Oops I did it again

Is it just me or did Freya get kinda hot over the course of the expansion?

When I first fired up WoW I knew exactly what class I wanted to play. I wanted to be a druid. I wanted to be the class in the game that could do everything. Artorin was my main from the moment I started playing right up to the end of Burning Crusade. During this time I came to realize that while druids could indeed do everything... there were some classes that just did it better and that I enjoyed playing more.

The result of course was my druid being on the back burner and only now, more then a year later, he has finally hit level 80. Being able to find groups quickly as a healer is what really drove me to finish off those last few levels. I really enjoy healing and the changes that I originally protested (mainly nourish) I've come to love. Yesterday my druid hit 80 around 5:00 PM. I then spent the next 7 hours going from regular runs to heroic runs. I leveled entirely in my BC epics from tier 4 and 5 content and only at 80 started replacing gear. All I have left to replace is a trinket and my gear will be all 200 up. He has the emblem of triumph idol and enough emblems to pick up the tier 9 shoulders.

I'm kinda sad now though... I like being able to say I have 8 80's! For some reason 9 80's just doesn't have the same ring :(

Now to level my deathtard to 80... I still have a good 7 days left of my holiday it could happen!

A tale of two pugs

It is no surprise I'm sure that I am still running heroics like crazy trying to gear up. Like all of you I've experienced absolutely terrible players and incredibly skilled players. Then there are simply the uninformed.

What I present to you today is the tale of a dungeon experience I had while on my druid Artorin. The last few days I've been trying to queue atleast once for the dungeon daily on my now 78 druid. The 2 emblems of triumph and 33k xp is nothing to sneeze at when you are working your way to 80. Artorin is still very well geared from Burning Crusade and going as a tree I find I have a lot of time to sit and observe what other players are doing.

In this case we had Ezili and Vaeled (names changed slightly since). Ezili was from another server and was our protection paladin tank. She used blessing of wisdom and seal of wisdom, as well as having 70 points in the protection tree. Vaeled was of course... a death knight from my very own server. He was an unholy speced DK who put 15 points into blood instead of shadow, skipped out of necrosis and didn't have gargolye talented. He also had 3 unspent talent points and never once summoned his ghoul.

I first mentioned something to the DK who was actively using death and decay before the mobs got to the tank in addition to not using pestilience... at all (except I saw him use it once on a single target pull). I asked him if he realized he had 3 unspent talent points. His response was "yeh lol I lvled so fast i didn't have time"....

You didn't have time to push a button 3 times to alocate 3 talent points??? Seriously? Oh yes... he was serious. He also linked the damage meter after nearly every pull when I commented that the tank was beating all of them in dps. He also took more damage during the brann bronzebeard fight then the tank did by standing in the fire whenever humanly possible. Which of course he said was because it was normal and that I would heal him...

On the flip side of this terribad DK was our tank the protection paladin. Before one of the pulls I mentioned to her that she should try blessing of sanctuary and seal of vengeance, then use divine plea before pulls to keep up her mana. What happened next? She listened! She had to dig through her spell book a bit to find the abilities I mentioned but find them she did. Before the end of the instance she was doing 400 more dps, totally destroying all the rest of the group, and had no mana issues while having 10% more str, stam, and 3% damage reduction.

After we killed the last boss she thanked me for giving her advice. She told me that it was another group that pointed out that she should be using seal and blessing of wisdom... probably because she was drinking between pulls and slowing them down. After about 30 mins of talking I told her that she queue for another dungeon and I would go a long so that we could continue talking. She queued us up... and we got halls of stone again... this time though she never had any mana issues or threat issues. She was also a little easier to heal, which isn't saying much because she was damn easy to heal in the first place. I never dipped below 80% mana on any of the trash pulls and proudly refused some mana biscuits from the mage.

During this second run she hit 80 and we began talking about gear options and getting ready for heroics. All in all we spent about 3 hours doing dungeon runs and talking. I gave her my e-mail address so that she could ask questions since we were on different servers. I really hope she doesn't get discouraged while gearing up for heroics because despite her lack of knowledge she was a very skilled player. I gave her the link to maintankadin and I hope she takes a look or at least keeps in contact with me.

It is truly rare these days to find someone willing to listen to advice and learn. I'm proud to have been able to help someone. But the real pride lies on the person who is able to listen and take advice instead of wallowing in self ignorance.

Da PvP

So I was PvPing on my druid the other day and we had just won AV... and the strangest thing happened. I had just died and resurrected and was looking at the leader boards... when all of a sudden my character started moving.

My druid switched into cat form apparently summoned one of my pets, the spirit of competition, and proceeded to start attacking a horde player. Don't believe me? Look at the screen shot! I couldn't move or do anything but continued to go through a pretty solid cat rotation on the player with faerie fire and keeping up bleeds.

Anyway this doesn't have any real relation to what I wanted to talk about aside from the fact that it was an interesting unexplainable event and involved pvp.

I've largely ignored PvP thus far in WotLK mostly because there has been so much to do in PvE and I've largely enjoyed raiding and instancing. Things are starting to change though...

Gearing up has become easier then ever and part of the challenge of theorycrafting and researching upgrades has dissipated when you can just go into a single instance and get all of your gear. Not to mention for the most part all of my 80's at the moment are pretty much finished when it comes to gear. No none of them have all best in slot but they have enough gear to perform in the raid environment that I would play them in. Essentially every character is Ulduar ready. Half of them are ToC ready/geared.

So I've been working on my rogue and druid getting them to 80. I realized that my rogue was 76 after making my post bitching about not having anywhere to quest... and so headed to Sholazar. Now she is 77 and there is a good chance that she may hit 80 by the end of the weekend.

All of this including the malaise I talked about over the current raid content has pushed my interest more into PvP. I spent a lot of time doing BG's and Arena's at 70 on my druid when I stopped raiding, so this transition isn't new for me. With PvE being either dull or seemingly pointless PvP is where the challenge is so that is where I am heading.

Last night after running Coren 15 times Kobeck, Phired and I decided to put together a 3v3 arena team. I decided to go on my shaman and Phired went on his lock. Kobeck decided to stay on his DK so we went as a 3 dps team, ele shaman/frost DK/destruct lock. I'm sure this isn't the greatest comp but it was still fun! We lost our first 9 matches in a row... I'll admit it was mostly my fault. I'm rusty in playing my shaman and had just switched my enhance offspec to pvp elemental spec. I picked up the stoneclaw glyph (which is totally awesome), thunderstorm glyph, and glyph of hex... I think was the third one.

We did 26 total matches last night and won 9 of them. Certainly not the greatest but it was a ton of fun and we started getting into the groove of things towards the end. One of the huge problems for me is while my shaman has insane gear... most of it is PvE gear. I had a grand total of 100 resilience, kobeck had 400, and Phired on his lock put us all to shame with 800. So it is my mission over the next few weeks to get into more bg's and get practice being an uber ele shaman in pvp.

In other words I need to get better at running away.

Oh btw... our teams name is Taunt on Cooldown in homage of Katmandue.

Character Spotlight: Artorin

Artorin was actually my first character ever created in WoW. His name came from an RP thing that my brother, sister, and wife did around Christmas before I started playing. The character that I had created for that was an older man that had magic abilities but rarely used them. So when creating my Druid I figured that he would follow in a similar fashion. Thus my druid was created with long white hair and an older appearing face.

History

When I first hit level 10 and discovered talent points, I put my initial points into balance because that was the only thing that seemed useful. Since you start out essentially as a caster reducing the cast time on wrath and stuff seemed like the smartest move. Then I hit level 20 and everything changed. Training cat form and looking down the talents I noticed that there was a talent that increased the run speed in cat form. That was it.

I immediately respeced into feral and leveled to 70 like that. Around the 50's Nikkyo who was my best friends boyfriend at the time joined up with me on his warrior to give me some pointers. His main was a feral druid and actually pointed out that my gear with int and spirit, regardless of being blue quality, was not as good as green armor with agility and stamina. With his advice I headed to outlands and began joining groups as bear tank.

When level 70 came I pretty much had it in mind that I wanted to raid and had spent lots of time on thottbot looking up armor upgrades through questing and what not. Also Polumaka (my friend) and I left our LOLZ guild to join Renevatio. Renevatio was a guild formed by burned out members from a PreBC raiding guild. They were talented, intelligent but burned out on raiding 5 nights a week chasing server firsts. I was about halfway through the attunement (I started at 68 thanks to being a druid w/ flight form) for Kara when I hit 70 and they were working on downing Curator. This was in July so around 5-6 months after BC was released.

At that time Kara was split up into 2 nights where we would clear as many of the early bosses the first and then work on the rest the second day. I started offtanking for them on the early nights till I slowly got geared up. Raiding for the first time was truly fascinating, every pull had to be carefully marked out and executed. CC was required and those trash mobs sure put a beating on you. I learned a lot from this crew of raiders and they instilled on me a lot of good habits that seem to be missing these days.

After we began clearing Kara regularly the leadership started to grow the ranks in hopes of running 25 mans. This is where things started to go down hill. With in short order we were running 2 10 man groups fairly regularly and eventually got enough to take on Gruul. Now there was an epic fight from my perspective. We spent 2 weeks on High King Maul... talk about a fight being dependent on the pull... and another 2 weeks after that to get Gruul. I still remember being the last of 3 tanks alive when the big ass guy finally fell over. Heart pounding, hands shaking, truly the last time I would feel those emotions on a boss kill.

Death of a Guild

A few weeks of farming gruul lead to attendance numbers dropping. Since we were getting ~20 members to show up, we decided to at least work on the trash in SSC and take some shots at lurker. Around this time I had serious questions about how much time I was spending on the game and decided it was best to cut back on raiding maybe entirely. Things had become stressful at home and telling my wife that I had to raid on certain nights so we couldn't do stuff... wasn't going over well.

Did I cause the downfall of the guild? I'll never fully know but after about a week or 2 of my announcement the Guild leader and his wife (really co leads) decided they were going to quit the game entirely and disband the guild. And so a few weeks later the guild bank and gold was distributed, the website and vent shut down, and Renevatio faded away into obscurity.

Before the Ren was completely shut down, one of the rogues nicknamed b2, told me he was starting a new guild and with the release of ZA would be focusing on 10 man. This is where things became problematic with my wife. I really wanted to help b2 and the new guild out and play as their main tank... but I had already told my wife that I was done with raiding.

Bad Choice...

I'm sorry to say that I made the wrong choice that day and chose to put the game and the guild over my wife. Tranquility was created and we began raiding again almost immediately. Zul'aman was a new raid with new challenges to experience and I enjoyed every second of it. We killed the bear boss our first night in and on our second try. The following week we got the eagle boss to around 20% and the week after he went down. The lynx boss.... ouch. He put an end to our good progress and the following week I chose to take a better geared warrior offtank over the lesser geared protection paladin. Turns out that decision would ultimately damn the guild.

The paladin's friend and GF happened to be 2 of our healers. So because I chose the warrior due to commanding shout and better gear over the paladin they quit the raid. Within a few days they all /gquit and progression stopped dead in its tracks. Without enough members to field a 10 man I should have just stopped raiding all together like I had said. But I couldn't...

Raiding was enough of a bug that I chose to, instead, join the guild that Nikkyo had went to after Ren broke up. Thus I joined the ranks of Serendipity, this time as a healer. Healing on my druid was new and exciting. I was also very good at it. Despite my lower gear I consistently began being in the top 2 healers for the 25 man runs. After a good solid month of raiding with them all hell broke loose.

Back but not the same.

On New Years Eve my wife told me she was moving out. I had put the game above my family and everything finally came crashing down. I hadn't noticed the depression she was in and while I noticed her turning to a friend I didn't see how far things were going. So I decided that it was time to quit WoW. Before logging off for the last time (or so I thought) I attended one last raid with the guild. We were going into Tempest Keep and making more attempts on Alar. That night we not only downed Alar for the first time as a guild but also took down Solorian and Void Reaver for guild firsts.

Still 10 months away from the next expansion this would turn out to be my crowning achievement in Burning Crusade with 4 bosses down in SSC and 3/4 in TK. My wife and I went through couples counseling and a few weeks after she moved out, came home. Things were still rocky between us but at least I didn't have any distractions. With a new outlook we overcame a lot of the problems we had and things began looking up. In fact she found out how annoyingly touchy feely I am when I don't have a habit to distract me :P

So around April or so with her permission I reactivated my account. I was still in the same guild and the people were still there but things were different. I was a raider before and getting into groups for heroics and what not was easy. Not anymore. I felt like an outsider and things were wearing on me. Since I wasn't raiding and just pugging everything I got to the point where I was just ready to quit the game. That's when Redd one of the warlock officers announced that she was going to start running Night Owl Kara runs.

Even though I had farmed Kara to death before and didn't need any gear I saw this as my opportunity. I was careful with the time I played and since these runs occurred late at night (starting at 12:30 am) I could raid and not ignore my family at the same time. Thus with my wife's permission I started raiding one night a week clearing kara and started making new friends in the guild. That was until the end of BC...

3.0 and the death of Night Owls

Night Owl runs were totally laid back and fun for everyone involved. This presented a problem though with the other officers. Eventually Redd stepped down as an officer to get away from all the drama but continued to lead raids. Things only worsened when we started to run ZA instead of Kara. The regularly scheduled raids had been having trouble getting enough sign ups while the Night Owl runs were typically overbooked. The officers viewed us as a threat to the guild and Redd, under lots of pressure, left Serendipity to help form a new guild.

In the wake of her leaving 80% of the Night Owl crew followed. I didn't. I had hoped that this all was because of the impending release of WotLK and that things would balance out at 80 with new content. Taking stock of Artorin I had full sets for balance, resto, feral dps, tanking, pvp resto, and pvp balance. All of it was epic and the pvp gear was mostly vengeful/brutal. With the expansion coming and vowing to make everything obsolete I decided that I didn't want Artorin to be my main character in WotLK.

At this point I had 4 level 70's; Artorin, Llina, Arravis, and Lanora. I remembered having the most fun leveling my hunter so in the last few weeks of BC I spent time getting Arravis her epic flyer and getting everything in order for WotLK.

Post WotLK Release

After the expansion Artorin was simply used for skinning and lw but I did this all carefully as to not to level past 70. I ran a bunch of alterac valleys till I was blue in the face but it wasn't until this week that I finally decided I was ready to work on him. So after getting 4 80's and a 78 my first ever character finally hit 71 and I have a feeling he will be getting a lot more attention.