OpenRaid’s transmog contest has ended for another year and the winners have been announced.
A video has been put together of the finalists in the Grand Prize, and the placing prize winners in each of the theme categories. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcYCOBcO7oI
They’ve also done a storyboard showing all of the entries from this year. There are some absolutely brilliant entries! There’s a particularly macabre “my pet and me” entry, with a very well done “butcher” looking transmog (blood on the cleaver and everything) set in one of the kitchens in the game – meat carcasses on the bench and all. His pet pygmy cow is sitting on the bench, ready to be the next meal. It’s disturbing and hilarious and I love it!
I had entered two transmogs in to the contest, and one of them (the celestial looking one) was a finalist in the My Pet and Me category, which was a nice surprise, though didn’t place in the list of winners. The person who did win the My Pet and Me theme had a really brilliant transmog, and was well deserved.
Here are my entries:
Check out the news item on the OpenRaid for the full list of winners for each category. I’m already thinking about what to do for next year’s competition! It’s been loads of fun this time around. 🙂
The Wowhead video above shows what they all look like. The only downside is that I already struggle with wanting too many other minor glyphs! But… this is super cool so I think Glyph of Ghostly Speed will go for awhile.
Now, if only we could get our elementals to be the new models… 🙂
Today my paladin dinged 100. So to celebrate I made her a lovely blue transmog.
I actually really like this set. The blue in the pants is lovely. She’s still got her MoP legendary cloak because RNG-sus is not kind. But I don’t mind. I love those cloaks and am happy to keep it for as long as I can.
I had a big derp moment, though. Once I had dinged, I went through to see what I could do about making a healing set. Almost all the levelling gear I had transferring over to healing quite nicely, so that worked out. I had a higher level of boots in my bags, so I popped those on, then set about transmogging everything to look nice. But the boots wouldn’t mog. I reset my UI, I cursed for awhile. I even went back and grabbed an older pair of boots and popped those on to see what would happen – the old boots would transmog, why not the ones I needed to wear?! And then it hit me – they were leather. I felt like such a moron. So I went off and bought a plate pair and had no problems transmogging those. What a silly fool I am! Had to laugh, though. 🙂
So that’s 4 toons to 100. I think my mage will be next. My pally and mage were my first 2 toons, and even though I said to myself I wouldn’t level them for ages, I really miss them. So I think the priest and hunter are just going to have to wait. We’ll see though. Might hold off levelling another toon until after 6.2 drops.
My boyfriend did a thing, and I think it’s pretty amazeballs.
This pic is a mosaic of world of warcraft selfies people have posted to twitter – each one only appears once and they’re all unedited. You might not be able to see it too well – there’s a much larger version here where you can see each of the individual selfies. He posted it up on reddit and I really liked some of the comments people made about it. This one was my favourite (and I hope the person who wrote it doesn’t mind me quoting them!)
I really like this picture. It’s great to see that, despite all the complaints about this expansion, people are out there making their own fun. Look how happy the characters are!
Say what you want about the selfie camera, but you have to admit that there’s a certain spark, a certain life, in these pictures that would have been unimaginable years ago.
This is spot on, and exactly how I feel about the game. For me, it doesn’t matter what happens to the game, I’m always going to be able to find my own fun in it, and I’m glad so many other people can do the same.
Last night was raid night, and to be quite frank, it sucked.
It sucked for me and because of me – not really anyone else. We did have a few issues with some key people being away, but there were people able to fill the roles and whilst it slowed things down a little, that’s not why I had a bad night last night.
Last night I got to heal, because one of the main healers had to fill in as tank to replace someone who was away. I was really excited and nervous. The only mythic healing I’d had a chance to do was on Kromog on Sunday. I think I did alright that night – was usually pretty high up on the healing meters, didn’t die too often to stupid things. I thought I did ok, anyway. But last night, argh I was a disaster and it really got to me.
Part of the problem is that I’m doing these fights on mythic as a healer for the first time. In some ways I feel like I was learning them all over again – learning what’s new about the fights, things I didn’t know about before because dps didn’t have to worry about it or vice versa.
Then there’s not having actually healed with these guys before, I don’t know team dynamics. In my last team, getting to heal with Zeirah and trollmonk and others that I had healed with for awhile, you got used to what each other was doing. These guys are lovely, don’t get me wrong. It’s more about not being able to predict what other people are going to do and when they’re going to do it. They also like to call out for CDs during the fight. Most CDs are planned in advance and are in Angry Assignments, but there are other CDs that I have that aren’t allocated and I’m nervous about using them, so sometimes my CDs will sit there unused because I don’t want to be in a position where a CD is asked for and I don’t have it.
My gear is also specced for ele. There aren’t a lot of differences because it’s all int and haste is useful to both specs, but on ele the next best stat is multistrike and for resto multistrike is low on the priority list, with mastery taking the top priority. When I was geared for resto as main my mastery was almost at 100%. Last night it was under 80%. So I’m sure that didn’t help a lot.
But I just sucked, and all of these reasons feel more like excuses than explanations. I died to stupid things, my heals were low. I was just downright crap and nothing I did made anything better. I tried switching around talents to see if I could make a difference, but nothing did. And we wiped a lot last night. We only got Oregorger and Gruul down (I managed to get a cloak from each which should be an upgrade for each spec which is nice)
What do you do when you have nights like this? Do you just pass it off as a bad night and hope it will be better next time? Or do I just resign yourself to the fact that despite loving healing, I suck at it?
Heroes of the Storm is finally launched and available for the whole world!
I haven’t been playing it nearly as much as I should do/want to, but that’s another story. What IS fun news is that to celebrate the launch, we can all get a free mount by playing a silly little game! It’s actually great fun to be honest, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. Just sign in with Facebook, ‘like’ the Heroes of the Storm page and then you’re off. WoW Adventurer did a great little step by step post about how to get it, which you can read right here (click it!)
When you’ve finished the little game, it will match you up with a hero that suits the characteristics you assigned to each person. I ended up with Zagara, who I know nothing about. But my friends got good matches – trollmonk you got matched as Brightwing! My friend Zeirah got Thrall, my bf got Li Li and my old raid leader got Arthas (which I found hilarious).
Like I said, it’s just a bit of fun, but you do get a free in game mount for your troubles, which I think looks completely awesome.
I’ve been raiding with my new team for a couple of weeks now. We are currently 5/10 mythic, which I am incredibly happy with.
Sunday last week we managed to get down Mythic Flamebender Ka’graz and Mythic Gruul on the same night, which was an awesome feeling. Wednesday just gone had a few people missing because of State of Origin so we just did a Heroic clear.
Last night was our first attempts at Mythic Kromog. What a fun fight that is! I was really happy because they asked one of the druid healers to go boomkin, so it meant I got to heal for the night. I didn’t realise just how much I had missed healing. The joy of being able to face whatever wall I want to was overwhelming. 😀 In all seriousness though, it’s a great fight to heal. It’s very well organised group which makes fights like this a lot easier to manage. Cooldowns are organised before the fight, and the healer lead is great at calling things on the fly so it feels a lot more controlled. I think I did alright healing last night, especially given at the moment my gear is multistrike priority for elemental, so gear is not at its best (though not terrible either).
The biggest difficulty at first was getting people out of the grabby hands fast enough to move in to the new mythic phase (the pillar phase). We had quite a few wipes because people weren’t getting out fast enough. but we got through that, and then it became working on getting all 3 pillars down before the phase ended. The little pop up pillars are a pain in the butt, and you find yourself running around so much that it’s hard to get a cast off, but there are some sweet spots if you’re lucky.
Our best attempt last night was 18% which was pretty good. I’m hoping we’ll get it next week because after that is Thogar and he gives me 4 BiS pieces!
I’ve been spending some time getting a few more achievements under my belt.
Earlier this week I finally collected the pets I needed to get the So.Many.Pets achievement and get myself a little Stormwing. He’s quite the cutie!
This evening I grinded out the last of the Apexis dailies to get another fabulous monument for my garrison.
And in the process of getting my new monument, I got my first exalted rep in Draenor – Arakkoa Outcasts. I liked getting this one because one extra quest also gave me another achievement and a new title.
Let’s face it – this is all anyone is talking about right now.
I’ve read quite a few posts/forums/tweets about the lack of flying in Draenor and the possibility that there won’t be flying in future expansions either, and to be quite honest I’m absolutely sick and tired of hearing about it. But what I’m more sick of is those who are very vocal about their dislike of this decision throwing tantrums on twitter or on the Blizz forums and claiming they speak for the player base. Let me make this perfectly clear – YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME. That’s not to say that I agree with no more flying – what I’m saying is that when people jump up and down on the forums and make statements such as those below, I don’t want to be lumped in the same group as them. The voices are loud, and many of them are childish beyond belief. They might as well be saying “I’m going to hold my breath until you give me some candy”.
“You NEED to take down flying mounts from your cash store.
You NEED to reimburse EVERYONE who ever bought a flying mount from the cash store.
Or you need to realize this is not a legally wise decision.
“
“…
I will be un subscribing after I finish this post. resubscribing is contingent on putting flight back in or getting a full refund on all things flight related.”
“This is a great way to make sure you lose another 2 million customers. Good job Blizz, since noone else can kill WoW, you’re going to do it for them!…”
“
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if Watcher was bribed by a rival company to kill WoW, each and every single of his decisions seems to go on that direction.”
“No player outside of a PvP realm thinks flying after you’ve already hit 100 is a bad thing, or breaks content. And you could just disable it on PvP servers if you wanted to.
Thanks Blizz, way to disappoint 7 million customers.
“
“Creativity and ingenuity at Blizzard has officially died.“
“Blizzard, you are nothing more than a sleazy, greedy, lazy, cowardly and uninspired shell of your former selves. Kudos to you I guess, for managing to string along your paying customers for as long as you did in regards to flying though. Gotta keep making those dollars right?“
Charming.
Is removing flight really worth quitting the game over?
No. It’s not. There is not one single person who could stand up and say “the only thing that I like to do in game is fly”. Because if that’s true, you are playing the wrong game. Yes, flying is super fun and interesting and the mounts are awesome. But that’s not the only thing this game is about. This is an MMO – you have internet dragons to kill and bad guys to round up and fishes to catch. There are other people to enjoy this game with- there’s PVP and pets to battle and quests to do and raids and dungeons and exploring and stuff. So much to do. If the only thing you like in this whole game is to fly, and have no other reason to play the game than to log on and fly around, then maybe this game is not for you. Seriously. (Don’t get me wrong – I love going out for a flight to explore a bit, but it’s not the only thing to do in game).
What you won’t do if flight comes back
A lot of posts on that thread went on about how much more they would do in the game if flying was there, and blame the feeling of being “trapped” in garrison on the lack of flight. What a load of bollocks. The only thing in game that is negatively impacted by the lack of flight is archaeology (and I agree – it’s a right pain in the ass doing that without flight!). But everything else – fishing, exploring, doing the daily pet battle trainers, Apexis dailies etc. – you don’t need flight for those.
But Blizzard lied!
Hmm not quite. They didn’t actually say definitely that flight would be in later in the expansion – they said they expected it to. Don’t get me wrong – I expected flight to be back too, and was looking forward to seeing my new Cindermane Charger spread her wings in Draenor, but they didn’t promise it. I think a larger part of the issue of no more flying is how the players found out about the decision.
It was a shitty way to find out about it
This I agree with 100%. A lot of people were looking forward to flying coming back, and were waiting to see it in each iteration of the 6.2 patch notes. They have been very vocal about flying since WoD was announced to not include it. Blizzard knew these people felt the way they did, and that there were quite a lot of them. So to find out in a casual interview with some magazine or whatever is a slap in the face. I completely agree with this. The way this has been handled does feel like Blizzard haven’t recognised just how much people wanting flying back in the game, or that they are ignorant to the impact of players finding out important information (to them) via a second hand source. It’s like being broken up with by having your (now) ex’s friend pass you note to say you’ve been dumped. You feel like shit, and that’s fair enough.
Are you for it, or against it?
There are plenty of arguments for and against flying. With flight in the game, you get to explore new places in the game you may not have found before (I know this happened to me a couple of times in MoP). Flying also feels like a reward for getting to max level. Not getting the ability to literally lord over players lower than you makes you feel like a “lowbie” and to a degree diminishes the sense of accomplished for reach max level.
Also, some of us have worked super hard to earn a number of flying mounts in the game. Seeing them waddle around on the ground is terribly sad.
At the same time, without flight, the world is more immersive. The environment around you matters – if there are loads of trees around you (for example) they are going to affect how you view and experience the world around you, because you feel closed in. It has an affect on your experience. When you have flight, you just go up and over them to get where you need without actually engaging with the world around you. You’re missing the experience.
Not having flying also means that pvp servers are going to feel more like pvp servers. With flight it’s far too easy to AFK and not engage with the enemy faction at all. If you’re grounded, you can’t hide – you need to stand your ground and defend yourself…. which is the point of a pvp server.
We have had flying in game for quite some time now. I’ve only ever played the game with flight in it, and don’t know a time before we had the ability to ride on dragons across the world. My concern is how they can make this change in the story of the game. What logical reason is there for our characters to not be able to fly?
Suggestions to improve the game if flying doesn’t come back
Allow flight paths to use your own mounts so that you can actually see and use your flying mounts in game
Have some new unique ground mounts – not just reskins, please.
Stop giving flying mounts as rewards for achievements.
Half a suggestion – allow flying mounts to at least be grounded in flight form, and not have them waddling about the place (they really do look ridiculous).
Add more flight paths. Or have NPCs that are visited often (such as pet battle trainers) closer to flight paths.
Make archaeology easier to do without flying. Having to run around mountains multiple times for one dig is not in any way shape or form enjoyable.
Suggestions on how to bring back flying in the game but still make it immersive etc.
Have more indoor content (underground?) where flying mounts can’t be used (but ground mounts can if it’s a large space). This will allow for the puzzles and the immersion etc. but will still allow people to fly when they’re outside.
Have no flying in levelling zones- phase parts of the zones if that’s easiest. My biggest gripe with flying is the max level players that sit there and camp low level players who are trying to level up. It’s petty and downright frustrating and makes it feel like someone else’s enjoyment of the game is more important than my enjoyment of the game. Finding a way to deal with this would be most helpful.
Develop an expansion that makes flying compulsory. I imagine a twisting nether style area where there is little ground and we need to fly from piece of rock to piece of rock to quest/interact with the world- something like Vashj’ir but in the air.
They are just some thoughts off the top of my head.
So what do I actually think about no flying?
Honestly, I’m not for or against flight in the game. I honestly don’t care. I absolutely LOVE flying, and I will be glad to have future expansions where I can fly. But if it doesn’t come back, it doesn’t come back, and I’m ok with that. Because I know that if Blizzard were to make such a massive decision as to remove flying from the game, they would need to make some pretty significant changes to the world and the way we experience it for people to stay on board.
What I’m not ok with is the behaviour of people at the moment who are acting like toddlers and having them claim to speak for all players. They do not. you are entitled to your feelings, yes, but please do not presume to think that everyone else is having those same feelings. Take a step back and reflect on why you are feeling the way you are and articulate that.
This week seemed a bit rough – they had a few people missing, but thankfully were ok with pugging some people so we eventually got the 20 to do mythic. Then content that they normally get through quite quickly took longer than usual, so it was a bit rough. We also didn’t get through all the bosses to get to progression which was a bit disappointing. 3 hours of wiping on mythic Hans and Franz last night had me dreaming about brightly glowing patches under my feet all night.
As I’ve mentioned, this trial has me playing elemental shaman instead of restoration. I enjoy elemental shaman – it’s pretty straight forward and can be so much fun throwing out chain lightning all over the place. But I really miss healing. A lot more than I expected I would. My biggest problem playing ele is that as a healer, I had to stand in all the same places as everyone else, but it didn’t matter if I had my back to the boss – I can heal the people around me without actually facing them so positioning was never a problem. Now, it really really is. I know the most important thing is to try to stay alive, but surely right beside that is to face the damn boss so you can hit it with your magic smashing abilities!
It’s also a bit rough because, even though people say they don’t matter, I’m low on the meters. This is partly because I’m rubbish about facing the boss all the time whilst trying to run backwards. It’s also probably in part because ele shaman single target isn’t the greatest in the world. And then on top of that the totems issue is a pain (though I’m figuring out the best times to place them so they’ll actually hit the boss. Don’t get me wrong – I’m getting better. I was at the bottom last week and this week I’m a few up from the bottom. But it’s a bit demoralising at times to be so low. But I suppose at least I didn’t get stomped on, right?
Last night I did a raid trial with the team Zeirah is currently trialling with. The evening was for progression on Mythic Hans’gar and Franzok.
I am trialling as an elemental shaman, and boy did I feel out of my depth last night! Not only was I learning a new fight that I’d never seen before, but I was also having to learn the ins and outs of my class (having played restoration for all of Warlords so far.)
The fight itself was interesting. A little more difficult than heroic, but not too much. I think the fight needs good raid leadership, and this team definitely has that. They are very organised which made everything much easier to deal with. I felt so terrible because I wiped the raid at one point as I triggered 3 stompers. But then others did the same so I didn’t feel too bad after that. But overall, their team was quite good! Everyone listened and learned from their mistakes which made the wipes ok. And in the end we got it.
Playing elemental was interesting. I do love playing that spec, but I need some more practice to feel more confident with it. Once I’d gotten in to a groove on the fight I remembered cooldowns like shamanistic rage to help with getting smacked by body slam. I remembered to use ancestral guidance to help with a bit of extra healing (though I need to work on finding better times to use it). And I remembered to drop my healing stream totem, too, to give a little trickle of heals where possible (though I doubt it did much).
The worst part about the fight was that my totem pets wouldn’t work properly! There’s a bug with them that makes them just pace back and forth in front of me without going over to smack the boss. It was a terrible dps loss, and over my dps for the fight was really bad. But the team did emphasise that it was much more important for people to stay alive than to do amazeballs dps, and when we got the kill I was still alive, so that felt great, even if my dps was bollocks.
The people themselves were great. They learned from their mistakes, they came back quickly from wipes AND they’re all nice! I hope it all works out ok and they want to keep us. It was much nicer going in to the trial knowing Z was there. Gave me someone to talk to, which was nice.
Hopefully I will get to run with them again on Wednesday, which means I have some research to do. But I’m looking forward to it. It’s nice to be excited about raiding again. 🙂
It’s been a week since all the dramas came to a head, and it’s only now I’m really in the right head space to write about it.
Unfortunately the guild team that I have been a part of for almost a year now, a team that has many people in it whom I consider friends, has decided to stop pushing for progression. The officers and GM decided that, due to busy work/personal lives and a lack of passion for the game, that the raid team would do heroic raiding only and would stop until the next raid tier, rather than trying mythic. The decision wasn’t a surprise – the team had been changing and it had been pretty clear that something was amiss. And so it was that the announcement was made on Sunday evening last week after raid that the changes would take affect immediately.
To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. It’s actually been pretty horrible. I’ve grown quite fond of the raid team and the guild members, and have thoroughly enjoyed raiding with each and every one of them. And it came to be that I had to make a decision – did I want to continue raiding with friends, but at a lower level than I would like to attempt, or do I venture out once more in to the breach, and try to find a raid team that wants to do mythics and who are a nice bunch of people.
It’s taken a while to make a decision. For some people it was a quick decision, though. My bf, who was the main tank, was already on his way out. He usually raids much higher level than this and had only really stuck around because of me. So Sunday was his last night. He’s now transferred to Alliance and to a different server and seems to be doing well so far. Others made the move shortly after. Then on Wednesday, two of my fellow healers, Zeirah and trollmonk had found guilds to trial with.
I had put in an application to trial with a different guild myself. They fit the bill – had a few mythics under their belt, but mostly seemed to have a really good attitude. All of their advertisements and forums posts etc. were polite but to the point and their website looked good. So I applied. They asked me to trial as elemental shaman, which I agreed to.
And then Wednesday happened.
Wednesday was not a good day for me at work. Things have been incredibly stressful for quite some time now – almost a year to be honest. On Wednesday it just all got too much for when something (someone) incredibly stupid happened and I had a minor meltdown. I walked out of work that day genuinely unsure if I was going to be back. I went home that day and cried and cried. Every time I tried to speak I’d just end up crying again – it had all gotten to be too much. I tried logging on to WoW, but couldn’t face it and just logged off again and climbed in to bed for the rest of the day.
I ended up cancelling the raid team trial for that night. There was no way I was going to be useful to anyone. And they seemed like such a nice group of people I didn’t want to drag them down.
I was a bit lost for a few days (and I suppose to a degree I still am now). I spent some time on Saturday talking to Z about it all (she is incredibly patient with me!) She said that the team she’s trialling with are looking for an elemental shaman, as asked if I’d be interested. I decided I’d give it a go. I feel really terrible for the other team I applied to, but I think raiding with friends trumps everything else. Because even when you’re having a bad night, your friends will be there to keep your spirits up (or moan with you!) and it’s so much better.
So that’s where things are at. I left my guild this evening before most people came on. I think if everyone was there I wouldn’t have been able to do it. And now I’m out the front of BRF waiting for my trial to begin. Everything is respecced to ele…. we’ll just have to see how I go. It will be weird being dps again – I’ve really gotten used to healing. Hopefully I don’t let everyone down.
So the official rules that I am following are available on the WoW Challenges site, and are pretty straight forward. But it does take some planning and thinking about how to actually approach this challenge. There are also some grey areas that require you to make a decision about how you’re actually going to participate in the challenge.
Gold
Ok so the biggest issue I’ve faced both times with doing this is gold. I have made the decision (and I’m sticking to it!) that I will not be sending my toons any gold or bags or anything that has been bought with gold from another toon. Which makes Cindermori broke to say the least. This is a challenge in itself! It’s really important to make sure you loot everything and vendor anything you don’t need. It will start to add up, especially as you get to higher levels. You’ll also have all the gear/weapons that you get from quest rewards that you can’t use that you can vendor and make some gold with too.
The other thing I’ve done to help out with the gold situation is to have another toon solely dedicated to auctioning the BoE greens/blues that drop while levelling. I even have a story it! Her name is Shadowrella, and I imagined the two met randomly in Exodar one day (Shadowrella (she’s human) out to see a bit more of the world). They fall in love, but are completely broke. Cindermori takes on the IronMan challenge to earn them both some gold so that they can set up their own home when Cindermori returns. So Shadowrella has taken up temporary residence in the big city of Stormwind, where she waits each day for mail from Cindermori, containing the materials they need to help save for their future. Any gold made from the items that sell in the auction house is sent back to Cindermori to support her on her adventures, with a little tucked away in savings.
It’s silly, I know, but I think it’s sweet. And it means potentially some extra cash to help buy Cindermori some more gear to make her more survivable.
Mounts
Ok this one I’m a little more lenient on. The only rule about mounts is to not use the heirloom mount. Not having this, this isn’t an issue for me (but I wouldn’t have used it anyway!) Other than that, nothing else is said on the matter. Some people believe you should have to buy the mounts again, even if you already have them, to replicate the gold sink of purchasing them. I’m not doing this. There aren’t any mounts (other then the heirloom mount) that give a player any sort of advantage, so I see no reason why she can’t use any of the mounts available. They’re all slowed down to the speed Cindermori is able to travel at, and she still needs to purchase the ability to ride them, so I think that’s plenty. That and I have some really pretty mounts!
General gameplay
So in terms of gameplay, I’m winging it and playing with only Elvui as an addon. Nothing else. I normally have a levelling guide when I’m levelling old content, but not for this. I don’t even have any rare spawn trackers either (which nearly killed me earlier!! Ran right in to a stealthed rare mob!).
I’m running around a lot, and generally killing everything I see, for two reasons:
Loot
This is the only way you’re going to get gear, other than buying it from vendors. And given how little gold I have, I can’t do this often. So I kill everything I can. Today was particularly lucrative, with a new pair of boots, gloves and legs all dropping for me just this afternoon.
Extra experience
Because your gear is lower than what it would be if you were wearing the greens/blues used for questing, you’re a lot squishier and it takes longer to kill things. So stay in zones as long as you can. (though once you stop gaining XP from kills, of course movie on).
I’m not eating food. The rules are clear that you can’t use pots or flasks or get food buffs, but I’m a bit unsure as to whether or not I can eat food for just general health regen. So rather than risk it, I’m just not having any.
One thing I am uncertain about is external buffs. The rules state that external buffs are not permitted, and I did have to wonder if that meant buffs from other players. E.g. if I’m out killing things in the world and a lovely mage happens to wander by, and in an act of kindness, casts Arcane Brilliance on me. Will I be disqualified for that? I’m hoping not, because something like that is completely out of my hands (and is also not out of the realm of possibility – people do this all the time to help out the levellers!).
Tips
Know your class!
I can’t stress this enough. I would still be going on my first attempt if I had have been more knowledgable of the hunter class. I was chased down by an elite level 85 NPC. I ran for it hoping he’d leash, but he didn’t. He caught up with me, sneezed on me (ok probably actually hit me, but anyway) and I died. If I had have thought it about it properly, I should have run away, disengaged even further away so I was out of range and smashed my Shadowmeld immediately to drop the threat. My pet would have died, but I probably wouldn’t have. So yeah – know your class!
Buy some extra bags when you can.
You need to kill everything and loot everything. Your bags are going to get full very quickly, so do yourself a favour and get some extra bags when you can. (even the little ones will help!)
Be patient
You are far weaker than you realise. Take your time, and think about what mobs are around you before charging in. Hunter tracking is amazing for this, and will help you immensely. Try and get your mobs away from others so you don’t pull too many at once.
Be alert
Number one rule is that you can’t die. So it makes sense that you are completely alert while you’re doing this. If you’re half asleep, you’re going to miss the mob around the corner who is going to bring its friends with it, and they’re going to kill you, and you’re going to fail. So take my word for it – do this when you’re able to pay attention. It may mean you only play for an hour at a time, but so be it. Better than than failing because you got distracted.
Have fun!
This, above all else, is supposed to be fun. It’s a challenge, yes, but it shouldn’t be a chore. This is a whole other level of gameplay in World of Warcraft. It’s designed to challenge you. But I tell you what, you get a lot more small victories doing this than you probably ever have levelling normally.
This is just how I’m doing things – might not work for everyone, but it’s a start.
So that’s about it. I hope this helps a couple of people. If there’s something else you’re curious about that I didn’t cover in here, drop me an ask and I’ll be happy to help.
I have made another hunter, but this time she’s Draenei, and I already feel more confident about this attempt. She’s kick ass and hot all at once!
I’ve only completed the Draenei starting area once before as a paladin, and I found it to be pretty boring. This time around though it wasn’t as bad. Although I had so many issues with bag space! It was terribly annoying having to run back to a vendor to clear out bags and then make my way back where I was. There’s an awful lot of running around that needs to be done in this area. Thank goodness for autorun!
There’s also pretending to be a tree on a beach… I think her moth pet really makes it look totally legit. 😉
I’ve been powering through and Cindermori is now at level 20. She’s just finished off the quest line that rewards the Tabard of the Hand. If you haven’t done it, it’s worth doing the start area just for this. Whilst you get a tabard (which I actually quite like!) the best part is actually when all the NPCs in the area (and even some chickens!) line up and cheer for you because you’re so awesome. Definitely very good for the ego.
She’s still got a handful of quests to go in the area that need to be finished off before she moves on in to scarier parts of the world. But for now, she’s 20!
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Far too many things happening at once that’s a bit overwhelming. The short version is that I need to find a new raid team, as my current one only wants to do Heroics and not Mythics. But I’m not sure if I’m ready for a new raid team. That and my work has been so insanely out of control that I’m struggling with anything. So a bit stuck at the moment.
I’ll be sure to be back to our regularly scheduled programming soon!
Sadly, Ironcinder died today, thus bringing an end to this attempt at the IronMan Challenge. She was level 29, and strayed just a little too close to a Horde area. An elite level 85 guard decided to sneeze on her, and she died in half a tragic second.
This seems to be the mantra of mythic guilds everywhere – where are all the raiders? Where are the people who want to kick bosses in the face? Where are the people who want to hang out with a bunch of random weirdos for a laugh and a few jokes? Where are the people who are…
I think there are also a lot of people – like me – who just don’t want to raid with that many people regardless of whether it’s the end of the end of the end of end game or not. Most of the people I raid with I’ve known for YEARS. A lot I’ve met in person. One is my bff. Sure, we pick up new people once in a while, and occasionally recruit to round out our roster for night people can’t make it, but for the most part we’re just not interested in inviting a whole slew of unknowns into our raid and having to police them. Forcing a 20-man format for the top tier of end game really was a mistake on Blizzard’s part. One I hope they fix (if not for the rest of WoD then at least in the next expansion).
Would I like to kill the hardest bosses and get the bestest loot? Sure, why not? But only if it’s with a group of my close friends. People I enjoy being with. People who’s strengths and weaknesses I know inside and out and can count on or compensate for accordingly. Otherwise it’s just not worth it. We’ll piddle around in Reg and Heroic and be perfectly happy.
And this mindset in a lot of smaller raiding guilds is probably also contributing to the lack of interested players available for heroic recruitment. A lot of really decent long-time raiders who have gotten used to a small raid environment aren’t looking to jump ship into Mythic.
YES! This is a very good point that I forgot to include in my original post and is also true for so many other guilds.
Blizzard spends a lot of time and energy reminding us that this is a multi-player game, and that it is best enjoyed with other people. They put in a lot of features to facilitate this, such a as guilds, group finder, LFR, dungeons etc. And we have been listening. Many people have found other players in the game that they could consider friends. They’re the people you have a laugh and a joke with – they are the people you feel comfortable with. They’re your mates! And raiding with them is fantastic fun. What’s not fun is having to tell a bunch of them there’s no place for them anymore (cull from 25 man) or trying to figure out had to add a whole bunch of people in to an already well oiled team. You can’t just force friendships. Adding new people to the mix can be very difficult – team compatibility is a massively underrated factor when choosing new recruits.
On the flip side, being on the outside and trying to break in to a new guild is just as tough. The friendships thing was the hardest part for me when I left my first raid team. I had friends on the team (or at least people I enjoyed spending time with in game) and it was a real shock to be on a new server, not knowing anyone. Later when I was looking for a new team I felt like such an outsider – some guilds are so well established it feels like you’re trying to break in to the “cool crowd” at high school again, and for a lot of people this is not an easy task. I got really lucky with the guild I’m in now – they are such a great bunch of people. I really enjoy raiding with them. Which I think is why it can be so frustrating not getting to do the raids because we don’t have the full 20.
And yes, if you’ve been in 10 man raids all this time, the jump to 20 can be a bit of a shock. I know it was for me as a healer for the first few fights panicking at how many more people there were in the process of dying at any one time. But not just that – it’s doubling the number of voices in vent/mumble. It’s doubling the number of people that need to be coordinated to show up at a particular time.
There’s 20 voices to compete with when strats aren’t going right.
And it’s quite a big leap for raid leaders who have only raid lead 10 mans to suddenly be thrown in with 20 people to boss around. Some people do ok with it, but others don’t.
I understand why Blizzard made the raid size set to 20 only. I understand it’s easier to have 1 set difficulty, rather than trying to scale for just 10 or just 25, or even scaling for whatever size we want to bring in. But it has been a really rough transition for a lot of people, and I don’t know if it’s been worth it. I would be curious to see information about how many people are currently raiding at the highest level in Warlords of Draenor compared to previous expansions to see if others are struggling as much as we are. And perhaps in some cases it’s not an issue for the team to not do mythics, but for others like ours, where we are so keen on getting to do mythics, it is and issue. The options if you can’t get the group of 20 are to not do mythics, just keep trying to recruit, or leave your friends and try to find another team. None of these options promote the group play spirit Blizzard talks about it. And it’s for this reason I think this is one of the worst mistakes made in the game.
This seems to be the mantra of mythic guilds everywhere – where are all the raiders? Where are the people who want to kick bosses in the face? Where are the people who want to hang out with a bunch of random weirdos for a laugh and a few jokes? Where are the people who are willing to do this 2 nights a week? Because we can’t find them.
Our guild cleared Heroic Blackrock Foundry a few weeks ago now, but we haven’t been able to move on the Mythics, simply because we don’t have the numbers. For whatever reason there have been a couple of people away for each raid night, and because we have exactly 20 raiders it means we’re left with not enough people to do Mythic content. The obvious answer is, of course, to PUG the missing people, but this isn’t ideal when trying to do progression. And I suppose my question is why there are so many raiders lacking that we need to do this in the first place?
How 20 man mythic broke raiding
My feeling is that the forced 20 man requirement for mythic raiding is what has caused the issues. People who were raiding 25 man had to drop some people, and teams raiding 10 man needed to double their team size at a minimum. And that’s where the issue is. There are more people looking for players than there are players who were “abandoned” by the cull of 25 mans.
Now a “logical” thing may have been for some 10 man teams to merge to create the new 20 man required size, but this isn’t easy. Guild merges are incredibly difficult (especially when big egos are involved), and there is very little support available to facilitate this. There are so many issues to deal with – who gets to be the Guild Master of the new combined guild? Do existing officers still get to be officers? What happens when guild gold and guild bank contributions are imbalanced? What are the guild bank access rules? And that doesn’t even cover whether the two guilds are a good fit, and who gets to keep their main when there are 4 of the same class now in the team. It’s very tricky.
So we tend to be stuck. We have recruitment posts on the WoW forums of recruitment and on the specific server forum, but we are lost in an ocean of other guilds who are in exactly the same boat. That is, they want about 5 more players on their team to have a consistent group of just over 20 that allows for absences that come up. And anyone who does post as a player looking for a raid team is immediately pounced on. One post I looked at today was posted a few hours ago, and already has 8 responses on it from prospective guilds.
There have been a few posts from small groups of players looking for a raid team, but they all include roles that we have an abundance of (priests, I’m looking at you!)
Everyone wants a free ride
This is another issue we have – some of those who do apply just don’t have the skills/gear/team spirit that is needed. We’re moving in to Mythic Blackrock Foundry – an ilvl of 650 just isn’t going to cut it. There have been situations in the past where the guild has decided to take a chance on a lower geared person, only to have them leave as soon as they’re geared up. Which isn’t fair and makes the officers even more reluctant to take on someone with a lower ilvl.
Is it just about the loot?
One of my other theories about why it’s so hard to find raiders is the thought that perhaps people are just playing the game for loot, and will only participate in the easiest way to get it. LFR can be a pain and has different tier so it’s not appealing. But Normal or Heroic level – that can be relatively easy to get with little effort required. So are people settling for this so they don’t have to grind through Mythic? Maybe.
What to do?
Well it’s a good question. Our team has decided to open up the option for everyone to change their main for 6.2 if they wish. The thought behind it is that perhaps we’ll get some gaps in different roles. There’s not too much change at the moment, but not everyone has indicated their preference yet so there may be differences soon.
But other than that, it’s just a grind of trawling the forums, spamming trade chat and keeping an ear out for people who are looking for teams.
Know anyone looking for a mythic raid team?
GUILD PLUG! (You didn’t think I’d post all this and not at least try to get some new members, did you?!)
Are you looking for a raid them that wants to get down the mythic bosses for the super awesome loots? Do you want to have a laugh while doing it? Only got 2 days a week? Then we might be the team for you! <Deadline> are a Horde based guild on Oceanic server Barthilas. We raid 2 nights a week – Wednesday and Sunday 7:30 – 11:30pm server time. We’re mostly looking for dps (not priests though!) at the moment, but if you’re a resto shaman or holy paladin, we’d like to hear from you, too! We are moving in to mythics so we’re looking for people who can commit to bashing their heads against a brick wall while we all learn, but I promise it’s a load of fun and totally worth it. If you’re interested (or know someone who is), check out our thread on the Oceanic Forums here for more info and for a link to the app on our website.
I’ve wanted this mount since the preview came out ages ago. When it didn’t appear in game I waited and I waited. Finally it shows up – as a recruit a friend mount. And my heart sank. I didn’t have any friends who wanted to play WoW, and I couldn’t justify starting up a second account and paying for 2 months of game time for the mount either. So I resigned myself to not getting it.
And then the WoW token came out and changed everything. My boyfriend had a starter account just sitting around that he’d got during one of the Blizzard sales for $5, so I “recruited” him and he activated it. Between the two of us we got the in game gold together to pay for 2 months game time on it, and here we are – Cinder on a Cindermane mount!
I think it’s a beautiful mount, and it really suits her. 🙂
I played Ironcinder a little more today and got her to 25 (For those just tuning in, you can read about my stupid idea here.)
20-25 took me through the last of Darkshore and on to Ashenvale. It has been relatively smooth sailing, but I am taking things very slowly. Very slowly. I only play her when I’m wide awake and able to give her my full attention, which means this is going to take an awfully long time to get done.
Today’s highlights included naming my first pet. Night elf hunters start with a beautiful tiger called “Cat”. I felt she needed a proper name, and me being childish, I named her “Meowzers”. I think it suits her. Here she is being all stealthy:
Meowzers
While out near Blackfathom Deeps I cam across some hydras, and remembered hunters could now tame them! So Ironcinder got her second pet. And again, because I’m immature, he’s named “HailHydra” 😀
HailHydra
I had a close shave at Maestra’s Post in Ashenvale. It was one of those quests you have an entourage and there are way too many mobs and it’s all supposed to be ok. But of course Ironcinder is weak and struggles a bit. And silly pets like to pull too many mobs. AND silly me forgot I had Aspect of the Cheetah on, so while trying to run away she kept getting stunned. It was a close shave, and she had to rest for some time before heading off again.
She dinged 25 in Astranaar, and that’s where I’ll leave her for now. She can deal with all the fires a little later…
So I deleted the 6.2 legendary ring post that I did yesterday. The Warcraft Devs twitter account had the following today about the ring procs that had been datamined:
The Legendary ring procs that have been datamined from the 6.2 PTR are from an old design. A new design is planned for a future PTR build.
I’m relieved, to be honest. I was trying to be positive about the whole thing because I don’t want to be negative about things I haven’t tried yet. But the general concept, whether it worked well or not, didn’t sit well with me. A solo based quest line that ends with a team based RNG proc item seemed very odd. So I’m glad this is not the case.
The mechanic itself was interesting, I must admit, and I was curious about some of the specifics of how it would work. So I wouldn’t mind if they did bring it in for something else in future!
In the meantime, I suppose the lesson really is to take the datamined content with a grain of salt.
Hey! I DO play a resto shaman 😀 But I never level as a healer. I always level and quest as Elemental. It’s faster (cos dps) and super fun (cos earthquake!). The only time I’ll switch to resto during levelling is if I’m going in to dungeons to level. (The faster dungeon queues are always nice, and the end goal for me is to raid as a healer.)
But if you’re not comfortable levelling as dps and switching to heals as needed, you CAN level as restoration shaman. It’s actually a lot better now because Blizz recently buffed damage done by lightning bolt and lava burst so they’ll do more damage. And best of all – they’re free when you’re in resto spec!
The rotation is mostly the same as elemental (which is why I tend to have elemental as my offspec to level/quest with – I don’t have to think much about what I’m doing!). Drop your searing totem, dot the target with flame shock, cast lava burst whenever it’s available (make sure you have an active flame shock dot on the target as this will make lava burst stronger!) and fill with lightening bolt in the meantime. That’s it! If you have multiple targets, you’ll want to throw in some chain lightning as well. And of course heal yourself whenever you need to in between.
Just a suggestion, but you might want to use the Echo of the Elements talent while you’re levelling. It will give you an extra charge of lava burst which is nice – just a little extra dps.
Just remember that levelling as a healer is always going to be slower, and your spells won’t hit as hard, so be patient! But it is absolutely possible. Good luck! 🙂
This is easily the stupidest thing I’ve decided to do in game, but I’m doing it anyway. I have decided to take on the Iron Man Challenge.
For those of you playing at home who don’t know what the Iron Man Challenge is, it’s a crazy challenge to get a toon to max level with nothing higher than white gear. And you can’t die. Ever. If you die, you’re done. You also can’t choose talents or specialisations or glyphs or use flasks or pots or do raids or dungeons or have professions (other than first aid). Oh god what am I doing?!
Given the biggest rule is don’t die, I immediately took myself over to a non-PVP server. I went back to my roots to Aman’Thul and created a night elf hunter – Ironcinder.
Going hunter is an obvious choice here – have a pet, let it tank for you so you don’t get hit too much. Hunters also have feign death which I’m sure will come in handy! And also, they’re fun to play. I was tossing up between draenei and night elf for the race, and eventually went with night elf for the shadowmeld racial. Again, something that I think will come in handy. And she looks pretty.
There’s a fantastic site that’s up that helps track your progress, and will let you know if you’ve broken any of the rules. It’s called WoW Challenges. I’m on there now!
This isn’t something I’m going to go all “hardcore” on. I imagine this is going to take a very long time to complete, and I’m ok with that. I like the idea of having a long standing achievement going (even though there isn’t an in-game achieve for this). I’m also really enjoying being Alliance again. Everything is pretty! And people are nice and not cranky at you! Such a nice change. I also enjoy having something thatI can do by myself. I do like playing with other people, but I always feel pressured to go faster than I want to when I quest with others. So it’s nice to just plod along at my own pace.
Ironcinder is currently sitting by a river in Darnassus, contemplating the difficult challenge ahead…
Well, it took me 9 months of on and off farming, but I have finally finished the Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest legendary quest line.
During the countless Firelands runs I did, I managed to see Flametalon of Alysrazor drop twice, but never managed to get the Crown of Flame from Ragnaros, or a heroic chest piece for the transmog set… which means I’ll be heading back in there for them both! (I didn’t see the Smoldering Egg of Millagazor either, but I already had that so wasn’t too bothered!)
I enjoyed this legendary quest chain. Sure, there was a LOT of Firelands runs that needed to be done, but the cinematics and the solo encounters were really fantastic. And getting a whole ceremony to myself in the middle of Orgimmar was pretty awesome, too! But best of all is getting to turn in to a beautiful blue dragon. I remember being there when my boyfriend got his during Cataclysm. I was in awe of the beautiful dragon the he turned in to. (I also had surprised him some streamer poppers when he finally got it! It was good fun). I’d wanted to get this staff ever since.
The whole thing felt epic… something that I’m not quite feeling with the current legendary quest line with the Khadgar ring quest line…. not yet, anyway.
Ok, I admit it, I bought a WoW token with in game gold. And I don’t regret it for a second.
I don’t know how long the idea of having the in game token will last for, I don’t know what impact it will have on the economy, and to be honest I’m not too bothered. Because last night I was able to pay for a month of my addiction WoW time without using real money and with very little effort. I paid $24k for it, which is below the initial price of $30k, though I expect the price will continue to go down over time. And I’ve accidentally spent more than that on pets, so you know…
Getting it was easy. There’s a new category on the Auction House called “Game time”. I clicked on that, it told me the price of the token, and I clicked buy! The token then arrived in the mail.
Here it is in my bags:
I right clicked on it to activate it:
Am I sure?!? Of course I’m sure!
Success!
The whole thing is being monitored pretty closely by Blizzard, and already they’ve made some changes to the pricing and what not. Here’s hoping it won’t get too out of hand and that this can stick around. Cos let’s face it, this is really handy. For whatever reason this time of year is always a bit financially crap, so not having to worry about paying for my subscription for another month is definitely nice.
Has anyone else bought a token? How did it all go for you?
Some of the guys in our guild like to record our raid nights. Thankfully they recorded our kill of Heroic Blackhand from the other night. Thought I’d share it so you too can marvel at how little melee have to do in this fight! (except for trollmonk – he has to go up on the balcony in phase 2 which sucks!)
Tonight our guild FINALLY got down Heroic Blackhand. It took 94 pulls to get the guy down, but we got there in the end. In true Deadline tradition we got him down on our last attempt of the evening. I was shaking by the end. I can’t even write properly there’s too much adrenaline going on. So exciting! Only downside was no loot for me. I’ve not been having any luck at all with the bonus rolls. Haven’t once managed to roll any useful loot for myself in Blackrock Foundry. It’s been quite frustrating because we haven’t been getting healer trinkets. But I’m sure we’ll get some soon enough.
BUT YAY!!!!!!! Ahead of the curve!! Savage hero!!! New titles! WOOOOO!!!!!
EDIT: OMG My lovely, beautiful, wonderful friend Zeriah gave me the healer trinket that dropped! Oh my goodness I’m overwhelmed, and so so grateful! It will replace a 670 trinket that has no spirit on it. zomg THANK YOU Z!!!!
Realm maintenance started early this week – 12am PDT – 6pm Melbourne time. Unfortunately for me I got a whole 2 minutes of game time. LAME! So now I’m reinstalling Heroes of the Storm to see if that’s available instead.
I was going to wait until the Easter break to set all of this up, but I just couldn’t wait. I found an absolutely beautiful tumblr theme to use for my new blog, and it snowballed from there. Come visit me! www.cindersays.net. (For those utterly confused, you may recognise me as Lexicon of Power!)
I’ve been wanting to change my tumblr blog for awhile now for a couple of reasons. Firstly, everyone refers to me as “lexicon of power” instead of Cinder. And I like Cinder better.
Secondly, I want to be able to blog about other games, even if it’s only every now and again. I’m particularly keen on blogging about Overwatch when that starts rolling out. Having a name that was so embedded in World of Warcraft was limiting in that way. So here I am.
I do hope you like the new site! Don’t forget to update your bookmarks if you’ve got me bookmarked.
Got some changes coming up to my blog in the near future, including new layout and a new blog name! Don’t panic – I’m not going anywhere! Just making a few changes 🙂
Zeirah nominated me to take part in the Liebster’s again this year. So here my answers to her 11 questions!
Z’s 11 questions for me
What makes you smile?
It sounds corny, but my boyfriend. He’s always looking after me, so if I’m feeling down he does all sorts of hilarious things to cheer me up. He makes me laugh a lot, and for that I am very grateful.
Where do you see yourself in 50 years?
Being taken care of in an old folks’ home!
Is there one class in wow you haven’t been able to really gel with?
Goblins. I can’t stand them! I find them to be incredibly selfish, and in that they’re pretty one dimensional. I tried playing a goblin and couldn’t even make it through the starting zone.
What is your biggest problem/challenge when it comes to blogging?
At the moment it’s having the time and energy. My work has gotten incredibly busy making a lot of things difficult to do anything at all other than come home and fall asleep at the end of the day. I have a folder full of things to blog about and just haven’t had the time.
What is your dream career?
Something to do with writing. Something that doesn’t have me confined to an office 8 hours a day. Something that pays enough to be comfortable. (Hey, it is a *dream* job!)
What is the one thing in wow you love doing the most?
Hmmm this is tricky. There’s not a single thing that I like above everything else. But of the things I do enjoy, they tend to be with other people, like raiding and what not. Some of my favourite times were doing challenge modes with my bf, Z and other fellow guildies. It was hard work but we got there and it was awesome.
What is your favourite book?
I don’t have one. I have a top 3 that are in no particular order: The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
If you could choose the next playable race, what would it be?
Val’kyr. I love their wings!!! Or the Brunnhildar – I’ve always thought they were awesome.
What is the most delicious food you have ever eaten?
This is the most difficult question in the list. I’m very lucky because my bf is an amazing cook, and I am spoiled all the time with absolutely delicious meals!
Who is your favourite wow character?
At the moment it’s Yrel and Draka.
What do you think the next expansion should be about?
NOT ORCS! Honestly I’m so tired of them, and I haven’t even been playing the game for that long! Other than that, I’m not too bothered by what the next expansion will be, so long as it has decent story to go with it, and loads of end game content (something that’s lacking a fair bit in Warlords).
The next part involves 11 random facts about me.
1. I don’t like crowds. 2. I don’t have a favourite colour – any favourite colours depend on what is associated with the colour (i.e. my favourite colours to wear are black and red, but I would choose a blue mug over a red one any day!). 3. I eat too much sugar. 4. I find adulthood and the world in general overwhelming and incredibly dull at the same time. 5. Awards shows make me cry. 6. I’ve always wanted to visit the Bermuda Triangle, just to see if I’d disappear (and if I did, where I would go!!). 7. I get motion sickness pretty easily. 8. I don’t excel at any one thing. I’m pretty good at a whole lot of stuff, but not good enough for any one of those things to be a career or anything. I’m just a jack of all trades. 9. I love the ocean. I love the smell of it, the sound of the waves crashing on the beach, the cool of the water on a hot day – love it! 10. My favourite perfume at the moment is the coconut perfume from the Body shop. 11. Gardenias are my favourite flower.
11 questions for my victims!!
1. If you could gender swap any character in WoW, who would it be and why? 2. What keeps you playing WoW during the lulls between expansions? 3. What food would like to be able to cook? 4. Describe your perfect day 5. Do you listen to the in-game music while playing WoW? Or do you listen to something else? 6. What is the best dream you have ever had? 7. What is one skill you wish you had? 8. What in-game spell would you like to have? 9. Tell us an embarrassing story! 10. Who should have an in-game character made after them? 11. Who is your favourite “bad guy” (from anything – not just WoW)
My victims nominees
Please don’t feel as if you have to do this guys! It’s just a bit of fun 🙂
I have been running around Azeroth collecting music rolls for my garrison jukebox so that I could get the portable audiophone toy. (Which I did – but that’s another story.)
One of the easier rolls to get is the Music Roll: Song of Liu Lang which requires a wee bit of Lorewalkers rep to get. When I entered the room above Mogushan Palace I noticed there were three new pandaren standing there. Lorewalker Han, Lorewalker Fu and Lorewalker Shin. When you speak with them, you can ask them “Tell me of Greenstone Village”, and you can solo queue for the scenario of the same name. They will allow you to solo queue (or group queue if you want to do it with friends) for Mists of Pandaria scenarios, heroic scenarios and raid finder level raids. Pretty neat! I’m off to see if I can solo the scenarios for the achievement Scenaturday!
Today I went to visit CosplayPy’s tribute in Talador. It’s really fantastic! She starts out as a little sha-touched sprite darter called Pydarter. The dialogue is really sweet and mirrors the dramas she had at the last BlizzCon. At the end she turns in to Grand Empress Pydarter (just like her costume!) I think it’s a really sweet tribute. 🙂
You can find Pydarter in the far north of Talador (64,2 for those of you with co-ords).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m so excited about these. I commissioned the incredibly talented Sleeping Fox to do a chibi of my shaman, Cinderstorm (top) and my boyfriend’s monk, Thorfu (bottom). She finished them yesterday AND LOOK HOW DAMN ADORABLE THEY ARE!!!!!! I love them so much!! ❤
So raiding went alright on Sunday. We actually did quite well, one-shotting Heroic Flamebender as well as Kromog (who we only got down for the first time last week!)
We spent most of the night progressing on Iron Maidens. I had talented in to Elemental Blast as this is apparently what all resto shamans should be using, and I’ve got to say, it was interesting trying to weave it in to my rotation. But perhaps that fight overall isn’t the best fight to be trying that out on for the first time. To start off with, unless you’re healing on the boat, there is VERY little for healers to until the bosses get to 20% and all hell breaks loose. And even then there’s little we can do as most abilities seem to near on one-shot people. I did find that my mind hadn’t settled in to the “just be calm and continue your rotation using Elemental Blast” mindset when things did get crazy. Part of me felt bad for casting that instead of a heal. So to all my shaman friends out there – should I be casting Elemental Blast on cooldown? Or only when I need it/before big incoming damage?
What was awesome was having a mostly full mana pool all the time. The spirit gained from Elemental Blast really does help, and I can now understand why resto shamans steer away from spirit gear and go for throughput trinkets etc.
We got them down in the end, bringing us to 8/10 Heroic 🙂
I’m really looking forward to seeing how I go with all of the other fights using Elemental Blast. I’m also REALLY looking forward to 6.1 coming out so I can get my new/old glyph, Glyph of Telluric Currents [causes Flame Shock, Lava Burst, and Lightning Bolt to cost no mana and deal 100% more damage.] With this I’ll be able to help out with dps during quiet times without worrying about losing out on mana by doing so. (only wish Chain Lightning was included in that, too!) I know this will make my healing go down, but hopfully it will also make my overhealing go down by not healing during low damage times.
I have some lovely followers. Thank you to everyone who messaged me after my giant whinge the other day. You’re all wonderful and kind and lovely. ❤ I do feel a bit better. I’ve taken trollmonk’s advice and checked out the class forums on MMO Champion. The Shaman forums seem pretty good. People asking for advice are getting thoughtful responses instead of “noob”, “terrible” etc. So I think I’ll hang around there a bit more.
I’m changing up my talents a bit for raid tonight after having read those threads. For my level 90 talent I’ve been running with Primal Elementalist and using it as a healing cooldown with Empower. But the overwhelming response on the forums suggests Elemental Blast is the way to go, so that’s what I’m going to try tonight. I tested it out in LFR yesterday and it’s a bit fiddly (especially if I’m using Clouburst) but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. At least this way it’s highly unlikely I’ll run out of mana!
I’ve been feeling a bit crap about things lately. It’s why I haven’t been posting on here all that much. I’m going through a “I completely suck at this game, why do I bother playing it” phase. Mostly it’s because of my raiding performance lately. It’s tough being a resto shaman sometimes. It’s not often you’ll see a resto shaman at the top of the healing charts (unlike when I was a holy pally), and even though I know being a good healer doesn’t mean always being at the top of the healing charts, it’s pretty demoralising to not be there very often.
Sunday night was particularly bad, too, as the dps weren’t getting the dispels of the “man at arms” in the Thogar fight, so I was having to smash purge every 5 seconds to help out with that, and my heals plummeted. And I kept dying to stupid things on Oregorger which just made me mad at myself. Sometimes I just feel so rubbish that I wonder why I’m still there, and figure it’s because I have healing tide totem and that’s a nice CD to have so people will put up with me.
It also doesn’t help the ego when you try to contribute to discussion on WoW discussion threads on Reddit and have people slam you for your thoughts and make you feel stupid. I won’t be posting on there again.
I’ve been trying to level my warlock to 100 instead of going to the alt runs our guild is doing. Everyone I step in there I just feel like rubbish about things. I just want to be good at something, you know? And at the moment I’m not feeling that.
Many of you will be aware now that WowInsider (and joystiq et al) have been shut down by AOL. (As of a few hours ago, the WowInsider twitter account was taken over, so any new tweets you see are NOT from the original staff!) This is really a terrible loss to the WoW community. I didn’t visit the site often, but when I did I always enjoyed what I read. What I loved most was that the content was conversational – like we were sitting down having a chat about stuff. Articles were opinionated and I LOVE that. I love hearing people who are passionate about something speak their minds. I don’t have to agree with it, but I enjoy the conversation and the opportunity to argue back. And oh how they got me interested in WoW lore!
Anyway the point is that losing WowInsider is a bit of a big deal. But on the positive side, the staff have got together and have started a brand new website called Blizzard Watch! And I am SO excited about it. It’s independent so they’re not at the whim and fancy of a parent company that doesn’t understand them. It’s going to be full of awesome stuff, and I can’t wait.
But they need your help. Because they’re independent, they need help financing it. They’ve set up a brilliant campaign using Patreon where you can sponsor their site for any amount you like each month. Even $1 a month will help them. (If you want to do a one off payment, just put that amount in, then shut down the ongoing payments.) I’ve contributed as best as I can. It’s not much, but every little bit will help. If you are willing and able to help out, please go to https://www.patreon.com/blizzardwatch and pledge what you can. If you can’t help financially, that’s ok too! You can still help out by reblogging or forwarding this to anyone you know who plays WoW or is part of the Blizzard community as a whole, to see if they can help.
I’m still here! I’ve just been crazy busy with stuff and haven’t had a chance to do much on here at all. Still want to finish off my Highmaul Resto Shaman guides, and have a bunch of other posts I want to put up, I just haven’t had the time. My bf and I are off to New Zealand next week, so might be quiet for awhile, but I’ll be back to annoy you all with WoW stories soon! 🙂
I’m putting together some short healer-based posts for each of the bosses in the Highmaul raid tier. Hopefully they’ll be useful for some fellow healers (my focus is on restoration shaman as that is what I play). Let me know what you think!
The Butcher is a skippable boss, but is the second boss you see in Highmaul. As always, Wowhead have an amazing guide for the fight which I strongly recommend checking out. Especially check out the tl;dr info for each class towards the end – it’s got the straight forward basics for each spec that is incredibly helpful. (I’m not going to go through kill strats here – everyone does this a bit differently
Healing this fight is awesome. The fight overall is definitely a dps check, but at the same time if healers can’t keep the dps alive you won’t get the kill. It’s fast and it hurts.
Talents and glyphs Without a doubt, Conductivity is hands down the level 75 talent to have – there is no movement and there are always groups stacked in melee getting smashed on, so Healing Rain shines. I use High Tide for my level 100 talent to make the most of my Chain Heal (and you will need to Chain Heal!) .
If you’re a bit squishy and struggling to stay alive from bounding cleave, take Astral Shift for your level 15 talent.
By default I’m using Echo of the Elements as my level 60 talent. I seem to have a lot of luck with it proccing, and can spam Riptide all day every day. This is particulaly useful for this fight, though, for getting the most out of the High Tide talent.
For glyphs, it’s up to you – I personally don’t feel there are any super compulsory glyphs to use. Having said, you will find that Glyph of Healing Wave will be useful for keeping yourself topped up.
Restoration shaman strat This will depend on how your team does this fight. However it goes without saying that you will have groups clumped up, and they should always always always have Healing Rain on them. By the end of the fight you will see that this is where the majority of your healing comes from.
I always have The Butcher targeted so I can see when he’s casting cleave. When you do this fight enough you’ll get in to a rhythm and will be able to predict when Cleave is about to go out. You should try to time it so that your chain heal goes out just as the cleave damage has hit. This way you’ll maximise healing time on your targets. Depending on how low they are, you might want to follow this up with another chain heal, or just throw out some single targets.
I’m in the group that baits the bounding cleave. I use spirit link totem to help minimise some of the damage from this and get the group back up as quickly as possible. Rinse and repeat. It gets very chaotic and painful once he gets to 30% and Frenzy starts – your mana will disappear very quickly! So make sure you have enough to get through this. Using Ascendance can be very helpful for managing mana, as apposed to using it for a healing CD. Towards the end I will bring out my Fire Elemental (with Primal Elementalist talented) and make the most of empower to help flesh out your heals.
Any other tips?
make sure healing rain is down AT ALL TIMES
riptide on cooldown
time your chain heals to heal just as cleave damage has been taken
conserve mana as much as possible to get through the Frenzy from 30% onwards
Make sure you are stacked/spread out as per your raid leader’s requirements. Stacking incorrectly can have some nasty side effects and throw the rhythm of the fight out.
This is one of my favourite bosses. That might be because my mastery kicks butt on this fight! But also, it’s simple and challenging all at once. The mechanics are very straight forward, they just need to be dealt with correctly, and dps needs to be kept alive 100% of the time.
How are other finding this fight? Anything I’ve missed?
A flight path from my garrison bugged out on me the other day, causing Cinderstorm to swim all the way to Spires of Arak. I love that she had her “holding my breath” underwater face the whole time!
I’m putting together some short healer-based posts for each of the bosses in the Highmaul raid tier. Hopefully they’ll be useful for some fellow healers (my focus is on restoration shaman as that is what I play). Let me know what you think!
Kargath Bladefist
Kargath Bladefist is the first boss you’ll meet in Highmaul. And the easiest. Wowhead have an amazing guide for the fight which I strongly recommend checking out. Especially check out the tl;dr info for each class towards the end – it’s got the straight forward basics for each spec that is incredibly helpful.
Talents and glyphs For my talents for this fight I tend to have Conductivity for my level 75 talent as there is always a group stacked up in melee that I can drop Healing Rain on. I use High Tide for my level 100 talent because everyone is spread out, so if I do need to throw out some chain heals it will go a bit further.
For glyphs, Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is a no brainer – with people taking fire damage throughout the fight, this will help to reduce the damage taken. And it shouldn’t affect your rotation because you should be dropping Healing Stream Totem on cooldown anyway. The rest of your glyph choices are up to you.
Restoration shaman strat As a restoration shaman, this fight is a little boring in that there isn’t a lot of damage that goes out if the fight is done properly. (Which thankfully our team does). We have an allocated team that gets grabbed by the chains and thrown up in to the stands (1 healer, a couple of dps and the tank who needs to clear their stacks) . Everyone else down the bottom just needs to stay spread out, get out of crap on the ground and run the boss through the fire that spawns when he does his berserker rush. Pretty straight forward.
You may have some difficulties with being in range of some players if you’re all quite spread out. Just make sure that you have at least one healer in range of all players (i.e. don’t have all healers hanging around one end of the arena – spread around the area).
Any other tips?
stay spread out
don’t stand in the flame jets
drag the boss through the flame jets if you get targeted by him for berserker rush
don’t fall in the tiger pits!!
Like I said, pretty straight forward fight for a healer. This fight will only get difficult if melee dps don’t get out of the way of berserker rush, or if people stay standing in the bad stuff on the ground.
Overall this is a great first boss – a nice way to ease in to the evil that is to follow. 🙂
Paragon have cleared Highmaul! I’ve been watching this race pretty closely. It’s been fascinating. For the longest time Ascension, who are an Australian guild on the same server I’m on, were kicking butt and clearing things super fast. They got a lot of world first kills so should be super proud.
A lot of guilds were stuck on 4/7 for the longest time – The Butcher proving to be the sticking point. Method got the first Butcher kill, with others following about half a day later, all sitting 6/7. Then there was nothing for almost a full day. Paragon were sitting on 5/7 for quite some time, which I was surprised about. But seeing why there seemed behind now makes sense – instead of banging their heads against the butcher, they had gone on to Imperator Mar’gok to get the world first kill on him. And then 4 ½ hours later downed Mythic Butcher for the world first mythic clear of Highmaul.
Pretty awesome. 🙂 What’s also awesome is how supportive the other guilds are being. Method in particular are super gracious. Just reading through Method’s twitter feed, it really seems like they’re in this for the fun, and I like that.
So many pets for me this weekend! I’ve been so so lucky.
It started on Thursday with Argi:
Argi is Blizzard’s fundraiser pet this year. 100% of the money paid for him goes to the Red Cross to help the Ebola efforts in Africa. If you haven’t adopted him yet, please do! He can do rally weird tricks for you!
Saturday was spent doing pet battles in Draenor for the newly adjusted Draenic Pet Battler achievement, which would give me my level 3 Pet Menagerie in my garrison. Thankfully the number of battles was reduced to 150, so I spent a few hours with netflix running, hanging around clumps of pets in Frostfire Ridge just outside my garrison.
While I was farming away, someone in guild linked me a pet – Hydraling. He looked pretty straightforward to get, so off I went and killed his mother to steal him. (God this game is awful sometimes!)
Anyway, he’s super cute, even with 3 heads!
Once I got back to Frostfire I really got stuck in to churning out the pet battles. Instead of healing up pets as they died, I’d use them all until they died then would swap in replacements (all the while levelling some of my lowbies). It was while I was skimming through my pets to see who would be next that I accidentally clicked something wrong, and happened to come across a link for the Pygmy Cow. He was greyed out, but I wanted him! SoI hovered over the icon to see where he came from and was immediately excited – he came from a level 3 Barn! On Friday night I had managed to complete the Filling the Ranks achievement that unlocked the level 3 War Mill, as well as unlocking the Level 3 Barn for completing the Master Trapper achievement – so I was set! Off to wowhead I went to see how to get this adorable little fella. Turns out, getting him wasn’t as straightforward as all that.
You see, the Glass of Warm Milk that he comes from generally spawns on the 2nd level of the Barn, and whilst there is a ladder to the 2nd level, for some insane reason (other than forced difficulty) the ladder is unclimbable. Research was telling me it was possible, and but this point I was well determined. So I set about running around my garrison to figure out a way to get in there.
My Barn is positioned right next to my main Town Hall building. Someone had suggested you could climb on to the wall of the Town Hall building and use a glider to get across – that was not true. I then climbed up the tower with the Ashran portal, jumped across to the garrison wall and tried gliding from there, but it was just too far.
Then I remembered that garrison buildings could be moved to new plots (along as the plot sizes were the same). So I swapped it over with my Lumber Mill so that the Barn was now beside the main entrance, and right next to a super high rock. It took me a while, but I figured out how to get to the top of that rock, and glided from there. I got SO close so many times, but ultimately I was far too uncoordinated to land on the 2nd level platform. So I looked for other alternatives.
One of the comments I had read said that the spawn location of the glass would change over time, but that it was possible to force the location change by moving your garrison to different plots. In the end, this is what I did. Eventually the glass spawned on the lower floor and I Was able to get it without problem. (I’ll still try to get to the second level, because I REALLY want to see what’s in there!!)
SO! After all that trouble, this little fella was mine:
Late Saturday afternoon I finally managed to unlock my level 3 Pet Menagerie, but because I’d already done the daily for the day, the new one was not available to me. So this morning (Sunday morning) I went and did battle against Rukus and Brutus for the Big Bag of Pet Supplies reward from the daily. How surprised was I when out of this bag came the stunning Sunfire Kaliri!
Look at how beautiful he is!
I’m changing my whole transmog tonight so we match. I think he’s absolutely beautiful. (I may have squeed when I saw him in my bags!)
In addition to all of this wonderful good luck with pets this weekend, I got super dooper lucky with a mount, too! I did a garrison invasion with a fellow guildie and my boyfriend. We got gold, which gave us 3 bags of loot as a reward. The first two contained gold and apexes crystals and the like, as did the third. But for me, the third bag (Invader’s Forgotten Treasure) also contained a Giant Coldsnout mount!!!!
Look at him!!
You should see his little legs while he runs – it will make your day. (If they ever fix the mac issues, I’ll make a gif so you can all have a happy making gif 🙂 )
Well, all manner of dramas are happening on our server at the moment. Highmaul has just opened, so raiding has officially started again!
We had a good start – everyone got in ok, and we one-shot Kargath Bladefist. And then everything went down the toilet. Looks like the servers are getting DDOS-ed so people have been getting kicked off left right and centre; lag spikes have been hilarious – dead bodies floating around the place. Good times.
In amongst the chaos, Z and I managed to capture out first WoD kill together. 🙂
The journey to 100 has been a lot of fun. I was incredibly fortunate and didn’t experience any of the queues or other such issues (although many of my guild friends did). To be fair, some mornings I was up at 5:30am so I think that definitely helped.
So! Here are a bunch of us all waiting by the portal to go through to new adventures in savage lands. General chat was immature as ever, but turned to excited squeals when the portal opened 15 minutes later. They shortly turned to “I can’t find Khadgar – can anyone see Khadgar? WHERE IS KHADGAR?!?!” and “laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggg” and later “this game f**kin’ sux” (aren’t people delightful?) And then the server crashed.
When we got back literally 2 minutes later, things were fine (lagging, but fine) and Cinderstorm made her way through the Dark Portal to Draenor.
The opening quests in Tanaan Jungle were pretty awesome, but took a good 2 hours to get through because of the sheer number of people trying to click/kill the same stuff, and didn’t really provide opportunity for screen shots.
Eventually we arrive in Frostfire Ridge to start building our garrison… and then everything kind of fell apart. The lag was quite intense, making it very difficult to do anything. In addition, people being people, it was incredibly difficult to click on certain things due to the rudeness of others.
Killing things proved difficult, too, as each person needed their own tag. Eventually I decided that it wasn’t worth the frustration, so logged over and sent my warlock and mage through the starting zone. By then a lot of the lag passed and I was set to make my garrison.
i really enjoyed levelling in this expansion. There were subtle things that made it so much more engaging. For example, the quest givers would be in one spot to give you your quest. You’d then trek off on your adventure to save the day. Instead of having to go back to where you got the quest, though, the quest giver has come to you, or gone a little past you, making it feel like they’re part of your adventure, too. I felt it really helped to move the questing along, and made it a more immersive experience.
It took me a few days to get to level 100. Not because of any issues, but because the place was so darn beautiful that I kept stopping to take screen shots!! And then there were all the rares and the toys and the new pets. Oh it was just so much and so exciting!
I ended up skipping over Spires of Arak towards the end because I was so tired from the early starts and late finishes, and I wanted to see the end cinematic in Nagrand (those of you who have seen it will know what I’m on about!) It was worth it.
So now that I’m 100 I’ve been working on my garrison and freaking out over how terrible my poor elemental shaman is (she’s gets smashed by level 92s!!!) Thankfully I’ll be healing, and I’m slowly getting better at that, so I think everything should be ok.
So I haven’t been here much, simple because I’ve been playing Warlords of Draenor every spare second I can. I was super lucky and didn’t experience many of the issues other people had. I suppose if I did I would have updated. 😉
Back to work today. Will do a bunch of posts in a few days, and spam you all with screenshots, via seriously the place is stunning!!
I’m stuck on the loading screen of death, so thought I’d share some screen shots of Warlords so far.
I had to turn general chat off because the whining from everyone was driving me nuts. It’s launch day – what is everyone expecting? Just try and have fun, and if you can’t, come back later. Everything will still be here 🙂
I haven’t been around much lately as my partner’s Mum is staying with us, leaving us little time for WoW. And so of course while I’m a bit afk, all things WoW are blowing up!
Blizzcon
Obviously the hot topic at the moment is Blizzcon. The tweets/posts about Blizzcon get me both super excited and super sad that I can’t go (the joys of living in Australia). It looks like it would be an amazing time. I’m ummed and ahhed about getting a Virtual Ticket, but I don’t think it will be the same as being there, given I wouldn’t get the chance to watch any of ituntil after the event is over. But for those of you going – have an awesome time! 😀
Framerates
So even though we’ve got visitors at the moment, I have had a chance to go online a little bit. Mostly to do the Headless Horseman dungeon (and not get the mount – got 10 sinister squalishings, though, so I’ve got that going for me), and of course to get my Blazing Wings from the Darkmoon Faire. However I’m one of those “lucky” Mac users that has been experiencing choppiness and general unplayability. It’s very frustrating. A hotfix was done on Monday night, which did help the choppiness a bit, but I’m having massive issues with things taking forever to load. An example being when I port in to Dalaran, I have to stand around for ages and wait for my toon to show up, the environment to shop up, and then the NPCs I want to talk to to show up.It’s super disappointing because I was really looking forward to improved gameplay with the new Australian servers and all, and instead I’ve had nothing but trouble. Very disappointed. At least it happened while I was on 7 days of free game time. 🙂 If anyone else is having troubles like this with their Mac, this is the thread to follow.
Guides
There are so many posts popping up about WoD (GUYS IT’S NEXT WEEK!!!!!!!) that it’s getting a little hard to keep on top of things. I’ve not had much of a chance to read up on things, so I’m a bit worried about being able to hit the ground running… but I’m sure I’ll get there. I’ve got a whole bunch of pages saved up to read through as soon as I get a chance – hopefully they will help.
Wowhead have delivered, as usual, though, with some brilliant dungeon strategy guides written by the awesome Dayani. (Go check out her blog – http://healiocentric.wordpress.com – she’s the bees knees!). The dungeon strat guides are on Wowhead here and are bound to be a big help in levelling quickly.
Anyway, that’s about it for now. Back to a bit of radio silence. Until next week. When Draenor comes out!!!!
I wasn’t patient enough to wait for the bug to be fixed, so I got a bit crafty, and instead jumped on my poor neglected Death Knight on Aman’Thul to try my luck. Thankfully Aman’Thul is as dead as ever, and there were only a handful of people attempting the Brood of Alysrazor achievement. I also did the trick of flagging myself for pvp, which did make a difference until I came across other people doing the same thing. Last night I had 3 good runs – 42, 46 and 48 (the 48 was a killer! I was so disappointed!) Despite the quiet of the server, though, there were still too many people around taking those last few rings I needed. So I left it and tried again first thing this morning. I got the achievement of my first run. I’m so pleased! As soon as these wings were shown on WoWhead I knew I had to have them.
The bottom pic is of my beautiful draenei Death Knight who did all the hard work in getting them. The top pic is my lucky shaman who reaps the benefits! But seriously, with a name like Cinderstorm as if she couldn’t have wings made of fire!! (well, all my toons are “Cinder” so they all had to have them!)
For those who are wanting a bit of help, I got a map from a new Facebook group I joined, WoW Healers.
Here’s the map they posted:
It was a good starting point. I didn’t follow it exactly, though. After a few runs I realised there were a few parts I was doing wrong and the buff would wear off, so figured out a path that would suit me. (Also with people taking the rings, it made following this more difficult.) You need 50 rings for the achievement, and there are more than 50 rings around the place. There are quite a few on the Eastern side of the island, so I saved those for last, making sure I had enough time to get them all.
All in all, I really enjoyed going for this achievement. It was challenging without being too difficult, and you get a neat little reward at the end of it. And look how pretty my girls are! 😀
I’ve been listening to the audio book of War Crimes for the past week. I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed it. It was nice to be thrown straight in to the story without the prelude of getting to know the characters and what not – I already knew who they were, and the descriptions of them only confirmed/added to that information.
The story itself I thoroughly enjoyed. I only have half an hour left of the reading, so will finish it on my way home from work tonight. But what I’ve read so far has been fantastic, and really eye opening. It has my head spinning with possible future expansion possibilities! What I liked about this one was that it presented insights in to past events. I won’t go in to detail as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else. Suffice to say, you get some more information about particular events, which I found fascinating. Perhaps those who are already well versed in the Warcraft lore will find it a little boring or repetitive, but I came in to this with no knowledge, and am leaving with an understanding of how certain people are the way they are. I love it!
Has anyone else read any of the other WoW books? And if so, which ones do you recommend?
6.0.2 has landed, and along with it a world of changes for everyone. Most noticeable of the changes are the changes to classes, and the stat squish. Last night our raid team ran a normal (ex-flex level) run so we could test out the changes.
Because I’m maining my Shaman in WoD, I took her with me to our raid last night to get my first taste of the new healing changes (how awesome does she look, btw??) So how drastic are the changes to Restoration Shamans? Not really drastic, to be honest.
As other healers are aware, we had quite a few spells taken away from us all i.e. no more small heals/fast small heals/big heals etc.Now it’s just heal, faster heal and a few others that are class specific. As a resto shaman, I didn’t feel much else of a change. Riptide is still instant, and I was already in the habit of casting chain heal off of a riptided target, so that didn’t change.
What I did find myself doing was creating my own “big heals”, though, by using Unleash Life with Healing Surge or Healing Wave to give them a bit of a boost. I need to do it better (i.e. only on Healing Surge) because it ends up being a time consuming thing to cast, and I’m not 100% sure of the payoff yet. Apparently it’s good to use with Chain Heal, too, so I’ll give that go later.
Healing the raid was… boring. I have to admit. Now that there are fewer spells to choose from, I just found myself casting Healing Wave on everyone all the time, Riptide on CD, Healing Stream Totem on CD and Earth Shielding the tank. Rinse and repeat. There wasn’t anything else to do. And there was SO MUCH MANA!! I couldn’t get it to drop no matter how hard I tried.
To be fair, for the most part, people weren’t taking a lot of damage – we had Mythic level gear in Normal level fights so this is to be expected. But then the AoE damage started happening, and to be honest, we were stuffed. We (Zeirah – my lovely resto druid friend!) just didn’t have the throughput to deal with the spikey damage that would come out. People would die in miliseconds, without any chance of us being able to do anything about it, and I found myself just standing there watching people die going “crap” but not being able to do anything about it. Healing through the last phase of Galakras was HARD, and at that level it shouldn’t be.
HOWEVER, as many people have pointed out, we’re not at max level anymore, and all of this is a result of that. The mana will become an issue later, which will make things more interesting. The fights going forward won’t be so spikey, so people won’t just drop after one or two hits, and in addition to that, people won’t be at full health all the time, so there will be something to do.
I haven’t re-gemmed/enchanted anything at this stage as I haven’t had a chance to read what stats I should be prioritising yet. I did have a go at using Mr Robot to give me a best in bags answer and was completely perplexed with the results… all haste. Which was odd because the guides I’ve been reading say either crit or mastery, so I’m didn’t change anything. I’ll try again on the weekend when I’ve done some more reading.
Anyway, at the moment my resto shaman is a bit boring, but I am still looking forward to what’s coming up, and getting to experience the new talents!
I also had a chance to play around with the Elemental spec (WHEEEE!!!!!!) but I’ll do that in another post because this has gone on lone enough!
In the meantime – how brilliant is the new ghost wolf form?!!?
Really loved this. I know a lot of people didn’t like this expansion, but for me it’s the first I’ve played from beginning to end and I’ve loved it (even with a year of Siege of Orgrimmar). Everything was beautiful, the music STUNNING. I’m going to miss it.
Yet another thing that I didn’t think I’d have the skill or time to do. Out of curiosity I took my shaman in to Brawler’s Guild to for a bit of a muck around. I figured I might get through the first couple of ranks but that would be about. I’d heard nightmares about particular bosses (Hexos in particular) so didn’t really have high expectations.
My gear just made most of the fights meaningless – I zerged most of them and progressed through the ranks quickly, dying only twice until rank 8 when I got to Hexos. Now I’d heard nightmares about this guy – guildies who were still stuck on him after having tried so many times. The Wowhead post on him is full of comments from people trying to help others get him. I was terrified when I got up to him. My first attempt I got him down to 10%. My second attempt I killed him. I was shaking so hard out of nerves and adrenaline! I was pretty stoked, though, that I managed to get him down.
The guy that proved most difficult for me actually ended up being Doctor FIST who I died to 3 times because I’m rubbish at getting out of the way in time. But I got him on my 4th attempt. Ahoo-ru was the next boss I was nervous about, having watched quite a few people wipe to him during my time there. Wiped the first time because I didn’t interrupt the heal (forgot I had a ranged heal, so was running in to melee to interrupt and missed it – very stupid moment on my part!!), but managed to get the kill on my second attempt.
So now I’m at level 10, and am stoked to have a very cool looking mount as a result! I’ve got a few of world drop bosses to do, but I’m holding off for the moment. This weekend I’m focussing for one last attempt at the Proven Healer title.
So yesterday I got it in my head that I’d get green fire on my warlock. Now let me preface this by saying that I SUCK at playing a warlock. I’m honestly beyond useless at it. I levelled her, took her in to an LFR and failed so badly I’ve only ever played her to do holiday dungeons to try for the mounts. So this was a pretty bold idea to have. It was also slightly problematic as she was on another server and Alliance, with no gold, and no-one to help.
I’m sure you’re all starting to see how stubborn I am… so you won’t be surprised to know that I immediately went to my ally warlock and headed off to the Isle of Thunder. Or so I thought. Turns out the poor girl hadn’t even started the quests to get there, so I had to get through that first. Then there was the niggling issue of having to get the Sealed Tome of the Lost Legion – a rare drop from the rare mobs that spawn on the Isle. That place was full of warlocks, obviously out to get the tomes themselves (either to use or sell). I stayed there for quite a few hours, suffering endless ganking and waiting for stupid mobs to spawn. In the end of I got so fed up I transferred her to my (now) main Horde server and just bought the darn thing. 😀
So then it came time to actually doing the quests themselves. I found the story quite interesting, and enjoyed travelling around for the bits and pieces required. It was interesting reading the story, too.
On to the Black Temple scenario itself. I used Sparkuggz’s guide to getting green fire on a boosted warlock as my ilvl was only 496. It made things a bit challenging, but by no means impossible.
The part he skipped over threw me a bit, though – I had to run around and loot a whole bunch of stuff in a short amount of time (like the thunder king treasure run) but I didn’t understand why. It seemed an odd things to do, tbh, and I didn’t want to do it. It didn’t really go with the story line. I’m guessing they just added it so people got the gold to pay for their repairs form the final boss fight! 😉 In the end, it didn’t take long to get to the last guy.
So then came the last boss. I spent hours on this. Probably about 5 all up over 2 days. The first couple of hours were figuring out how to warlock and understanding the fight. The only thing I did differently to the video guide was to have a gateway up near the portal to help me drop threat every now and again (great suggestion by my bf!) and that really did help, especially with keeping the doom guards off me.
It was quite tense!! On the second round of felhunters I lost control of the pit lord and he came running for me – quickly managed to re-enslave him and got charge out before Cataclysm went off. Then the other doom guard came out, then more imps and I was done for. Thankfully I had souls toned, and me dying had dropped all threat, so I could smash out that last few hits on the boss. I was shaking like mad at this point, as I was sure I was going to die from the dots. But nope!
I handed in the final quest, clicked the dude and FLEW!! And now everything is green 😀
I’m pretty chuffed! Shame she has a rubbish transmog, though 😉 I’m pleased that I got this, and am really looking forward to the “of the Black Harvest” title that comes from getting this when WoD comes out. I am, however, slightly disappointed that I’ve been able to get this (which isn’t easy) on a toon that I never play, but can’t get the Proven Healer title on a character I’ve healed on for most of the expansion. Makes me sad and really question whether I should be playing a healer at all.
I got Challenge modes on my pally!! I’m really pleased with myself, because I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to heal Challenge Modes to gold. And yet, here I am!
I love the paladin set. I particularly like the way is glows when I cast spells – looks really cool as a healer 😀
So here are some pics.
1. My paladin in her new Challenge Mode set, with her lovely new pet Chi-Chi
2. Flying on her Emeral Phoenix (SO glad we get all 4 mounts in WoD!! It’s too hard choosing between them all).
3. Even though she looks lovely on her new phoenix mount, I think the set looks brilliant on the Azure drake that dropped for me the other day!!
4. Our little team that got it done. From L-R: Klorithor – hunter, Anaesthestics – rogue, Tenkai – druid tank, Thorgasm – shaman, me! Cindelaera – holy paladin
Well, my stubbornness has paid off. Last night I finished levelling the last of my pets to 25, so off I went to try my hand at the Celestial Tournament. I was actually really nervous about it, but the WoWhead guide to defeating the Celestial Tournament is AMAZEBALLS and got me through.
My lovely mage in her Challenge Mode set with Chi-Chi!
Xu-Fu was the most difficult pet, I found. Mostly because the strategy in the guide doesn’t allow for any misses. And my Darkmoon Zeppelin was naughty a few times and missed some shots, causing me to wipe and have to start the whole tournament from scratch.
Chi-Chi was next most difficult. The first time I tried the strategy made no sense at all and my pets just died one after the other. I tried again a second time and realised I was out of sync. Figured it out, though, and got through it all.
I was so excited to finally get my little Chi-Chi pet!
I think I’ll keep doing this each week to get the rest of the pets. They really are quite adorable. And after the amount of time I spent levelling them all, I really should do the rest.
But right now, feeling pretty please with my efforts. 🙂
Well, I’m doing challenge modes again. This time as a healer. I wasn’t expecting to do this – having done challenge modes twice now as dps, I saw how darn difficult it was to heal them and figured there was no way I’d be able to do that. But here I am.
I’ve taken my holy paladin in to heal. So far we’ve gotten through 6 of them. Bad server lag on Thursday meant we weren’t able to get anything done, so we’re not as far along as we’d like to be, but we’re getting there. More than anything else, though, I’m healing challenge modes! Which I’m really proud of. I’m also a bit surprised because I (still) can’t get through endless proving grounds on any of my healers, but can do this.
I’ve been using a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the pets I need to capture/level. I didn’t have all of the recommended pets, but I do have a lot of alternatives, so that’s helped.
I’m now at the point where it’s the hard grind to get everyone to 25. Doing the Pandaren spirit/tamer dailies definitely helps get levels done quickly. But after that it’s just a grind. Getting there, though!
Well, my headset died over the weekend. I’m not happy. I’ve only had it for a year, and it wasn’t the cheapest thing in the world (though not the most expensive either – just enough that they made a dent in the bank account at the time). What broke in the end was the wire that leads in to the ear pieces – it has pulled out and is frayed. I’m a bit baffled, but mostly pissed.
I’m torn about what to do. First thing is I’ll see if the broken ones are still under warranty. If not, I’m not too sure what to do. I don’t want to fork out +$100 for something that won’t even last year. I’m careful with my stuff. My headset has its own hook to hang on beside my desk when it’s not in use, and even though I get frustrated, I sure as hell never throw them. Anyway, for the wire to come out is beyond crap, and I’m not keen on spending a bunch of money on something that won’t last.
If I do decide to get another headset, though, I’m eyeing off a Steel Series one, as it was recommended by a fellow guildie. Anyone else have much experience with these?
I can be pretty obsessive. (Shame I can’t be obsessive about eating right and exercising, but that’s for another time!) When I set my mind to something in WoW, I don’t stop until it’s done. It’s how I’ve got 9 max level toons, 4 legendary capes and stupid achievements (and why not having the Proven Healer title is driving me nutes!!). Once I’ve decided I want something, I go get it. Last week it was finishing the legendary cloak quests for my monk (4th toon to have this), and getting exalted with the August Celestials on my priest so that I could learn the Royal Satchel pattern because I have so much transmog on my shaman I’ve run out of bag space.
This week, it’s the Celestial Tournament. I’ve wanted to do this for awhile, but I’m completely hopeless at pet battles so dismissed it as something I’d never get to do. But the other day my bf was talking about how he was doing it so he could get the little Xu-Fu, Cub of Xuen pet for his monk tank and I decided that I needed the Chi-Chi, Hatchling of Chi-Ji pet for my healers.
Because this is “end game” content, player’s should not reasonably expect to waltz into the Raid [Tournament] with no knowledge of the Boss encounters [NPC Pet’s Abilities, Strengths/Weaknesses] and inadequate armour and weapons [non-diverse, minimal max-level collection, poor quality pets] and simply breeze through it on their first attempt.
The Celestial Tournament is intended to be a challenge; but above all else, it’s meant to be fun!
So I got to work. I decided to go with the Original Pets list from the guide. I quickly realised, though, that while I had all the pets, they weren’t all rare quality. The Alternative/Replacement Pets list has been incredibly useful, and sure enough, most of the time if I didn’t have a rare of the original pet, I did have one of the alternatives.
Then there were the breeds to worry about. I didn’t realise just how important the pet’s breeds were to their performance. I just thought it was a bit random. But now I know better. To help with this, my bf got me on to two add-ons that have made things infinitely easier:
I had to start a spread sheet to keep track of all the pets I was going to use, what breeds they were, their level and rarity. I needed to figure out which ones I was going to boost with battle stones because some pets just aren’t rare when you get them (e.g. Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling), and which ones I was going to boost because my patience with farming is very minimal (2x 310+ speed rare Nordrassil Wisp, I’m looking at you!!) Because I got both add-ons at the same time, I’m not sure which does what, but one of them has fantastic feature that will show you what a pet’s stats will be once it reaches 25 (and is rare).
In the end I was only looking at having to farm 5 pets. Sheer bad luck with Alpine Foxlings (no rares at all, let alone the specific S/S breed that I needed) lead me to purchase an alternative pet from the Auction House – Moon Moon (got him for a great price, too!).
The rest of the pets I had to get just took time and a bit of patience. It took me 4 hours to get a rare Lofty Libram, but thankfully only about 5 battles for the rare Brown Marmot I needed. And then after farming for a rare Nexus Whelpling for a good hour or so, I went and accidentally killed TWO rares in a row before I managed to snag a rare of my own.
Don’t let his adorable-ness fool you – this guy is brutal!! Image from Wowhead
Now that I have all the pets I need, I’m spending loads of time levelling them all. Whilst I had quite a few at 25 already, only about 4 or 5 of them were those needed for the Tournament. So I got to work. The really low level ones were levelled up a bit while I was farming the other pets. Once that was done, I headed to Pandaria to see the Pandaren Spirit Tamers and Pandaren Tamers, the idea being that I’d level pets quickly and also have the chance of getting some battle-stones in the process.
I found a brilliant guide on Wowhead that has helped me get through this quickly (remember – I totally suck at pet battling!). Check out A Pet Battler’s Guide to: Defeating the Pandaren Battle Pet Dailies if you also struggle a bit with these. The guide is so so useful and has helped get quite a few of my pets to 25 pretty quickly. I managed to get a couple of battle stones over the two days I’ve been doing this, but got way more junk than anything else.
So that’s where I am. I’ve got about 10 more pets to get to 25, and then I’ll be ready. Is anyone else working on the Tournament, too? And those who have already done this – any advice for a noob like me?
So in some strange internet rabbit hole, I came across videos of 2 of my favourite things: World of Warcraft, and Jonathan Coulton. They’re pretty old, so some of you may have already seen them. But I haven’t, and they are glorious.
For the past two weeks some of us guildies got together and worked our way through the challenge mode dungeons. At some silly hour on Saturday night, we finished our last one! Gold wins for us all! Of course we immediately ran off to put on our new transmog set and get our phoenixes. We then spent far too long failing getting a decent screen shot – lots of laughing was to be had. But here are some pics!
Our little team in our new outfits! We have Zeirah as druid heals, Cinderstorm (me) as elemental shaman, Zugs as blood DK, Necrosion as destruction warlock, and Thorbat as survival hunter (who also happens to be my super-awesome bf).
For those who don’t know, each of the challenge mode sets has a visual effect, just to make them a bit more super awesome.
Here we are /roar – ing to show off our effects (unfortunately Z’s druid effect only works when casting – but she’s got SUPER awesome lightning going on with hers. It looks fantastic!) This shot caused a few giggles trying to time it right (DBM timer ftw!)
We then tried to get a shot of us all on our new phoenixes…
We failed REALLY badly at that. By this point we were terribly hyperactive and laughing like made. Ahhh adrenaline! 🙂
Later on I discovered that my transmog’s visual effect would work while I was flying!
How completely awesome is that?!?!
Lastly, a closeup of my Cinderstorm in her new set. Doesn’t she look fierce?!
So that’s it. I’m super proud of our little team. We worked really hard and did so well in the end. Very very happy. 🙂
We’re now figuring out which toons to do it on next. I’m thinking my paladin.
Just had a very lovely moment in WoW that I wanted to share with you all (given there’s so much negativity going around at the moment, perhaps a nice story will help?)
I was hanging around on the timeless isle farming leather for my dailies. As I approached the area with all the sprites, I noticed someone was killing them for the Dandelion Frolicker pet. I also noticed the poor fellow was almost dead. Luckily I was in my healing gear, so I spam healed him up to full and stayed with him, healing him up as needed while he did his thing. When he was done I went on my way, thinking nothing of it. He then whispers me a “thanks bro!”. I said “np! 😀 Any luck?” him: “I got 2!” me: “oh wow! that’s awesome! Grats, man! I’ve been farming that for ages and haven’t had any luck.I ended up buying one.” him: “want one?” me: “lol nah it’s all good. You should sell the other one!” him: “it’s the least I can do” me: “are you sure??” him: “of course”
And then he traded me one of his little dandelion frolickers.
It was such a nice and unexpected gesture – very kind indeed. I didn’t heal him because I thought I’d get anything out of it – I’ve just been in that position before (but died) and it was really disappointing. Thought a little help wouldn’t go astray.
Anyway, I just had to share this nice story. Not everything that happens in WoW is negative. It’s true when they say that it’s the people you play with that make this game awesome.
I got a lovely blog birthday message from tumblr for my blog’s 2nd birthday. And to make things even better, I got my 100th follower on the same day. Huzzah!
Thanks everyone for being awesome people to follow. I love seeing the things you find. The beautiful pictures, the funny stories and your WoW adventures make me smile every day. Thanks!!!!
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Image from 
Here we are /roar – ing to show off our effects (unfortunately Z’s druid effect only works when casting – but she’s got SUPER awesome lightning going on with hers. It looks fantastic!) This shot caused a few giggles trying to time it right (DBM timer ftw!)
We failed REALLY badly at that. By this point we were terribly hyperactive and laughing like made. Ahhh adrenaline! 🙂
How completely awesome is that?!?!
Lastly, a closeup of my Cinderstorm in her new set. Doesn’t she look fierce?!
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