Dailies Heroics and other games

It's been a week since I posted anything but, in all fairness I did not get much time in game due to personal life and a birthday (not mine) during the weekend. Since I last posted I have done dailies, ran some heroics and starting calculating to figure out what gear I can get based off of maxdps and rawr. I also have to limit the gear based on not doing any raids.

As far as dailies go I have dropped the fishing and cooking dailies to cut my daily time consumption down. So, I am left with tournament and venom hide dailies. I am still only champion for 2 cities so I am stuck doing the dailies to get those valiant seals and the starter champion seal dallies. Venom hide dallies are still boring after you do each one once. I still have over two weeks until I am get the new mount and 12 days until I get the Crusader title.

I have gotten in some heroics which showed me that I need to work on my gear since I was out DPS'd on a couple PUG's by both the other DPS. I did get Legplates of Relentless Onslaught from H ToC 5-man. Very nice upgrade over Legplates of Bloody Reprisal

With 3.2 out now I realize I have to evaluate my gear to see what I can improve on without counting on any raids. That means maybe one or two drops from regular ToC 5-man, H-ToC 5-man and badge gear. Luckily both my gear BiS sources allow for filtering based off source. Unfortunately neither of their filters work great. So, I am currently compiling a list of BiS for a retribution paladin without going into a raid. Then I will figure out the change in DPS for each piece to figure out what to buy first. Of course this is all while trying to do H-ToC 5-man as often as possible and adding the daily heroic in when possible and then adding as many other heroics on top of that whenever I can.

Now in other news I am trying out the new Champions Online game here and there. I think that as far as character customization goes the game is incredible. I took way to long in designing my toon. When I got in the game it seemed fairly straight forward for someone who has played MMO's. The interface seems fairly simple. As far as combat goes I am not sure as I only got through the first dozen or so quests. I only have three abilities: block, short range attack and long range attack. I hope that more depth comes into play as I progress. My main concern for this game has to do with the payment model. They are going for a subscription AND micro transaction model. From everything I have heard they are sticking with the 15 USD and adding MT's. I don't see this game as being worth more than any other game to start with. I personally think that the game will have problems picking up people when they want more money than games that have years of development behind them. Well, that is enough non WoW related news.

Personal patch results

After trying out the new battleground, five-man and some dailies (including the new mount quest-line) I am kind of underwhelmed.

 

It does seem like the DPS drop wasn't as bad as I had feared.  This is probably due to the last minute change to the SoCor to make the damage actually ramp.  Though I did notice an overall DPS drop in all fights but extended boss fights.  The PvP burst loss does hurt though I still can handle most people.

 

The new five-man has some interesting mechanics in it though I think a little more time could have been spent on the scenery.  It is only one room.  It was cool the first time I went in and the announcer guy called out my name and went through his little speech.  But, the third time and beyond I was just wishing he would skip it.  The drops are good but, overall most of the dungeons in Northrend, outlands and even the old world had more thought put into them.

 

I will say the new battleground is pretty fun to play.  The new idea of launching or dropping into the enemy keep is pretty neat.  The different capture points for different vehicles and resources are interesting.  I should probably read about the idea behind the battleground to get a better idea of what is going on though.

 

I am currently champion for 2 cities (Org and Silvermoon) and working on UC.  The dailies are starting to wear on me though so I am not sure if I will get the crusader title.  I have the ambassador title already so all I need is the valiant seals and the argent crusade rep.  I wish there was some other way to build up those things.  We will see if I make it the 14 more days it is going to take.

 

I am currently two days into the path for getting the venomhide mount.  That is annoying to have to go back to ungoro, silithis or tanaris to quest those.  I found a short cut in sholozar basin in that waygate thing.  I just go through that jump down the mountain and ride over to the flight point or southern ungoro to do the daily.  Not sure if that waygate thing works for everyone or not.  But, it is worth a try to save the run from CoT (the first short cut I tried) to, at the closest, western tanaris but possibly farther.

 

In case anyone is wondering I have not set foot in a raid since my return to the game.  My guild went once or twice but I didn't have the block of time to commit to a raid.  Maybe someday.  Until then I will just continue heroics and dailies.

Achievements

I have been somewhat of an achievement junkie this last week. At the beginning of the week I decided I wasn't going to wait any longer and went to Ice Crown and got my last 3 quests for Ice Crown: The Final Goal by soloing some more 5 man quests. These were the ones were some ghost chick hovers above an arena floor and you take the quests and she flies up and you kill a bunch of baddies, turn in, pick up another quest and so on. This in turn gave me Loremaster of Northrend.

This weekend I decided to work on some old world rep by doing the starter quests in Trisifal Glades which got me to exalted with Undercity and as a side benefit got me the explore Trisifal Glades Achievement. Now, I know I could get me rep by just doing the Argent tournament dailies. Meaning NOW I know I didn't when I started.

One of my guildies made level 80 on one of his alts this weekend so he wanted to do some heroics I was able to influence the choice of Heroics and after a couple of hours Halls of Lightning, Oculus and Old Kingdom are scratched off the list and bam I have the Heroic Dungeonmaster achievement completed. Along with that we got the Lightning Struck and the Timely Death achievements done. Meanwhile I got exalted with Kirin Tor for that achievement.

I started working on the Argent Tournament thing and got Argent Valor last night along with learning that now when I do the dailies I will be getting Horde city rep (small amounts right now since I had to start with Silvermoon who I am already exalted with)

I was doing my cooking and fishing dailies everyday so, I got the 500 fish achievement. With the Emblems I got from the heroics we were doing I got the Libram of SoC which gave me the superior achievement.

All in all I got 14 achievements in 7 days. We'll see if I can get anything like that this week.

If someone is hitting people with a big hammer it is always better to be the one who is swinging the hammer.

Weekend Report

Another weekend gone and what have I gotten done?

Quests-
I am still working on the Icecrown quest achievement. I am at 133/140 now and all the quests I have left are group quests. I got some guildies to help me with a few of them but, several of the ones left now are in phased areas of the map. And one of them requires more than one person in the group to be on the quest.

Reputation-
I got exalted on Knights of the Ebon Blade by running a bunch of heroics and also the quests in Icecrown. I also made it to honored on Sons of Hodir doing the dailies. I am not sure which tabard to wear in instances now since I didn’t see much in the way of reputation gear for the other two factions. I am just wearing the Kirin Tor tabard until I decide since more rep with them lowers repair costs in Dalaran.

Gear-
I got my new bracers enchanted and put some gems in them so I wear them now. Those replace my vengeance bindings bringing my epic count up to eight. Because of my new reputation with the Knights I was able to get some new boots which replace my crafted ones. More than likely I won’t replace my helmet since it is in the top three in the game right now. I finally made a list of heroics to do to replace my blue armor to best pre-naxx in slot. I also helped one of our enchanters to make his runed titanium rod so he could put massacre on my polearm and greater assault on my boots.

PvP-
While doing the daily for the Viking women a rogue and DK tried to kill me. Both of them were level 80 so, I figured I was dead. Well, it turns out that they should have left me to do my daily since they both got to do the flight of shame about 60 seconds after they attacked. Then after they resurrected they ran away. Sometimes people are just amusing. The next day a mage tried the same thing, attack me while I am doing the pit fighting. He ended up fully following their example by making his flight of shame in around 45 seconds. Also last night I did a Wintergrasp defense, unsuccessfully I might add, and got like 3000 honor. That puts me around 19k honor. Maybe I will buy something soon.

Heroics-
We ran a few heroics (HoL, UP and UK) and I have to say I have not successfully killed Loken on heroic yet. It is really annoying that we can’t get that one done. We tried the stand and fight method and the healer died every time. We tried the up and down path and we could only do like 4 times up and down before we screwed it up. We tried the right left method and didn’t even make it to the right before we died. I don’t know what to do. I need to finish that one but, I hate dropping 75-100 gold on attempts. That’s more then I usually spend on repairs for a raid night.

Alts-
I ran my lock a little bit to try and get him up in level and work a little on his tailoring. I really want to get his tailoring up so I can make bigger bags for my main. I just can’t get enough interest in him to level him up.

Weekend report

Another weekend is gone. I decided to do the entire honor your elder quest series and realized that that is a large time investment. I ended up finishing all of them except a few the ones in the Northrend instances. I will try to get those done fairly soon. I wouldn’t mind getting another title besides Jenkins. While doing the quests I ended up getting exalted with org and getting close on UC.

We ran some heroics as a guild but, I didn’t get any gear ups for my main spec. We did AN, Gundrak, Drak’tharon keep.

I have been doing the daily cooking quest everyday and for the last 6 or 7 days it has been the same one. I am about sick of making a plate for the gathering at the legerman.

I really need to figure out a gear upgrade plan for my paladin instead of just saying I need to do it. My plan is to make a list of all my gear. Find what the best gear I can get from a heroic is. Use a formula I got from somewhere to rate the amount of improvement each gives. And finally, rank the gear by amount of improvement. My fear is that there is not going to be that many pieces that give an improvement in heroics.

Right now my plan is:
1) Finish the lunar festival achievement
2) Make a gear plan
3) Work on finishing the quests in Northrend
4) Run heroics to achieve gear plan

Botanica and a couple of Halls

Last night I ran the daily Wyrmrest quest. I think the achievement for running a daily quest five days in a row is broken. I have run that specific quest like 7 or 8 days in a row,
Then a guildy asked for a Botanica run to finish off some alchemy quest so we started off the night back in TBC. It was pretty simple so we burned through in about 15 minutes or so and headed back to Northrend.
Two more people added to the group and we headed to Storm Peaks to try out those instances. Ran the halls of Stone first with some of their lowers 75 Ele shammy, 76 tankadin, 77 disc priest, 80 frost mage and me 80 ret pally. It was a cake walk. The priest got some drops and I think the tankadin got one as well.
Since it was so easy we decided to go across the way and burn through Halls of Lightning as well. So the shaman logged over to his 80 retribution paladin and we gave it a shot. Three of the five of had never done it before so we wiped two times on the second boss but, we figured it out and burned him down too. Everything went fine until Loken. The whole tank him in one spot, run away when he is casting his AoE then running back seemed to be too much for the group. It probably didn’t help the tank was 76 and the three DPS were doing decent DPS. The priest finally called it and I went away unfulfilled.
Summary for the night: three instances ran, several deaths, almost 100 gold in repairs and not a single upgrade. I should probably figure out what gear I need for upgrade and map out a plan to upgrade it. I will have to shoehorn that in with trying to get everything else done at the same time. I really need to get better gear.