WoW Journal - 9-October-2006

Things are getting desperate, I find myself doing more and more PvP. :) After getting my warrior to revered with the Frostwolf, and not being sure yet whether exalted is worth the grind, I went to Alterac Valley with my priest instead. Although Horde always loses AV, I kind of like the place. And my Horde priest really could use the 10% vendor price reduction for being Sergeant, as he is buying tons of sacred candles every week for raiding.

Now my priest is holy spec, and you wouldn't think he was any good in PvP. But surprisingly he ends up being a lot more fun to PvP with than the warrior. Except for his ridiculous bow, the warrior has no ranged attack, so he is forced to be always in the middle of the enemies, and so he dies a lot. Especially since most of the damage dealt in AV is by magic, and the warrior has no defence against that. A holy priest can not only cast spells from a distance, he also survives magic attacks better with the help of dispel magic, his bubble, and healing spells. His psychic scream works a lot better than intimidating shout, and has a much shorter cooldown; I even managed to ninja graveyards by fearing the NPC guards and taking the flag before they were back. And of course I spent some time healing warriors in the middle of a melee, provided I could identify who the warriors were. As for the priest the goal is to get to honor rank 3, and I don't target a specific faction, I might try Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin with him this week as well.

Other than PvP, my Horde priest spent 5 hours straight wiping against Firemaw in Blackwing Lair. I had missed this weeks first part of BWL, where they took down the first three bosses, so this second raid to BWL went straight to Firemaw and did nothing but that fight over and over. We never won, we need more training and more fire resistance gear. The fight is highly complicated for a healer, because you are supposed to stand in a way that you have a line of sight to the tank you are healing, but not a line of sight to Firemaw, who is stacking a nasty fire damage debuff on everybody in view. That is trivial as long as the tank and Firemaw don't move, but unfortunately they refuse to stand still, so you always end up either having no LOS to the tank, or getting damaged by Firemaw.

The other raid this weekend was more successful, farming Molten Core in less than 5 hours from start to finish. We had one wipe on an overly enthusiastic trash mob pull, 4 groups of trash mobs is a bit too much, but killed all the bosses on the first try. Majordomo dropped the Eye of Divinity, and while I was on top of the priest DKP list, I declined and passed it to the next priest in line. I like my Will of Arlokk, it looks a lot better than Benediction. And even if I had the Eye of Divinity, I would need to spend a fortune on the Eye of Shadow, do a very difficult quest, and then spend another fortune getting the new staff enchanted. Maybe another time, but other priests wanted the thing much more than I did. Turned out to be a good decision, because by passing on the Eye I was still on top of the DKP list when Ragnaros dropped his pants, uh, I mean dropped my pants, the leggings on transcendence. My second tier 2 item, I hope that in one of the next BWL raids I can pick up a third and get the very nice 15% mana regeneration while casting bonus.

I didn't play my Alliance priest at all this weekend, except for logging him on for a ZG raid which didn't take place due to lack of participation. The guild I am in is small, and very nice, but inefficient. And as I already said, playing an Alliance priest at level 60 isn't really a change from playing a Horde priest. So right now this priest only has a future as a guinea pig, he already has mining and a store of ores and gems to test out jewelcrafting. My Horde priest just dropped enchanting to learn mining, but still has tailoring, and I need to find out whether I can keep tailoring in combination with jewelcrafting, or whether I need the mining / jewelcrafting combo.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link