WoW Journal - 10-July-2006

Another weekend on the raid circuit, two raids to Molten Core, one to Onyxia, with my low level priest played in between. Nothing really exciting on the high level side to report. In the two MC raids we killed everything up to and including Majordomo and decided not to waste our time on Ragnaros, due to low average fire resistance. Not my fault, my fire resistance is now 148 unbuffed, which isn't half bad for a priest. The MC raids weren't perfect, we had a couple of unnecessary wipes, but in general it was okay.

The Onyxia raid was short, we killed her on the first attempt. While my fire resistance and absorption capacity with potions was good, it turned out I wasn't claw resistant. Somehow my healing drew aggro on me in phase 3, and Onyxia critted me for 3500 points, and killed me with a second strike immediatedly afterwards. I still have to survive a combat against her, but at least we won in the end.

Onyxia dropped the priest tier 2 head piece, and in Molten Core we had found a robe and a crown of prophecy. Neither of these went to me, but at least the top 2 priests in the DKP list are now full epic, so more stuff will hopefully trickle down to me. Not that I'm complaining about my amount of epics, with 3 prophecy parts and the Will of Arlokk staff I'm already quite well equipped. But there are priests in the guild with more DKP than I have and not a single epic, due to our strange positive sum DKP system.

As the next 4 weekends I will be on holiday, and my laptop isn't exactly raid-enabled, I'm basically taking a month break from raiding now. That will kill my DKP score, relatively speaking, as in a positive sum system everybody else's score will go up. But I hope that those priests who already have more points than me and no epics will receive a lot of drops, as only if everybody above me already has the item I can get it. The break from raiding isn't unwelcome, I'm starting to get bored with MC and Onyxia.

But a break from raiding doesn't mean a break from World of Warcraft. I should be able to continue to level my low level priest on the laptop during the holidays, if I find the time between other holiday activities. My priest hit level 33 this weekend. I finished all the quests in Duskwood, including the elite ones. My only complaint about those quests is that there are far too many times where you have to run from Raven Hill to Darkshire and back, even if you group your quests as efficiently as possible. In the end I refused to run that any more, and instead took the shorter way from the cemetary to the Westfall flight point and took the gryphon to Darkshire.

The only dungeon I did this weekend with my low level priest was Gnomeregan. Good group, but the guys were in a hurry. We didn't do the lower level quests outside the instance, like Techbot, but went directly and on the shortest way to Thermaplugg. No wipe, we killed the end boss, I got nice xp, but neither the quest rewards nor the bosses in the dungeon dropped anything remotely useful for a priest. I could have taken a blue cloth robe as quest reward, but it didn't have +int bonus, and I didn't consider it useful.

Unfortunately that character is now in the level range I hate the most, the "Stranglethorn Hole", where the game has the least variety of places to go and zones to explore. As I've been avoiding Stranglethorn with my last characters, and know the Horde quests there better than the Alliance quests, I went to the Stranglethron rebel camp and got quests there. That sent me to the Kurzen camp, and one of the most unpleasant mobs in the game: Kurzen Medicine Man. These have powerful heals, often appear in pairs healing each other, and regenerate mana so fast that they can keep up self-healing forever if you try to solo a pair of them. In the end I grouped with a rogue, and used Mana Burn to drain them of mana, and we managed to kill enough of them to get 7 Jungle Remedies each for our quests.

I also did the two first parts of the tiger and panther killing quests in Stranglethorn, plus the first raptor part. But now the remaining quests are a bit too high for a level 33, I think I'd better look elsewhere for level 30 quests. Maybe Hillsbrad. I think I'll skip Desolace this time, and the Shimmering Flats of Thousand Needles I've also already done far too often. If I can't find any nice quests, I'll just start grinding yetis and ogres in Alterac for a couple of levels, which is boring but easy, and is relatively fast leveling.

Approaching level 35 I will have to decide whether I want to keep up tailoring and skinning as tradeskills. Tailoring was good for early money, but there are too many tailors now, and profits aren't good any more. Do I want to skill up tailoring just for making runecloth bags for myself? Do I want to switch to herbalism / alchemy, knowing that it will block large parts of my inventory and bank? The announced jewelcrafting sounds interesting, but I'm not sure whether I can already learn a craft which combines well with it. If gathering jewels from veins doesn't destroy the veins, a combination with mining sounds good. But if you can do only either mining or jewel gathering from any given vein, I might want to keep tailoring to craft cloth items with sockets. Decisions, decisions. Anybody got some clever advice?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link