Awesome Video

Thanks to Kae from Dreambound for this video. Definitely worth the time to watch.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/eRsGy ... 2=0x6b8ab6

Great night

Had a blast tonite in ICC, got through the first 4 bosses without too much trouble. Had a new guy come in who hadn't run q lot of raids before so he was pretty excited about going on this one. Had the bow drop off Lady Deathwhisper, splinter of ice dropped for my sister the disc priest, dagger dropped on loot ship and I had the deathforge leggings drop on Saurfang. While I was getting gems and let armor for leggings someone put saranite sword breakers in trade chat so picked those up as well. Have to get a red gem to get my meta gem bonus and get the wide to put greater stm on my braces.

I have set myself up with 2 tanking specs one blood and one frost. Kept the frost since it is one I knew and have familiarize myself with the blood one. Got it from pwnwear.com, very nice site with lots of dk resources especially for tanks, little warning there is some swearing there so wouldn't recommend it to a younger audience. I remember when I went into ICC last week as blood to try it out, wasn't very pretty, felt I as just masking keys and didn't have a plan. Played some heroics this week as blood to get used to it. Totally different story this week, went on and dis the whole first 4 bosses as blood. It isn't quite as smooth to run and you have a lot less air tank available but not bad overall. Will post my blood spec later.

Well time to /logout, u have a good weekend and hope to see you next week.

A good night.

Went into Ulduar for the weekly which was Flame Leviathin(sp). Went pretty smoothly even tho we could only get 8 people for it. Then went into Wintergrasp and held off the Horde to declare a victory there. Will have to setup a bar for pvp as I wasn't having much luck with my Dps bar for blood.

I am really enjoying tanking with my DK and look forward to continuing on with him. Will I make him my main? Doubt it as I have sunk so much work into Airdrigh that I am not willing to give him up yet. I do enjoy the easy playing of not trying for achievements, tho I would like to get glory of a hero at some time. I think it is the only chance I have at a fast proto Drake.

Guild Achievements

Interesting read posted by the wow.com who skimmed thru the WoW forums check it out if your curious about that sorta thing. :)

http://www.wow.com/2010/08/18/cataclysm-beta-guild-advancement-qanda/

The Quiet Before the Storm

I have noticed a definite lull in the game lately. Ruby Sanctum came out and haven't seen a lot of people loading that one up, not like Sunwell was for BC. I almost think people are just getting tired and have been waiting with bated breath for what is to come in Cata. Has Blizz ramped it up too much? I wonder.

I will admit I am looking forward to the changes that are coming and I have enjoyed reading some of the different posts that beta testers have put up but I think they may have flooded the market too soon. Maybe they are worried about people leaving especially with Star Wars: The Old Republic hitting stands some time next year. Maybe they just couldn't keep it in any longer and like giddy little fan bois they wanted to spread the word about their work.

On a toon note, I have been working on Crannoc a lot more lately. I thought I could go back to Airdrigh but there just isn't much of a call for healers as there are for tanks. Could be just me but it seems that every time I queue up for a random as a tank I get in right away. As a healer? Well in no way is the wait time as bad as a DPS but it is still quite long. Not exactly sure why that is but can only assume that people are exploring healing more with their alts than tanks, granted it is much easier to gear up a healer and to go into an instance and heal than it is to tank said instance. I am enjoying tanking and my sister and bro-in-law are getting back into the game so that is helping quite a bit too.

Ah well time to head back into it. Hope to talk to you all again real soon. :)

New Site

Seems Battle.net has been revamped a little, not sure if everyone has it, or if it just happened to me lately or what but must admit I am a little lost without. Ah the joys of change. I keep checking in to see if I have a beta invite yet and so far...no luck. I have been keeping up with some of the changes that are posted on the wow.com site as well as following the pwnwear.com blog whose author is in the beta. FYI pwnwear.com deals with dk tanking which if you don't know has been of interest to me since I leveled Crannoc and have been playing him lately. Just don't see as much call for healers as there are for tanks so figured I would help fill a role that way.

I am a little flighty when it comes to my toons and do have a habit of switching from one to another. I enjoy playing Airdrigh my shaman but like I said not much call for them since it seems that everyone is leveling a healer alt, but not that many want to tank. Did a full clear of ToC last nite that went very smoothly, fastest I have ever gone through there in my whole WoW carreer. Healers and DPS were top on and we only had one wipe that was on the first set of bosses, the pvp part even went smoothly which was unusual. Picked up a tanking ring out of there that was a definite upgrade. Hope to get into ICC with him some time and see how I do against the first 4 bosses minimum.

Side note. Been checking out Tankspot.com, and watching The Weekly Marmot. Pretty informative webcast though a little biased in that one plays a tankadin and the other plays a priest for the most part. They do have some interesting perspectives especially since they are trying out the Beta. Hop over there if you find the time and check it out.

New Talents on MMO-Champion

New talent trees were released tonite in the beta and they posted them up on www.mmo-champion.com at www.wowtal.com. I took a look at them and played around, they still have the points setup for 1 per level so it takes a little planning, just remember you need 31 in the tree you are specializing in and then you get the other 10 whereever you want to put them.

Here is what I am thinking. http://www.wowtal.com/#k=fvvFmh9X.9mn.shaman

New Changes!

Amazing how the game can be in such a flux during beta, and how people can get so perturbed by that fact. I must admit I am very curious how the new talents will shape out, and from the looks of it those in beta are getting a chance to look at it tnite. Hopefully we will have something to play around with by morning. :)

Cata Resto Spec

Was playing around on the wowhead.com talent calculator and have changed the spec that I plan on. This of course is up in the air due to it only just starting beta but thought I would put it out there.

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#hVZVIZxceuIcoVzRfuAu

Cata NDA Lifted

As I am sure most if not all of you know the NDA has been lifted and Cataclysm has moved into the Closed beta. How does this affect me? Not much, I will keep playing my Shaman and DK, though I am curious to see the changes to DK tanking since it is supposed to be down the Blood Tree. I will say that I applied for my guild for the 10 player contest they had going on earlier, highly doubt we will get invited but one can always hope.

Side note I got Crannoc into ToCr on Monday for the weekly Raid and did ok at tanking it. Was with a warrior who had prot as his 2ndary. Died on the worms when they had gotten loose and I pulled them both on me til the warrior could pick them up. The raid then burnt the worms down and the next boss. Lord Jarraxus was interesting as I was the OT and picked up the maidens and the infernals as best I could. Got a nice pair of bracers out of there, running a fair amount of randoms on him yet.

The Beginning and the End. Hmm Sounds Dramatic

Had an interesting night last night. Got home from work around 1035, 1040 at night, gave the wife a kiss we chatted and then grabbed a couple of glasses with some mature drinks in them and headed downstairs to the office to load up the game. Loaded up Ventrillo and first thing I saw were that our friends were logged in along with another guildie who has been missing due to playing something else (thbbbtp.) Said hello and loaded up my lvl 72 warlock to help my friends. I get in and ask them so what do you want to do? They were a little indecisive so I asked do you want to run the instance for Howling Fjord which is where they are leveling. "Sure!" I get so we all get ready, I ask my wife to load up someone to fill out the role we needed here, she brings her lock as well.

We queue up using the LFD going for UK in particular and zone into the instance. Buffs, cookies and soulstone done and time to start. Our group comprised of 2 level 68 druids, healer and tank, a 68 unholy dk, a 72 affliction lock and a 73 destro lock, interesting group. First pull, no problem we get the 2 guys down. Second pull we wipe due to some inexperience with tanking and healing. Come back in, take them down and move smoothly onto the forge area. We get the first pull off pretty well, 2nd pull healer wasn't ready when the tank went in and we ended up wiping after I manage pull aggro, stupid DoTs. Needless to say this is so much different than running the heroics that I have been doing on my shaman which is basically a face roll. We make it up to the first boss after working on the healing rotation for the druid and some cooldowns for the tank. We try to take the boss down but can't quite coordinate the group to make it happen, also I think we need to work on leveling up the 68s to 70 and see if we can find them some good gear to use as well. Since we were power leveling them through Vanilla and BC content I think they missed out on some of the good gear for their level. Once they hit 70 I am planning on running them through Kara with my DK and see what drops in there.

That was the beginning.

We then get invited into a pug for ICC, loaded up my shaman for healing and the wife loaded up her shadow priest, took a little bit to finally get the party together but worked it out in the end. Raid was 2 shaman, resto and ele, 2 hunters, 2 pallies, holy and prot, 2 dks, frost and blood, a mage and a shadow priest. Not too bad, mostly casters but that is what I am used to. We moved in and things went smooth, only 2 healers, Holy pally was keeping the tanks up while I took care of the raid and back up healed the tanks. Made it through 2nd boss, Lady Deathwhisper I believe and pally tank d/c'd, he loaded back up into our vent and tried logging into wow and wouldn't let him at the game servers. I remembered running into this before so told him to do a ipconfig /release, /renew that worked and we were off again, it did take us about 15 min to get it all figured out and to get him back into the game. Got through the ship part and hit Saurfang, he was like a brick wall, we just couldn't quite get him down, wipe 1, wipe 2, wipe 3, I had been up since 8 the previous morning and 3am was coming on fast, wipe 4, "Ok guys I am going to have to call it a night.", "No please just one more time we can get him.", "Ok one more and that is it.", we take him down. Everything just seemed to pull together right and made it through pretty well.

Thus ends my story of the Beginning (Utgarde Keep) and the End (ICC). Take it for how you will. Laters all and keep your stick on the ice.

Cataclysm Talent Preview

Blizzard released the talent trees for a few classes yesterday and I did some playing around with the shaman one on cata.wowhead.com/talent this morning. Now I know that it is still in beta and they will probably change it before the actual release but thought I would put out where I would put my talents.

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#hxZVI0oZv0ezIeoVzRfuio:qAicmM

Tell me what you think.

Moving to a new House

Moved to our new house today. Will be closing on it in a few days but needed to get out of our old one so we could get it cleaned up and ready for the new owners. Interesting thing moving, especially when you move into a house that isn't quite ready for you. Now we have to work on getting the basement finished off so that we can have our office/computer room down there along with the family room and such. Looks like WoW is going to be put on hold for at least a week if not 2, especially since we have to unpack boxes and build furniture back up.

Hope you all have a good weekend and a happy Easter next week.

Movin on Up! To the Middle Side?

Finished Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra along with the various instances there. Started in Dragonblight and did the An'Kahet instances there too through randoms or using the LFG interface. I am really liking this thing as it makes it so much easier to get into instances. You don't have to wait at the stone to get the people you need for it, and there is such a big pool to choose from. Glad Blizzard came up with it.

Anywho! Made a slight change to my rotation due to the amount of burst damage that is out there. Seems people don't like to wait for the tank to get aggro, they are just interested in topping the damage meters (wish they had never invented those sometimes.) I now go into a fight using icy touch>pestilence>Howling Blast>blood boil with Frost Strikes in between. I find this gets the initial aggro that I need to hold. While it is still possible for the dps to pull off of me they don't do it quite as easily. If it is a single target then I go in with Icy Touch>Plague Stike>Howling Blast> Blood Boil>Blood Boil.

A Slight Change

Due to some RL issues and being burnt out with healing I have decided to turn to the other end of the spectrum. I built myself a Death Knight and am working on leveling him up to be a tank. So on to the juiciness that is being stabbed over and over again.

Name: Crannoc
Spec: Blood/Frost
Purpose: Tank

There isn't a lot of guides out there for tanking with a D/K along with blogs. Hope to come across a few to help me out otherwise it will be trial by fire. I have noticed in the few instances I have run that it is hard to hold aggro against a lot of the people using randoms. Seems everyone is either used to playing with over geared people or with pally tanks. I had an especially difficult time trying to hold aggro against a ret pally who insisted on running with his righteous fury on. Needless to say I left that group pretty quickly when they weren't interested in actually letting me do the role I had asked for when loading. Maybe it was petty of me, maybe not but I do feel the need to have experience and I won't get it by being the dps instead of the tank.

Here is the build I am planning on when I hit 80 along with the glyphs. Icy Reach may not be necessary but I figure all the help I can get is a good thing. Current rotation is go in with Icy Touch followed by Pestilence to spread Frost Fever and then Howling Blast, follow this with Blood Boil until your blood runes are gone. Get a plague strike in along with another icy touch and keep them rolling along with Frost strike. Not the simple fighting that you get when doing dps as blood, keeps you on your toes for sure.

Will post the macros I use next time I get in.

Tree of Life: Flash mobs

Tree of Life: Flash mobs

awesome videos. Enjoy em every time I see em.

The King is Dead. Long live the King.

Seems that we are losing quite a few bloggers out there lately. Wow.com's shammy blogger is moving onto greener pastures in the form of a different type and centering on his warrior. Totemhealz has just said that he is phasing out, and I have seen many others slipping by the wayside.

Thankfully we have had a few new people step and take the reins. I hope things work out great for them and am looking forward to reading their posts.

Personally I hope to get on here more often as I have been letting it slip lately. I have been healing with my shaman a lot lately though quite a bit of it has been randoms. I was farming mats for my Chopper which I finally got a cpl weeks ago. Picked up my t9 chest and legs, doubt I will replace anything else as they seem better.

Picked up the riptide totem with my emblems of frost along with the LHW one with my honor that I had from the few Wintergrasps that I did. Tried out both in 5 mans and prefer the Riptide one though I find myself having problems maintaining my 3 energizes that you can stack.

List of new blogs that I came across:

http://lifeingroup5.com/
http://blueberrytotem.wordpress.com/

Ice Crown 5 Man walk Through..Sort of.

I know this is really late but thought I would put it up none the less.



Tuesday night after much waiting and cursing I finally managed to get into game. Just couldn't seem to get the game to load up and thought it was something on my end but after eating supper and spending some time with the kids I managed to get in and try it out. 


First thing I did was the new LFG system and we whipped through AN pretty quick, I was heals even though I had signed up as dps as well. Finding a group went pretty quickly I didn't even get a chance to try and find the entrance to the Ice Crown 5 man instances. I love the new sharding system that is available, thankfully we had someone who could d/e and be able to take advantage of it, not sure how we are going to work this out for guild raids and all. Got my 2 emblems of frost and ported back to Dalaran.. Picked up the alliance quest outside the bank and then flew to ICC and found the entrance to the instances, it is on the west side of ICC on the second level.


After getting a party together we proceeded into Forge of Souls, and went again....and again...and oh wait that one worked. As I am sure many of you know the instance servers were spotty at best. We loaded in with a tankadin, dps dk, shadow priest, ele shaman and resto shaman. Instance was on normal 5 man and the pulls began. All in all it was pretty easy except the tank had to learn to wade into the mobs instead of just pulling them in due to their being ranged dps for the most part. 


We got to the first boss and started dpsing. Right from the get go I had the ele shaman running with tremor, cleansing, wrath, and wrath of air. I was running stoneskin, flametongue, windfury and mana stream, yes I know flametongue was redundant but hey I like to have control of my totems and a searing totem just makes me nervous. This boss everyone get in close because he has a spell that damages people if they are outside of 10 yds of boss. He will pick one person from the group and fear them, hence the tremor totem, keep heals ticking on them as they are going to get damaged as they try to get back to the middle. Burn him down and on to the next trash and last boss. 


This boss is like one from Ulduar that I never took on, or so I have heard. There are 3 faces to the boss, one does huge damage if it is pointed at a person, another is a mirror and sends the damage back as it is hit, the last one brings up spectres that you can't damage but they sure deal it out for a period of time. Once you have that boss burned down talk to Jaina and take portal to next instance....and again...and...oh hey only 2 tries.


Pit of Saron.


3 bosses in here. first one is far to the right from where u load up. You need to release 15 slaves for the quest so start working your way over there killing trash and freeing them. The boss is up on a landing that you take some steps to. He reminds me of the tauren guy in Dead mines that you take on in that he stuns you for a bit while he complains that his weapon isn't good enough as he switches it out for a different one. 2 differences he has a freezing debuff that does some damage, he throws rocks at the party that dps seem to be able to cast through but healers can't heal through it. Last debuff he casts just before he dies is deep freeze. If the party can't kill him before this goes off then it will do 4k dmg to whoever has it. One thing of note, make sure to hand in quest because receiver dies at end of instance and you won't be able to hand it in after that. 


Next boss you follow the wall up towards a ramp, skip past the ramp and you get some mobs that drag boxes behind them, kill the mobs keeping a cleansing totem out and stay out of the green stuff. Then its time for the boss, much like the trash around him he casts green goo that you need to stay out of. He will also drop aggro table and center on one person that is called out, there you just kite him around. The last thing to watch for is the little gnome tells him to stop and he casts out arcane mines that follow the party around. everyone has to keep moving around while trying to dps and heal. Kill him off and on to the last bost Tyrannus.  


Before you hit Tyrannus there is a bit of a gauntlet through a cave, to get to it you go up the ramp you skipped over. In the cave watch for falling ice, if you are doing it on Heroic and manage to get up the cave without anyone taking damage from the ice you get an achievement, Huzzah! 


Tyrannus is an interesting fight. 2 things to watch for, his brand and the ice damage that his dragon does. With his  brand don't do any healing and don't let the dps do any damage while they have it on them. thankfully it only targets one person at a time and ES doesn't seem to do anything against the brand. Ice damage from the dragon consists of zones that he shoots out that will slow down walking and casting as well as a spell that encases you in ice and splashes to anyone within 12 yds of you. Stay spread out. This fight I usually pop my fire elemental along with heroism at the beginning to help get the burst damage on it. There used to be a bug that you could dps him before he dropped down off his drake but they have fixed it so that his hp resets.


Halls of Reflection


This instance is basically 2 sets of gauntlets and will test the gear and capabilities of your tank and healer along with the gear of your dps. First gauntlet consists of 5 groups of 4-5 mobs running at your group that you have to burn down as quickly as possible and still have mana for the next one. There are 2 alcoves along the side and I personally like to use the left one from where you enter the instance. We usually have the dps and healer stack up around the corner for Line of sight and have the tank stand out in the open but within sight of the healer. When the mobs come in make sure to burn the priest first, personally I like the hunter going down next because I despise his frost trap that he casts on various party members. There are warriors and rogues along with the group that can get rather frustrating but it is possible to burn them all down. I usually run stoneskin, flametongue, wrath of air and manaspring since you can go through a lot of mana in this fight. Once the mobs are done then it is time for the first boss. 


With this one you want to make sure you have a tremor totem and healing stream down. He does a fear that does damage and each time he fears it hurts the party more. So keep the group up.


Another set of waves and the last boss in this area. This one casts out a curse zone that if people stay in will kill them fast. Make sure the dps moves out and get your cleanse on them to wipe the curse off.


Next you have a couple of single trash though the first one brings 5 mirror images of your group that you have to burn down as well as the single mob. second one just kill and you meet up with Arthas and Jaina duking it out. When you get there Jaina is almost dead and she casts an iceblock on Arthas, you start the event and start running down a path that leads out of Icecrown. Arthas will bring up 4 walls that you need to protect Jaina while she tries to burn through them. Basically it is another gauntlet with 4 groups that get steadily harder, keep your stoneskin, flametongue, wrath of air and mana spring until the last wave. I usually wait until there are a number of mobs in the last wave and pop my flame elemental again along with army of the dead if you have a dk. After they are up I pop Heroism and burn through them as fast as possible.


Hopefully you staid ahead of Arthas through all of this and run out onto a platform. At this point a ship comes up and blows the wall behind you sealing the cave you were in along with Arthas behind it. Climb on the ship open the chest get your loot.


One thing to note on the 4 waves don't get too far ahead on the first wave because I have actually had the wall form behind me and got cut off from the group once and 2nd time I was inside the wall and accidentally walked off the cliff to my death.