Outlands ho!

My monk made it to outlands last night and I'm up to lvl 64. Things finally feel like they're starting to come together with the class.

As usual, I'm doing a great deal of grinding in instances. The level of dumbassery has decreased slightly. Other monks tend to no longer be too much of a problem. As long as I get a hit or two on something, the threat is high enough that I don't worry about them pulling threat.

The class that does tend to cause me the most problems is death knights. They still aren't terribly well balanced in terms of DPS. While most classes will be doing 800ish DPS, DKs will be pulling 1,700. Keeping aggro against that is tricky. At least they're plate wearers and can typically kill something before they are hurting too badly.

Another headache that's cropped up has been a bit more of people not understanding itemization of drops. I've had an appreciable number of tanking items ninja'd from me by DPS. While I can understand something that isn't properly itemized in its stats being an upgrade (I've had several instances where a healing head was just way better than what I was wearing presently), it's always polite to ask the person in your group that could actually use the item if they need it. In the end, it doesn't matter too much since I'll run through every instance 4-5 times and will likely see the drop again, but it's still annoying that there's a lack of altruism in the game.

When I have been questing, I still feel my single target dps is somewhat lacking. I don't mind doing the quests where I just have to pull a bunch of things and kill them, but if they're too spread out and I can't pull 4-5 at a time, it seems to take forever. But I ventured into Nagrand last night and started on the Hemet Nesingwary hunting quests which all start off with killing 20 of various types of animals. I could pull 5 at a time and DPS them down with little trouble. The exception was the the Clefthoofs which have a stun attack. Getting a few of those untimely chained becomes a bit scary.

In that case, I'd typically end up below 30% health after a pull and lacking a good healing ability, this was annoying but finally at 64, I got the Healing Sphere ability which serves for a pretty good out of combat heal. Technically, I suppose I could use it in combat, but it takes a lot of energy (60 to be precise). It also helps that there's been some ability I got (not sure exactly when) that makes me create little green healing spheres during combat. I'm not sure what's driving that (perhaps when I crit?), but they heal pretty well. Unfortunately, it means I have to be able to see them and on large enemies, or large groups, they're often inside them which means I have to run around aimlessly to happen upon them.

I have a strong suspicion that this is an intentional sort of annoyance however. As I noted in a previous post, the cone on Breath of Fire is annoyingly narrow. To use it effectively means having to do a lot of movement anyway to clump up enemies and get them in its effect. As such, the class as a whole seems to be centered on lots of minor movements, which fits the feel of a squirrely monk, flowing like a river or some such nonsense.

I did run another instance on my paladin last night. I still feel like their tanking is far superior, both from being able to get threat, but also their survivablity. I think the hope is that the Stagger ability will continue to mitigate more damage, making it easier to survive, and that the ability to shrug off that stagger DOT will effectively make monks have an active 20%+ mitigation. However, that skill to dump the damage doesn't come for another 10 levels. As such, it means I'm still taking the damage in the long haul.

The bigger problem I see is that the stagger DOT never gets to the level where the shrug off would really be important. There's three levels of Stagger: Green isn't bad. Yellow is like a real DOT from a strong enemy, and red is just pain. Well, supposedly. I've never gotten it to red and only on a few occasions has it gotten to yellow. As such, it's just not picking up that much of the damage.

There's ways to improve that. At level 80, it looks like I'll be getting a mastery which picks up a percentage, and Fortifying Brew dumps a big extra 20% in while active. I'm not sure how those will factor in just yet since I haven't gotten there, but I'm hoping those small bits will add up. My impression is that big bosses at endgame will push through enough damage to make Stagger pretty impressive, but right now, I just don't feel it.

It's Like Death Knights All Over Again

The post title was a comment I made in an instance last night regarding people playing monks.

Back when Wrath of the Lich King was released, there was a proliferance of Death Knights. I never created one (still haven't), but as they all hit level 80, suddenly the instances were filled with them. Unfortunately, they hadn't figured out how to play the class just yet and they were using Death Grip on everything they could because it was just so cool to do. Quite often, they'd do this when they were DPS, before the tanks pulled getting themselves killed in the process and making mobs go everywhere.

The new class also apparently brought out all the idiots. Every one that played a Death Knight had apparently forgotten how to play the game in general. They forgot that standing in fire was a bad idea. They forgot that running everywhere without paying attention to aggro range was stupid. They forgot that you should keep an eye out for patrols.

If you saw a Death Knight in a group, you had about a 90% chance of them being a complete dumbass.

The same is true for the monks.

While they don't seem to have nearly as many annoying talents that get them aggro after the tank pulled, the people playing them seem to all think they're tanks. With Death Knights, at the very least, they would be plate wearers, so they could take a bit of a beating, but the monks wear leather and it's only the skills of staggering the damage that make Brewmaster (tank) monks viable.

But most monks I've been playing with seem to just charge right in, and nearly get themselves killed. When playing with non-monk healing classes, healers have seemed to keep up. Disc priests are still my favorite healer to see with me. But monk healers at low levels have just seemed woefully underpowered. As I hit level 30 last night, they seemed to get a very notable increase in their healing power, although I'm not yet certain what it was. I did make my offspec Mistweaver, so I'll be trying healing myself sometime, but I haven't collected enough suitable gear just yet to want to try it out.

Ultimately, I did find one good group last night and they stayed in group while I queued for 3-4 instances in a row. At level 20 and 30, monks get a quest to go back to Pandaland for some spiritual training which results in a bonus 50% xp for an hour with a daily quest that does another 2 hours. So with this buff and some instance grinding, I made it to level 37 last night. I'll probably be doing the same tonight, but once I start hitting the upper 40's I start going through the annoying dungeons like Black Rock Depths which are huge. Already I've had several Gnomeregan runs which is a pretty dreaded instance. For some reason, people just can't figure out their way around it, even with the map. At least with BRD, I know my way around because I solo'd it a large number of times for rep on my main Tia.

Still haven't tried out the pet battles and I can't wait to start hunting the new pets. I heard rumor there's a giraffe. I think I need him. And every other new pet. But I'll get there.

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.

WTF Happened?

I've certainly had my ups and downs with WoW, but I think this one may be the one that gets me to swear off finally.

For the 2-3 weeks, I've barely been playing. I went on vacation to visit a few conventions and on coming back, it felt like a completely different game I was playing.

The biggest reason seems to be 5-man dungeons. They're nigh unplayable at this point. Unlike in Wrath, many of the Cata bosses have mechanics that people must perform or it's a wipe. Early on, you expected wipes as people learned the mechanics, but eventually everyone knew them. At this point, there's no excuse for someone not to know how to do the beams on Corla in Blackrock Caverns. Yet the past 3 times I've been in there, someone's gotten themselves transformed.

Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines are lengthy, torturous instances full of wiping on trash because people can't focus fire. ZA and ZG people seem to know now, but they're also painfully long.

And queue times keep getting worse. It used to be 20ish minutes if I queued as dps, 5 as healer, and none as tank. Now it's 45, 25, and none respectively. Only to wipe repeatedly due to poor players looking to be carried.

Raids haven't been too bad though. The biggest issue is that we're still having to pug 1-2 spots every week and the result is having to waste large amounts of time teaching someone new how we do things every week. I'm not interested in sitting around and waiting for them to get it while we wipe repeatedly, so after a few hours, I generally quit.

So the only thing that's been left for me to do lately is dailies. And then I log. And I'm done.

That's not worth my monthly subscription fee anymore. So we'll see if that changes by the 23rd when my time expires.

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.