Progress!

Or: The Blog That Continues to be Less About Shamans and More About Level 60 Content.

So it turns out that farming Dukes isn’t as tough as I has feared. I was lucky enough to get the Duke of Cynders on my third attempt. After mentioning in guild chat that I needed to go back to UBRS to finish the quest, I managed to convince a couple guildies to come along (luckily, Thireas is an enchanter and generally willing to run old content–except Scholomance, but I guess everyone has their limits.) I only needed to kill Pyroguard Emberseer, but we figured it was worth clearing the whole instance since we were already there.

After that, I just had to run down to BRD and kill Lord Incendius, then run back up to the entrance of Blackrock Spire to pick up the next stage of the quest, which turned out to be killing Kormok in Scholo (the dungeon set 2 chain branches into one of four possibilities at this point, so I wasn’t sure what I’d end up with). Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep up with Kormok’s incessant add spawning on my own, so I had to call it a night. The next day I got help from a mage (thanks Dorinal!), and killed him but good. After a couple quick side trips to Dustwallow Marsh and Silithus (and singing the praises of Astral Recall’s 15 minute cooldown the entire time) it was time to go back into LBRS to summon and kill Mor Grayhoof.

After dealing with Kormok, Mor was a giant pushover. The fight consisted of earthshocking his heals and slowing beating him to death with a hammer. With that done, all I have left is to gather bracers from the orcs in BRS, then summon and kill Lord Valthalak. Since the orcs in the upper half have a higher drop rate, and you can take advantage of the fact that some of them will constantly summon more if left on their own, my current plan is to gather bracers on my next UBRS run, then run back out and turn in the quest so I can kill Valthalak in the same run.

In the hopes of only having to run UBRS one more time, I also went into Blackrock Depths and busted Reginald Windsor out, then revealed Katrina Prestor’s true form. So I can also get my Onyxia attunement finished. I’m pretty sure my guild will kill Ony at least once when the achievement system goes live, so it’s probably a good idea to take care of that while I’m running UBRS on a fairly regular basis.

I’ve also cleared Scholo a couple times, but still haven’t gotten my helm from there. I did pick up ten Corruptor’s Scourgestones on my last run, which put me past the revered marker with the Argent Dawn. I’m contemplating grinding up to exalted with them, since a run of Scholo is worth around 2000 rep for two hours’ work. I guess it’ll depend on how many runs it takes to get my helmet.

Coathangers!

Or:

A few days ago, I finally finished the 45-minute baron run portion of the tier .5 chain. As luck would have it, my kilt also dropped that run, leaving me with only the helm and chest level of my tier 0 set. So for the last couple days, I’ve been working on advancing the chain as far as I could solo. I spent several hours killing the ogres outside Dire Maul for their beads (and sent a guildie enough runecloth to buy an elekk). I then soloed Scholo for dark runes, and hoped that my helm would drop (no luck there, but let me just say that Gandling is a huge pain to solo–as he will pretty much chain teleport you the entire fight.)

With these items acquired, I set out for the Ring of Law in Blackrock Depths to challenge a group of five gladiators to mortal [k]ombat. I ended up dieing on the first attempt, as I didn’t know what my kill order should be. On the second attempt, I dropped an earth elemental at the very beginning (the mobs are immune to taunt, but the big guy still kept a couple of ‘em occupied by punching them a lot), then burned down the engineer, rogue, and warrior, in that order.  The engineer does the most damage, while the rogue has a short stun with a longer silence effect, and the warrior mortal strikes. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with a healer, so they went down fairly quickly, even for a resto shaman. After that, I was free to pick off the hunter and mage. This was one of the most challenging five-person encounters at 60–and the inspiration for the Delrissa encounter in MrT–it’s not an easy thing to solo. I ended up using a healing pot and two charged crystal foci, because I spent so much time silenced and/or mortal struck.

Running through these quests has taut me two things. First, the items that were the easiest to acquire when everyone was 60 are now the biggest hassle. Dark Runes, for example, used to be so common most people just sold them to vendors, but now they sell for around 20 gold each on my server. Second, resto Shamans are as close to unkillable as I’ve ever gotten. The combination of mail armor, a shield, earth shield, and a healing stream totem lets me pretty much ignore most incoming damage. While earth shield’s spell interruption protection means that, if things start to go badly I can heal myself reliably, no mater how many mobs I happen to be fighting.

Unfortunately, I’ve once again come to a point that requires a group. The next step in the chain requires not only a return to UBRS to kill Pyroguard Emberseer (how much you want to bet he drops my gloves, now that I don’t need ‘em?), but also a jaunt into Silithus, to kill the Duke of Cynders, who can only be summoned through random chance or the use a Signet of Beckoning (remember what I said about the stuff that was easy at 60 now being the hardest to get? Pretty much anything having to do with Silihus falls in that category).

Leveling with the Itch King’s Rash

Or: How to Get Your Hands on Elemental Gear Before Outland

Generally speaking, I’ve tried to keep from posting every time I’ve read something interesting about Rash of the Itch King. But I’ve been leveling a balance druid lately, and while looking into gear for him I realized something. Stats like spell and melee crit rating will be fused together in Wrath, and will apply to both spells and melee attacks. Which means that a lot of gear that was originally melee-centric will become pretty valuable for casters as well.

Of course, this realization means that I’m tempted to put my newly mounted, would-be moonkin on hold while dreaming of the amount of spell crit I could get with gloves and a mace.

A Night of Killing Orcs

Or: Upper Blackrock Spire and Shattered Halls

Last night I continued my attempts to farm UBRS. Luckily, there were no account problems this time, and I managed to get a steady stream of guildies to join up to get their Onyxia keys. I also managed to pick up my shoulders, giving me half the Elements set, lacking gloves, pants, helm, and chest.

After UBRS, we did some quick party juggling, and headed out to heroic Shattered Halls, in order to to work on the Champion of the Naaru chain. All in all, it was a very smooth run, with only one wipe on the fire gauntlet. I’m not sure how long we took, but we did kill the Shattered Hand Executioner before he killed any of the npcs, which means that we got an extra bage and several potions from him–meaning that the run was worth 5 badges, pretty respecable considering we were only there for a little over an hour.

I also picked up The Bladefist off Kargath. Not because it was an upgrade for me, but simply because it looks so impressive and I was the only fist-user in the group.

And for those keeping track, I helped kill two would-be warchiefs in one night. And yet Thrall hasn’t sent a sigle word of thanks.

I’m Calling Him Wiley

Or: I Ain’t Ded!

I’ll admit that I haven’t touched the blog lately. I’m currently stuck in the pre-expansion doldrums, and I haven’t done anything worth writing about lately. I did help out a partial Kara run tonight, though, and then convinced some guildies to come out to Tanaris and kill Don Carlos in heroic Old Hillsbrad, so we could take his hat.

For anyone interested in getting one of the coolest non-combat pets out there, I really recommend getting a group together at some point and taking him down. He patrols along the road in OHB, and is pretty easy. Even on heroic, we killed him with three people. He always drops his hat, and while killing him will save you to the instance, you can still run out a reset and kill him again (to a point, at least; after we’d killed him the fifth time his corpse stayed on the roadside, no matter how many times we tried resetting.) The fight itself is pretty simple, I recommend killing his pet first, then him. He’ll scatter shot whomever is second on his agro list, which means that dps should be careful with agro, lest the tank end up out of action for half the fight. He’ll also periodically net people, which immobilizes but has no other effects. All in all, it’s a pretty straight-forward fight, and possibly the easiest thing in heroic OHB.

Best Reason for Wiping Ever

Or: UBRS and Account Management

As I posted a while ago, I’m attempting to do the tier .5 quest chain. Unfortunately, most of the gear I need drops in UBRS, which requires three bodies to get into. Sunday night, I managed to convince Thireas and a leveling priest to come along, and we made pretty good time through the spire, clearing past Rend with no difficulties. Then, as we’re starting to clear the Beast’s room, the tank stops responding. and then goes offline. And doesn’t come back. I Anhk up, rez the priest, and wait. After a couple minutes, one of his housemates logs on and whispers me, apparently Thireas’ account lapsed mid-pull.

Given the rarity of someone’s account actually lapsing, and the odds of it happening mid-pull, I am officially declaring this the Best. Wipe. Ever.

Reflections on a Return to Raiding

Or: Next

Now that I’ve seen and killed Gruul and Maulgar, I’ve come to a couple conclusions. First, full-sized raiding is not the nightmare I remembered it to be. Before Sunday, the last time I had been in a raid larger then ten people was when I was running Naxx on my priest, before the Burning Crusade. I’m sure Nax was a very interesting raid, once you got the hang of it, but, unfortunately, my experience there consisted of wiping all night long and never downing a boss. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun in places like BWL and ZG, but when your last experience is a bad one, it tends to stick in your mind and sour your perceptions. Luckily, my foray into Gruul’s Lair was an enjoyable one, and although there was a lot of dieing (we took five tries on Maulgar and four on Gruul), everyone kept a positive attitude, and the experience made me feel kind of foolish for being so worried. The fact that my current guild is made up largely of people I know and am friends with outside of WoW helped, as did the fact that several of us were playing together in a computer lab, LAN party-style.

Secondly, I have no burning desire to go back. Certainly I would run the instance a couple more times if the opportunity presents itself, but I feel no real motivation to return on a weekly basis, in the hopes of collecting gear. I think this stems in part from the value of the gear obtained there, versus the effort required to get said gear. For a guild the size of mine, Kara and ZA are vastly easier to run, in terms of logistics. Even with getting virtually every 70 in the guild to come, we still had to pug 4 slots, whereas we never have a problem filling a Kara run, and very rarely have problems getting people together for ZA. Couple that with the fact that Kara gear is roughly on par with that available from Gruul’s, while ZA gear is actually better, and you can understand why I feel like it’s just not worth attempting it on a regular basis.

Additionally, I feel no real motivation to venture into Gruul’s Lair from an in-character point of view. I don’t claim to be a roleplayer (at least not in regards to playing WoW), but compare the number of quests you do as you key for Kara and advance through the instance, verses flying out and killing Gruul because he’s there. I understand that Blizzard doesn’t want to create a faction for every instance in the game, but consider the fact that neither Onyxia’s Lair or Blackwing Lair had a faction associated with them, and yet I always felt like I was going something heroic whenever I entered there. For the Alliance, Ony is first hinted at as a villain when you’re in your 20’s, with The Missing Diplomat chain. She’s also hiding in plain sight in Stormwind, which means that, as a player, you’ve already developed a dislike for her, even before you find out her secret.

Nefarion doesn’t have the prolonged exposure that Ony has, but I still encountered him well before I ever thought of setting foot into his lair. When you fight Rend in upper Blackrock Spire, Nef is there, taunting you. Run UBRS enough (and unless you got really lucky with drops, you were gonna be running it a lot), and you start to develop some motivation to find 39 friends and kill the smarmy bastard.

So where does that leave Gruul? He’s got plenty of sons, and there are quests to kill each of them, but even though I’ve completed each of them, the only mention of their father I’ve seen is from a prisoner in the Slave Pens.

So, good bye, Gruul. Killing you once was fun, but you’re a two-dimensional opponent, and I have no desire to go back.

Hell Yeah

Or: We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!

I’m gonna let the picture speak for itself on this one. I’m the stylish one in the nice hat on the left.

You can click for a better look, special thanks to Dr. Katarin for the pic.

Achievements

This is a short post, as I’m stuck at work. But I wanted to point out that the Tuskarrmageddon achievement is possibly the funniest thing ever, and I really hope it makes it to retail.

I’m Gonna Get What?

Or: WotLK Beta News

MMO Champion has some great info from the WotLK Beta, including the current class changes. Shamans get quite a few talent tweaks, and it looks like they’re attempting to spread out the awesome totems over more elements, as opposed to having 3 air totems that you wanna drop at once.

The things that really stood out are worth noting:

Elemental Focus (Restoration): Now also can proc off Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave, and can be used on all healing spells. I assume that it actually means Elemental. Elemental Focus gives you a 40% cost reduction on the next two offensive spells cast after getting a crit. This change would make spell crit important for resto shammies, much as it is for holy paladins now.

New ranks have been added of Water Shield, starting at level 20. (Level 20, 27, 34, 41, 48, 55, 62, 69) That is huge for anyone leveling a shammy. Even leveling enhancement, I spent way too much time drinking. Getting access to water shield at level 20 will make leveling as elemental or resto actually doable.

Flametongue Totem is now a flat spell damage totem. All ranks have been modified.

New Spell: Earthliving Weapon – Imbue the Shaman’s weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by x and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additionaly over 12 sec. Lasts 30 minutes. I’m assuming that the change to Flametongue Totem will mean that Flametongue Weapon will also grant extra spell damage. Which would give elemental and resto shamans a reason to use weapon enhancements while in a group.

New Talent: Cleanse Spirit (Restoration) – Cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease effect, and 1 curse effect. Roll cure disease and cure poison into one spell, and removes curses, too. If nothing else, druids and mages will be happy.

Shapeshifting will no longer cancel Water Walking. Woot to crossing water even faster!

I’m also pretty excited about the achievements system, and the implementation of the barber shop, but those are topics for a future entry.