I can taste it!

Just gonna do a quick one today.

I did the epic flight form chain and just need to do the heroic run! Man that is frustrating.

Picked up the Vindicators Neckpiece from the boomkin, and he's up to almost 350 res. :)

Doing some PvP on the Pally, and have gone a 10/0/51 spec. I tried going a prot/ret spec but it just wasn't my style. Maybe when they bring WotLK and I get to level 80, I'd put points into Prot to pick up Reckoning. Man that would be sweet.

Also checked the 2.4.2 patch notes at first the pally change looks great on paper, but then you realise its just a bug fix :(

Oh well back to waiting for the expansion...

A new hope

So I made the massive decision to switch to a new realm. I've been fed up with the 400+ queues on Barthilas and have made the switch to the new PvP realm Dreadmaul and have brought over all my characters to start over.

The first week has been interesting, I've seen the population explode to about 8500. I've been watching the census carefully on the server, it was originally 60% alliance 40% horde, a pleasant change compared to the 60% horde 40% alliance. For those of you that haven't had the pleasure of playing on a PvP realm, you always feel like a 70 is gonna drop out of the sky and go for the gank, and when it is heavily in favour of the other faction its much more annoying. But the ratio has slid in favour of the horde now, and is now 47% alliance 53% horde. I hope it doesn't slide too much further.

With raiding pretty much out of the question until the new guilds settle in, its also had an impact on my gold income. With no raids going on, there's no new gear being obtained, and therefore no need for JC gems. Still, there's always PvP and on this server in lieu of raiding, the prices of PvP gems have spiked so I'm still making the odd bit of dough here and there.

I have used this time to save up and do more dailies than I normally do, and have put together another 5k gold to save up for my epic flight form for Rexamus! Pew pew. I was however stunned to learn I also have a 17 step quest chain to go through to get it. Thank you Blizz, gfg! FFS! Still, at least the end boss I have to kill in Sethekk Halls has a chance to drop an epic mount. That might make it worthwhile, so fingers crossed!

I'm not sure where to from here though. I want to help out my mates gear up, and I'm sure you don't want to hear about the countless stories I'm going to have to tell about running Kara again, I think we've all been through that. I'm grinding heaps and heaps of PvP at the moment as well so I'm hoping to get some more resilience up. The druid is sitting on 328 so far, and I want to see if I can crack the 400 mark sometime soon.

I love the Balance druid on the battlefield, its a walking tank, and is so far packing about 900 spell damage AND healing. And with those HOTs, this thing is a behemoth.

Sup

Ah server restart, a perfect time to put down some thoughts.

Ya I know I haven't updated this in awhile, but I've had nothing much to report. I quit the raiding guild I was in, basically because I wanted to focus on other things, helping some RL mates gear up and focus on earning some cash. I've joined a guild called Brace Yourself, which have just started doing SSC, so I hope I can contribute to helping these guys move forward.

I've always been reasonably good at making gold, as a hybrid though you gotta be. The constant respecs (especially when I'm in a non-dps spec) means it can put a real drain on your resources. So in the meantime I levelled a mage to 70. I started from the get go specifically to level a jc and being a mage, can supply my mains with a constant supply of food tables. I figured he could basically live in Ironforge and port from place to place servicing players with their jc cuts. Its turned out really well, its now a side thing I do. My main focus now is to do the usual prospect and cut and put on the AH. So now I just do some cuts and make some cash, all within the comfort of IF.

On another note, I've got enough Arena points to get my S3 helm now for Rexamus. It'll be some pew pew pew!

New build?

I've been wracking my brains of late trying to figure out a way to pick up Vindication without giving up Kings or my Pursuit of Justice (I believe that more speed is less time spent running back to the boss for more dps. I think I've finally cracked the nut.

I thought about going only 1 point of PoJ but at that level you only get 5% increase in speed, and if you're gonna do that, you might as well get Cat's swiftness or Boar's speed enchants which give you an 8% speed increase. Problem for me is that I use the Surefooted enchant (for the +10 hit rating) and am finely balanced at 95 hit rating.

So what to give up? Well I reckon I'm going to only take 2/3 out of Sanctified Judgement. I'm hoping that the mana I can pick up from proccing JoW off Vindication will be enough to offset the lesser mana efficiency.

I'm not a big fan of respeccing 3 times a week, so I hope this all rounder build will give me enough flexibility in both the 10 man and 25 man raid environment and save me some gold.

Resistance gears

Well my last post about MgT got me thinking about resistance gears especially for high end content and this darn heroic MgT. I hear there is a fight in BT that you may need to stack resistance (shadow?). Well my refitting of my old Horseman's Helm to include a resistance gem could be taken further and add 2 more resist all gems to the remaining slots. I also have some other old epix I could refit, my legs from Heroic mech have 3 gem slots, and I should be able to upgrade my chestpiece to the Bulwark of Ancient Kings with some bought Nether Vortexes (thanks 2.4) and put 3 gems in there (I'm going to go with the Vindicators S3 chestpiece over the BoAK for general PVE). In MgT normal, I can get an upgrade to my boots, which means I can refit my existing boots with a further 2 resistance gems as well.

So the end result? Well that would give me a total of 11 gem slots (i.e. 44 resistance to all schools of magic) that would be a good all round resistance set, I just hope that it doesn't cripple my dps stats.

MgT?

Funny about the new Magister's instance in 2.4, no-one knows what the heck to call it in Looking for Group. I've watched with interest though, and it can't be MT because of Mana Tombs or Mag because of Magtheridon's Lair, so I've started seeing the acronym MgT start to take hold... well at least on Barthilas. So... what do you guys call it?

Anyway, over the weekend I took Rexkicker through the non-heroic version, and only remembered towards the end of instance that my new fear works on demon's as well. Damn, I wish I remembered that earlier, I want to CC that demon add on the third boss that does the fire damage. Wiped a few times on Kaelthas and a few accidental pulls on trash, but all in all not to bad for a geared group. The epic druid cape dropped with res and armor, but it got De'd.

So I then took a break and did the Sunwell Offensive dailies, I got a Badge of Justice from one of the supply packs! Holy cow, these are definitely on my to do list from now on, goodbye Skettis dailies. Being on a PvP server though, its all out warfare, the dailies take ages to do because of the constant ganking going on. I wear my full PvP gear to quest there trinkets and all. Sure it takes a bit longer but its much better than waiting 2 mins to res after you've been ganked for the fifth time.

I then tried MgT on Heroic, the lure of an epic off each boss was too much to ignore and I'm really gunning for the Shard of Contempt seeing as expertise isn't exactly the easiest stat to get. We only got up to the second boss though before our tank and one of our dps had to go to ZA. Doesn't matter though, we weren't getting past the second boss anyway as we wiped about 3 times on him.

The arcane damage was just to great. I was getting hit for about 3k per blast and with the Violet Badge trinket equipped (45 Arcane Resistance), it mitigated up to half that amount. But it wasn't enough, and I'm not going to let some frickin arcane damage stop me from some epic loots. So I went through my stash of gear that I don't use anymore and dusted off the old Horseman's Helm! I bought a cheap '+4 resist all' gem from the AH and a not so cheap Glyph of Arcane Warding head enchant from the Sha'tar Rep Vendor. So now I'm packing 69 Arcane Resistance and am keen to give it another shot. I'll wear this helm against Kaelthas as well, so its not as if I've gone crazy and done this just for one measly boss. The Horseman's laugh will be heard again!

2.4 PvP and Project X - Kara test

Well I'm in Kara atm on Rexamus and waiting for the group to get together for the Prince pull so I thought I'd update my blog.

Since 2.4 I've been busy buying the entry level scrub pvp gear for the moonkin and pally. Its helped heaps and filled in the holes in my arena sets. In fact for the boomkin I have enough resilience now to reach the 224 cap (sitting at 228).

So I've decided to do a small road test with the panzerkin and its been pretty fun tanking trash and stuff and still standing. I'm having mana issues but hopefully once I get more vengeful pieces and a good headpiece, it should help.

The ret pally saw some SSC/TK action last night and we did Lurker and Leo. I finally managed to down the bugger, he's been annoying me since on the previous 3 attempts we haven't been able to do it. The Tsunami Talisman dropped and bidding got out of control, going for 900 dkp, 3 times more than I have in total!

On lurker I was the top dps a first for me, and a sign that I've caught up gearwise. I was flying blind in there, no threatmeter, damage meters or swing timers, so when they posted the results I was shocked with my 960 dps. I'm sure I was spamming CS at the wrong times without my trusty swing timer so I'm confident that next time, I can get more.

Someone asked me how high my attack power can go, and I said it can get over 4k. Which is a bit nuts and hard to believe sometimes but it does happen, have a look below. I was seeing about 4.1-4.5k crits at this level, so its pretty cool when it does happen.

Oh wait the fights starting...

Ah crap, no T4 helm. But at least I have enough badges to get the Cloak of Subjugated power.

That little baby has pushed my armor to 21.7k armor and my stam is just under 10k. A nice upgrade and that next step closer to the dream. :)