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.

We can Haz Pengu?

Interesting. Was logging into WoW tnite and came across a post at the login in screen.

"in 29 days, on November 11, 2009, all accounts must be converted into a Battle.net account to login to World of Warcraft. Any existing account that upgrades to the Battle.net platform, including ones that were upgraded in the past, will receive a brand new in-game penguin pet starting later this week."

Will have to wait until later to get a screenshot of the pet to show off, but to think we will be getting a penguin and a mini Onyxia? Wow they are free with the vanity pets. Does this mean they are catering to the female gamers out there? Just Kidding!! /ducks flying debris thrown by lady gamers.

10 man TOC

Very interesting fight.

1st one is the creature fight where u have to take on is Gormok, pretty simple heal in that you just have to watch for the bars going down. We had 2 shamans in the group along with a priest healer, I set up the other shaman and priest as mt/ot heals and had myself on raid, we through down stoneskin, fire resist, flametongue, mana stream, healing stream, wrath of air and wind fury totems to help buff up as much as we could. As a healer watch for the impales, keep the tanks and raid up and watch for Snobolds, if you get a snobold call for a dps to kill em as fast as possible as they have a nasty habit of interrupting.

2nd was the 2 worms, I hated this fight because I could never quite get it figured out. Make sure you are to the back of the worms as the stationary one will spray and aoe in front of it. Have a healing stream totem close to the tanks to help keep them topped off.

3rd Icehowl. Pretty simple fight, only thing I found was when he pointed at you, you want to run perpendicular to him so that he won't hit you with his charge. After he hits the wall with his charge dps was able to burn him down pretty fast.

Lord Jaraxxus
This was a pretty simple fight, only things to watch for were the 2 types of fire that he kicks out on the raid. I definitely had a fire resist totem up for this to help out a little. We also set up a couple of safe zones for people to run to if they had the legion flame so that they could run around. Reminded me a lot of naxx when you take on Glob. The rest is just a typical keep the healing meters up.

Champions
This was an interesting fight in that I don't do much for pvp, at all. Since in our group the other shaman and myself were the only cc's available we took on hexing the 2ndary healer while the group burnt down the first one. Make sure to watch your surroundings and help out however you can. Once the group has both healers down I usually picked up a caster to hex as I was able to try and minimize damage to the group. Healing stream totem is very helpful here.

Twin Valkyrs
Royal pain in the butt. With this fight you need something like DBM to help tell you which color to change to. We ran with 1/2 the group in white and half in black. In one of the phases there are balls that come out and you want to make sure keep the opposite color from your tank from hitting them, thus we usually had the healer in a dif color to the tank. Let the dps pick up like colors as this will improve the damage that they do. Only other thing to mention for healers is the vortex. When this comes up you want to pick the same color as is being cast, so if it is a black vortex then change your aura to black. This will minimize the damage done to you by the vortex.

Anub'rekan(SP)
This is the last fight you will face, when it starts out good old Arthas comes walking out and tells you about the history of the place and then drops the floor out from under you and you drop into a pool of water. Make sure all DK's have their water walking aura off as this will kill the people affected by it. (stupid DK's) you then get ready for the boss. Much like in AN he has the same abilities. deals dmg, burrows under ground, throws up spikes. In this fight the dps has to kill the bugs that come out to spread out the permafrost, also there are extra adds that come out that the dps will want to concentrate on. The thing to remember is that when the boss goes underground he throws out spikes that follow one or 2 of the raid members. The only way to keep yourself from getting killed by it is to make sure the Permafrost is between you and the spikes. They are frozen in place and you are safe. The next phase you have to do some dancing around with your heals, you want to keep the tank topped off as much as possible and yet you want to keep most of the raid at 50% so that the amount he is healed by is minimized. I can't honestly say when the phase starts as this was my first time in there and I just went off what the RL told me over vent but needless to say it took a lot of firing of CH and LHW.

Once you have him done you are done with 10 man TOC.

Hope this helps :)

Oh and I picked up this from the raid. Gloves of the Azure Prophet.

Dual Spec:

Wow, has there ever been a lot of posts, blogs and articles on this particular subject. And while I don't consider myself an expert on the field I have done my fair share of respecs for the guild and for leveling. I will be honest the idea of it is great but I think Bliz will drop the ball on the execution. I personally will love being able to hop from Resto to Ele and back again as needed, however I don't think that we should be able to do it in an instance or that it should be easy to do. I think we should be able pay our 1k g and be able to switch specs as we need to and have our bars and glyphs go with it, but have it that we have to still do it at our trainers not just anywhere. While I would love as an inscriptionist for there to be a reagent I honestly think that would get away from the thing that Bliz has been trying to do with LK in that no trade is absolutely necessary.

Current build and this is what I plan on having for Elemental when the time comes, givin that they won't change the trees too much.

Reason I think Bliz will drop the ball is that they will have to design the instances planning on people be able to switch on the fly, which will make things more difficult for the groups who don't have enough of the hybrid classes in the group with them. We will probably see places that need 5 healers or 4 tanks and then switch to needing 1 tank and 2 healers but need the rest to be dps. It will go from essentially a balanced game to something so inbalanced that it will be laughable.

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.

Alive?

Yup still here. Just haven't had a lot of time to myself lately. Been workin hard on lvling my shammy and have him at 61 almost 62. By the end of the week we will be out of Hellfire and into Zangarmarsh.

Fishing is at 336 now and have been working in Zangarmarsh just outside of the Cenarian Circle area. Fishing is pretty good and I have sold my Blackened Sporefish on the AH for a decent amount. Keep a stack on me all the time to use while lvling. I have been getting a lot of spell dmg mail lately and am thinking of respeccing to Elemental to try it out. Might even go resto early but have to wait and see.

Did some reading and it seems that Blizz is talking about 3.0 coming out around the 14th. This coincides with what happened with BC in that they released the bridge about 30 days before BC hit the stands and the 14th is 30 days before Wrath hits the stores. I can actually picture myself standing outside of either Walmart or Gamestop to get my 2 copies of  Wrath so I can install it that night. One for myself and one for my wife.

Personal note only have about 2 months left til we have a bouncing baby on our hands again. Wife is getting anxious to be done with it but that is about normal I guess. She felt the same way when we had our first one.

Release!

Hmm a few things to say for today. Blizzard released the date that Wrath is coming out which I am sure all of you know. November 13th 2008 will be a day that many a business will be shut down due to people taking the day off so that they can install LK and start leveling to 80. Hmm I wonder how long it will take? I remember seeing a Draenei Shaman at lvl 70 in IF by the end of the 2nd week after BC came out so can't imagine it will take all that long. And the DK's? Well they will probably have Northrend flooded with them before Sunday I imagine.

Onto a slightly personal note. The guild has been in a bit of a flux of late. Seems that I had 3 officers pull their mains out of the guild so that they could see End game content before November. This is really frustrating for me because I thought I could count on these guys. I thought they would be there to help the guild no matter what. I guess I thought they had the same feelings for the game as I did in that it isn't the content that you see it is who you see it with. For me personally it is all about having fun with my friends whether that is running Deadmines to help out a lowbie or getting into Kara to see if we can take down Netherspite( which I did for the first time last nite on my druid.) Sure I wouldn't mind seeing ZA and getting into SSC or TK but to be honest if I am not running with my friends and the people I have spent the last 2 yrs with it just isn't worth it.

The other frustrating part about this is they were officers and they want to come back when Wrath comes out. I have no problem with this but how do I treat them? Do reinstate them to the level they were before they left? Do I have them start from one of the low lvls and have them earn their way back up? Also a few of the other officers have alts that they have in the progression guilds as well. Do I treat these guys any differently? Always hard questions when you are the GM of a casual guild and have people who want more.

I guess I will just have to try and stay true to the basic rules that we have in the guild and since these people are spending more time in the other guilds they will then have to get bumped down to a lower rank. While I am sure I can call on them when the time comes for Wrath it will be a little harder to accept them in the leading roll since I will always wonder if they will do the exact same thing when they have reached 80 and want to get to see some of the content that we aren't capable of doing.

Also I hit 58 on my shaman along with my wife on her pally. We are going to stay in Vanilla until we hit 60 then move on to Outlands and work on quests there.

Downranking=obsolete?

From reading through my various sources(elitistjerks.com, plusheal.com, toomanyanas.com) I have been noticing that quite a few Shamans will down rank their healing to conserve on mana for the fight. Seems that quite a few people found out that the HPS for Healing Wave rank 4 and Healing Wave rank 5 in reference to amount of mana used for it. Also quite a few people would spam rank 1 to get Healing Way to proc on the target since mana cost was low and and cast time was fast. But it seems that Blizzard has made that obsolete. I was reading throught Resto4life and came across this post about how they are making things a % instead of a base mana amount. This really doesn't pertain to my druid as I am always hitting with the highest rank heal that I can since LB only has rank 1 and the others I use to help out when things go south. But for the shaman it does kind of frustrate a person in knowing that the things people have studied for and worked around are now going out the window. In a sense it is like saying here take all your methods of healing and throw them out the window and start from scratch with it. I was thinking that maybe people would maybe go for the downrank for a faster heal but if you look at Lesser Healing Wave there is less mana used in this and only a 1.5 sec cast while Healing Wave Rank 1 still has the 32% mana used and the 1.5 sec cast time. Just looking at it the lesser is the way to go even if it is rank 9

Well just something to think about. :).

Nothing New under the Sun.

Went into Kara on my Tankadin tnite and finished past Curator, of course nothing great dropped but hey got some badges. Played for about 30 min on my Shaman and got Grid+Clique setup for heals while in party. Also while going thru my forum roll I came across this macro and I plan on trying it out instead of clique.

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover, help][help][target=targettarget, help][target=player] Spellname

Will get back to you as soon as I have tried it. Could be tomoro but have to wait and see if we find the 2 tanks and the healer we need for ZA.

Side note that I had to boo on because of how my Shaman will be healing. According to Wow Insider one of the things Bliz is toying with is call Potion Sickness. Seems this won't allow you to take a 2nd pot after you ahve takin your first in combat. So no chain chugging.

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/29/azeroths-new-plague-potion-sickness/

Another Prelude courtesy of BananaShoulders

Wetlands to Northrend by Siha of Proudmoore from Siha of Proudmoore on Vimeo.

SW gets a harbor?

Came across this in my blogroll and love the views.
Stormwind to Northrend by Siha of Proudmoore from Siha of Proudmoore on Vimeo.