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

Three days and one drop

Three days go by and what have I gotten done in WoW? Not much unfortunately. Wednesdays are an off day for me.

Tuesday was patch day and with the disconnect issues going on I spent most of my time on my DK. I realize now that some people have no business trying to PvP. My DK was level 60 at the start of the night and in the starter gear you get for the initial quests. I am running around in hellfire and I end up in a bad pull. I had about 6 mobs on me beating me about the head and shoulders. I do OK and end up killing off three of them when another DK grabs me and commences to attacking me. So, I turn my attention to him and kill him. I look at his level and he is a 62. What?!? OK must be a fluke. I finish off the last three mobs and have to resummon my pet since he did actually kill that. Then I decide to see if I can kill some more mobs and stack up 5 more. Halfway through the same DK attacks again. He ends up with the same fate as last time. This time I did end up turning into a ghoul but did not die until I exploded myself so I could rez into my normal body. The he commences to attack again with no mobs on me. I really don’t get it. He couldn’t kill me while I was fighting a bunch of mobs and now he attacks me at full health and read for him. He died. Again and again. I think KoS said like 10 times I killed him that night before he gave up. I finally continue on and make level 61. Then I am fighting three of those ravager things to get their eggs and a retribution paladin hits me. I figure I am done now he’s level 63. Next thing I know I am standing there with his corpse, and the corpse of 5 ravagers ( got some adds in the running around fighting) and at like ¾ health. He didn’t come back for more. Lesson to be learned if you can’t PvP don’t attack people who are not bothering you.

When the servers finally came back online and stayed working I logged on my pally and did my cooking daily and logged off.

Thursday, our designated raid night came and when raid time came around I was online with 8 others waiting for one of our tanks to come online. Long story short at like 0100 he still had not come on. We ran heroic Gundrak and the purple ring dropped. The funny thing is I replaced the ring I had just gotten from heroic nexus on Monday.

We got into some PvP before the run in the crystallized fire farm in Borean Tundra. Those guys were good. We were not so much. They had titles we do not. You know the titles like Brutal Gladiator and the flawless victor. We finally ran the three of them off when our fifth showed up. We need to work on our coordination a bit on that. Didn’t help they made the sky’s not so safe with one of them being a shaman and the other a priest. The shaman knocks me off my mount and the priest gives him levitate. The hunter was plinking away as I am falling. And then right in front of the instance we jumped some people.

No Raid last night

Last night I logged on late (to minutes before raid time) due to work running over and causing my Monday basketball to go late as well. I figured I would get a ration of crap for being late. I should have known better. I had some flasks already and a few plus foods so I could realistically just go to the raid and get started anyway. So I log on and look at the guild list there are three people online (including me). What!?! Oh well, guess were not raiding tonight. I log off and log on my banker/AH character to check some auctions and when I get back on 5 minutes later there are 10 online including me. Wow, talk about bell tappers. Any way I look at what members are online and only two healers and no tanks are on. After I log in i see in guild chat "only need tanks and we are good to go for naxx." So, I look again at the guild list and see that only four of the members are level 80. Granted that several of them have 80 alts we don’t have enough for a naxx run. I say this and get annoyed comments.

So my arena partner logs on and asks if anyone wants to run some arenas. I let him know I am ready let’s go. We end up running some 3vs switching people in and out for points. Then we start our 2vs. Personally I like 2v2 arenas the best. A retribution paladin teamed with a frost mage is a pretty fun combination. The only problem is that last night we had four to five minute queues with our matches lasting less than a minute it was a lot of sitting around waiting for a quick flurry of activity. What I have found is that our cap right now is around 1400. As soon as we went above that we got smacked back down. It was still a lot of fun. By the way, I really need to get some better PvP gear. I really think it is funny when a druid shifts to kitty form and I drop HoJ and proceed to burst them from 100% to corpse before the stun wears off. Let this be a lesson for druids that don’t know, don’t shift to cat form in front of a paladin who has you targeted. The worst match we had was an elemental shaman and an enhancement shaman team. 8 totems make it hard to target who you want without clicking. And for those that don’t know those shamans can throw some serious DPS out. If they FF they can burn down you down before you can say uhh ohh. Anyway we ended around 1400 as I said.

After we finished up with the arenas the guild leader had come on and wanted to discuss raid schedules. We set up a schedule, much to my chagrin. As fun as raids are when they get scheduled it veers closer to the work zone then I prefer. I do understand that when you are dealing with more people it makes sense that you schedule things but, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I also brought up some loot rules. I had written out a simple looting rules plan a week or so ago and posted it on our guild site and a total of 2 people read it. By the way, that is kind of annoying. I explained it (again annoying to explain something I had already typed up) and after some discussion my policy was for the most part accepted. A couple said they would like to look into DKP and a couple others said that if we used DKP they didn’t want to go on the raids. I will hammer out a few details of my looting rules plan and post it here later on.

While we were having this meeting I was down in dragon blight farming fish for strength food and some idiot level 80 horde warrior starts fishing the node I was on. I mean come on the lake down there has like 5 or 6 spawn points and they respawn fairly quickly. Sometimes I wish they allowed me to hit another horde upside the head. So, I posted his name in guild chat and to our sister guild. I hope he doesn’t need anything from anyone of us.

Finally done with the meeting and with not enough guild members on to run naxx I wanted to run Heroic Gundrak for the ring I need to replace my last green quest piece. But, unfortunately two of the people that would go had already ran it since it was the daily. So, I got everyone to go to heroic nexus. And when we went to the tree boss low and behold the blue ring dropped for me so I am all blues and purples. Now I just need to start replacing my lower blues. I wish there was a good replacement for the venture co libram.

cya

Catch up

Well, I haven’t posted in awhile. I have been finding that when I log on in the evening after work I want to advance my main character (the paladin). So, I look to see who is on in the guild and most times we have ten people on plus or minus two. Then when I look to see who it is there is one or two people on that have tanks and the rest are all DPS types. I know I shouldn't say anything as I am on a DPS character right now as well. Seeing as I want to make my character better I go and do some quests for reputation and gold and make sure to do the dailies for the Wrymrest Accord. At some point someone with a healer gets on and we go do a heroic. I guess no one wants to run a healer now. I am glad that we can usually find a tank to run but, as the only thing I have ever done with my paladin is DPS and tank, it makes it hard to do a run.

I could try to round up a healing set and spec holy but, that’s not the type of paladin I am. I have never gone further into the holy tree then tier 2 or 3 for some divine strength and some off healing junk to get into some groups before paladin could do the massive amounts of DPS they do now.

OK as for an update since I haven’t posted in awhile. I got exalted with Wrymrest and got my pants and the drake. I finished exploring Northrend to get the tabard. I upgraded most of my gear by doing heroics. There is only one piece of my gear that is still a quest reward. The only good rings I have found are in heroic Gundrak and heroic nexus so, I have been trying to do those as much as possible. I haven’t had enough time to see what the proc rate is on the mirror of truth yet even though I went ahead and got one. While I was questing in storm peaks I went ahead and used the polearm from the rep gear and topped off that weapon skill to give me my fourth weapon to 400 for the achievement.
Now I need to get my warlocks tailoring skill up so I can make some new bags to get more storage space. I might do some leveling on him so I can get some cloth to make that stuff since I spent 1.6k gold on a dragon mount.

Holiday break

It has been a couple weeks and I have really not gotten much done due to spending a week or so out of town.
As a guild we have been doing some heroics and gave two of the 10-mans a try. Notice I said try. I think our DPS needs to gear up. Our tanks and healers seem to be doing fine but, the bosses stay alive too long so the healers end up running out of mana. I am not sure what DPS we are supposed to be at but, I am at around 1400-1800 depending on the fight. The next guy down (yes I am on top) is around 1300-1400. We had a couple of our guys PUG nax but, I don’t like PUG’s and there are still morons out there that think retribution paladins can’t DPS. I also got my northrend dungeon master achievement.

I got my purple crafted two-handed mace and helm. So my instance DPS set is shaping up OK. Let me tell you, that helm made a big difference in overall DPS (around +100), way more than I had expected. And that is without an enchant or gem in it yet. The mace I had expected to have a large impact and it did add around 100-150 or so. I still have not gotten around to making a plan for upgrades yet.

I am working on wyrmrest accord reputation currently. I really want the dragon mount but, the purple pants will be nice as well. Next will probably be ebon hold for the head enchant.

I teamed up with a frost mage for my first arenas of the season and we pulled off a 5-5 set of ten. My partner was the guy from our raids sitting at number two in DPS. We really had no problem with other two DPS teams but, healer-DPS teams posed some difficulty for us. Some of those healers can heal like crazy. I really can’t believe that with both of us banging away at the healer he can keep himself alive. We had problems with all the brands of healers. One of the fights was a DK/DK team both unholy far enough to get the ghoul form thing after you die. While that ghoul doesn’t last long if we concentrated on it, we both seemed to space out the fact that the ghoul might appear. So, when it happened the first one that died came around and killed the mage, I killed the other one and then both of those ghouls focus fired on me. I think with a little more practice we can do pretty good in there. We also did some 3v3 fights with a resto shaman, frost mage and ret pally. Those went ok. And we did a few two ret pally and resto shaman. Those went ok as well.