WoW Journal - 25-October-2006

Not a typo, this is a journal of "regular" World of Warcraft adventures, not Burning Crusade beta adventures. Now that the expansion has been postponed to January 2007, I don't want to spend all of that time playing the beta, and then already go bored by its content into the release. Especially since everything I do there will reset, and I have to do it all again. The other important aspect is that I would like to stay close to my guild, raiding with them, keeping in touch, and not vanish into the beta for 3 months.

On the other hand last weekend I did three BWL raids, Friday night, and Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The Friday night raid never started, but counting all the time together I spent 12 hours in BWL, which is too much for one place on one weekend. So I'm trying to split up my raiding activity a bit better over the week.

Fortunately for me, yesterday night there was a raid on our calendar which was especially interesting to me: second half of Zul'Gurub. I have done the first half, killing all the animal-aspect priests of Hakkar, many times. But somehow I never was in a raid killing Jin'do and Hakkar. So a raid doing only the bloodlord Mandakir, Jin'do, and Hakkar, was exactly what I was looking for as a divertisement from BWL raiding. Due to our lack of priests it was easy to get invited into the raid. Having two different "sizes" of raids is sometimes problematic for a guild: If you have enough people on weekends for 40-man raids, you probably have too many for one 20-man raid, but also probably not all the classes necessary to make two good 20-man raids. You end up creating one raid, and having some people unable to participate. I always feel slightly embarrassed that I rarely have to sit out a raid due to my class. But then again, it is obvious which classes are more in demand than others for groups and raids. And if you insist on playing a class where there are too many off, you have to live with the consequences.

So we started the raid with not quite perfect, but reasonable, mix of character classes. Only 2 priests, but both of them experienced raiders (excuse me for saying that about myself) in good gear. As you would expect the raid for a Zul'Gurub raid in a guild which is half through BWL, we had a mix of experienced people who were there for practice and fun, together with some less experienced people who could use the training and the loot. That went very well. We killed all three remaining bosses on the first try, with not a single wipe, and in just 2 hours. Yay! My first Hakkar kill!

Then I got extremely lucky, Hakkar dropped the Touch of Chaos, an epic wand with an awe-inspiring 82 damage per second, plus a +18 bonus to spell damage and healing. And the people who had more DKP than me already had it, or something equally good, while the less experienced raiders in the group obviously had less DKP than me, so I received the wand. Yay! My first epic wand! I used to wield the Antenna of Invigoration from AQ20, but the new wand has a whopping 10 dps more. Even in the Burning Crusade beta I haven't seen a wand as good as that yet. As my soloing strategy as priest is very much wand-based, this was a very good find for me. It is unlikely that I find anything better before being quite a bit into the expansion, and that is now months away.

Recently I have been quite lucky with epics. My DKP are dropping, which isn't easy in our system, as it tends to give out more points than taking away. I'm sure that will be balanced by other periods where I don't get anything for some time, but I don't mind. The priests in my guild are currently circumventing the DKP system, by having a gentleman's agreement to stop rolling for tier 2 priest items before every priest in the raid has three of them. Our DKP system by itself would be more likely to first equip one priest with lots of tier 2 items, before slowly trickling down to the next priest in line. But we felt that for the Transcendence set it would be better for everybody if we spread it out more evenly, and get every priest the 3 pieces needed for the very nice 15% mana regeneration set bonus.

In fact I would be perfectly happy to go into the Burning Crusade expansion with the gear I have right now, 5 prophecy, 3 transcendence, the Will of Arlokk, and now the epic wand. Every further improvement is just for fun. If I continue raiding Molten Core, I'll probably even end up with Benediction one day, even if I am not a big fan of that staff. But if everybody else has it, I'll take it before throwing the eye away. My necklace, and the two rings I'm wearing, are still blue, but I haven't even seen any epic items I'd want to replace them with. I'm not really searching websites for how to improve my gear, I prefer to go raiding where I like, and get surprised by the result. Yesterday that worked, the wand was certainly a nice surprise.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link