A Night of Relaxation

Piqued:

Took the day off from leveling for the most part, at least in reference to questing. Did some herb picking to get the wife's inscriptionist up, spent about an hr to an hr and a half on that. Then went and got her to Dalaran and showed her the sites there. She then proceeded to pick up her gryphon and picked a few more herbs. I went to the sea and found some fish. Side note got my fishing to 433, yeah me and my Herbalism to 404, woot. Gonna try and generate the cash needed to get my mount as well but til then I will just choke on her dust when we are in Outlands.

Osirri Introduction

Skarrde, my guild leader, has been kind enough to give me a forum to post my thoughts and experiences as a Death Knight (DK) on his blog. I have never tanked before rolling my Death Knight. I am normally used to being a dps spec as a hunter, so I am thinking that there will be a lot of trial and error while I learn how to be a valuable member of a party as a tank or off-tank.

Currently, I am specced unholy. Here is the link for my spec...please keep in mind that I am still learning the class, and I realize that I have to clean it up. I am still doing research and experimenting with the talents.
Arcindinia's Unholy Spec

Thanks for reading and I will update again later with some experiences I have had with being a new DK tank.

Shared Topic Idea: Children of Wrath: Dawn of a new Era

Piqued: Starman of Casual Raid Leader asked:

We've talked about the concept of a BC Baby and the world that they grew up in. What things will the Children of Wrath never see? What aspects of the world will they miss? What aspects will have changed so dramatically that they have no concept of things we speak of?

Interesting idea:

1. What it was like to only have paladins on alliance and shamans on horde.
2. 5 min buffs for paladins that had to be cast on every single person in the group. (Hence the name buffbot)
3. taking 9 mos to lvl from 1-60.
4. BRD, LBRS, UBRS, Scholo, Strat all being 10 man instances.
5. The epicness of BRD.
6. Fighting Onyxia in SW Keep.
7. Sailing from Menethil to get to Auburdine.
8. Trade chat not going across every cities channel.
9. LFG being the busiest channel in game but not a single person actually LFG.
10. Having to run to every instance since summoning stones were non existent.
11. No organized PvP, aka battle grounds or arenas. PvP was chosen by either flagging yourself or fighting in arena by Booty Bay.
12. taking 3 mos to pick up 10 lvls after 60.
13. When Illidan and Arthas were just a piece of lore.
14. Taking down Baron for the first time.

Tank #2

Piqued: I have asked a fellow guildie that is leveling up a DK as a tank to give her input in any way she wants. Please be kind and welcome her to the board, hopefully you can find her as informative as I have. :)

RL vs. WoW: The Coninuing Battle

I am currently having a bit of a dillema battling between the two of these. My wife  is pregnant with our 2nd child and is due the beginning of next month, with this comes the difficulty for her to sit in her computer chair for long periods of time. We have always leveled all of our toons together and so have had an equal number of high level toons to play with. Now with her being unable to play as much as I am this has dug into my time with playing as well. I don't want to disappoint her and level my shaman but I am missing the moving through the zones and reading the quests. I have been leveling my different skills, skinning is at 450, cooking is up to 416, fishing is now at 418 and rising and my herbalism is over 400, not sure how high. I am enjoying the time that I get to quest with my wife and look forward to every time we get to do it but I just wish it was more.

Martyr that I am and feeling sry for myself over this whole thing I should probably just level up my mage since I can solo that pretty easily.

Well ttfn and have a good nite.

2 steps forward or is it back?

Finished the quest chain for the key frags for Kara for Piqued. Will try and get into BM before the end of the week. The really fun part of this is that I have my mom running along with us on her first 70, a feral cat druid. She seems to be enjoying it so far I just hope she isn't overwhelmed with it. Mom doesn't plan on getting LK for a bit yet but we will see what happens, I did tell her to continue questing to make some extra gold especially since she hasn't gotten her epic ground mount yet.

In Northrend been mostly fishing due to RL issues going on this week and all. Other than that has been spending about an hr working on the Kara key quests, so a pretty slow week thus far.

Bleh why does work have to interrupt wow life huh?

Utgarde Keep

Went into my first instance in Northrend last nite after finishing off Kara and it is amazing the differences in the instances. Karazhan which was an interesting fight before 3.0 has become rather bland and easy to run through. Utgarde on the other hand was awesome with the visual detail they went into with this low level instance. The fights were pretty even, especially since we had a fellow guildie who had been there before. We made it through most of the instance without problems, it wasn't until we hit the last boss that we had some major problems. Healing was pretty straightforward and I kept my riptides running on the tank for the most part and then filling everyone else up with Lesser Healing Wave. The one thing I did notice is that there is a mana shortage for Shamans but I think this is more my fault than the games. I had been basing my gear on a different model than what was actually in Northrend. With the way it was in BC post 3.0 we could afford to lose mp5 for crit, right now I don't believe that is the case. Since we have no real way of generating mana through talents or crits like all the other classes we are going to have to continue using the fall back of mp5.

Healing strategy for Utgarde Keep

The main thing as always is keep your tank up and for this riptide and chain heal work the best. It is also nice when your chain heal bounces to the other melee in the group and keeps them alive. For totems I threw down Flametongue, Mana, Stoneskin and Windfury, the last one because I had more melee than casters in my group. I usually try to keep my air totem applicable to the group. I did find myself really enjoying Tidal waves for the haste factor for Lesser Healing wave. The first boss isn't too bad, he brings in four guys at beginning so you have to watch the aggro, try to make sure that the tank is between you and the door they come through, this is especially helpful when running with a paladin tank. After you kill them off the boss will rez the four guys again and once again watch the aggro. If it is possible move around to opposite side of the tank so that they have to come past him to get to you.

The second boss consists of 2 mobs, one is a caster and the other is melee. The fun thing about these 2 is that your party has to kill them at about the same time. We got lucky going in there so I can't give you a definite time limit but I believe it was within 5-10 secs of each other. If you don't do this then the one will rez the other and you have to start again. We had the tank move right in and I put my totems close by. We were then able to burn them down without a problem and continued on.

Time for the last boss. This guy is was very difficult for us and we wiped twice on him. Nice thing is that we had a hunter to help us run through the whole instance after we got back in, it is a very long walk. There are 2 phases to this guy. The first one was pretty simple, the only thing the melee had to watch for was his shield bash which was an aoe that affected anyone within 20 or so yds of him. He is easy to burn down since he had next to no Hit Points. The next phase he gets rezzed by a Valkyrie and he starts dealing out shadow damage. You want to burn him down as fast as you can because he does a shout that puts a debuff on the party that increases shadow dmg done to you. Watch out for his shield bash aoe because this dmg is generated though shadow so can be very wicked. Burn him down as fast as possible, we made it through 5 shouts and then he took care of everyone in mail along with the tank and then the warrior and druid in bear form.

GL :)

Northrend Ho!

My wife picked up our two copies that we had reserved at Gamestop, would have prefered getting at midnite last nite but oh well. Started installing around 9 cst and it is now 930, I am in the process of installing the patches and she is still working on getting the LK disk installed. Hope this gets done soon so we can head in.

Wrath Preorder.

Shazbot! I went to the Gamestop website and preordered the 2 copies of Wrath for my wife and myself thinking "Hey I will get it at midnite. Cool." Then I called em to make sure they are having a midnite opening and low and behold no such luck. So gonna have my wife head out during the day and pick up the copies and install them. Hopefully when I get home I can head into Northrend with Piqued and work on getting to 80 as fast as possible.

Moral of the story? Check with the store before you preorder. You may not have one around that will be open at midnite.

Side note about glyphs. You can only have one of each in your glyph page. I picked up an extra minor glyph of watershield to try and get an extra orb and couldn't put it on. Guess I will just have to wait and see what we get above 375.

Spell Power> Crit> Int> MP5

So been working with my Shaman quite a bit lately and have been working on the healing end of it and have found that Crit has been making things a little better for mana generation. Since I consume a globe of water shield every time I get a crit on Riptide, LHW or  HW. While I don't use LHW or HW much I do find myself using Riptide quite often, it is a wonderful HoT and makes CH easy to work with. I did get the minor glyph for extra globe of water, I think I might even invest in another just to have it available so that I am not casting it all the time.

Re-Rethinking Resto Talents

Thought I would throw up my thoughts of where the points for resto-shaman in rebuttal to Hoof n Healz. Personally I went with 0/10/51 to get the crits from Thundering Strikes and since I use Riptide and Chain Heal for most of my heals I enhance CH. I don't use LHW or HW but when I do I like to have Tidal Waves proccing. I am so waiting for the Glyph to improve CH, at least there is only a wk left for that.

But hey that is just my opinion. :)

A dirge to the weapon buffs!

Was doing some reading in my blog roll and came across this article from Wow Insider, and I must admit I was quite shocked over it. Why in the world would Blizzard go ahead with this idea when it has always been a core for me when customizing myself for raids. Some people like to go for the Superior Mana Oil for the mana regen while others go for Brilliant to get the extra heals and the regen, and then there are those that go for the Wizard Oil to get the extra heals or hits. Personally I was running the Brilliant on my druid just to keep up the mana regen tho with 2.4 I did fall back on Superior when it was available. And now? We either won't be able to use any new ones or people will be farming the mats to make the old ones still. Personally I hope they just don't improve them so that people will still need to visit some of the old world places to get the things they need for it. And it will also make it possible for people to sell items on the auction houses.

I could be wrong in this but it seems that they are taking a lot of the staples that Alchemists make and cutting down on what is needed for raids. No longer are we able to drink more than one potion during an encounter which means that people won't be buying as many health or mana potions. No longer will people be using oils or sharpening stones so Alchemists won't be able to sell their potions and Smiths won't be able to sell their stones. How are people going to make their money anymore? Are they going to have to charge more for the other items to keep generating the income that they would have lost otherwise? Seems that Blizzard will actually make things harder for Raiders if you think about it. Instead of picking up a Healing Potion Injector or a Mana Potion Injector which used the business of an Alchemist and a Engineer, and may not have cost as much per potion, people will spend the same amount on 5 potions that they will carry and have to try and balance out when to use them. And then think of the wipes that will ensue from choosing the wrong potion. Oops sorry for the wipe I clicked on Mana potion instead of Health potion and died.