lose is made up of 2.4 * 20 = 48.0 Defence Rating.

First impressions was that I could take 48 Defence gems out and replace them all with Stamina gems.

Luckily, before I went ahead and made this purchase I realised that Defence Skill also contributes to Combined Avoidance.

By reducing Defence from 510 to 490 I will also lose 3.216% Combined avoidance. Now with the bracers and the shield I have added around 2.06% 3.0579% combined avoidance. So to regain 102.4% avoidance out of those 48 defence points I need to make up 0.1581% with dodge gems.

But, of course I'll also need to take into account that I was actually above 102.4% CA so can probably lose a fraction of that too. I think I may have been at 102.8% so that's another 0.4% to lose for a total of 0.5% more CA I can afford to drop.

Edit: having respecced back to prot my CA is now 105.8853 so this loss of 3.216% reduces my combines avoidance to 102.6693.

Having worked out the standard deviation (right phrase?) of my actual CA against my calculated CA to be about 0.1% I should assume I am about 0.15% over.

As dodge contributes 0.053% CA per point that means I need to put +2.98 dodge rating back in to make up for the loss of avoidance from reducing my defence. OK, so that's 22 dodge gems.

Dodge comes in batches of +8 so I'll have to get 3 of them, that's 24 dodge.

But now I have overkilled avoidance again with a boost of 1.272% (24 * 0.053%) as opposed to the required 1.156% and increase of 0.116


So, Defence now sorted and I want to up any shortfall with dodge, so those stats sorted.

Block next, well I don't think I have, or they even exist, any block gems. All my block rating comes directly from the gear, so I don't have to worry about that. The consequence of this is that my quandary between removing block rating or adding stamina is over. I have to add stamina! Edit: No block gems.

Sidenote: I'm not even going to worry about Agility, I'm going to assume that I don't have BoK going and I'm pretty sure that none of my gear has any + Agility on it, so any part that Agility plays in my avoidance is static and is made up from my base stats. Edit: +20 Agility on Garona's Signet Ring which is 0.8% CA so any new ring has to replace that :(

Last, but not least, well yes least actually as it's pretty crap, Parry, as this has the worst conversion ratio, 0.0423%, I want to lose any parry gems in preference for dodge and stamina.

I think I have 2 +8 parry gems, maybe 1, maybe 3. Each gem adds 0.3384% Combined avoidance. Edit: I have 2 +8 Parry gems in red gem sockets.

So losing 2 parry gems I lose 0.6768% combined avoidance, reduced by around 0.15% leeway that I have from the new armour and the loss of defence gems, so I need to put in enough dodge to make up 0.5268% CA.

1 Dodge gem ([Subtle Living Ruby] ) will add 0.424% and Defenders Tanzanite will add 0.2115% making 0.6355% well within limits! Both go in a red slot so wil replace the parry gems in the red slots of my helmet and waist.

OK, so at this point I want to replace all but +16 of my defence gems with stamina.

My slots are as follows:

Head
Red +5 spell dmg + 6 stamina
Yellow +4 defence +6 stamina
Blue +4 defence +6 stamina

Shoulder
Red +8 dodge
Yellow +8 defence

Chest
Yellow +8 defence
Blue +4 defence +6 stamina
Blue +4 defence +6 stamina

Shield
Red Nothing
Red Nothing
(newly acquired +18 stamina)

Hands
Red +8 parry (replace with +8 dodge)
Yellow +8 defence

Waist
Red +8 parry (replace with +5parry +stamina until I can lose parry)
Yellow +4 defence +6 stamina

Legs
Red +5 spell dmg + 6 stamina
Yellow +8 defence
Yellow +8 defence

Feet
Red +8 dodge
Blue +4 defence +6 stamina

I'm not going to do the comparison now because it is midnight but the gems that have the stamina on that I want are:

Red: None
Yellow: None
Green: Solid Star of Elune +12 Stamina
Orange(Red or Yellow slot): None
Green:(Yellow or Blue slot): Jagged Talasite +4 Crit +6 Stamina
Green:(Yellow or Blue slot):Enduring Talasite +4 Defence +6 Stamina
Green:(Yellow or Blue slot): (Vendor 40 Apexis Shards - Ogri'la?) +4 Int +6 Stamina
Purple:(Red or Blue slot): Sovereign Nightseye +4 Strength (aids block) +6 Stamina
Purple:(Red or Blue slot): Glowing Nightseye +5 Spell Damage +6 Stamina

NB There are other purple gem that add Stamina and Agility or Attack Power but that is white damage increase and pallies threat is unmodified for white damage so yellow damage is better. So I am going to ignore them.

OK. So tommorrow I will work our what gems I want for each slot.

So course of action:

  1. Check actual figures and work through previous calculations again
  2. Check I have no block gems
  3. Check I have 2 * +8 parry Gems
  4. Map out gem socket colours and required gems and ensure a match - In Progress
  5. Replace +48 defence with stamina or something
  6. Replace parry gems
  7. Enchant the bracers with something.
  8. Enchant shield with stamina

If my calculations have gone awry then this is going to be awfully expensive in blue gems, so I will be doing it one gem at a time and comparing the results with what I have calculated. Wish me luck!

Leo Again

Went to SSC again last night for another pop at Leo, I was late and wearing my tanking gear - oops.

So started off at 7th place on the healing meters - haha. Swapped into healing gear after the fist pull and was up to second on the healing meters within 10 minutes at 10% when we had 9 healers. the only holy priest was up at 12%. We had 9 dedicated healers and some off healing.

By the time we had cleared Leo's trash I had actually topped the holy priest and was above 14% to her 12% - Oh joy!

We had a good few attempts on Leo and I got my Inner Demon's a few times but got the down each time real quick, again - thanks Bliz for patch 2.3 increase to healer damage!!

We got Leo down to 17% at best and managed to reset the bugger a few times by running him into the tunnel - never heard of that before.

A good experience fight

Sunday 16 December 2007

Heroic Mana Tombs Daily

Popped into to do the daily quests and the 2 normal quests that were outside.

Did Pandemonius after 2 wipes cos I didn't heal tank enough. I gave up grop healing and concentrated on tank and he went down easy.

Tavarok went down 1st try and then I mined up some good stuff from his body :)

Nexus-Prince Shaffar was harder and we wiped a few times untill we actually kept the beacons down and finally got him down.

So including daily hand in that's 5 Badges of Justice as well as
Consortium Plated Legguards
Design: Lustrous Star of Elune
Warp-Scarab Brooch

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 37
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 2672/21000 Revered
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Auction House Gone Mad

It must be Winter Veil Festival, maybe christmas costumes, but the price of wool went through the roof on Saturday.

I normally deal in wool cloth, buying low and trying to keep 5 stacks at around 50-60 silver, but it was flying off the shelves.

It went up to 1gold 99 a 5 stack and someone was so desparate they bought a single for 60 silver and a 20 stack for 10 gold! WTF?

It seems to have returned to normal now though :(

Friday 14 December 2007

More Tanking Stats...

Well, I just bought myself Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx with 35 Badges of Justice.

I equipped them and my Ogri'la Aegis and gained a whacking 3% avoidance and 19 defence at the expense of HP and Mana. But this means that I can now drop some defence and avoidance gems in favour of stamina.

Not only that but the shield has 2 red gem slots and I can enchant the bracers, probably, with +12 stamina.

Now that I can increase my HP pool and have a full set of tanking gear I can also look to swapping out some of the parry in preference for some dodge. Unfortunately there is no block I can eliminate at the moment.

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 32
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 2672/21000 Revered
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

SSC Lagathon

I don't know what was up with Blizzard last night, maybe they just had lots of people off sick or maybe this is just another example of their horendous incompetence, but the lag issues effecting our realm since just after patch 2.3 hit a peak last night.

I had to do the Simon Says quest in Blades Edge 3 time because I would get a lag spike and it would send 5 colours at once - yah, which order were they in? Wankers.

TiceNits was in SSC by know and her raid was plagued by DC's and lag spikes.

We ventured into SSC as well and lo and behold, lag, lag, DC, lag, DC all over the place.

Having said that we did quite well to only take 2 attempts to get Lurker down, he dropped some trinket, a ring, a recipe and Some Plate chest with healing thing, wich must hae been moer shockadin because the healing bonus is in the 50s rather than the 80s which my breastplate of the lightbinder is, it had the same armour and the same in but a little moer stam, less mp5 but had a plus crit rating too.

The lag was toobad so we quit at that point rather than trying for leo.

Wednesday 12 December 2007

More badges

Karazhan was tonight, got myself some more badges but never got round to checking my tanking stats.

Took Attumen down easily and of course Vambraces of Courage didn't drop but Stalkers Ward Bands and Gloves of Dextrous Manipulation did along with a Badge of Justice.

Then Moroes went down dropping Shadow Cloak of Dalaran and Emerald Dagger and 2 badges but didn't drop the Boots of Valiance. So a wasted night, cos we ain't getting Prince down tonight and I doubt we'll be lucky enough to get Red Riding hood again :(

So onto Maiden and I put Blessing of Sacrifice on the MT and of course didn't have too much of a problem with healing as I was always being broken out of it. Bitch dropped Barbed Choker of Discipline again and Shard of the Virtuos along wth another 2 Badges.

So we of course got Romeo and Juliet (can't bring myself to name it properly anymore) and another one-shot with Earthsoul Leggings and Masquerade Gown dropping plus 2 Badges, yes I remembered to loot both corpses this time!

Curator was easy, but did get 2 evocations off, possibly a third, can't remember as I was concentrating on keeping JoL up. He was kind enough to throw Staff of Infinite Mysteries and the Rogue, Shaman, Paladin T4 glove token into the pot along with 2 more badges.

We finished off the night with a Nightbane one-shot and got Robe of the Elder Scribe and Ferocious Swift-Kickers and 2 Badges.

So, a good Kara farm seeing as we were group 2 and only got started building the group at about 21:00 after I suggested Kara rather than Heroics!!!

My healing was of course great (sorry if that sounds egotistical) with a paladin and a druid as the other healers. In the first half hour I was on 48-49% and was hoping I'd be able to hit 50% with 2 other healers, I eventually dropped to around 42% with the druid at around 29 and the other pally floating around 20% - thats clearly not good for him :(

Well, 11 more badges at least along with 5 soul essences and various grey crap including The Stoppable Force - lol and only a 9 gold repair bill.

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 67
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 2672/21000 Revered
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Leoblahblah the Blind

Having wiped on Morogrim on Sunday night and learnt a bit the guild decided to do the same with Leo.

Good old Blizzard popped a server crash on us about an hour and a half before raid start and seeing as I was in an Heroic Slave Pens at the time I was locked out of the game for longer than most cos it took ages for the instance servers to come back up. As a result I couldn't sign up for the raid.

Lots of other people also had trouble getting into the raid as well, I presume their characters had been invisibly locked into groups.

After a lot of frigging around I ended up in the raid group and off we went.

Clearing to Leo was pretty painless and we got there quicker than I expected, then the fun began.

We wiped several times but got further and further each time, my main problem was my group kept getting out of range and my mouseover Divine Intervention macro didn't work (still haven't figured out why yet!)

I got my inner demon twice. The first time I didn't notice it for a few seconds as I was concentrating on healing, it was only when I moved and spotted this bugger following me that I realised it was mine. It still went down pretty quick though with the improvement in patch 2.3 adding 1/3rd of your healing as damage. The second time it went down even quicker, I suspect NPCL thought I wasn't on the ball and shouted over TeamSpeak "HL - get your demon down" and which point the cool down finished on Judgement and Holy Shock and it was on the floor before she could take a breath to shout again.

One of the wipe was caused by me; we had just about got everyone up after a wipe but there were 3 peeps that had been mind controlled and had been standing with Leo, when the mind control wore off they died immediately. I decided to try and get close enough to rez, Uh-oh - body pull and another wipe.

Well, we had another go and wiped and just as we were ready for another pop, 5 minutes after end time, we got re-spawns right in the middle of us. Bubble-Hearth and raid over.

I started the outing 4th on the healing table after a few trash but was soon in second place 2% behind an uber priest and at least 1% ahead of a shammy with NicePallyClassLeader mixing it with the druids down at the bottom of page one. This time I remembered to throw in the odd down-ranked Holy Light to ensure Light's Grace was around when needed. I even remember to pop Divine Favour and xxxx (can't remember name) once in a while!

Not a bad run, I hope that "Portugese Porkers" start using wws soon so they can see I am uber-healer!!

Post-Uncrushable - Dodge or Block

I just commented over on Zen-Tanking about his block/parry/dodge/defence comparisons because I was slightly confused as to the value on any avoidance once you have hit 120.4% avoidance and are un-crushable.

I'm a little confused now having been looking into this more and more.

Surely once you have reached 490/1 defence and are uncritable and then powered on to 102.4% CA there would be no point in putting any more effort into avoidance as crits, crushes and hits have all been pushed off the table and the only thing that can hurt you is when you block.

So presumably at 491 Def/102.4% CA you just want to keep piling on block so that you mitigate more and more of the damage that gets through?

Of course I may have completely misunderstood the whole concept!!


It has now occurred to me that even though block has twice as much value contributing to being un-crushable, damage does get through so you really want to replace as much block as you can with dodge that gives you 0% damage at the best ratio of points -> avoidance rather than taking mitigated damage.

So now that I am un-crushable and un-crittable the only thing left to do is push this mitigated damage out of the equation with pure avoidance?

Am I on the right track now?

Xmas Food >> Raiding

Monday night was yet more christmas dinner goodness so no raiding for me, although I did manage to bash out another Aldor Rep quest so that is progressing nicely. Will update my rep tally when I get home later.

I have also been doing some more research into tanking gear in light of the fact that those bloody Vambraces of Courage never bloody drop from Attumen the Huntsman in Karazhan.

I found Badge Rewards - Sidegrades? over on Zen Tanking. Thanks for that Everlight. Luckily the only badge reward I want, Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx, is the only one that is rated better on all counts than the Attumen bracers, regardless of that, I'm not even looking at an upgrade from tank to tank piece, the bracers are the only tanking pieces that I have that is not a tanking piece, it's my healing Justicar Gloves. So all is good. And as for Everlight's last comment on the Lootreaver bracers - with my DKP looking the way it is I am unlikely to be seeing those bad boys on my wrists for quite some time!!

I have still not done an overall calculation of how my tanking stats go up with the Orgrilla Aegis as opposed to my Tryptiach Shield of the Ancients, or even if they do. I will lose 1K of armour and a few block points (although the tool tip is unclear whether this is block rating or block value). But I can socket it with a couple of red gems which should boost stamina if I don't need to stack any more avoidance.

Next up there is mention of a cloak, now I have the Ironscale War Cloak which may last me a while so I may spend badges on healing stuff instead, I'll have to check the cloak stats at home later. That is if I can find and good healing upgrades from badges rewards.

Regardless, it looks like I'll be going on yet another gem spending spree, hopefully I can drop quite a bit of defence and parry (because new pieces will have more defence on them and because parry "alledgedly" can increase boss attack speed) and boost stamina and block (or is it dodge? - see next post)

Monday 10 December 2007

Morogrim Tidewalker and Uber Healing

Last night we finally fielded the second raid of the week into SSC and Target: Morogrim Tidewalker got going. This time we were over-subscribed so the DPS classes had to rolll for places, not the fairest way of doing it I suppose but, this guild does a lot of things in an arse-about-face fashion.

Luckily as usual we didn't have too many healers so I'm guaranteed a spot.

We clear our way to Morogrim with a lol-wipe and then a body pull on Morogrim himself but luckily we have DI's a plenty and soulstones thrown out for good measure.

We give him a few goes and each go gets better and better, but we didn't really get much progress on him. I suggested that we really need a pally tanking the murloc adds, I would be perfect, swap on some tanking gear and AoE tank, but alas we didn't have enough healers as it was, so we just took them on ad-hoc.

It wasn't the murlocs that wiped us anyway, it was the spike damage on the main tank, he died, we all died. Not quite the Uber Healing as mentioned in the post title, but I'll get on to that...

What was great was that for the first time ever I remembered to reset Omen and I could see that right up until the end I was top of the healing meter and then I only dropped by 0.4% into second spot to NicePallyClassLeader.

Looking at the data it also looked like NPCL was spamming Holy Light on the MT, so that is why she overtook me. I asked her if she was going OOM and indeed she was and was having to chug mana pots, whereas I was still on 50-75% having used no mana pots and kept up almost 100% constant FoL on MT and across the whole raid.

So if I throw in the odd Holy Light then I will knock her off the top spot again and will still maintain masses of mana to ensure I can get through the whole fight.

I suspect when we survive longer on him that NPCL will go OOM and have pots on cooldown so my mana efficiency will put me back on top spot anyway.

I am going to keep a closer eye on those healing meters from now on. Yes, they can have the same effect as damage meters so I am not letting on to anyone that I'm looking at it and starting a healing war that may actually damage the raid healing.

What was even better was when I checked the over-heal report, which can indicate healing meter chasing, and whilst I was top of the actual healing, my over-heal was at 8-ish % and down at 5th position, with NPCL up at first.

I really am getting to be a bloody good healer...and modest with it - hehe!!

When I was raiding with "Fucking Tossers" I was plagued with being 4th or 5th on the healing and suffered chronic over-heal. I haven't really got much more bonus healing, although I am now on 1705 and with epic orange gem and meta gem hope to boost that to 1725, but what I have got is Grid, a great addon that I have mentioned before, but have to mention again.

The name plates are compatible with my mouse over healing macros and the green dot really does seem to indicate that someone is being healed, and that is what has cut my overheal down, and that is all good for the raid.

Enough of this disjointed blog post, I have another Christmas Party tonight so no raiding, but I may get some more Aldor rep done.

Badge of Justice Purchases

What with the gem problem I have with my Justicar Headguard it occurred to me that I could spend some of my badges on a BoJ piece.

I'm wearing Kara Epic Mail boots and belt and a blue cloak and trinket. I can hopefully get either Red Riding Hoods cloak or Prince's Stainless Cloak and of course Boots of Valiance. So I checked out trinkets and Plate Belts.

Now, trinkets can't be socketed and none jumped out at me anyway so it's the belt.

I am pretty sure there are no plate healing belts in Karazhan so this would be the ideal BoJ purchase.

So I get looking for epic plate healing belts with gem sockets, the plan being so that I can socket an orange epic gem in them giving three benefits.

1. Upgrade to Plate
2. More healing from Orange Epic Gem
3. Orange Epic Gem will activate the Meta Gem

Guess what, there are quite a few epic plate belts but none are specifically healing, there was tanking, ret, tank/ret. There may have been one healing and spell damage, but that was lower healing than the one I already have, so that would be a backward step.

Looks like I'm gonna have to look elsewhere for my meta gem activation, or bite the bullet and over-write the purple epic gem I already put in the headpiece.

Aldor and Sha'tar Rep...

Saturday night and some of Sunday was spent progressing the aldor rep quests lines. I got the Shadowmoon and Nagrad quests done up to the stage where I need to go to Arcatraz to do Seer Udalo.

Also got 3 quests from A'tal, or whatever his name is, in Shattrath to do three different Heroic's to prove allegiance to the Sha'tar, along with some other heroic quests I have I can see myself doing quite a lot of heroics in the near future.

Saturday 8 December 2007

Progressing the Aldor Rep

Spent most of today on the Aldor rep quests and also handed in an Auchenai Crypts quest and got me some more Sha'tar rep.

So Aldor = 4762/21000 Revered
and Sha'tar = 3745/12000 Honoured

We were supposed to finish Karazhan tonight but couldn't get any tanks and if I respecced then we wouldn't have enough healers :(

So, I'm gonna do some more Aldor rep quests now then pop onto PS the Rogue and do some imba damage to poor unsuspecting mobs.

Friday 7 December 2007

Heroic Sethekk Halls

Did a guild run through Heroic Sethekk Halls this afternoon for the daily quest, did it with only 2 wipes. Dodgy trash pull half way through and then I didn't know about the end boss's Arcane Explosion thing, so died. I was only healer so everyone went down eventually.

Not a bad run though as I came out with another 3 Badges of Justice, Deathforge Girdle and Ravenclaw Band for my Ret build. I'm sure I need the ring, not quite so sure about the leggings though, I'm pretty sure I have been using Belt of the Tracker for that build.

When we got out the mage tailor offered to make me Golden Spellthread with the Primal Nether we got. So I "acquired" 10 Primal Lifes and now I have even more healing on Justicar Leggings :)

And of course the quest hand in gave me another 2 Badges of Justice.

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 56
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 2672/21000 Revered
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Aldor rep

Had a christmas party to go to last night so no raiding.

Today I have decided I am fed up with slowly grinding Aldor rep whilst doing other things so I spent 160 gold to buy enough fel armaments for 2 lots of epic shoulder enchants. 1 tanking and 1 healing and enough Marks of Sargeras to get to revered.

Now I'm going to do all the rep quests and see how many more Marks of Sargeras I need after that. By my calculations once I've done all the rep quests (and with 10% human rep bonus) I'll need to buy 360 marks, and on my server they go for about 1 gold each.

360 Gold and some questing and I will finally be exalted with Aldor.

This is just on HolyWarrior you understand, still gotta worry about EvilBastard and what he is going to do

Thursday 6 December 2007

Karayawn

Did Karazhan again last night, sarting to get a bit boring now with Attumen never dropping Vambraces of Courage, Moroes never dropping Boots of Valiance and being denied red Riding Hood's Cloak ... have I mentioned that before? And we rarely get as far as Prince so still short on his loot.

But we 1-shotted Attumen and got: 1 Badge of Justice, Stalkers War Bands and Gloves of Saintly Blessing.

On clearing trash we got a random drop of Inferno Waist Cord.

We the gave Moroes a hard time after a quick reset because we pulled him while clearing trash, after that we 1-shotted him too for: 2 Badges of Justice, Shadow Cloak of Dalaran and Broach of Unquenchable Fury.

Then another Inferno Waist Cord dropped while clearing more trash before we got to Opera and pulled the Romeo and Juliet fight. we had three rogues and they still managed to fail to sto Juliet healing so once healers got down to zero mana we wiped. We returned and gave them a good kicking and got: 1 Badge of Justice, Despair and Libram of Souls Redeemed.

Wierd, though, the Crone gave us 2 Badges of Justice last week so I was miffed to only get 1, maybe youhave to loot Juliet as well, I'm sure se didn't have loot sparklies above her though.

Anyway, next came Curator who was one shotted before he could even stat his second evocation - woot, and for our troubles: Dragon-Quake Shoulders, T4 token for paladins, rogues and shamans (I have all 3 sets) and 2 Badges of Justice.

Finally we go and take out Shade of Aran, I'm taken out about half way through but have a soulstone up and then we get him down to about 5% and lose the tanks and then he runs around 1 shotting everyone, he has about 1 or 2% left and there is one rogue left - he saves the day and gets him down :)

Somewhere along the line I had been soulstoned again, either it was lucky cooldown timing or we had 2 warlocks, I can't remember. But anyway, he drops Steelspine Faceguard, Tirisfal Wand of Ascendancy and 2 Badges of Justice.

We ran half a hour over rad time but worth it for the badges.

I'm not sure where I picked it up from but my Aldor and Sha'tar reps have increased slightly. Aldor has gone up by 165 (150 + 10% human bonus?) and Sha'tar has increased by 437 (Can't figure that one out!!).

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 51
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7989/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 3184/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Wednesday 5 December 2007

Login when you sign for raid ffs

Last night's raid was supposed to be SSC again. Target: Tidewalker.

What happened? well, not enough sign ups to start with (16 an hour before raid time), but that's not usually an issue because a lot of the guild don't bother signing up.

But that was combined with the fact that people who had signed up didn't even log on till at least half an hour after raid start; if at all.

Result: Maximum of 16 people in the raid.

And to make matters worse, of these 16 people, there were not enough that even wanted to make a Karazhan run to clear it by getting Netherspite and Illhoof down.

This guild, "Portugese Porkers", is really starting to piss me off. People don't sign for raids so we never know if we have enough for 25 mans beforehand = Target:Whatever! People not logging on when they have signed for a raid. People arriving late and not ready.

I'm not even going to mention the time when I won the roll on Red Riding Hoods Cloak with a roll of 93 and was told I couldn't have it - Bastards, oops I have mentioned it.

I am constantly amazed that this guild has gotten anywhere, let alone the ease with which the likes of voidy and lurker drop when people actually get organised and put their mind to it.

Oh well, got to sit in front of the telly with GF and watch our fave TV programme as she wasn't raiding either. Then I bashed out a few dailies before heading to bedroom land to grind some gf rep.

Tuesday 4 December 2007

Some Pallies Give Us a Bad Name

ZOMFG - Soooo funny

Thanks to Paladin Schmaladin for this. :)

What happened to my 3K FoLs?

Last night I knocked out a batch of daily quests including the mana berry collecting cooking quest to make up for the weekends repair bills and then into ZA as part of 3 man healer team (2 pallies and shammie).

We missed out on the 20 minutes to down Bear Boss Nalarakk by about 30 seconds. We started the fight with about 7 minutes left, I think, and he was down to about 10% with 2 mins left and I went in and JoL, Consecrate and Holy Shock and hit him with my big hammer in between healing but he just would not die. Grrrr. But I got a badge of justice out of him I suppose.

It was decided we didn't have enough AoE for the dragon and bird bosses is it? So we went onto the Halazzi the lynx boss, on the way I threw some consecrations out on the packs of wolves that were being multi tanked and this all seemed to go pretty well with me only dawing aggro once, which I bubble out of. The other pallyhealer was also managing to drag aggro from random trolls, a quick Hammer of Justice (from me ?!?! why?) soon dropped him aggro and allowed the tank time to get back on him.

So onto the Lynx and a quick pep talk beforehand and straight in. 10 Seconds later ... "Err I forgot to tell you guys about this thing the boss does" ... Wipe!

Well that was the first and only wipe of the evening and after that he went down pretty standard, with me focusing on MT and a little raid healing and cleansing.

I have put Grid on as my raid frames now and I like it lots, I think it tells you when someone is being attacked (red dot in top left hand corner) and being healed (green dot in bottom left hand corner) but I will need to investigate this further. It allows my mouseover healing macro to work so this is good and it also shows when someone is poisoned so this was super helpful.

The Lynx dropped some plate dps boots which no-one else wanted so I got them and also got 2 Badges of Justice.

Skullshatter Warboots

But I never once saw a 3K FoL crit :( the best I got was 2780 I think. Maybe I had better and/or more buffs when in SSC

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 43
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Monday 3 December 2007

Lurker Kill and 3K FoLs

Last nights raid went to Serpentshrine Cavern for Lurker.

I've fought him once and died lots but the guild pretty much has him on farm.

I was doing pretty well, but yet again, even though I was safely in the water for the spout I was still getting hit by it, it's bloody annoying.

But we got him down on the third attempt where I had been dead for most of fight. Just once I would like to be survive an encounter with him.

Of course there was no loot for me, but at least my DKP is building up, so when something does drop I may have enough points to win it.

It must be the new helmet and gems socketed in it, combined with lots of raid buffs; but I was quite regularly getting 3K Flash of Light crits - woot!! I wasn't even eating Golden Fish Sticks, I wonder if I'll get 3100 FoL Crits when eating them. Now I really am uber-healy-pally :)

First Time in Underbog

I am going to tidy up this post soon ... honest!

Having spent the morning levelling PS and waiting for TiceNits to come online, she finally arrives and asks if I want to help power level her hunter FuglyNelf. I remind her that we were going to go Underbog to bang out some quests clogging up the quest logs.

She accedes and we decide we may as well make it a heroic run, but she won't PUG it.

I'll finish this later but as reminders to myself

Iodine the rogue from FTs and Ticenits
Horizon the Feral Druid from PPs
LFg mage, druid or shammy - took the shammy GodAwfulShammyTwat

graphics crash - couldn't get back on for ages
buttons, heal macro doesn't mouseover standard party frame wiped group
shammy asked if Iodine had threat meter - cheek!

Got first boss down on second try
got frond for quest
wipe after wipe
gettiong sanguine hibiscus for quest not picked up yet
2nd boss Gahz'an - pain, swipes with tail and shammy kept going in water. spits acid to front, i kept dying
Iodine left and was replaced IceMaiden the mage from PPs
TiceNits had to get ready for raid and was replaced by BlackBag the Rogue from PPs

finally got Gaz down and he drops the last Sanguine Hibiscus i need

Now shammy keeps getting aggro on way to third boss - lol - threat meter?

Found 3rd lost guy for lost in Action quest

Got to 3rd boss. Shammy dies pretty fast, tank dies as boss dies and the bear pet is on full health with me, rogue and mage left.

Mage kittes it around, rogue keeps getting stunned, so mage tanking with me spamming heals and keeping JoL up. And we get him down to 30% - just where he goes back to being NPC Claw, so I can speak to him and complete Lost in Action.

Final Boss goes down pretty quick and I get a nice tanking trinket and the primal nether to sell cos noone wanted it but i can't use it.

4 Badges and tanking trinket!

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 40
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

PS the Rogue Update

I still haven't started re-levelling EvilBastard the Warlock yet but I did try to get some work done on PS yesterday, problem was I was on my lappy and it kept crashing again :(

I moved to a cooler room and the crashed stopped but the lag was worse, maybe I'm gonna have to re-locate the wireless router :(

But I did manage to rep up Timbermaw hold and head through to Everlook and progress the Linkens Boomerang quest line and follow up in Feralas and then headed over to Blasted lands to get some demon killing done for Razelikh quest chain.

I dinged 56 but this was frustrating to start off with as lots of crashes at most in-opportune moments and getting back in to find dead rogue :(

Saturday 1 December 2007

Holy Paladin Gem Problems

Last night I started looking at socketting my shiny new Tier 4 Helm, its got a meta slot and a red slot.

But first I threw the Lesser Arcanum of Rumination on it which I've been saving for this for ages, and also because my Sha'tar rep is not enough for the grea head enchant, or is it Aldor rep? who knows :)

So lets look to socketing. I picked up Royal Tanzanite last week so that should be ideal. In it goes.

Off to the auction house to look for meta gems ... Nothing really useful and what there was required a certain number of this colour gem and that colour gem. Hmmm a problem here; most of my gear is Karazhan healing epics and guess what, not one single item has a gem socket :(

So, I woke up this morning and straight onto the Auction House and found this little beauty for 120 gold (Ouch! Full set of dailies need to recoup that) Bracing Earthstorm Diamond.

Now for some reason I though the Royal Tanzanite was an orange gem, ie red and yellow, which would meet the stupid requirements of "more red than blue gems" and "more yellow than blue gems", hmmm, It's purple, so it's back to square 1. I need an Orange gem to activate the meta.

I have 2 choices both of which include getting an orange gem.

1) Get a piece of gear with a red or yellow slot and socket an orange gem I don't have.
2) Replace the Royal Tanzanite with an orange gem I don't have.

ARRRRRGGGGGGGG!!!!

Tanking Shield and more

Last night I got Ogri'la Aegis so next time I respec to protection I should be able to replace some parry gems with stamina. At the same time i may also replace all parry gems with dodge in case parrying and attack can increase a bosses attack speed as some people have been musing upon.

I have enough Badges of Justice now to buy more gear as well. But I am unsure whether to buy up tanking bracers or get some more healing gear.

After the head piece my only deficiencies in healing gear are

Cloak: Cloak of Whispering Shells
Belt (mail): Belt of Gale Force
Feet (mail): Windshear Boots
Trinket: Scarab of the Infinite Cycle

Friday 30 November 2007

Tier 4 Helmet

Just handed in the Tier 4 token to get...

Justicar Diadem

WOOT, this is so much better than Cover of Righteous Fury. I am Happy :)

Also got a lead on a tanking sheild: Ogri'la Aegis

Needs revered rep with Orgrilla and an apexis crytal and some apexis shards, not a problem on any count.

Aldor or Scryer (part 6,471,385)

So, EvilBastard, my level 61 affliction warlock is gonna start leveling again soon, should have a gadzillion rested bonus!

And of course I am back to the same Aldor/Scryer quandary that roughly 6.5 million WoW players have had before me.

It was pretty easy with my paladin, I was a nub, I picked the Dranei dudes obviously, being a human. I wasn't gonna ally myself with some dirty horde!!

But this time I'm thinking that I should put some thought into this.

So as a Level 61 Gnome Affliction Tailor/Enchanter Warlock whose boots should I lick?

Edit: for those people finding this post through search engines wondering what way to go? I went Scryer in the end. Enchanter trainer is on scryer tier to start with, and you don't die when you jump down at the lift!!

Karazhan as a Healer

To cut a long story short...

Tanks: Prot Warrior and Feral Druid
Healers: 2 Holy pallys, off spec druid and shaman
DPS: hunter, 2 locks and a rogue

Nightbane
1-Shotted
2 Badges of Justice
Emberspur Talisman
StoneBough Jerkin

Curator
2-Shotted
2 Badges of Justice
Pally T4 Gloves
Wrynn DymnastyGreaves

Shade of Aran
1-Shotted (just! We got sheeped at around 3%)
2 Badges
Rapscallion Boots
Pendant of Violet Eye ( got this but unsure if I need it)

Chess Event
1-Shotted (nearly lost though - hehe)
2 Badges of Justice
Ring of recurrence
Girdle of Treachery

Prince
1-Shotted (very nice strategy, pretty lucky with Infernal drops. I got killed by being too close after enfeeble but got a battle rez.)
3 Badges of Justice
Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix
T4 Token - Helm of the Fallen Champion - I want
Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted - I want

I won the Helm of the Fallen Champion - woot, but rolled a 9 on the cloak. :(

So I got 11 Badges of Justice, A trinket I probably don't need and T4 helm

Bosses left: Illhoof and Netherspite (any more?)

I'm still gonna update my tanking progress as I may get a chance to go back to it..

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 36
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Can Pallies Tank?

Whilst I was doing the cooking quest last night I got a /w from NicePallyClassLeader asking how my healing was. I told her that it was better than my tanking, lots better than my tanking. I thought she wanted me to re-spec for the night.

Turns out that most of the guild officers are not converts to pally tanking and she wants to trial me as a healer permanently. I really have not been a particularly good advert for pally tanking, but I think I have learnt pretty fast and I was really getting into this tanking malarky, but, to be honest, I am a healer at heart so took her up on the offer, even got the respec money off her. hehe.

Off to Stormwind for a quick re-spec before tonight's raid. Which of course, for me, was not Zul'Aman but the continuation of Karazhan.

Blades Edge Cooking

Last night the cooking daily led me to Blades Edge mountains. First off to buy 2 recipes from Toshi's Station that are needed to cook up the ingredients for the main course, Abyssal Broiled Blah.

Crusty Serpent something and mon'dathal Shortribs requiring serpent flesh and raptor ribs. Luckily I had these on an alt. The recipes cost 3 gold each and I saw a profit opportunity and bought an extra one of each to stick on the auction house for lazy people. DOH! soulbound recipes! And the bitch only bought them back for 75 silver each.

I cooked up the ribs and stuff and headed off to Camp forge Terror to kill an Abyssal thingummy so that I could use the cook pot. Whilst I was there I also banged out the dailies then headed back to Shat to hand in. No special recipes in the quest reward today either :(

Main Tank Karazhan

Wednesday 28th November 2007

Tonight the guild had a Zul'Aman run and of course I wasn't invited. But we got a Kara group together and I was main tank.

I'm still not totally confident about assigning targets and pulling, so I let the OT assign.

We knocked out Attumen, after a quick wipe where I couldn't target Attumen for some reason, so he took out the healers pretty fast. Ooops, But on the second attempt he went down easy. 1 Badge of Justice but no bloody Vambraces of Courage :(

Then onto Moroes' room. I managed to pull 2 elites from up against the wall when we weren't quite ready and died pretty quick, but we didn't totally wipe. We had to reset Moroes once because the crowd control went to shit, but once we got that sorted I had him tanked perfectly and even instructed the Off Tank what to do, ie bring his target next to Moroes and get a few hits on the big guy to make sure he was 2nd on aggro list. Another 2 Badges, no good loot.

On the way to Maiden we got a random drop of Boots of Elusion, but I have Ironscar Boots (or whatever) so didn't need them.

We tried with me tanking Maiden but the bitch kept silencing me so no Holy Shield and therefore a 35% drop of avoidance - Ouch! So the OT tanked her while I swapped to healing gear and stuck Blessing of Sacrifice on him so that I got damaged out of silences. 2 Badges and loot I already had.

The last kill of the night was set at Opera. Up we went and we got the Wizard of Oz event. There was lots of confusion over the event because we hadn't discussed strats first before starting the event. I tagged Dorothea first, we burnt her down, then the dog, then Strawman and finally tinman. Have I left someone out.

The crone came along, and more chaotic dpsing and flying round the room happily led to a 1-shot. More luck than judgement? Probably. 2 more badges, no loot worth mentioning.

Back door open.

Well, another 7 badges anyway :)

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 25
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Thursday 29 November 2007

Old Cooking Dailies

Last night I popped over to Nagrand and AoE ground talbuks and clefthoofs for meat. I need 4 Clefthoof meat to make Roasted Clefthoof for yesterdays daily cooking quest.

Once I'd got it I popped back to Shattrath to cook it then headed to the Ancestral Ground on the western edge of Nagrand. I tried to use the cooking pot and, ffs, requires cooking fire.

You have to use the cooking pot in The Ancestral Grounds so there must be a bloody cooking fire here. Wasted all that time going back to Shat to cook the clefthoofs up. Fuck!

I flew around a bit and found a fire, cooked up the Spiritual Soup and went back to The Rokk and handed it in. Unfortunately I didn't get any recipes this time though :(

So, this at least proves that you can do the previous days cooking daily quest. But, you can't then pick up the current days one.

20 Slot Bag ... woot!

Tuesday 27th November 2007

Didn't get much of a chance to do anything today as I had work all day and then a meeting till 10 this evening.

But what I did do was pop back up to Ghostlands and hand in the first ZA quest which involved getting a map after killing the bear boss. Lucky for me "Fucking Tossers" had killed the bear boss before asking me to come and help them.

One thing that I have been suffering from of late is lack of bag space, especially carrying round different sets of gear and half a bag full of apexis shards and various other quest/rep items.

Handing in the quest rewarded a 20 slot bag. That got equipped straight away and then I went to the Auction House and bought an imbued netherweave bag (18 slots) for quite a wad of cash. This gave me a little extra space.

What is really annoying is that you cannot upgrade bag slot 1. so you can have all your other bag slots with 18 and 20 slotters but you're stuck with a 16 slotter in bag slot 1.

Phew, what a lot of slots, reminds me of downtown Birmingham on a Saturday night!!

I also picked up the daily cooking quest which involved making some spiritual soup with the cooking pot. But by the time I got in from the meeting I couldn't be bothered, I'll see if I can do it tomorrow.

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Iron Maiden or Tier 4 Gloves

Back when I picked up 5% more avoidance the first time I was pondering whether to use Justicar Gauntlets or Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden.

I am unsure which is better and will check out the stats later, but, the question that needs answering is...

Are the set bonuses (or is it Boni?) on Tier 4 worth the loss of stats? Opinions?

p.s. if you've just googled Iron Maiden and ended up here - tough shit! Ha Ha Ha You fell for my evil plan ... mwuhahaha!!!

Vengeance or Righteousness?

So as suggested by NicePallyClassLeader I had been running with SoV and JoV after a JoC rather than a SoR and JoR.

I am back on SoR/JoR now, with an ETA on an EMI toting an STI which is TMI on GCD ... blah blah blah, bloody TLAs

So, my current pull process is...
  1. BoSanc, Righteous Fury, Retribution Aura (Dev if boss)
  2. Try and remember to turn auto-attack on - DOH!
  3. Seal of Crusader
  4. Pull (With Captain America if safe to do so)
  5. Consecrate (if safe)
  6. Judge Crusader (if mobs aren't too close yet)
  7. Holy shield
  8. Seal of Righteousness
  9. JoR, re-seal and judge as necessary
  10. Consecrate as necessary
  11. Exorcism, if applicable, as necessary
  12. Try and remember to spam Holy Shield and keep it clear of GCD conflicts
  13. Try and remember not to use spells requiring cast time*
* a) It's stupid and wastes time because it WILL get a delayed casting. b) You shield is on your back - not good for block or threat generation. I can't help myself though. I wanna be Captain America and I love the Hammer of Wrath. hehe

So, what is best? Righteousness or Vengeance?

Also, does my pull strategy seem sound? Have I missed anything?

Answers on a postcard or the back of an envelope to ... err please post comments :)

Tankadins really ARE useful

Missed my guild run to ZA last night because I wasn't going to be home in time, no bad, was expected.

But when I logged on I immediately got a /w from MescalinMadness, one of the Officers of "Fucking Tossers", asking if I wanted to come along to ZA.

I gracefully accepted and found they were having trouble getting to the Lynx boss, the invisible packs of cats were giving them some grief.

Paladin AoE Tanking FTW. Dunno what the problem was ... hehe

So we get up to the Lynx boss after some more uber-uncrushable-tanking on my part and I swap into my healing gear.

5 wipes later its time to quit - ROFL

MescalinMadness /w me afterwards and thanked me for coming and said it really made a difference with me pally tanking on the way to the boss.

I felt very proud :)

Easy Cooking Quest...

...at least if your level 70 tankadin!!

Today's daily cooking quest involves going to the northen edge of Netherstrom and picking mana berries from the bushes.

What a joke, you can probably do this in 5 mins without engaging a single mob. I, however, am fairly trigger happy with Captain America's Sheild. hehe. My HP never dropped (visually) from a full bar on the level 70 raptors.

I took on some level 71s and it may have dropped to 80%.

That little blue bar they call mana, well that's a different story.

Monday 26 November 2007

Mount Hyjal Attunement

Ripped off verbatim from somewhere...

Everybody who wants to go at The Battle of Mount Hyjal, has to pick up the quest The Vials of Eternity from the Soridormi. This is important step in the Black Temple Chain as well. Mandatory is, that this quest will have its place in your Quest Book!

Notice, it is not important to follow the whole attunement line for Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep itself anymore. Though the people who want to get their Champion of the Naaru title, has to do those lines as well. It will include killing of Magtheridon and Gruul the Dragonkiller.

Comment Moderation Turned Off

I had turned comment moderation on as I originally intended this to be a pretty private (although not technically) blog.

But having been reading a lot of other blogs the direction has changed somewhat.

Now I do actually want people to leave comments and I feel that the moderation option may be putting people off, so I am going to try and remove that option.

If I get inundated with spam offers to buy penis enlarging viagra (I wonder how many googlers I will get because of that!!!) then I'll be turning moderation back on.

The Route to Black Temple

Just found this and thought I'd stick it here so I can find it again...

The Black Temple attunement starts at The Altar of the Sha'tar for Aldors, and the Sanctum of the Sun for Scryers. Both are in Shadowmoon Valley.

Aldors start attunement from Anchorite Ceyla at the Altar of Sha'tar in Shadowmoon Valley.

1. [70] Tablets of Baa'ri
2. [70] Oronu the Elder
3. [70] The Ashtongue Corruptors
4. [70] The Warden's Cage

Scyers start attunement from Arcanist Thelis at the Sanctum of Stars.

1. [70] Tablets of Baa'ri
2. [70] Oronu the Elder
3. [70] The Ashtongue Corruptors
4. [70] The Warden's Cage

After that, the chain comes together for Aldor and Scryer.

5. [70] Proof of Allegiance
6. [70] Akama
7. [70] Seer Udalo

Seer Udalo is found in the Arcatraz just before the last boss.

8. [70] A Mysterious Portent
9. [70] The Ata'mal Terrace
10. [70] Akama's Promise

After you finish this chain, you get to pick from some rewards and the chain seems like it ends. It continues however, inside Serpentshrine Cavern from Seer Olum who you can speak with after killing Fathom-Lord Karathress. He starts the next part of the Black Temple Chain.

1. [70] The Secret Compromised

After you get this quest, you just return to Akama in Warden's Cage to get new task. First you will be ordered to slay Al'ar in provided Ashtongue Cowl.

2. [70] Ruse of the Ashtongue

Follows gaining access to The Battle of Mount Hyjal and slay the first boss, Rage Winterchill. To do this, Lady Vashj and Kael'Thas Sunstrider must die.

3. [70] An Artifact From the Past
4. [70] The Hostage Soul
5. [70] Entry into the Black Temple

Follows raid doable quest, great event with defending of Xi'ri. You will be awarded with the[Medallion of Karabor], that will grant you entrance to Black Temple.

6. [70] A Distraction for Akama

At this point, you are attuned and can enter Black Temple, although the chain continues and you can soon upgrade your medallion.

1. [70] Seek Out the Ashtongue
2. [70] Redemption of the Ashtongue
3. [70] The Fall of the Betrayer

And Tonights Raid is ...

Sunday 25th November 2007

LootReaver.

After a bit of uncertainty whether we'll be doing 2 grps for Kara and/or ZA we have 25 people signed up for the raid so off we pop to Tempest Keep and fight out way to LootReaver.

I am not tanking, although I reckon I could have done, in fact I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have wiped on all the birds just before A'lar's room if I was tanking. Pally AoE tanking rocks!

Even after patch 2.3 I still am to be convinced that paladins can DPS, a guy in "Fucking Tossers" has gone Ret and says it is viable. I will need convincing. I'm on DPS, we have 3 tanks. WTF?
I'm a paladin. I am a PROT paladin. hmmm. At least I can go in and keep Judgement of Light up. But to be honest I was doing that as a holy paladin anyway.

But no, I wasn't tanking, so we wiped and/or ran out several times. In fact I was so sure this was gonna happen I made sure I had a clear shot to the exit and hung back a bit and healed the tanks between swings.

We made it to LootReaver relatively quickly and had some wipes on his trash including one where we still had 2 mechanical demon thingies up and the tank, a pally healer, me and about 2-3 dps were the only ones still alive. Things got very frantic and me and pally healer were going oom pretty fast. I had been healing like a nutter long before someone calls for me to pitch in with the healing, but NicePallyClassLeader pointed out I already was. Well, actually, at the time I was hiding behind a wall with 0 mana and 5% hp, keeping out of LoS of the saw blades and deciding whether to make a run for the door. :P

But back in I went and managed to keep the tank up thanks to some well timed heals on me which gave me enough mana to keep going. We must have been down to tank, me and NicePallyClassLeader by the time the first of the 2 demon thingies went down and moved onto last one. We're about half way through the last one when the rest of the raid, freshly rezzed at graveyard, finally storm in and unleash a maelstrom of pain on the poor bad guy.

..Phew

So we start off the Voidy event and wipe, I manage to run out with about half the raid.

Attempt 2: Takes some time and there are some scary moments when I thought I was gonna die, chugged plenty of pots, healthstones and self-healed but we got through to the end.

He dropped 2 set of Warrior, Priest, Druid T5 shoulders and the Cowl of the Grand Engineer (or whatever) that TiceNits has been after for ages.

I, of course, could use none of this, but I enquired as to whether I earnt any DKP for my trial here the other week. No I didn't.

A fun night.

Daily Cooking Quests

Sunday 25th November 2007

It's been a while since patch 2.3 hit and I have finally got round to figuring out what this is all about.

You go along to "The Rokk" who is a goblin located in the northern area of Lower City, Shattrath between the Netherdrake vendor and the Arakkoa area.

He gave me a cooking pot and told me to make him some Kaliri stew which needs the cooking pot, 3 warp burgers and a large kaliri wing. The wing comes from those bloody annoying birds that harass you when you're trying to do the Skettis quests (flying mount required) you can also get the warped flesh required for the warp burgers from Skettis too.

Simply cook up the warp burgers then use the cooking pot to make the Kaliri stew and hand it back into The Rokk.

I got about 8 gold (I think) some serpents flesh, some warped flesh a large fang ?!?! WTF? and a Hot Talbuk Steak recipe

Not bad, knocked out the 2 skettis dailies while I was up there, so it paid for my Shambolic Arcatraz outing.

Time for a couple of pints before tonights raid...

Heroic ... More Like Shambolic Arcatraz

Sunday 25 November 2007

Just goes to prove I'm still learning the ropes as a tankadin.

My one-on-one tanking skill is just about there I reckon, just need to fine tune what I do when I lose aggro.

What I really need to improve is pulling, that got us a few wipes and I'm sorry to say we had a paladin as healer.

I'm not sorry that the healer was a paladin, I'm sorry that the healing was, lets just say, cutting it fine and sometimes plain inadequate. I think I'll check up on her armoury profile and see if my healing gear is better.

Of course I caused a few wipes with my nub tanking skills and a couple of dodgy body pulls! We cleared the first boss room then skipped him and headed up stairs, I then wiped us on the voidwalker thingies a couple of times. First time because I didn't move them out of their healing portals because I didn't know about them (read: forgot) and the second time because I got all tangled up against a wall and left it in its healing portal again.

The Paladin left and we got a resto druid in to continue. We cleared the room easy then (now that I knew about the portals) and moved on.

I then executed another bloody awful body pull and then hid round a corner so I couldn't get any healing - oops.

Onwards to the 2 bitches. We took the one on the left.

With her, she heals. So the rogues (of which we had 2) have to interrupt. This is just after a whirlwind, so all melee have to run out and then rogue back in to interrupt her heal. Of course this didn't happen.

First time the rogues both died to the whirlwind so we all ran the entire length of the instance - haha - to escape.

The next time the rogues didn't die but her HP just never went down, I guess they weren't interrupting the heals. We ran out again and reset once a rogue went down.

We decided to call it a day at this point. So huge repair bill and no badges of justice and no daily quest complete.

:(

Saturday 24 November 2007

Mouse Over Item Links

Thanks to BigBearButt for this page which has allowed me to add mouse over tooltips for every item.

Basically you need to add some styles and javascript into you blogspot template and then add a class and javascript mouse events to the anchor tag, like this...

class="epic" onmouseover="showWowitem(event,32756);" onmouseout="hideWowitem();"

... and you end up with this.

Cloak of Whispering Shells

You will notice the tooltips appearing now on more and more of the items in this blog as I revisit each one and update the links.

Friday Night Drunken Karazhan Run

Last night we did a late starting Karazhan run at 21:30 (22:30 server time). I tanked (badly) but we got Attumen down, then Moroes, then Maiden and finally went to The Opera Event.

Of course we had the obligatory wipes and I died quite a few time, but we took down the Big Bad Wolf on the second attempt.

And he finally drop Red Riding Hood's Cloak which I have been waiting for forever as an upgrade to Cloak of Whispering Shells for my Healing gear as I am primarily a Holy Paladin at heart!

So the raid leader calls the roll...



...and look at that roll. 93 - woot. But over TS there are two words from the Raid Leader "No HolyWarrior"



WTF???? I won the roll and it goes to the second highest roll. This was a generally Alt run, so why should an alt get the bloody cloak over a main?

OK, I am tankadin at the moment, but that does not change the fact that I am a healer at heart.

I was pissed off. We moved on and I lost all will to do anything. I maybe tanked one of the Money Mobs after that, I sat around watching, taking the cash as they killed mobs, I went afk for a smoke at one point, then wandered off to get another beer and then tanked a ghosty by the back door when I accidentally got to the front of the group and was noticed.

Once I saw the back door open I "red-X'd" TeamSpeak and WoW at the same time to simulate a DC.

I suspect they were giving up for the night anyway, but after a combined 54 gold repair bill and drops totalling 8 Netherweave Cloth and 2 Soul Essences and then being denied the only loot I could use that I won on a fair roll, I'll be fucked if I'm gonna carry on or have happy chat in /guild.

Someone pointed it out, on one of the other blogs that I read, that tanks have the highest repair bills (as proved tonight) and rarely get the thanks for this.

I swallowed a 54 gold expenditure to run Karazhan tonight so that everyone else could get some phat epix and I get no thanks and even denied the only loot that I wanted.

Fuckers.

At least I got 7 badges of justice out of it.

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 18
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Lets Spend Some Badges

Yesterday I looked at what my badges of justice can buy me and, now that I understand what dodge, block, parry etc contribute to my combined avoidance, I thought 42 block rating on the Libram of Repentance is a must ... NOW!!!

15 Badges later... 102.827% Combined Avoidance.

UNCRUSHABLE!!!

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 11
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 102.827%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Friday 23 November 2007

Item wish List

Head
Helm of the Fallen Champion (Karazhan - Prince) x 3

Neck
Dunno yet

Shoulder
Mantle of Abrahmis (Karazhan - Netherspite)
Pauldrons of the Fallen Champion (Gruul's Lair - High King Maulgar) x 3

Back
[Healing] Red Riding Hood's Cloak (Karazhan - Opera - Big Bad Wolf)
[Healing] Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted (Karazhan - Prince)

Chest
Dunno Yet

Wrist
Bracers of the Green Fortress (Crafted)
Vambraces of Courage (Attumen)
Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx (35 Badges of Justice)

Hands
Dunno Yet

Waist
[Healing] Girdle of Truth (Karazhan - Netherspite)

Leg
Unwavering Legguards (75 Badges of Justice)
Leggings of the Fallen Champion (Gruul's Lair - Gruul the Dragonkiller)

Feet
[Healing] Boots of Valiance (Karazhan - Moroes?)

Trinket
Figurine of the Collosus (Shattered Halls)
Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch (Karazhan - Moroes)

Ring
Andormu's Tear (Black Morass Quest)
Elementium Band of the Sentry (Arcatraz)
Ring of Unyielding Force (25 Badges of Justice)
Shermanar Great-Ring (Karazhan - Shade of Aran)

Weapon
Dunno Yet

Sheild
Azure-Shield of Coldarra (33 Badges of Justice)
Shield of Impenetrable Darkness (Karazhan - Nightbane)
Aldori Legacy Defender (Gruul's Lair - Grull the Dragonkiller)

Libram
Libram of Repentance (15 Badges of Justice)

Random
Fiery Warhorse's Reins (Karazhan - Attumen the Huntsman)

Let me pick up the Arcane Tomes you Bastards!

FFS Blizz - Why? QQ

What annoys me now is that if you're Aldor you can't pick up Arcane Tomes. Now that is bloody stupid. OK, you can't use them but you can trade them for Fel Armaments which do the same thing for your faction.

Guess what, Mechanar dropped loads of Arcane Tomes last night. Guess how many Fel Armaments dropped?

Update 22/08/08: Thinking about it maybe master looter was on?

Tankadin - Attempt 4 - Oopsy

Still no ZA for me last night :(

But NicePallyClassLeader arranged an outing to a Heroic and as we were doing this for me it was agreed to boost my Sha'tar rep, so Heroic Mechanar it is.

(check my Sha'tar rep on previous entries before continuing...)

So off we all fly to Tempest keep, well the short trip from Cosmowrench anyway, and I can't get in. Errr ... OK guys ... slight problem ... 5999/6000 Friendly with Sha'tar. OOPS

Them: Go kill a mob.
Me: (panicing) err ... no rep.
Them: In an instance.

So off we go and reset Mechanar to normal mode, pop in, kill a mob, I ding Honoured, hearth to Shat, buy Warpforged Key, get a summon back and slink into Heroic Mechanar with a red face.

To cut a long story short, I've been in 4 Tempest Keep instances before. 1 for Karazhan attunement for myself, 1 for Karazhan attunement for StupidDorf, 1 VoidReaver run with "Fucking Tossers" and finally (before today) my VoidReaver audition run with "Portugese Porkers". Hence the 5999 friendly rep and my woeful nub performance in their tonight.

It didn't help that we were on a different TS server, the group leaders first language is not English and that I had consumed vast quantities of Stella Artois; so I looked really good in front of the new guildies, I wiped us several times, executed some god awful pulls and I'm surprised I didn't have <Guildless> above my head by the time we got out.

In all fairness though, the mage wasn't helping with the Frost Novas, restricting my ability to get aggro back. The Shaman wasn't helping by attacking mid pull and the healer was cutting it fine a lot of the time and my mana suffered a lot because of this. The healer was actually unaware of the mana boost to pallys from healing, he is aware now.

We got the Gatewatchers down pretty easy and then Mechano Lord Capacitus gave me an Assassin's Fire Opal (+6 Crit Rating and +5 Dodge Rating). This I'll keep till I'm re-arranging my gear, post 102.4% avoidance, to up damage and threat.

We temporarily bypassed Sepethrea and had a couple of wipes getting to Pathaleon the Calculator who kindly gave me another epic gem: Defenders Tanzanite (5 parry, 6 stamina) and epic mail gloves: Handguards of the Steady (vendor trash probably).

And then we gave Nethermancer Sepethrea a couple of wipes. She was a bit difficult for a nub to Mechanar, she summons some hard hitting fire elementals who AoE. I had to tank her walking backwards and avoiding the fire.

It went to shit the first couple of times and then the shaman who refuses to go to ZA, has been moaning since the start and who kept screwing up my pulls and getting aggro declares he is off.

We pull a guild shadow priest in, buff up and kill the bitch.

She was very nice, she gave me another Assassin's Fire Opal and Stellaris - a blue one handed axe (more vendor trash!)

These epic gems are unique equiped so it looks like 1 for my Ret set and 1 for my tank set

I also got some sunfury signets and marks of sargeras and a random green cloth thing.

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 26
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 2747/12000 Honoured
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 97.500%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Thursday 22 November 2007

Too Much Gear.

Wednesday 21 November 2007

So, I've now got another blue tanking cloak from Heroic Slave Pens.

Before we worry about that...

NOOB ALERT: For some reason I thought I was waiting to get Aldor Exalted to get shoulder enchants. Well I noticed today you can get green quality enchants at Honoured - DOH! So 2 Holy Dust for tanky enchants and 2 holy Dust for Healing enchants.

Anyway, back to the cloaks. Is it better than the one NicePallyClassLeader and I made the other night? Ever the nub that I am I'm still unsure quite what Shield block and block rating mean and how much they add up, so I have now researched that.

Ironscale War Cloak
78 Armour
26 Stamina
+12 Dodge Enchant
Equip: Increase Shield Block Rating by 19
Equip: Increase Shield Block Value by 29

vs

Cloak of Eternity
76 Armour
36 Stamina
+12 Dodge Enchant
Equip: Increase Defence Rating by 23

So, lets work this out.

Un-Crittable by Level 73 - need 490 Defence
- Defence needs to be 5 * boss level = 365 to reduce base crit chance to 5%
- 25 Defence reduces crit (as well as increasing your dodge, parry and block) chance by 1% so 125 Defence (5 * 25) = 490 Defence = Un-Crittable.

Un-Crushable by Level 73 - need 102.4% total avoidance
Your miss, dodge and parry plus your dodge block needs to be 102.4% to be un-crushable against a level 73 mob.

First off I equipped Ironscale War Cloak without the dodge enchant. This increased my total avoidance (even without the dodge) , so clearly this is better on the un-crushable front. But it reduced my Defence to 487.

OK, so I found out the difference between block rating and values.
Block rating is you chance to block (part of your combined avoidance)
Block value is how much damage is actually blocked (not part of avoidance)

Conclusion: Shield Block Rating of 19 > 12 Dodge + 23 Defence

OK, so two things.
1) Ironscale War Cloak is obviously better, even with apparently less stats ?!? We need to find out why.
2) I need to replace some gems to get my Defence back up to 491.

First off, lets get un-crittable again...
I have 2 Enduring Talasite (+4 Defence and +6 Stamina) on my Wrynn Dynasty Greaves. I replace these with 2 Thick Dawnstones (+8 Defence) at 29 gold apiece.

This +8 Defence improvement actually only increase actual Defence by 4, wierd, but there is my 491 Un-Crittable.

This, along with 19 block being better than 12 dodge + 23 defence, confused me slightly so time for some more research...

I eventually found the figures I was looking for on Zen Tanking

and shamelessly ripped from there...

Ratings Summary
  • 1 Block Rating = .127% CA
  • 1 Defence Rating = .067% CA (Combined Avoidance) @ 490 skill
  • 1 Dodge Rating = .053% CA
  • 1 Parry Rating = .0423% CA
  • 1 Agility = .04% CA (Kings brings this up to above Parry, slightly)
so my +8 defence rating bought me 3.333 Defence skill, which was enough to boost 487 -> 491

This also explains why Ironscale War Cloak is better, lets look at the stats.

Ironscale War Cloak
Shield Block Rating by 19 * 0.127 = 2.413 Combined Avoidance

Cloak of Eternity
+12 Dodge * 0.053 = 0.636 Combined Avoidance
+23 Defence * 0.067 = 1.541 Combined Avoidance
Total = 2.177 Combined Avoidance

Now that we've got that out of the way my Combined Avoidance is now standing at 96.864% and putting that +12 dodge enchant on is going to up that to 97.500% I've lost 10 stamina but gained Combined Avoidance and 2 armour.

So now I'm going to concentrate on getting the rest of my pure tanking gear - shield and bracers to start with and then I can really start confusing myself with maths :)

Tanking Progress:
Badges of Justice: 22
Holy Dust: 9
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 5999/6000 Friendly
Defence: 491
Avoidance: 97.500%
Armour: 14491
HP: 11227
Mana: 4953

Tankadin - Attempt 3

Wednesday 21 November 2007

So I was happily pootling around Felwood with PS when the other half asks if I want to tank Heroic Slave Pens with "Fucking Tossers". Why not? I think so off we pop.

Doesn't go too bad at all, we only wipe a couple of times and I'm doing a pretty good job of crowd control - when not feared.

Boss #1 down with me not losing aggro and not dying..

Then we wipe just before boss #2.

I follow the group leader, an officer of "Fucking Tossers" called (name changed to protect ... err ... me as usual) MescalinMadness, on our run back and she runs us straight into a pack of Naga... OK restart corpse run.

Boss #2 - one-shotted :)

So, some more badges to add to my collection and Ironscale War Cloak drops. Hmm this might be better than Cloak of Eternity. I take it just in case.

See next post for analysis and progress.

Reduced Quest Level?

Wednesday 21 November 2007

So, I have been following a quest guide that I ... err ... bought off e-Bay for about $3 (£2 at the time, less than £1.50 now - LOL)

Anyway, I have been updating it for all my alts to follow (As if I don't know every quest route from 0-60 now!) with extra details and new quests as they come up.

Well, up until patch 2.3 hit this was great; OK I'm probably running 1-2 levels higher than the guide says but I hate skipping content. The quests I picked up when instructed were yellow or orange usually.

But today PS the Rogue hit Felwood and the first 2 quests were marked as low-level (another good 2.3 improvement) and were green in my quest log.

I'll have to pop onto another alt and check if the same is occuring with quests I know should be yellow at that level, but the question is; have the quests levels and/or mobs had their level of difficulty reduced?

Tuesday 20 November 2007

3 Piece Suite

Tuesday 20th November 2007

PS started Un'Goro this morning and dinged level 53. By the time he finished tonight he was level 54 and had finished the first batch of Un'Goro quests.

So what does that mean? It means stormshroud shoulders and a set bonus of a 2% chance to gain 30 energy - woot!!!

Funny YouTube clip (non-WoW)

Hilarious - Heroes

An Extra 5% Avoidance

Monday 19th November 2007

Tonight the guild did ZA tonight, and what a surprise, I didn't go.

But NicePallyClassLeader got a mostly guild group together and we hit Karazhan with me and a druid tanking.

We hit Attumen first, but no Vambraces of Courage - that's the main reason I want to go :(

Onto Moroes and for some reason the 5th target kept getting shackled right next to where we're tanking Moroes. The druid had aggro most of the time so I couldn't move him away and every time he vanished or I muscled-memoried (read: spasmed) a Consecration the shackle would break. We still got him down anyway. But no loot of interest dropped.

Then it was asked if we should skip Maiden, I checked AtlasLoot and saw that there was only Barbed Choker of Discipline I wanted. I said this and we decided to give it a go.

I popped my healing gear on and off-healed as a ProtPally - haha - can still bang out some good heals, just swapped my Holy Shield button for my mouseover healing macro and banged the old nostromo key a lot!!

Down in one!!

Off to Little Red Riding Hood, down in ... err ... two. I got the scared little girl buff and didn't notice and continued trying to tank - haha.

Nothing dropped from the wolf for me either.

NicePallyClassLeader asked why I was using Seal of Righteousness and suggested I use Seal of Vengeance. I gave it a go, but to be honest I can't really figure out what was best for TPS. But I'll use Vengeance for a while. I may check out ElitistJerks.

And finally onto Curator who was kind enough to drop a T4 gloves token for me :) I already had the holy gloves but didn't realise at the time (well I suspected) that I also had my Protection gloves too. Oh well - I now have a full set of T4 Gloves!

We called it a night and portalled off to Shat.

NicePallyClassLeader and I then spent the next hour buying mats to make and enchant:

Cloak of Eternity

76 Armour
36 Stamina
+12 Dodge Enchant
Equip: Increase Defence Rating by 23

She then bought Crystalforged Sword with 200 gold of the guild banks money and stuck a +40 spell damage enchant on it.

And then we enchanted the T4 gloves with +2% threat.

So I equipped the necklace and my avoidance went from to 90.416% to 91.836%.
Put the cloak on and went to 94.059%.
On with the sword and I hit 95.454%

So a 5.038% boost to my avoidance.

However, comparing T4 Justicar Gauntlets to Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden I am unsure which is better. Opinions?

Badges of Justice:18
Avoidance: 95.454%
Holy Dust: 13
Aldor Rep: 7824/12000 Honoured
Shatar Rep: 5999/6000 Friendly