Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

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.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

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.