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Showing posts from January, 2011

Looking for Alternate Gear Sources

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As I get SLOWLY ready for raiding, I am constantly on the look out for cheap upgrade options. Sure, eventually, I'll have enough valor points to get my nice shiny T11 warlock gear, but that's a ways away. 2200 valor points / 70 points per heroic dungeon = 31 days / 4 dungeons a week = 7 week s Long story, short, by March, assuming no raiding, I should be replacing my lowest grade item. First off, what's an upgrade? While I was searching for PAWN scales and Simcraft results, I found this forum post on EJ . About half way down the page, Peanut posts his simcraft stat prioritization levels for destro locks. # gear_stamina=4846 # gear_intellect=4355 # gear_spirit=20 # gear_spell_power=1729 # gear_hit_rating=1756 # gear_crit_rating=858 # gear_haste_rating=1298 # gear_mastery_rating=438 Using these values, I figured I had a fairly good Heroic Destruction Pawn scale. To simplify my numbers, I divided everything by 100 and used that (stam=4.846, etc.). ( Pa

Slow Week - No updates

Work has literally been eating my brain this week, ending in a project finally completing this Friday. Besides work, here's what I have learned. I am still looking for a pawn scale for destro. Both "Affliction", but Nibuca has one and their's one on EJ . Maybe it's time to fire up Simcraft and build one for myself?? Got a shock that maybe Destro does want haste ??  Mortigan is making a come back. If you missed it last time, he has a great post on raiding . Still relevant. Great post on the Blizzard forums about Casual players . A casual player is not someone to lazy to jump on the forums/wowhead/wowpedia/youtube for boss strats. A casual player is not someone who has to much of a "Life" to gem/gear properly. A casual player is not someone who lives their life around ruining your WoW experience. You can filter your Google Search results  to only posts made in the last # days. Which doesn't go to help you find anything new on the Blizz

They finally left me!!

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With each dismount , they chided me for leaving them in a strange location. They complained about what a " good friend " I was.. Now they're gone and I miss them.. Where'd you go Drix and Mojodishu?

Enchanting Evening

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By this weekend, I am planning to have almost all my equipment upgraded. I am running through Twilight Highlands and picking up a good portion of i333 gear replacing my Uldum greens.With that, I'd like to run through with guildies and enchant all my blues and purples. Here's what I am thinking for Destruction: (Vendor) Purchasable enchants: Boots - Lavawalker - Movement speed, stam and mastery. Personally good for both PVE and PVP situations. How better to "not stand in fire" than to be able to jump out before it hurts (too bad). Gloves - Mastery or Greater Mastery - Destro loves mastery. Mastery = increased damage from fire spells. Bracers - Precision (+50 hit) - at least until I max out my raiding hit. The other option is Haste and all the news I keep reading says Haste doesn't stack well for Destro. (darn if the haste buff doesn't make those incinerates fly during the dragon boss in Vortex Pinnacle) We're all about flash and bang, not the lon

I have legs!

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Playing a warlock, you get used to seeing your toon in robes. Long dramatic clothing that goes down to the ground. Today in a pugged a Heroic Deadmines. From the second to last boss (Cookie still has a fairly good wand too ! ), I picked up a chest piece that show my pants. I had to double check to see that I had my chest piece on...  i346 with stam, int, mastery and crit! sweet! I haz legs I came into this dungeon when they lost one of their DPS. Looked like a guild run as they were all from, well the same server and guild. The next series of fights to follow Cookie, evolved around Vanessa VanCleef (only in Heroic). She is a rogue, who poison's you. You then experience a series of nightmares and have to fight that nightmare's meta-boss. I died standing in the fire. Then I died standing in the fire again on the boat. Note the rope is a vehicle, grab it at the bottom. Edit: Not long before this was posted, I ran a heroic Blackrock and picked up the most excellent BOP

Set Oven to Cataclysmic Achievement

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I was looking for a way to get the achievement for my guild called " Set the Oven to Cataclysmic ". See, after your guild makes 5000 Cataclysm branded recipes, your can get the Broiled Dragon Feast recipe. This feast feads the raid/party and provides 60 stam and 60 points in highest stat. Sounds easy enough. 5,000 recipies by the entire guild. ATM, my guild has 950 of those done. The last 60 were all me. I bought the Kungaloosh  (alchololic mana food) replacement recipe off the cooking daily vendor in Orgrimmar. From there, I grabbed the portal to Twilight Highlands and in the Inn at the Dragonmaw Port, is Lizzy Lemons . She sells both materials for the South Island Ice Tea; ~5s for the water and ~8s for the fruit (or vice versa) 5000 x 14s = 700g. Assuming I do it myself (and I won't), we'll have the recipe by the time I finish leveling in TH. Soon to raids and 5-man parties near you...

Escape Artists

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This is not about WoW. This is about WoW intersecting my commute to work. See, I don't listen to broadcast radio on my short 10 mile commute to work, I listen to audio books. (Commercials??) More to the point, I listed to podcast-books, free books often read by the author, or another party who enjoys that genre. Over the last month, I listened to two different podiobooks that made me think, hmm, that sounds like Warcraft. The Warlock and the Good Man (by MK Hobson) - Think Red Dead Redemption meets WoW. Cowboys and goblins living together in a small town at the bottom of a mountain inhabited by an other-worldly goblin king. The visual of a priest/sheriff working together with a warlock was interesting. I liked the back story about how the warlock got his start, similar to the WoW lore (IMHO). This story was read back in September 2010, but is still on the site. (Yeah, I am a little behind these stories.) They've rated it "R" for content, gore and language. (snipp

Idle Thoughts: Guild Build

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I have an idea. I think it's a good idea. I know, it's a long shot, but that's why I created this Idle Thoughts category. So, I was reading in the upcoming PTR notes about the changes coming to the Guild tab: Guild Interface A View All button has been added to the profession display regardless of whether Show Offline Members is checked. Online members can now be sorted to the top of the View Crafters list. The guild reputation cap is now displayed in the tooltip. So, I can see all the various recipes that my guild can make, now I want a disenchant button. You know that function you get while in a group, to disenchant items when you have an enchanter on hand. See, I have a tailor in my guild who has a recipe for those cool, i346 pants. I have all the mats, but this guildie is in a different time zone, so she's never on, at least not when I am. I could mail her the mats, hope she makes the right ones, and wait until tomorrow. But I got a disenchant button, so..

Idle Thoughts: WoW Macro Library

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gotta love those moths With all the talk of macros in the blogosphere yesterday, I got to doing some of my own research. The night before, I ran through the Lost City dungeon and someone did the /love Oasis Moth emote for the Cata Squirrels achievement. In wrath, I had an emote macro (like this ). My research into WoW macros was to determine a max size. I had roughly remembered that macros had a 255 character limit (very visible in game, but not from the office). Hmm, in database terms, macros fields are strings; strings can be a maximum of 255 characters. < geek out > This leads me to believe, attached to your character table, is a macro table. The macro table has probably 5 fields (account id, character id, macro name, macro icon, macro code). Now, why would they want to setup a new table for each and every toon out there. No way, management overhead nightmare. They likely have a single table on each realm, that hosts all of the world of macros. < /geek out > WoW

Faking Gear Score

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Click to go to WowArmory Last night, I finished the quests in Uldum and saw that I still had a 328 average iLevel. Out of curiousity, I picked up the honored i333 cape that the Uldum Quartermaster had on sale. This cape is totally inappropriate for a warlock. Sure, it has the bonus stats of mastery and crit strike, but it's primary stat is strength. On the other hand, just purchasing this item brought my character's iLevel up 2 points (328 to 330). This doesn't seem right. Here I could roll greed on an agility trinket, or pick up a melee cape and fake my way into a (heroic) dungeon. Stack this up on all the non-cloth mandatory items (neck, back, both trinkets and potentially 3 weapon slots) and you have a well geared player that does 0 dps. Hmm, that explains my Lost City of Tol'vir run last night. We had a hunter doing between 300 and 1100 dps!.  It wasn't even Heroic. Unfortunately this group was rather feisty, so while he wasn't kicked, we wiped then dr