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/