New Project ctd. - Picking a Main for Cataclysm

After a long hiatus, I've decided to start the blog back up.

For the past couple months, my play time has been even less than before. I'm getting married in August so wedding planning is taking up most of my weekends and during the week I've been logging in basically just to post some auctions and log back off. Quietly, I'm trying to reach the gold cap but since Ive only been posting auctions 5-6 times per week it's a slow process - I think I'm at around 50k gold currently.

I've also found a new focus for this blog. In preparation for Cataclysm, I've begun a mini adventure - choosing a main for Cataclysm. As of this post, I'm considering all my characters higher than level 40 to be in the running. But I'll quickly eliminate some of them right now.

The contenders:
Jasari, level 80 Blood Elf Paladin.
Profs: 450 Mining, 450 JC, 450 Fishing, 450 Cooking
Epeen Perks: Tutle Mount, 1 Thunderfury Binding
She was my main during my WotLK raiding career. This included raid leading through Naxx, Malygos, Sarth + Drakes, and Ulduar (with some hardmodes). The release of ToC coincided with the disbandment of my guild and the end of my raiding career for this expansion. Since then I've pugged raids here and there but never really gotten back into anything remotely serious. I haven't really played her much since my guild disbanded and for whatever reason don't find myself very interested in dusting her off more more than a JC vending machine.

Tuwei, level 80 Troll Priest
Profs: 450 Tailoring, 450 Herbalism, ~425 Fishing, ~425 Cooking
Epeen Perks: ZA Bear Mount, "Hand of A'dal title"
He was my original main. I raided with him through BC, including Kara, SSC, TK, Hyjal, and BT before I quit the game while I finished college and my honors thesis. My greatest WoW memories are with him. Downing Vashj and Kael for the first time (pre 2.3). Getting a beautiful Zul'Aman Bear mount. Sporting the epeen boosting "Hand of A'dal" title. From a purely, "this character makes me feel cool" perspective, Tuwei is tough to beat. And while I love raiding as a shadow priest, I can't stand running 5mans if I'm not a tank. Additionally, the main reason I enjoy DPSing in raids is that it's easier to find pugs that way and I tend to not get as annoyed with retards because I can find some satisfaction in topping the meters - even if the raid is ultimately a failure. Tanking is more rewarding when you're in a good group or a good guild, but it's infuriating when you're in a pug with a bunch of idiots. Tuwei's definitely a contender but his lack of tanking ability may cost him the title.

Tooee (soon to be Mahalo), level 80 Tauren Druid
Profs: 450 Alchemy, 450 Enchanting
Epeen Perks: None
He was originally created a casual alt long ago. Even his name is meant to sound like "Tuwei". I never dreamt he'd actually become my main, but when 3.3 introduced the new LFG tool this druid inspired the creation of this blog through his pug tanking antics as I leveled him up. I absolutely love the versatility of druids. A druid in the right hands can do so much for a raid. Battle rez, and innervate continue to be overpowered raid buffs brought exclusively by druids, and a feral druid can DPS or tank decently regardless of whether they're spec'd more toward kitty or bear. The fact that I'll be able to change is race (and name) to Troll (and Mahalo) in Cataclysm is a huge bonus as well. Tooee (Mahalo) is probably the front runner right now, the one drawback I see is that I'm probably going to have to find a guild in need of a tank, which is usually more difficult than finding a guild in need of a DPSer.

Ventulus, level 80 Undead Warlock
Profs: 450 Engineering, 450 Inscriptions
Epeen Perks: None
Originally name Tuwie, this was my level 39 twink through most of BC. I leveled him to 70 right before WotLK released and then leveled him to 80 when I wasn't raiding on Jasari. I changed his name when I transferred him to another server to play with a friend of mine. I do enjoy playing him and I like what I've seen for Warlocks in Cataclysm. But if I'm going to be choosing a DPS class, Tuwei is still the current favorite.

Ritzenhein, level 79 Troll Shaman
Profs: None
Epeen Perks: None
While I was leveling Ritz, I was sure he would take the spot of my main for Cataclysm. I liked the idea of DPSing through BC, Tanking for WotLK, and Healing for Cataclysm. The problem? As soon as I hit 79 I suddenly lost interest. He's seriously been sitting at level 79 for months, I just don't have any desire to play him anymore and I'm not sure why. I leave him on the list because should I have a sudden change of heart, I do have a high level shaman who would be easy to switch to. The fact that he doesn't have any professions yet, does hurt his chances though.

Rono, level 56 Orc Rogue
Profs: ~150 Enchanting
Epeen Perks: None
Toward the end of BC I was leveling him with the intent to raid on him in WotLK. But ended up finding a guild that needed a tank so Jasari took center stage instead. Since then I never really god around to leveling him. I think as a melee class, Orcs look awesome which does give Rono some cool points. But honestly, now I see his as a druid that's permanently stuck in cat form (no offense to rogues out there).

Ventulus, level 49 Orc Warrior
Profs: None
Epeen Perks: None
I just started leveling this guy on a server with some college friends. Warriors have always appealed to me because their mobility is awesome. They're also OP at low level tanking. It's painfully obvious that they were originally the only class that was meant to tank. Even at level 49, I have most of the skills I need to tank anything effectively. With BoA gear, I'm doing close to 60% of the total damage of the group and that's not exaggerating at all. This is probably the most OP I've ever felt in the game. At 80 I know everything else catches up but I do enjoy the warrior's play style. If I do choose a tank for Cataclysm I think it'll probably be Ventulus (the warrior not the warlock), or Tooee (Mahalo). Right now it's a tossup. I love the versatility of the Druid but I love the charging, thunder-clapping brutality of the Warrior.

Current Rankings:

Front Runners: Druid, Warrior, Priest
Contenders: Paladin
Back of the pack: Warlock, Shaman, Rogue
Out of the Running: None.

New Project?

I've basically gotten bored again. Still playing some on my Druid because I hate running heroics as anything except a tank. I'm brainstorming some kind of new project to blog.

Stay tuned...

The Return of the Shadow Priest

So over the weekend a couple things happened.

First, I did a 25man ToC with my guild. I came as feral DPS and did decent for my gear ~6.5k DPS. But I realized something during the run. I don't enjoy playing melee DPS very much. One of the reasons I "rerolled" druid was because I wanted a class that could tank 5mans, since I get extremely irritated by piss poor 5man tanks, but one that I could have fun DPSing in raids. I never enjoyed ret on my Paladin, but I thought it was because ret's rotation is pretty boring. Cat DPS is more involved and I thought it'd be more interesting for me. It definitely is a difficult class to master and I'm far from mastering it, but I'm finding that I just don't like melee. Things feel too hectic when I'm up the boss's ass. I prefer the methodical nature of caster DPS. The obvious solution would be to go boomkin, however I find boomkin to be a hideous sight and I can't ever imagine myself playing one.

So while I was considering what I would do next, I figured I'd level my shadow priest some more. If you've read my first blog entry, you'll know that my Shadow Priest was my first ever main. He's who I played when I killed Kael and Vashj and scored a ZA bear. When I had the time to raid 20+ hours a week, it was my priest. My shadow priest was my first love.

So I logged on Tuwei, bought dual spec and cold weather flying and start leveling. I had left him at 73 a while back when I'd play him occasional between raiding on my Paladin. I went with a holy off spec for now just because it's nice to heal the occasional instance while leveling since it doesn't take much effort or energy.

I healed a couple runs, ran a couple quests and then decided to finally queue just as DPS so I could remember what it felt like to melt faces. It felt good!

My priest is still wearing mostly T5 and some heirloom gear. I only ran a couple Hyjal runs before I quit back in the day so I don't have any T6, but I have the sweet pink mace from there. The gear is about on par with level 75-76 blues it looks like but I'm raping damage meters against people whose "gear score" is considered higher than mine. And it's fucking fun. Especially after getting Mind Sear. My experience when tanking is that ret pallies and DKs usually dominate 5man meters. But it really seems like shadow preists have excellent tools for 5mans. Mind Sear is one of the best mass AOE spells in the game, and with multi target dotting, SPs can dominate on 2-3 pulls too. I really can't tell you how fun it is to play my priest again and how many memories it brings back.

I don't know yet whether I'll actually raid on Tuwei when I hit 80 or if this is just a temporary fun little tangent. But I think I might be done with my Druid for now. I know I'm going to miss being able to raid on a consistent schedule when I hit 80 though so there's a good chance the fun will only last until I'm fully geared from badge/heroic gear.

334: Vault of Archavon

Yesterday I finally got to try to new boss in VoA.

First I tanked 10man. Our group tried two healing it which caused us to wipe once but we got it on the second try pretty easily. As a tank the fight's extremely easy, you just taunt back and forth with the other tank at 3-4 stacks while making sure to let your debuff fall off. You'll want to pull him toward the back of the room some to give DPS room to spread out and kill the orbs that spawn.

Later I got to join a group as kitty DPS. They said "5k minimum" DPS. 5k is pretty low in a 25man and I was confident I'd be fine but I still don't have a full cat set - had to use my tanking cloak and one tanking trinket. Before I joined the group I had been practicing on a target dummy and was consistently between 4.1k-4.3k. Since raid buffs make a huge difference, especially for crit levels which cats are extremely dependent on I knew I'd be a lot higher in a raid.

Before we pulled the new boss, the raid leader said "If we wipe and anyone's low on DPS I'm going to boot you. If two people are rolling on the same item and one person is at least 2k DPS higher than the other person, I'm giving it to them." Again, DPSing is easy and people are idiots so I thought even with my sub par gear I'd be okay. But since I'd never really DPS'd on my Druid before I was a little nervous.

We pulled once and wiped because tanks didn't pull him back far enough and DPS were dying. But it was a fast wipe so not enough to really judge DPS. Our second pull went fine and the fight was simple enough. I was pleased to see myself #5 for DPS at 6.4k. This isn't exactly worthy of flexing my epeen, but for only having about 50% crit unbuffed, under 1k ArP, a tanking cloak and one tanking trinket, I thought it was solid. The cat "rotation" is also starting to feel a lot less awkward - it helps when you have a warrior to keep up the 30% bleed debuff.

I didn't end up getting any loot from any of the bosses but the extra frost badges were nice. And it was good to see that my DPS is coming along. I think gear is holding me back more than skill at this point. There's definitely still room for me to improve but I'm getting decent uptimes on rip/rake now (I'll start posting WoLog reports soon). And when I get some more gear - particularly the trinket from H FoS things will really start coming together.

One final thought - I'm considering getting some the i245 DPS craftables made. Crusader orbs are going for a cheap 160g nowadays and they'd be HUGE upgrades. The main thing holding me back is that even 10m ICC has drops better than them. My DPS doesn't seem to be too terrible but we'll see. The higher gear score will make it easier to get into pugs so that's something to consider.

Opinion: Gearing from Pugging

My previous post included my current gear list that I obtained almost entirely from 5mans. I thought I'd do another post that replaced the few raid items I'd gotten with gear from badges/5mans. Now, I haven't looked closely enough to insure that this is truly a "BiS 5man" list, but it's very close. There are possibly upgrades to the i200 items on the list but this is a set that's good enough to past most raid pug's gear checks.

Keep in mind that there are quite a few easy to obtain upgrades to this list that can be snagged from very puggable raids such as Onyxia, ToC 10, and even Ulduar. This should serve as just a baseline for what you can go after while pugging.

Here's a wowhead profile of my recommended gear: http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=20771511

Note that you're easily hit capped, but still about 3% away from dodge capped on expertise. This is definitely acceptable as feral cat is one of the few specs where hit and expertise aren't always your best stats below the cap. You also get the 2pc T9 which is pretty good and sit at 531 ArP without any procs. This is low, but again all this gear is obtainable from badges or 5mans so that number will shoot up as you start doing raids. The idol is the frost badge one, but any of the other idols are decent too.

312: Ready for ICC?

Over the weekend and got a lot of playing in. My tank set is basically done for now. I'm in full epics, mostly i232+ with just a couple i200, i219 left. It's more than enough for heroics and VoA which will be the main places that I'm tanking for pugs. In addition I've almost completed my kitty set as well. I farmed reg ToC5 a bunch last night and finally snagged the ArP trinket. This gives me enough ArP from gear to make it the best stat to gem for, which is a huge step because I was trying to hold off on gemming too much of my kitty gear because I knew I'd have to replace all that agility with ArP pretty soon.

My cat set isn't quite complete though, there are still a couple items that I'm looking for from the new ICC heroics:

Needle-Encrusted Scorpion from FoS. This will be tough because there is almost always one other person rolling on it and I haven't even seen it drop yet.

Band of Stained Souls from PoS.

Choking Hauberk

Barbed Ymirheim Choker from PoS or Broach of the Wailing Night from badges. The Choker is slightly better but if I don't see it drop soon I'll just buy the badge one.

Chewed Leather Wristguards from PoS.

There are a couple other minor upgrades from some of the reg ICC 5mans (upgrading my i200 to an i219 but I don't think they're worth the effort. According to wow-heroes my gear is ready for ICC10 so hopefully I'll start running that and fill in a couple of the worse slots.

Picking up those last few items mentioned above will give me the following profile:
http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=20767916
These items were obtained almost entirely through 5mans. The only exceptions being my weapon (from XT 25) and my gloves (from ToC 10). Both of these have suitable replacements - there's actually a better weapon in H HoR and plenty of decent gloves replacements. There are only a few "bad" items - the cloak and belt are in serious need of upgrades and the boots are "kinda bad". But in general the gear is good enough to progress through the newest content in the game (on a 10 man level) and enough to not contribute some even on a 25man level.

153: Almost "Done"

Well, I've now killed ~150 heroic bosses.  I have the i245 headpiece, tanking ring, dps ring, shoulders, and the i232 T10 feral chest piece.  I have some bracers from 25man Flame Levi and a staff from 25man XT.  I still have a couple blues and a couple i200 pieces, but it's safe to say I overgear all the non-ICC heroics.  It was extremely fast and super easy to get to this point but now I'm at the point where I'm looking toward raids - I'll probably be kitty DPS for those.


My DPS is pugs is picking up.  Pushing ~2.8k now and hopefully I'll be breaking 3k before long.  One thing I was worried about when switching from my paladin was that I wouldn't be able to stroke my epeen as much on the damage meter in heroics, but it's looking like I had nothing to worry about.  Ferals do solid damage and when I'm no longer in blues I'm sure I'll be able to give my paladin a run for her money.

Now, there are a few heroics I want to talk about:

Forge of Souls
I've gotten thrown into the first two of the new ICC heroics for the first time this weekend.  They were actually a lot of fun and definitely more challenging that anything blizzard has given us so far from a 5man perspective.  Forge of Souls was easy from a tanking perspective but there was significantly more damage flying around than in other heroics so I was glad to have a solid healer.  The packs with a couple casters are fun because I group up on one caster, throw a few swipes/mauls and then charge/interrupt the other to keep aggro and keep damage intake down a bit.  It's not a huge deal, but it's always fun to throw in a few little tricks to make runs even smoother.

Pit of Saron
I hadn't read up on these new heroics before getting into them as I was expecting to need a little more gear before I'd get assigned them.  So I always had to ask the party to let me know anything important.  Pit of Saron was  a lot less intuitive to me than Forge of Souls.  The huge open landscape had me wondering where I was supposed to go, but luckily the group pointed me in the right direction.  The trash and first two bosses are super easy though even though I was intimidated by the bigness of it at first.  They really don't need any explanation besides "hide behind a rock when he runs away" and "stay out of bad shit and run if he chases you".  They were both easy one shots.  The trash leading to the last boss was a bit harder for my first time there.  I didn't get a good explanation of the collapsing tunnel and wiped once because everyone sprinted ahead of me who didn't know it was a gauntlet type thing.  I'm fine taking the blame though.  After one run through that stuff I'm sure it'll be easy the next time now that I know what the expect.  The final boss wasn't bad, the only explanation I got was "he does evil stuff" so I just stood still and tanked him and he died.  Later I heard that I was supposed to kite him as some point but that didn't seem to be an issue at all.

Halls of Reflection is the last instance to check off the list, but I still need better gear before it'll unlock for me so that'll be for another time.

Occulus
Finally, I want to mention Occulus.  This is now the easiest and one of the fastest instances in WotLK.  Anyone who says otherwise has not run it recently.  If people know how to avoid the trash dragons, you only have to kill 1-2 the entire run and even if people are idiots, you should only have to kill 5-6.  Every boss leading up to the last one takes less than a minute to kill and the trash can be done without a healer.  Yesterday I had a group in which the healer left after the first boss and we proceeded to 4man the rest of the instance without him.  I hotted myself up before each pull but probably didn't even need to.  Everything dies ridiculously fast and you even get 2 bonus badges at the end along with some gems.  I still haven't seen the blue drake, but I'm sure it'll show up eventually.  But the point is, people should not be afraid of this instance, it's one of my favorite to get because of how fast it is and how many badges you get.