So Maybe Firelands Isn’t Dumb…
Just a short while ago, I wrote that post-nerf, Firelands was a breeze. It was easy. So easy, in fact, that my guild was planning on doing three or more hard modes in a night. Well, we finally got in there to try out the post-nerf hard modes, and I’ll be the first to admit (cue Illidan voice): we were not prepared. On Thursday we headed into Firelands eager to try out the new fights, and decided to give Beth’tilac a single HM try to get a sense of the difficulty. Thirty seconds later, we were all lying dead on the ground, with the realization that progression was going to be a lot more arduous than we’d been expecting. We switched it to normal mode and took out Beth’tilac, then continued onto Rhyolith HM, where we spent most of the night. Despite our repeated wipes, it was a fun time; the fight was challenging and we were all enjoying getting the fight down. Once we finally got our kill, there was more good news: my bracers dropped, giving me a nice upgrade to my 359 ilvl bracers from the prior tier. Afterwards, we put in some attempts on Shannox before calling it for the night. All said, it was a satisfying raid, and I’m glad we were able to get our first hard mode down without too much trouble.
We returned on Sunday to finish what we’d started. We continued our attempts on Shannox and, surprisingly enough, we managed to get him down within only a few attempts. Our later start Sunday night meant that we had less time to progress, and we ended up doing normal modes for the rest of the night, minus a few hard mode attempts on Staghelm, which were characterized, of course, by the punishing healing and damage requirements. We wrapped up the night with a comfortable one-shot of Ragnaros, and I managed to snag another new piece of gear: the uber-awesome Necromantic Focus. Between that and my bracers, I’m hoping for a nice DPS boost for our next raid.
In other Sayis-news, I got some arena playtime in, ran Ulduar 25, and finally managed to sell my Crimson Deathcharger. For the arena, well, it went good and bad. Bad in that, on our first day of playing, we managed to go 3-12 and drop about eighty rating. Good in that we made it back up, mostly, getting our ratio up to 14-20 and up to an 1899 rating for the week. I accrued enough points this week to get my Ruthless pants, meaning that my last piece of non-Ruthless tier piece is my helm. Then, it’s off to the off pieces. As for the Ulduar run, I managed to come in halfway through, but it was a bit of a letdown overall. While it was still great to see all the old fights, and the atmosphere there is still incredible, all of the pieces I’d been hoping for were no-shows. On the plus side, I picked up a few esoteric achievements, and managed to get Algalon down for the Astral Walker title. Very cool. Wrapping it up, I finally sold my Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger for a cool 70k. I purchased it for only 47, giving me a nice 23k profit. Now, to sell that damn bear…
Back in the Groove
So, a couple posts ago I was pretty down after a tough night in the Arena. Things hadn’t gone our way, we’d lost a bunch of fights and suffered some pretty terrible losses. Things changed for the better Monday, though, when we hit our stride and earned that rating back. Part of it was probably some new gear, namely my weapon and eventually my shield partway through the evening. But more importantly, it felt like we played a tighter game throughout the night. We LoS’d better, CC’d better, coordinated better, communicated better, we were just… better. In everything. It paid off with a 12-5 ratio, and a team rating back over 1900 points. Despite the turnaround, we still decided to call it for the night as soon as we were all capped; both my teammates were sick, and I was pretty exhausted from lack of sleep. It was good to go to bed satisfied, though.
My Ruthless Shield to match the Dagger... nice.
That wasn’t all that went on this week. In overall WoW news, the 4.3 PTR just went up. There are changes being made to Shaman, most of them subtle but important. Elemental’s big change for this patch is that Chain Lightning, at long last, has no cooldown. In addition to an Earthquake buff, it’s supposed to shake up our AoE; no more tab-targeting flame shocks and fire novas, instead, it’s gonna be Earthquake/Chain Lightning all day long. Lightning Bolt also received a new spell effect, making it less of a ball of lightning, more of an actual bolt, which is a change I can get behind. On the Resto side, there’s been a nerf to Wind Shear, with the cooldown increased to a whopping twenty five seconds, up from five. Yikes. Riptide and Ancestral Healing were buffed to offset the change, but it’s definitely a nerf overall, albeit a needed one. One last piece of new stuff: PvP models for the upcoming tier have been datamined and posted for all to see. In a word: Wow. I’m not sure who decided PvP sets don’t need to look like shit anymore, but I want to hug that amazing, awesome man (or woman). The Shaman set is going Herod-style with its one giant shoulder, the Mage set looks Archmage-y, the Rogue set is terrifying, and the Paladin set makes me want to reroll one just to stand around in that gear. Seriously. Without a doubt one of the coolest sets I’ve ever seen in the game. The next tier’s shaping up to be a great one visually, it’s almost a shame that Transmogrification means we won’t be seeing a lot of people in this new gear.
On personal notes, I finally got a run of AQ40 in, which in turn put me at Exalted with the Brood of Nozdormu at long, long last and has me sitting at thirty five Exalted reputations. Just as important, I got the Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal and the associated Feat of Strength, which leads to the most important part of all: No more AQ40. Ever. I have my AQ40 set, I have the Reputation, I have the Crystal… I’m done, and I’m never setting foot in that obnoxious, bland, awful instance again. Boredom and excess time (and the fact that my AQ40 set makes me look like an Azerothian Iron Man) drove me to grind up the set and the rep, and I’ve got no qualms with leaving that raid to rot. On the subject of raids, tonight’s our weekly raid, and hopefully we’ll be able to pull out some hard mode kills. Game time.
So, Firelands is Dumb Now
Blizzard, for this week, decided the time was nigh to nerf Firelands content. Firelands, of course, is still the newest raid content, so what has this shot in the arm done for my guild? How about nine-manning the first six bosses, and then coming back for a one-shot on Sunday with ten mostly so we could give the tier token to somebody. So, less a shot in the arm, more like replacing the entire arm with a crazy robotic one that instant-wins WoW raids. As cool as a five-minute raid can be, I prefer a little bit of a challenge when I play, something I thought was going to be a Cataclysm trend after BoT/BWD’s tricky encounters. Now, Firelands has been nerfed and we’re looking at trying not one, not two, but three hard modes in the same night to bring back some excitement and prolong our time raiding. We’ve never even tried one before, but in light of the nerfs it would be foolish not to try. More gear now will make progression easier then, and we’ll have Deathwing’s head on a giant pike that much sooner. The whole “five minutes spent raiding versus three hours” thing also helps, since we basically had a super awkward Sunday night. I’m looking forward to some hard modes… hopefully they’ll actually be, well, hard.
In other news, tier set bonuses have been announced for the upcoming tier. Elemental looks pretty good, and the two bonuses will work well together; I assume the community will have to do some theorycrafting to re-value Mastery/Haste etc based around having a two/four piece bonus, something I’ll be eagerly awaiting. While losing perma-Fire Elemental, aka The Best Two Piece Ever, hurts a little, I’m sure the next tier will be a nice boost overall.
Arena Woes
I’ll keep it short; we three-shot Ragnaros in a quick raid on Sunday and I didn’t get any loot. It was nice to see everything come together, but my focus this week was squarely on PvP. Two friends and myself were, before the summer, running a pretty 3s team in the Arena. I had finally made the long-coming switch from Elemental to Resto; we reformed the team and blew past our old rating to 2k with me healing in Arena, and PvP in general, for the first time ever. This was back in the day of the Elemental/Resto piece overlap, which meant I had extra resilience, and my Elemental gear served me well as a Resto Shaman as I switched in different pieces. Then, I got a summer job and couldn’t play WoW all summer.
Things have changed.
For starters, my full Vicious set, that I’d painstakingly acquired? With the new season, it’s completely outdated, and to make matters even worse, honor gear is better by a wide margin. I know complaints were flying around at the time, but I’m only now feeling the effects of that move. Before, I was the most geared member of our team, and probably the most experienced all around. Now, I’m sitting with a full set of old PvP gear trying to play competitively as we march on towards 2k rating. Some days have been better than others, but Monday wasn’t one of them; our team rating dropped a full one hundred points from the low 1900s to the low 1800s. Ouch. My lack of gear, and especially my lack of a weapon, has been hurting our progress since my throughput can’t keep up with other healers, I go OOM faster, and I die more quickly. Compounding this is the fact that, after an entire summer off, I’m out of practice compared to my teammates and arena comps have changed up for a new season. Double melee, shatterplays, KFCs, TSGs… there are plenty of team compositions and acronyms I could throw out, but the point is that I’m having a tough time in arena right now. My friends and I had been waiting for Monday night with excitement since it was our only chance of the week to PvP. Then, it was loss after frustrating loss, as we struggled to grind out the weekly cap. While Monday was rough, things have improved since; I did some throwaway 2s matches with a friend for a few Conquest points, which, at long last, allowed me to snag that elusive 378 weapon.
My brand-spankin' new Spellblade. Finally!
One step closer to competitiveness! With any luck, I’ll manage to get a full set of gear together… in time for the next season to start, which is when I’ll start PvP-ing for real, or so I keep telling myself. On a side-note, while Arena was the focal point of the week thus far, it wasn’t the only thing going on. I joined a quick Sunwell run for some Transmogrification gear; while neither shield I was looking for dropped, I did get every off-piece for my t6, giving me another set to consider once 4.3 drops. Choices!
Big Battle Bargain
Coming off my quiet days, it was back to raiding Firelands. Our guild beat Ragnaros for time last week, and I was itching to get to hard modes; alas, attendance issues meant that we were forced to PuG and stick to normal modes. The raid went well, for the most part; we had to bring in two non-regulars, and both performed well. One might actually become our new OT since our current player is… flaky. He also picked up not one, not two, not even three, but four pieces of loot from the raid, putting him well on his way to being well-geared. For my part, I snagged a new mail chestpiece, the Gatekeeper’s Embrace. My whole look is a lot more consistent now; prior to this week I had t12 shoulders/gloves, with t11 for everything else. It’s good to look, well, good again. We wrapped up the raid in the same place we do every week, 6/7 with Ragnaros for Progression Night (tonight!). Since the raid, I’ve only had one other item of note: I bought a Big Battle Bear for the big price of 70,000 gold. I remember when I thought 13k for a Mechano-hog was big, and 16k for the Tundra Mammoth was surreal. In truth, I don’t know if I’m actually going to use it… according to Wowhead and a quick forum/Google search, it goes for 140k. On that note, fun fact: I’ve had WoW idling in the background while writing this post. I decided to spam trade for some offers on the bear. Within moments of my first post, my offer of 140k was accepted. They’re getting the gold together and by next weekend I’ll be a good deal richer. Nice.
Well, this is as good a place as any to end this post. My raid begins in under thirty minutes, and with any luck we’ll get down Raggy quickly, leaving time afterwards to hop into the arena. Or study, but who does that anymore?
Uneventfulness
It’s been a rather uneventful few days in WoW; I’ve spent most of time studying for an upcoming test for a Management class. All I’ve done in the past few days is run ToC with a friend a few more times to help him get a helm he wants to Transmogrify with whenever 4.3 eventually comes out. With that noted, I can firmly say this:
I hate ToC.
Well, hate might be a strong word here. At 85, it’s easy to two-man, the toughest part is the jousting. The fights are okay and back in the day it wasn’t awful; the Occulus or Culling of Stratholme were far more obnoxious instances. But the design of the place is what really ruined ToC. It was, frankly, stupid design; everything takes place in a single room, there’s very little trash and the room itself was visually bland. With annoying music. Add to that the fact that I spent months in that same room running not only heroics, but raids? Things got boring fast, especially coming off Ulduar, aka The Best Raid Ever. Needless to say, we’ve been there several times now and the helm he wants has refused to drop. On the plus-side, I’m really good at jousting now, so that’s… something. Veering back from my ToC rant, the only other thing I’ve done in WoW was a quick Tempest Keep run. Unfortunately, my luck wasn’t any better there, since nothing I wanted dropped. No fist weapon, no tier pieces, and of course no phoenix mount. No big deal, though; there’s always next week.
The Beginning
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Confucius
This is the first post of my new blog; the first step of my journey. I say “new” because this isn’t my first WoW-related blog; I also wrote the now-defunct Bloodlust. This new blog will follow a similar format; it’ll mostly be a diary of what I end up doing in Azeroth. Along the way, I’ll talk about WoW news and upcoming changes, and whatever else is on my mind. So, let’s give it another shot.
Unleashed Lightning 
