WoW Journal - 19-September-2005

My guild rocks! Our first guild raid to Zul'Gurub was a great success, we managed to kill both high priestess Jeklik and high priest Venoxis, each on the third attempt. We had some advice on the bat lady, how to pull her into a corner and avoid adds, but the tactics on the snake guy we worked out on our own. Zul'Gurub is interesting in that the developers clearly noticed that people are mainly interested in the boss fights, and designed the place for that. The non-boss mobs aren't all that many, and they don't seem to respawn at all. There is one central path, with lots of side paths leading to the different bosses, so you can chose which boss you want to attack. Each boss has its own tricks up the sleeve, and needs different tactics. A fun place, especially for medium sized guilds.

In other news I finally visited Dire Maul west with Raslebol, with a very good guild group. Tough place, but interesting, although I still think the north part is better. While Zul'Gurub got me no loot, in DM west I won a nice fire resistance cloak for future Molten Core visits.

Besides these two highlights, I had a bad week. Our guild is short of priests, and this week one of them was on holiday. Another guild priest is working late, and I didn't see the third priest around much. So I had several occasions where I tried to get a group together, and never got there due to lack of a healer. That was a bit depressing, and I got more and more convinced that leveling my shaman wouldn't help much. So I stopped leveling Waldin at level 28, and switched to leveling Kyroc, my priest.

Playing a priest first was very hard, I had trouble even with mobs a level or two lower than me. But after asking around in the guild I got advice on a better tactic: Never use Smite, pull with Mind Blast, shield yourself, and finish the mob off with a wand. A guild mate ran me through BFD to get the blue wand quest reward from there, and from then it went much better. I want to have this priest at level 60, but the problem is that I need to solo him there. We got lots of level 60 in the guild, but the alts and lower level characters are distributed widely over all levels, and you never get a low-level guild group together. So leveling to 60 means soloing, pickup groups, and occasional powerleveling help through a dungeon. By far not as much fun as leveling Raslebol to 60 together with the guild.

Wanting to have a level 60 priest, but having less fun actually leveling him, translates into a certain grind. Most of the quests I do I already know, because there aren't many quests left that I never did at the lower levels. I leveled Kyroc from 26 to 29 mainly in Ashenvale, and then moved him to Thousand Needles. After a while I got bored of casting shield every 30 seconds, and installed the Autobuff mod, which casts all buffs automatically on yourself. One more step towards the dark side, I have certain reservations against installing macros that play the game for you. But if you are mainly grinding, wanting to automatize it comes naturally.

So the plan for the future looks like this: Whenever there is a guild group or raid which Raslebol could join, I'll play him for fun. When there is nothing going, I play Kyroc, in the hope of getting him to 60 fast, and having more possibilities for guild groups. Waldin, the shaman, takes over the old job of Kyroc to play in duo with my wife, when she wants to play her mage. Mage / shaman is probably a better duo than mage / priest anyway, as we gain better tanking capabilities.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link