And We're Back

After letting my account expire last year, I took a year off playing. My long time guild had fallen apart. I'd joined a new one and had some fun for awhile, but they too had problems getting groups together consistently. I'd finished most of the achievements, including the difficult It's Over Nine Thousand!. It got boring.

So I quit. I played Old Republic for several months, but the extremely poorly organized launch with servers that were utterly barren killed that game. The raids were not too bad, and it's actually a very fun game to level in, but the endgame just wasn't there.

Then a few weeks ago, one of my friends in the real world completed heroic Deathwing and suddenly I missed raiding. So I resubscribed (sadly, I didn't use a scroll of resurrection), rerolled on her server (Aggramar). I considered transferring my characters, but to both server transfer and faction change was ridiculously expensive, so I started over.

I considered going the familiar route of Shadow/Disc priesting as I had with my old Tia, but the class has changed so much from what I loved about it, I decided against it. When I began, somewhere around the middle of Burning Crusade, classes only got one spec, and I went Shadow. At that time, Shadow wasn't much of a DPS spec. They were very weak, but their main value was as a support class. While they were weak themselves, they were able to help replenish the mana of others in their party. This meant mages and warlocks could DPS balls to the wall and not worry as much about running out of mana. This boost in their DPS ostensibly made up for the lack of DPS from Shadow Priests.

But eventually other classes got this ability, and Shadow Priests DPS gained, and mana became a non-issue in most cases. Shadow Priests became just another ranged caster class. So I figured there was no reason for me to continue. Instead, I created another paladin, although I did keep the trend of keeping "Tia" in the name as "Tiadin" as I'd done with my previous paladin.

I made it to lvl 65 before Mists of Pandaria was released yesterday, and it was time to try out the new panda monks. So far I've made it to lvl 19 and I've got a few first impressions.

Thus far, I've only had the chance to run one instance. I ended up in Deadmines, with a group of, surprise surprise, 3 other monks and a shaman healer. As a monk tank at lvl 15, I had a lot of troble maintaining aggro. At that lvl, monks only have one multi-taret damage attack to keep AOE threat and it has a long cooldown. However, the damage from the 3 DPS monks was so high, things were dying before they could do any damage worth mentioning, so threat wasn't really that important.

I'm not at lvl 19, and at 18, gained Breath of Fire which is a very strong ability that does a front facing AOE. It also combos with the previous AOE (which applies a debuff, slowing enemies) by lighting them on fire for a hefty DOT. With these, I have far less worry about maintaining aggro.

The other issue I've been noticing is that, at least with the gear the quest chains have been providing, monks on level have difficulty hitting their targets. I'm sure this will resolve itself with better gear and levels, it's extremely difficult as it's made killing quest mobs far more challenging than it should be otherwise.

I also feel painfully slow. With the Paladin, at lvl 15, I could pick up Pursuit of Justice which increases my base movement speed my 15% + 5% more for each charge of holy power. Since I tend to have quite a bit leftover after a battle, that's a 25% speed increase pretty much all the time. Sure, it's not a mount, but for those 5 levels between 15 and 20 when I was mountless, it was great. The same thing in caves or instances where I can't use mounts.

Monks, on the other hand, get a Roll ability which is a short speed boost. Much like Link's in the N64 Zelda games. But it has a very long, 25 second cooldown, although you can use it twice. At lvl 15, you can get the Momentum skill which gives you a stacking, 25% each time you use roll, which means you have a temporary speed boost. But the cooldown is pretty killer. Plus you have to engage it actively. Not a huge boost.

I'm pretty close to 20, so I'll get my mounts back. Which is fantastic. I really like that pets and mounts are shared across the entire account now. It's made moving to a new server much more bearable. Especially given that I'm such a huge pet collector.

Speaking of pets, I'm quite excited to try out the new pet battle system, but am not wasting any time doing so until I've maxed my monk. I'm excited to get back to raiding and hopefully I'll be having fun with my Kung-Fu panda.

It's Tuesday!

The guild finally downed Cho'gal last week. I capped a vid of it. Oddly enough, our feral dps druid was in the wrong gear (healing) and as a consequence, only pulled 3.7k, and we had no problem.

Meanwhile, last night, we spent 3 hours on Al'akir, hoping to get him down before patch today, but it wasn't destined to be. Our best attempt got him to 11%, but we only made it to phase 3, a few times, so people weren't able to get the handle on moving with the clouds. But it looks like nerfs are coming, so we'll get it down soon, we hope.

Because it's patch day! 4.2 is out and I'm downloading it as I type this. I've looked ahead to what daily reward vendor I want to unlock first and.... they all suck for me. Each vendor has one item I can use, but every one of them is itemized with crit/mastery, the two worst stats for a shadow priest currently.

The only thing that does look pretty nice is that there are some blacksmithing plans to create an ilvl 365 dagger I can definitely use. Guess I need to start making truegold again. I guess this might be some incentive to work on my warrior again, who's a miner. Might also be a good idea since it's the Midsummer festival and I can get the XP buff.

Aside from the gear, however, it looks like there's 2 new pets. The Crimson Lasher and the Hyjal Bear Cub. As a pet collector (up to 127 now!) those are definitely on my list. I think those may determine which vendor I go for first more than the gear. >.>

Sadly, it's looking like most of my new gear is going to have to come from Valor Points. There's a ring and wand I'd definitely like since I'm currently using 353 items in both of those slots, as well as a neck, and wrist.

Killin Critters

I don't have a tendency to join large guilds. The one I'm in currently has a full raid team, but that's pretty much it. As such, trying for the Critter Kill Squad achievement so I can get the Armadillo Pup is a ways off. Thus, I'm always looking for ways to murder some critters.

I found this post on another WoW blog that suggested using stormchops and standing in the Ironforge side of the tram where rats spawn indefinitely and then just letting them do all the work while I take a shower or something.

The idea sounded pretty good for 2 reasons:
1) I don't have to do much - I don't even have to be at my computer!
2) It's close - Hearth is in SW, so quick tram ride over.

Sounds like a sweet deal, so I figured I'd try it. So I dropped by the auction house to pick up a few.

None there.

Damn.

Oh well. I have the recipe. Just need some lightning eel.

Crap. None of them on the auction house either.

Oh well. I know how to fish.

Unfortunately, the drop rate sucks. Whatever. I fished 5.

Bought some clefthoof meat. Slapped it together and have five stormchops. Great. Let's kill some rats.

I used two of the five I made and watched some TV. In total, I netted about 600 dead critters, so all said and done, about 300 per 30 minutes. In other words 10 per minute once you're all set up. Factor in the time taken to fish up the damned eels (another 10 minutes) and you're probably getting 6-8 critters a minute.

Not too shabby.

Except that I can kill about 300 critters in 1-2 minutes up in the cave on the west edge of Eastern Plaguelands. They don't respawn instantly, but do in about 10 minutes. Do the math there and you're averaging closer to 20-30 critters per minute. Far better.

The real exception is whether you want to travel all the way to EPL. It's not too bad if you take the portal to Twilight Highlands, but still, rather out of the way.

However, I get a lot more satisfaction out of seeing the kill count shoot up so much. So I think I'll stick with the latter.

Finally...

Nearly 2 years ago, while living with my ex-girlfriend (rogue), I first got into real pet collecting.

One of the pets we wanted the most was the Phoenix Hatchling. We farmed the ever loving hell out of MgT back when we were both 80. She rogue tanked, I healed and did some dps. We got to the point where together, we could clear it in 10 minutes and were hitting the instance lock out for too many instances in an hour.

Months of doing this when we had nothing better to do and neither of us had one.

When Cata hit and removed the portals to get to Shattrath to get to Sunwell Plateau easily, I pretty much gave up on ever getting it but went back a few more times just to see if maybe I'd get lucky.

And tonight I finally did.



PS: If you want to see all my pet collection, check out my profile at warcraftpets.com.

1 Week + 1 Day

The upcoming release of Cata is getting me more and more antsy.

This past week in raid, we finally downed heroic Putricide and Sindragosa. We only took three attempts on Putricide before nailing it pretty flawlessly. I think it helped we had two friends from other guilds that were exceptionally geared and experienced helping out and the lack of one of our usual members who doesn't watch where he's standing quite often which threw our debuff all over.

Sindra took far longer. We spent nearly three hours wiping on her quite often due to trying out small variations on tactics and some people getting confused on what we'd changed due to negligence. But we finally got it, jumped onto Lich King, did our [Been Waiting a Long Time for This] and are now only left with just [Full House] and [All You Can Eat] to do this weekend before Cata is released, earning us our pretty Frostbrood Vanquisher.

Aside from that, I've been working on a few other minor projects to pass the time. I've been working on grinding out the Gilneas rep through some heroics with my pocket healer and real life friend Midoria. In the meantime, she's been using the Justice Points to work on a Boomkin set so she's not entirely stuck healing come Cata.

Also on the rep table, I finally finished off my Honor Hold rep earning my 30th exalted rep. I've been pushing my guildmates to run some more old world raids with me and joining pugs for them more regularly, so I'm fairly close on a few of those, and did get my Hero of the Zandalar Tribe before it was made into a Feat as well as winning a ZG Raptor before it was gone. I also found the cute Razzashi Hatchling on the AH very cheap and bought a few before ZG was removed, but it looks like they've just moved it to dropping off some other STV mobs. Oh well.

I've also picked up the new Shattering pets. The singing sunflower is awesome. I also ground out Mr. Grubbs (I recommend farming it at Zul'Mashar if you want to try for it; took me about 30 minutes there). Lastly, I did the quest chain for Withers although I don't get him out too often since he looks so much like the other tree pet.