Oh man...

I was just looking at the talent calculator looking for possible holes in my warlock spec. Going down the list of talents that Elk has selected and ...

1. Soul Leech - Passive - heals based on damage done. 
2. Shadowfury - Instant cast - stun on all enemies in aoe reticle. 
3. Soul Link - Instant cast - share damage with pet. 
4. Unbound Will - wha???

I can remove "movement impairing effects"!!! This immediately brought me to last night's 4 wipes on the Durumu fight and his annoying eye sore maze and the slow caused by Lingering Gaze. I am putting up a button as soon as I get home!

That reminds me, I put a new button on my 'healing' bar the other day. A druid buffed me with Symbiosis. This in turn gave me rejuvenation, a HOT. Not the coolest or most interesting of druid talents, but definitely has a nice niche. You know when I am short a healthstone, lifeblood is on cool down, soul leech isn't doing it and don't want to interrupt dps loop to drain life.

So much for missed opportunities..

Wrath, Cata or MoP Gear Market?

With 5.3 dropping right now, I started thinking back to past patches in past expansions. Blizzard has changed how they did gear upgrades in each of these three expansions and I am not sure I really enjoy this last iteration.

Do you remember
the panel of
Magisters?

Wrath was a pain. From what I remember, during the expansion they regularly put out new currency that dropped during dungeons and raids. IIRC, dungeons got heroism tokens, and raids got triumph, the next patch dungeons got triumph tokens and raids got justice, etc.. This kept raiders always one step ahead in gear level behind 'casuals' that could only successfully run dungeons (/s "looking for group for heroics"). They did not upgrade, but instead you could use a convoluted transfer system, where one vendor would take X of an older and convert down. If you didn't run the latest dungeons or raids, you couldn't get the latest gear.

Cataclysm simplified it. With each of the patches that brought about new gear, we saw a devaluing of the higher currency; valor points converted down to justice points, and the valor gear converted to justice gear. A casual player would accumulate both valor and justice points simply by running dungeons, but raiding would still net you more valor with each kill. Raiders still had better gear, easy. On patch day, if you saved up, you could often buy two new justice point items from the former top scale. Raiders would need to start over re-accumulating valor points for the new tier gear.

MoP? I am still undecided. Now instead of my valor points devaluing, the gear gets cheaper. Add in the prevalence of Raid Finder, and now casuals are able to pick up lower level raid gear fairly easy. It creates a market where two valor point items are available with fairly different stats. Do I get the Revered Sunreaver Onslaught back or the Honored Shadow Pan Assault back?

I guess the MoP model has benefits. I am able to get raid level gear (iLevel 522) without much more effort than before. As long as I pay close attention and not simply buy SALE items, but hold out for best available, I won't waste valor points.

Did Catacylsm Fail?

I just watch Danger Dolan's video on why Cataclysm had so many issues.



I agree with a lot of what DD mentions, the monotonous grind to get gear. The requirements to do dailies up dailies to get anywhere. I also agree with the lack of flow leveling between zones. You had 5 distinctly different questing areas and no real tie between them other than 'Deathwing broke this.'

As of note, I wasn't one of the 'casuals complaining about difficulty'. I totally expected the new content to be harder. Until my gear outstrips the content (like at the end of an expansion), repair costs are going to be high.

Sadly I never did see a lot of the Cata raid content. LFR was there, but not as prevalent and when it was I was heavy into PVP.

Heroic Scenarios coming in 5.3!

I dread the moments running through my daily scenario. It typically is quick and easy now that Elk is running in 490+ gear. Only when we have someone who's never ran the specific scenario is there typically any chance of a wipe (typically due to over pulling). So when I was reading through the PTR notes, I got excited AND disappointed:

• Heroic Scenarios
  

  • A heroic difficulty for Scenarios have been added and are designed to provide challenging content for small groups of well-seasoned adventurers. Completing a Heroic Scenario awards Valor points, and a chance to obtain Raid Finder quality items.
  • Heroic scenarios require a pre-made group to join.
  • Heroic scenarios offer bonus objectives that will reward additional valor if completed.
    

    • An option to run a random heroic scenario has been added as a drop-down in the scenario tab in Dungeon Finder.
  • Players can complete a normal or heroic scenario for bonus valor each day, but not both.
  • Six heroic scenarios will be available in patch 5.3. Four are new and two are upgrades of existing normal scenarios.
    

    • Battle on the High Seas
    • Blood in the Snow
    • Dark Heart of Pandaria
    • The Secrets of Ragefire
    • Crypt of Forgotten Kings
    • A Brewing Storm

Yeah, 502 iLevel gear from a scenario! Boo requires a 'pre-made' group. I guess my best bet is to run a regular scenario, then re-queue for a heroic scenario.

Another interesting scenario change is the option to run cross-faction scenarios.

• Lorewalker Cho will allow heroes to take part in either faction's scenarios, so players can see what the other side has been up to.

I've always been curious if an alliance character is driving Big Bessa. (Oh, NM, it looks like Alliance are sweeping up after the Horde's attack).

Where are you hiding Scout Captain Elisa?

Yes, Elk is doing his dailies. Surprised? I really want the rep with the Sunreaver's so that I can get the commendation. That way when my priest opens the area up, she'll earn rep a lot faster!

So, we're trying to turn in Compy Stomp to Scout Captain Elisa. I met her at the entrance to the zone unhidden, now she's hiding somewhere under a shield of invisibility. Unfortunately I can stand on top of her ? but no zone, no silence, nothing.

This video has made me realize that maybe it's bugged. Watch closely at the beginning, or fast forward to roughly 10minutes 10 seconds. The player runs in and out of the cover. It's absolutely, plainly visible in the video. I stood there last night a few times and nothing.. Tag support? Or drop and re-run the quest?



Try tonight and let you know what I find...

Update: I opened a ticket last night with support. I could check on the status of that ticket now, IF I had brought my authenticator to work... So, anyway, I went and dropped all of the beast pen quests that would end under that dome. Ran back to the quest hub and started over. This time, I found her standing under a dome in a different part of the zone. She had three quests killing sentinels, including one bugger that would heal himself if not interrupted. Note, as destro, I don't have an interrupt, especially if running with a voidwalker, swapped to my observer mid fight to use his.

Update 2: Blizzard got back to me. Evidently she moves around and I simply needed to check back on the day she was working in the area. Dropping the quest line was definitely the best solution.

Oh, Never Mind

Last night I experienced my worst case of LFR fail. You know the kind you wait 10 minutes to get there, then wish you never clicked the "Accept" button!?

My first thought was "That was awfully quick!?". I typically run through a scenario then dungeon then the raid pops. Not last night. As soon as I dropped out of my scenario, I was immediately dropped into Pinnacle of Storms. Ok, sure, that's got a tough boss fight and I could see a lot of turn over.

Enter the instance and people are dying to a Thunder Lord and a Lightning Lord. If you haven't run this raid, they are the first trash you hit in the raid. People had logged off, people were leaving, people were complaining in raid chat! I went through 4 deaths, one even looked promising where we had all 25 players and made the run up the electrified stairs. Not enough healers, so we all died on the top of the stairs. It was the players saying "there's a group of us all the way at Lei Shen" (meaning they weren't helping clear trash) that I finally called it and dropped.

Once dropped, I started over on my routine. This time, I queued for Terrace of Endless Spring. Again the raid is dying to the trash. This time it's the corrupted elementals that disappear when attacked. Yeah, they were right at the landing zone for the raid. :-\ Happily we all died or teleported out and they reset. Drop back in and cleared the entire raid with no more raid wipes! At least I got one more token for the Black Prince quests and a nice shiny belt. Only 300g in the hole.. Gems and buckle later, I am broke!

Have you done much PVP in MoP?

Last expansion, I loved PVP. I was the healer in a 3-man arena group, the Backpedaling Clickers. We weren't that bad. If I remember correctly, last season we reached around 1800 area rating. Our worst problem, I am west coast and the two pallys are east coast. I'd just be getting home from work, when they were headed to bed. This expansion, with DPS so easy to get into a dungeon, my priest is still sitting in mostly PVE gear. I'd rather have the easy job of blowing stuff up instead of having to deal with keeping the DPS alive.


So, how is PVP this expansion? I see Blizzard is bringing out 2 new PVP instances with the 5.3 expansion. Fun? Not worth it? Need more discipline healers!?

Elk Heart Bad Robot Pet!

Blizzard announced last Friday (19th) a new pet coming in a 'future' expansion. This awesome little robot will be an engineering pattern so start collecting your mats engineers. I see futures in the robot market.

Question, is he going to be child-sized, like the argent crusade helper or smaller like the Lil Smoky? Personally, I am hoping more child like.

(Note: Blogger doesn't like <3 in the title, so it may caused some odd cross posts.)

Tagging Phased Major Nanners

Major Nanners is a rare spawn elite that sits on the border between the Valley of Four Winds and

Kun Lai Summit. He sits on the edge of a pond and would disappear when I got close to the pond (still haven't done many quests in area.) . I tried a number of times to agro him using my FelGuard, but couldn't keep him hooked. Nanners also has 3 corporals standing next to him and you can easily drag a few along when you get him.

Nanners can be seen down in chat window.

I found that if I sent my voidwalker to the edge of the cliff. I could then (CTRL+1) tell him to attack Nanners. Let him agro, then tell him to return to me. When he was within spell range, tell my voidwalker to attack and keep him at a distance. We made 2 attempts, first time Nanners brough along one more, we killed the corporal, but not Nanners before he killed us. Run back to corpse, avoid giant bananarang and successfully kill him! Sadly, nothing fun dropped off him.

Video

On the Hunt for Green Fire (no spoilers)

Last night Elk officially started his hunt for green fire. Unlike Amijade, I didn't suffer the RNG gods, running around Thunder Island for weeks hoping the Tome drops. Instead (lucky me), the tome dropped on the auction house for an absolute steal of 1300g. 30 seconds to swap to my auction house toon, transfer 500g over, and it was all MINE! Woot!

Impressions so far.

Sneaking through the
laser security system

1. Nice bit of lore. The reading (and it's copious) uncovers some of the behind the scenes to how warlocks got our MoP spell improvements. 
2. Class specific. This quest line has me using warlock spells that I haven't used since the novelty ran out. I just ran through a maze of traps using my all seeing eye.  
3. It's not easy. When I ran through the Battered Hilt quest chain, it was rather easy. I am at the first big 'boss' fight and have died officially 3 times. There MUST be some warlock spell I need to cast on this dude to kill him off. I am thinking teleport out of AOE range.. :) 

Well, I'll let you know when the (now) destro 'lock has some green fire, but I don't think it will be soon. Reports of needing 500+ gear score may be a problem.