Where do I start?
The last 2 weeks now have been a blur of * have to do this.. and this and this in game, and now I am finally settling into what is called playing.
Whats my goal? I said I wasn’t going to raid. I am trying not to want to, but everything so far has been working up to better gear, getting professions high enough to get good stuff.
Got 505 chanting and 500 tailoring- so I am getting into the good stuff.
Including a offhand chant of 100+ Intellect. How sweet is that. Now it gets down to farming cloth. 50 gold a bolt is stupid. I have found a nicer spot then my advertised beach in Twilight Highlands – except it’s phased up at Dragon Maw pass. So I have left one quest incomplete for now. I found it by accident while questing waiting for a 5 man heroic group to form up. I kept killing mobs while I waited. I tried to share the place with a friend but he couldnt see the mobs.
It looks like what ever my reason for leaving to a new server pre cata can only be considered an awesome move, because when I have tried to log over to alts just to clear bags so I can transfer them there has been queues for over 1000 on Blackrock. ( I’lll leave eventually.. ) Apparently its up to 2000 in peak. The highest queue on Proudmoore has been 100 – I think it seems to have a more spread out US/Oceanic population so it’s not so bad at peak. Well at least not when I am logging in after work and such.
I tried my first rated Battlegrounds on the weekend. 15 Queued up. We lost the first AB, won the next Eos,and then lost the next Eos. It certainly is a different Pvp. They talked strats and raised that if its points we are after for now until the lines between has gear and doesn’t gets bigger then we may be better off doing arena which is disappointing.
My Guild Rep is low. I haven’t even cracked half of friendly. We got level 5 over the weekend so my pieces of copper and silver are filtering in to the bank, but I don’t have the rep to buy our standard because everything I have been doing has been with everyone but them. It’s fate – I do pipe up to go on a guild run – we get in, and the server says ‘shut down in 15 min’
I dps’d heroics, and I hate my mana situation. Picked up some nice heroic gear, and a couple of pieces of badge gear, and I’m already surpassing the need for Revered faction gear. Mostly 333 -346 i levels atm.I’m getting used to SWDing on cool down just to make sure I can get my mana back. I have also glyphed dispersion so my downtime between pulls is less, and my Dark Evangelism’s 5% mana return means I will blow a cool down on trash, its on 90sec CD . Multi dotting targets eats mana, but I don’t seem to be doing too poorly against similary geared classes.
I cobbled together some healing gear and then healed a couple of normals. It was ok. Groups being brave enough to pug seem to be a little more patient. Tanks got the message. Watch your healers mana. Ill work my way into the confidence to queue a heroic and heal.
I have to liken this ilevel heroic entry restriction to much like our gear score assessments. In this case Blizzard have made it a legit measuring tool by denying access to heroics till you get that magic number.
I got the magic number with a tanking trinket and some pvp gear. I wasn’t geared enough when I started, I am now, no probs. I did fine though but I was running with ‘friendlies’ But if a tank fakes his score – a healer fakes his score, then the dps fakes their score then what was the point – your run fails.
I queued for one heroic as dps on my own with out ‘friendlys’ – waited my 46 min – Only to find the tank doing something stupid with the marking. Skull would change every 2 sec, and I was trying to be the good little dps and dps skull. I said – stop changing targets or I just won’t hit the skull. “Oh will you – shut up you f*g” I looked at all of them from the same guild – and went yeah. 46 min is still not worth this, and left.
I somehow ended up with a collection of meta achievements – ok they were done intentionally. A few in our group I’ve been running with one and off are chasing the new Heroics meta already, and we seem to be geared and co-ordinated so far enough for most of them. Nothing is as cool as my ICC bone skelly mount so unless the new Drake is throwing up gold coins or can eat horde I’m not too terribly interested.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
I don’t seem to have much trouble with mana using Archangel on cooldown and Shadowfiend very often. Sure do wish Mind Flay would crit more though…
However, Mind Control is Awesome! I was pulling 50k dps doing Deadmines with Mind Control :O
We’re recruiting a Shadow Priest… if only you didn’t work while we raided… (well, I assume; 7 – 10 Pacific).
I struggle leveling up my tailoring bigtime at the moment; I refuse to buy overpriced cloth at the AH and it seems to me that the drops in 5mans are really poor. some of the instances have hardly any cloth drops whatsoever and it’s rare that I pick up larger numbers of 3+…..so I’m stuck at 485 at the moment.
On the bright side I maxed alchemy with very little financial effort. I guess tailoring is just gonna take some patience (makes me cringe each time I hear a guildmate maxed his first aid tho /sigh).
Whats a queue? Haven’t seen those since I left Garona. LOL
I for one am excited with the new game.
Whilst queues annoy me (Frostmourne US) I can get around them thanks to remote queueing.
However, the difficulty of the new heroics is what gets me. I’m sorry, but your average raider from ICC who had 11/12HM probably still isn’t going to be good enough to heal most of these heroics at ilvl 329. Same with the tanks.
The heroics have been overtuned I feel to keep the scrubs out. Not that this is a bad thing, but damn it still makes it hard even with a competent group. I never managed to get Springvale down until I found a healer who could just heal my arse through Desecration.
This is just an example of how silly some of the tuning is.
And masses of trash doesn’t make for fun game times either. I understand wanting to slow down the pace of things, but needing 2-3 CCs on a number of pulls just seems to be taking things to an extreme – that said it also keeps the scrubs out or more easy to spot.
Overall though – apart from these few niggling annoyances, everything else seems to be spot on.
Thought I’d take a second to let you know about a really nice spot for farming embersilk cloth.
On Tol Barad Peninsula (the northern island) there is a spot called The Restless Front. There are several packs of mobs there fighting eachother, which means they rarely aggro on you until you hit them and are frequently at very low health to start. Just go around killing those off and you’ll find yourself with plenty of cloth in no time. A lot of the time they drop three pieces of cloth each!
The best place I know of is the packs of mint non-elite Shnotz infantry men. They are guarded by one elite with 220k hp, but he is susceptible to mind control… If only he was s caster with air. Alas he is a hunter bit packs of none are so sweet. The full pack is ten, the exact number of the aoe