So bloody close....

Finally raided again last night. Got in on a Bastion of Twilight with one of the top guilds on the server doing an alt run. Despite some problems with some of the other pugs, we downed the first 3 bosses and for only the second time since the expansion came out, I got to stand up against Cho'gall.

Our first attempt was pretty miserable. I was healing at that point and the DPS wasn't quite sufficient to keep the blood boils out of the raid so we barely made it into phase 2. At that point, they had me switch to shadow and decided we'd two heal the fight. We easily got the boils down that time and got the boss to <300k health before wiping. So bloody close.

One of the tanks had to go shortly after, but we got in one more attempt and again got him down to just a few percent. The tentacles kept killing us because people were getting them too early on (including me; lesson learned, the shadow crash graphics are slightly smaller than the actual radius of effect). I'm hoping we'll continue it tonight. About the only gear I still need comes from Cho and Nef.

Catching up & Looking at 4.1

So I took a few weeks off from WoW to prepare for Naka-Kon. Before that, I'd joined the guild I'd mentioned previously, that I'd raided with before being bitched at by the GMs of Legions of Azeroth. Now, I'm a member of Guildbook on Stormreaver. I raided with them for one week before Naka and we beat down the first two bosses of Bastion of Twilight pretty quickly. That was more bosses in one night than in two months with LoA.

I then took two weeks off, and upon returning last week, we again downed the first two bosses and wiped a few times on the Twilight Ascendant Council. This week, we beat them in just a few attempts, before heading on to Cho'gall where one of our raid members decided to afk for 30 minutes without telling anyone. We pulled without him and wiped fairly quickly and no one felt like waiting for him, so we called it there.

Still, I managed to get myself a new healing neck. I also won the roll on some healing boots but passed them to one of our healers since I'm main spec shadow (why this guild doesn't do main over offspec, I don't know, but we're all cool enough that it's worked out fine).

So I'm currently quite pleased with how the social dynamics and progression in game are going for me right now. My real life friend quit last month to go back to playing Everquest (and subsequently quit that too), so I'm out one friend on there, but another friend just rolled up on my server and we've been playing together quite a bit the past few nights, keeping things fun outside of raiding.

But in upcoming news, Blizzard has announced some of the things coming for the 4.1 patch. Probably the biggest news is that Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub are being retooled into heroic 5 man dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of simply retooling things, but similarly, I wasn't thrilled about ZG being taken out, if for no other reason than I really wanted the damned mounts! The week before Cata hit, I got the raptor, but I'd still never gotten the tiger. Similarly, in ZA, my guild had gotten to the point where we could manage to get the Armani War Bear, but I always lost the roll and eventually, it was no longer available. Thus, I'm excited that similar mounts will be available again, even if they're not the same ones.

Of course, with patch comes class changes. Not much is changing for us priests. The biggest change I see, is that our mind sear damage will again be increased which will hopefully, again, make our AOE respectable.

My hunter is also now 85 so I glanced at their changes. Again, not much, but our multi-shot damage is getting a huge buff. That will be swell, but given that hunters already have good AOE, I don't know that it will stay that way.

I recently started leveling my paladin again to help tank instances as he levels. Currently, she's at 81 so possibly 85 by the time 4.1 hits. Again, not many changes here. We get a holy power when our Grand Crusader pops and we use our Avenger Shield. But given holy power isn't a huge issue for tanks, it's not something I'm jumping up and down over.

So that's where I'm sitting currently. Cool story.

LFGuild

I've been thinking about leaving my guild lately. This is a tough decision since I've been with this group since the middle of Burning Crusade when Karazhan was still the highest level of content all but the most elite guilds would ever see.

Our biggest problem getting further then, and then in Wrath, and again now, is just members. The guild is tiny. We only have about 10 really active members and with people changing mains for Cata, we don't have a good raid balance, even if everyone can make it. Three druid healers isn't good for a raid. I've been voluntold to heal for the time being which I don't mind terribly, but we're still lacking a strong tank healing class.

Or a second tank for that matter.

Several weeks ago, we'd had a guild meeting and discussed recruiting, but in the intervening weeks, we've not gained a single member. We found a paladin tank that's decently geared that's willing to come with us although not join the guild. So we're able to get in to content now, but this new tank didn't seem entirely comfortable at tanking.

Additionally, our GM has been telling us to watch videos for a fight so we can learn it, and then tries to tell us to do something different which confuses everyone and suddenly people are running all over getting themselves killed. It's been a mess. Poor leadership all around.

So I've been watching trade chat and LFGuild channels to see if I can find a guild looking for a good shadow priest and no one seems to want us right now. It's quite sad.

Tonight is supposed to be a raid night, but I'm taking it off for RL stuff and don't really care. The entire game has turned into nothing more than logging in to do dailies, blow my alchemy transmute, run my daily heroic, and log out. Raiding hasn't been worth it thus far.

So in 2 weeks, my paid time will expire and I think I'm going to let it lapse. I'll see if I can find some friends elsewhere to play with, but so few guilds seem to have my desired raid times or need my class the game hasn't been seeming worth it lately.

Perhaps this will mean I'll have more time to write my book

An Introduction to myself and Cata

I've been wanting to start a WoW blog for awhile now but never really felt I had much to write about with the end of Wrath, but with the new patch just released with the Shattering, I suppose it's time to start.

So I'll start off by introducing myself.

I'm Tiadara. I'm a raiding shadow priest (with discipline offspec) on Stormreaver, Alliance. I've been playing since a few months after Burning Crusade was released. In BC, I got through Karazhan and Serpentshrine. My guild (Legions of Azeroth) was working on Hyjal/Black Temple but back in the day of 25man only raids, we often had trouble getting full groups together. And being an astrophysics major irl didn't help me make it too often anyway.

Then Wrath came out. We blew down Naxx, Obsidian Sanctum, and Eye of Eternity. When Ulduar came out we struggled and never made it past Mirmiron. In Trial of the Crusader, we downed that including hardmodes on everything aside from the last boss. We've wiped the floor with Vault of Archavion. Lastly, with Icecrown, we've dethroned the Lich King and done all hardmodes except Sindragosa and the King himself.

We went into Ruby Sanctum the week it was released but due to some paste eating, we couldn't down her and haven't been back since most of us had better gear anyway.

Aside from raids, I collect pets and achievements and to a somewhat lesser extent, titles and mounts. I had just over 7k achievement points before the Cata patch and it got knocked down to 6885. Not sure what was removed, but I noticed they broke down old world into small numbers of quests for loremaster, so I'll probably go back through that and get a bunch there. I already have loremaster for oldworld, outlands, and half of northrend, so I'm safe on most of those, but to get the title, I'll have to actually quest my way to 85 come Cata. I generally go healer and instance grind as I hate leveling without a partner.

Regardless, with the patch out, I spent some time exploring the remodeled old world yesterday. I can't stand not having portals from Dalaran to all the major cities. At least they left the one to Tanaris alive as well as the ones to Blasted Lands. So I took that and did some running around. I like that they've added so many flight points and that they're now marked on your map. I picked some of them up and started playing around in the new zone in southern Blasted Lands, picking up some Gilneas rep.

I'm quite excited for the expansion, although I hate leveling and don't look forward to it. Hopefully it'll be as good as I've heard.