WoW Journal - 31-March-2008

Before talking about my adventures in World of Warcraft this weekend, I'd like to say grats to my wife: Mrs. Tobold dinged 70 for the first time, also the first time she hit the level cap in three years of playing WoW. She has about a dozen characters, but most of them were given up a few levels before the cap. But then she discovered stealth, and first leveled up a rogue to 68, and now finally a druid to 70. Too bad she's running out of stealth classes now. As she neither groups nor does PvP, it isn't clear what she'll do next.

Me, I'm still playing three characters. Although I must say I'm playing my warrior less and less. At least I managed to get him up to another 9k honor, so he could buy the off-hand epic sword. As my tanking career is less than satisfying, and the welfare blues provide a good start for a dps gear set, I might respec to dual-wielding dps fury and see if that is more fun. Or I'll park him in a cupboard and only let him out when I need potions made.

My mage is coming along nicely, now level 67. I'm at the last quests in Nagrand, and plan to go from there directly to Netherstorm, because I haven't really quested all that much in that zone. This weekend I found a group with guild mates and a stranger to do a whole bunch of group quests in Nagrand. The demon quest series, the end of the Nessingwary hunting quests, everything except Durn the Hungerer, because we didn't have a full group. Doesn't matter, that quest doesn't have good mage loot anyway. I had great fun with AoE in Sunspring Village with the murkbloods, and just have to finish the Warmaul ogres before moving on.

The character I spent the most time on this weekend was my priest. I did every available Sunwell Offensive daily quest with him every day, plus several Magister's Terrace (MrT) runs. The funniest run was a heroic MrT run with a tank, two mages, and a hunter, all very well equipped, and playing well. With lots of crowd control even heroic is relatively easy, and we got to Kael'thas without many problems. But in heroic Kael'thas occasionally puts up a 10k health shield, and starts casting pyroblast for 50k damage. You need to take down the shield and interrupt the spell, which seems pretty much impossible. So you just have to wipe a couple of times until you get lucky and manage to get to phase 2 without him having launched a pyroblast. So we did that, Kael tosses us around with gravity lapses a couple of times, I desperately try to keep myself and everyone alive with prayers of mending and renews, until I find that everyone but me suddenly is dead. I target Kael, and find him at 1% life. So I cast a shadow word: pain and a disease on him, start blasting him with a wand, and somehow manage to kill him. ROFL, holy priest soloes Kael'thas on heroic!

If you have a good group, heroic MrT is nice, because it gives you 5 epics and 4 badges of justice. I had the impression that the loot table for MrT has an above average amount of weapons on it, heroic Kael'thas dropped two epic weapons for us, for example. My priest got an interesting epic trinket from the third boss, which gets one charge every time I cast any healing spell, up to a maximum of 20, and I can discharge it instantly and heal a target for 100 health per charge. An instant 2000 point heal can be rather useful, and you can charge the trinket before combat by spamming cheap renews.

With all this activity my priest is half way through honored, just 6k more reputation until revered, where I can get the jewelcrafting recipes I want. I think I overestimated the effort needed, I'll have the jewelcrafting recipes for epic gems long before the server reaches phase 3 and I can actually buy the uncut epic gems for badges. Not that it was a waste of time to do all those daily quests, they padded my wallet quite nicely. But I'm wondering if maybe I should stop with my priest at revered, and either do the dailies then with my warrior, or level up my mage and do them with him. Right now I don't see the use of getting my priest to exalted, while the warrior or mage could get some nice gear for reputation.

The last thing to report is a raid to Serpentshrine Cavern, where we killed the Lurker, and tried our hand at Leotheras the Blind. That was fun, and interesting to see for the first time for me, even if ultimately we didn't kill him. What was somewhat less fun was an episode where my guild wanted to start another SSC run, I didn't feel like going there, and their raid didn't get off the ground due to lack of healers. Talk about peer pressure. I sometimes get the impression that some raid healers go deliberately into hiding, log off, and don't even play alts around the time raids are formed, to avoid being pestered into raids they don't want to go to. Is it just me or are raid healers burning out faster than other raiders?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link