Newest Alt

Right, so I’ve actually been playing it for some time now, but I’m actually leveling a druid! Epakoto the tauren just hit level 40 yesterday and nabbed Leader of the Pack for that oh-so-good +5% crit chance buff.

For the longest time, I haven’t been able to level a druid past the 10-20 range. And levels 1 through 10 tip so far towards unbearable it’s just mind-numbingly frustrating. Much like hunters who spend their first 10 levels without a pet, druids spend theirs without any forms and are forced to act like some sort of hybrid balance druid. Hybrid spellcaster mixed with some sort of melee toon without any special abilities. Yep. Cast Wrath a couple times til the mob reaches you and then auto attack until it dies.

Bear form at level 10 does not really help. If you go bear, you get to act like a warrior for their first 10 levels, spamming your own version of heroic strike without the benefit of Charge to build any initial rage. What I ended up doing was casting one wrath and following that up immediately with a moonfire, and then closing in to melee for the rest of the mob’s health bar. This seemed to work better (and maybe be a little more stimulating) than attacking stuff in bear form.

What I’ve heard is true ehough, though. It does get better with Cat form. In addition, shortly after 20, I made it to 24 and started leveling right alongside a friend who is playing an enhancement shaman. The two work well together, especially with the group buffs provided by Unleashed Rage (+10% AP when the shaman crits) and LotP (+5% chance to crit). As well, now that she’s got Stormstrike, everything we attack dies pretty quick-like.

If we fight an elite (one for a group quest or whatever) or end up taking on two many mobs, I usually switch to bear and start spamming swipe to keep them all on me. With a decent amount of dodge and way more armor in that form, it tends to work better that way I think. She’ll keep me healed as we beat them all down. Otherwise, she is usually “tanking” (leading dps a lot from SS+WF burst usually) and if she needs healing I’ll toss a Rejuvenation and shift back, continuing the rampage.

Granted, the mobs were all levels 36-39 (with me at 39 and her at 40) or so, but we stormed through the entirety of Zub’dwai or whatever it’s called there north of Grom’gol. It was pretty fun.

These two would probably level all the way to 70 and eventually 80 together quite well.

My Death Knight, Spec, What the Heck do I

With the expansion nearing and me still bored at work, I’ve thought some about how I will spec my Death Knight. This has proved more difficult than I originally anticipated…there is so much synergy, so much hybridity between the three Death Knight trees that I’m really not sure which I will end up picking. I may have to pick based on thematics, for goodness’ evil’s sake. And then it’s still a tough decision.

So far as I can tell, all three trees sound quite fun based on tooltips alone. Not to rehash information you might find in a million other places on the internet, but what you have is a melee class that relies quite heavily on disease debuffs. It tanks without a shield, like a druid, using the Parry mechanic more than Dodge. It uses two different types of resources for funding its abilities, the first being Runes which operate vaguely like a Rogue’s energy, and the second being Runic Power, which behaves similarly to a Warrior’s/Bear Druid’s rage.

Each tree has a different “Strike” ability associated with it at 41 points. Heart, Frost, and Scourge, for the Blood, Frost, and Unholy trees, respectively. Each tree is also quite heftily loaded with one-point on-use abilities as well as a host of other passives, much like the trees for the other classes. The difference between the Death Knight trees and the trees for said other classes, though, is just how good almost every single talent in every tree sounds. It’s hard to say for sure how good these talents are having not yet played one…but I don’t recall any talents in any of the trees I would call “pointless.” Not that any talent is completely pointless, but Booming Voice for instance, for Warriors, is as close as you can get, in my opinion (have it increase the radius of Piercing Howl, and then maybe we’ll see if I put it in any of my warrior builds).

If you glance over the Death Knight talents, you notice a lot of what Blizzard learned concerning talents for their classes. In almost every passive talent you can see the word “and,” or the phrase “in addition.” This may not sound like much, but what this means is you have a class where your talents are far less situational, affecting more than one of your abilities or having multiple effects.

Unfortunately, the more I think about it, it seems like this all really boils down to a difference based largely on thematics. You have Blood for melee dps, Frost for control/tanking, and Unholy for spell dps, but only vaguely. In every tree there is at least one hybrid talent for one of those other roles. For instance, Unholy has Magic Suppression and Anti-Magic Zone, two abilities which would be great for the Death Knight tank’s supposed niche role in tanking mobs/bosses that deal hefty amounts of magic damage. In Frost, sure you have a lot of survivability talents, but you also can provide a group buff that increases attack speed. The hybridity is excellent. I hope it works out well.

Now they just need to work this in to the other classes. It would be more difficult in the triple- (or quadruple-, you poor druids) role hybrid classes we have, especially the healers. Basically, what I see in the Death Knight trees is what I see in other talent trees, and that is playstyle based on talent build. However, there’s enough hybridity in each that the build is not so limiting.

This is almost a separate rant, but wouldn’t it be nice if Beacon of Light had some dps utility of some kind, without making it overpowered? How about Riptide, Wild Growth and Guardian Spirit? Do you see Penance? Yeah, kinda like that. All I know is that soloing as a Holy Paladin is boring as hell. We gave tanks increased damage, can we do the same for healers, maybe?

Back to Death Knights, and the one I will be making… it’s going to be Luthehza. I kind of want to look at it from a roleplaying perspective and take into account what I think she would be. As someone once a warrior, Blood makes some sense. However, she’s to have changed, I think. Given (warning, fanfic link here) where she last left off, Frost almost makes some sense. Or perhaps the transition to evil would make Unholy viable.

In short, I don’t know. XD

Leveling Specs for WLK, Part IV – Mage

Haezyl will probably stay frost!

I have been far too enamored with kiting things to give that up on this character, and the simplicity of frostbolt spam is actually quite appealing to me.

However, I’ve been toying with the idea of switching back to elemental. (The old mixed fire/frost spec, where you still use shatter, just with buffed-up fire spells instead of frost ones.)

…

All right, I suppose I should actually write this post.

I have determined that yes, Haezyl will indeed stay frost. With the free respec we are presumably acquiring before the expansion actually hits, I will be going 0/0/61, and probably put one point per level in the frost tree after that. At 80, I’ll respec back to 17/0/54.

The frost tree is full of goodies now, and it would appear that, especially with perhaps some synergy help from the Death Knights, the raiding frost mage will be set to go, mainly because of Fingers of Frost. This talent allows for Shatter combos on mobs that cannot be frozen. Couple this with the mana battery effect of the Improved Water Elemental and Frost is a pretty freaking awesome talent tree.

Plus I still get to kite things. This is most important to me. : )

/shifty eyes

Hello! Hope everyone’s doing well.

It has been a couple weeks since I’ve posted anything, and mostly I’d like to apologize for that. I mean, it’s my blog, my time, and I’m not getting paid for this or anything, but I do feel guilty whenever I don’t post anything for a while. I’m still playing WoW for the most part, though I have been spending a bit more time out of game than I have in the past couple months.

Also, however, I’d noted that, as of last month this blog has been around for a year. Or maybe it was the month before. As Ratshag would say, I can’t be bothered with the details. Or keeping track of them. Whatever it is he isn’t doing with them, that’s the same thing that I’m not doing with them. Or something. (He’s better at it.)

Anyway…here’s what I’ve been up to. And I wish I could access my screenshots folder from work so that I could put together some sort of montage thinger. But you’ll have to live with my writing for now!

Firstly, my brother and I are still working at 2v2. We managed to power our warrior/shaman pair up to 1625 two weeks ago, only to get stomped back to 1539 earlier this week. Played a couple more games to get back up to 1594 or so. We were 4-9 before, got back up to 8-10 later.

One note on that: zoning into the arena should automatically equip your pvp trinket. No specific reason I would think this whatsoever, just seems like a good idea. Yep. It most certainly didn’t happen to me. Please quit glaring at me. Ok fine, I had to eat a Blind against a rogue/priest team and Ferrus (the shaman) effectively bit it during that time. I felt pretty noobish. Was the one game we lost.

We did, however, beat a warlock/paladin, separate rogue/priest, hunter/paladin (this one took forever…), and hunter/priest. And I mean, the week before we were beating down mage/rogue and druid/warrior teams pretty easily…and then this last week…I’m not sure if we lost focus or what but we just had the hardest time pulling out wins. Currently we’re trying to push for 1650 rating to pick up some rings. (My current rings are the Vindicator’s ring and the revered-level Violet Signet.) After that and S4 pants I’ll have much less deviation in gear levels and I can just pick whatever upgrades I want as they’ll all be about the same…though I think the best next choice would be going from Merciless legs up to Brutal, since 1550 is not going to be an issue to maintain and is a sizeable upgrade.

Secondly, I’ve been saving up for my second epic flyer finally. This one is for Niemandra, and is so she has a fast mount ready for when she hits 77…or whatever level it is you get to use your flyer again in Northrend. Also going to be leveling in tandem with a warlock who has one, and it just wouldn’t do to be putting along really far behind.

Third, I’ve also being playing some Alliance alts on different servers…have started up another warrior that has been being leveled alongside a paladin on Windrunner. The player of said paladin is the same as the warlock mentioned above. Is just something to kill time…better than doing laps around Shat on Skywall anyway.

So that’s that…nothing exciting, but that’s just the way it’s been going lately.

If I were to receive a beta invite…

I have not yet received a beta invite.  If I were to, I have very little I’d like to do with it:

First, I would copy over my paladin, warrior, shaman, and probably mage.  (Unless there’s a limit on the number of characters you can transfer.)

Second, I would spec each of them to the 51 point talents in Ret, Fury, Enhancement, and Frost, respectively.

Third, I’d find some mobs, and try them out.

Fourth, I would respec most of them again…to the ends of Holy, Arms, and Fire.  (The shaman is not doing anything but staying enhancement.)  I would try these out.

Finally, to Prot, Prot, and Arcane, and one last go-round.

Then I’d be done.  I wouldn’t go to Northrend, try out a Death Knight, or anything else, really.  I want to save that stuff.  For now I just want a crack at the new talents :)

Leveling Specs for WLK, Part I – Warrior

It’s July, and pretty much the end of it.  I think we have 4 months to the day until the projected release date of Wrath.  I myself, having little else to do, have started thinking of how I’m going to level my toons to 80, and what specs they’ll use.

First, Niemandra.  She’ll be getting to 80 first.

I think what I’ll do here is go for a hybrid fury/prot build.  The protection points should help for all those times I know I’m going to have to tank.  I seem to remember some things about Defiance changing, perhaps the threat bonus being rolled into Defensive Stance by default, but I’m not sure.  At any rate, assuming Defiance remains as it is, I’d be going as deep as that, and probably no farther.  Tactical Mastery will be a must for the bonus threat to Bloodthirst, a talent I’ll get from Fury.

The protection contribution will be something like this:

2/2 Improved Bloodrage
3/3 Tactical Mastery
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Defiance

13 points total.  I will probably respec into this the day WLK hits the shelves, so to speak (it’s irrelevant to me what it hits, I’ll have it shipped to my house).

That leaves, at 70, 48 points for me to spend in Fury.

My main objective here is Titan’s Grip – allows me to dual-wield 2-handed weapons, compensated for by an attack speed penalty.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure of everything I’d be taking in this tree (I don’t really have any of the new talents memorized yet), but:

5/5 Cruelty
5/5 Unbridled Wrath
1/1 Piercing Howl
3/3 Blood Craze
1/5 Commanding Presence
5/5 Dual-Wield Specialization
5/5 Enrage
1/1 Sweeping Strikes
5/5 Flurry
3/3 Precision
1/1 Bloodthirst
5/5 Improved Berserker Stance
1/1 Rampage
1/5 (the +% stam / -% zerker stance threat talent)
4/5 Titan Grip

Alternatively, I could take one point out of Titan Grip and put that in Last Stand, over in prot, for the extra “aw crap” button.

Ideally, I’d tank dual-wielding, using Sunder Armor and Revenge (and Bloodthirst in lieu of Shield Slam) frequently to hold threat. I’ve reasoned that if I’ll kick out more threat per second at the expense of taking more damage (not using a shield), that’s better than not holding threat and letting mobs one-shot the mage. By my guess, having to use a shield in this build would probably decrease the incoming damage I take by about 5% while simultaneously decreasing my rage and threat generation by about 30% (and decrease my damage output by a similar percentage). I’m pretty sure that’s not worth it.

I’ve tanked all of SV in Berserker Stance, and tanked the end boss of that with Recklessness up. I should be able to take on introductory WLK instances in defensive stance, perhaps in PvP gear. Time will tell, though.

From this point in the spec, I think I would finish up Fury (filling Titan Grip), getting to…Shockwave? I think? That will be level 72. I’m not sure what this talent is for, really (pvp? doesn’t seem to be worth it, damage-wise) but I think it will help me hold aggro on multiple mobs alongside Thunderclap.

From there, I will end up making a decision between Improved Revenge and filling the talent I couldn’t remember the name of above. Level 76…4 points left. There is a talent, if I remember right, on the opposite side of Rampage from the above unnamed talent, that allows you to decrease the cast time of your next Slam by X amount of time when you crit with Bloodthirst. Would 4 points allow me to fill that (as well as Improved Slam)? Would that make it instant-cast? That sounds delectable.

If that’s not possible…I’d fill the +% stam / -% threat talent.

And then, at 70 80, back to Arms. Mortal Strike for PvP or Blood Frenzy for PvE.

Alt Planning – Revamp

Waaaaay back here, I had laid out my plans for all my alts and my proposed roles for them.  I admit I was a bit naive, and for one thing still believed that hybrids could be decently effective.  Blizzard continues, however, to pigeonhole the specs into their roles yet further, if the alpha leaks are any indication.

So, I’ve done some more thinking since then, and have decided to try and optimize a bit differently.  Since that aforementioned post, I have decided not to (at least not any time soon) level a druid or a hunter.  I’ve gotten bored with them too quickly in trying, and I don’t see our druid/hunter raid attendance dropping.

And so, here we are.  The plans.

• Niemandra, Warrior.  Blood Frenzy/Imp Slam raid dps utility spec.
• Vaexxi, Shaman.  Enhancement, as she is now.
• Zerei, Paladin.  Unless they make some sort of raid-viable holy dps spec, I don’t see us losing our current raiding Retribution Paladin, so this character will probably remain a tank or a healer.
• Haezyl, Mage.  I can’t recall if the alpha leaks included any new utility for mages beyond Int Buffs, Polymorphs, and Water Vending, but really all I can say with confidence for this character is “ranged dps.”
• Ahzethul, Priest.  Shadow spec, for Misery and Shadow Weaving.
• Luthehza, Death Knight.  I’m unsure of what I want to do with this character yet, I don’t really know enough about the class to make an informed decision.

These last two are also indefinite depending on whether or not I actually level them up.

• Valefique, Warlock.  Affliction utility spec for Shadow’s Embrace and Malediction.
• Thaea, Rogue.  I’m thinking a Hemo build would be nice, but the Subtlety tree most likely still won’t be for raiding.  I’m wondering though, since the tree includes +10% AP and +15% agility that with some different gearing than what rogues are used to (ie, favoring +hit because of SnD) if it couldn’t be viable now.

And that’s that, really.  If I was going to level a hunter it would be Survival for that Expose Weakness debuff our raids never get.  Any druid I rolled I’d want for it to be a Balance/Resto hybrid, one o’ dem fangled “Dreamstate” healers, also with Improved Faerie Fire and Insect Swarm if I could manage it.

See the common theme here is utility.  I see a lot of things we could have in our raids that we end up without, those largely being included above.  Of course, I can’t do them all at once, but here’s the condensed reasoning list:

• Blood Frenzy – Increases all physical damage the target receives by 4% while your warrior’s Deep Wounds or Rend abilities are active.  All of our warriors are Protection or Fury.
• Expose Weakness – Increases the attack power of all attackers by 50% of the hunter’s agility.  All of our hunters are Marksman or Beast Mastery.
• Hemorrhage – Increases physical damage by X with 10 charges or something like that.  All of our rogues are Assassination…do we have any combat rogues?  I don’t think we do.
• Shadow’s Embrace – Decreases all physical damage the target causes by 5%.  I think we have some Affliction warlocks, but I’m pretty sure they don’t take this, or maybe only put one or two points in it to increase their Life Drain lawldamage.
• Unleashed Rage – Increases the attack power of your party members by 10%.  We largely have Elemental and Restoration shaman.

These are the debuffs our raids are most often lacking.  In 10-mans it’s not such a big deal, the group make-up gets splintered by the lack of people you can bring, but in 25-mans these would seem to be most helpful.

The Dailies I Do

In the interest of earning the most I can for the smallest amount of time spent, I will only do certain dailies on certain characters.

First, I will only do Arm the Wards (gathering mana remnants) and Don’t Stop Now (getting keys and ore) if I’m not grouped with anyone.  Having to farm the quest items for those while sharing drops is too much of a hassle and a slowdown.

But, other than that, all of the quests on the isle.  Converting the robots, gathering the bloodberries, killing elves, finding ley lines, killing demons, enraging murlocs, and both bombing runs.  I try to get these done on as many characters as I can every day right now, requiring a great deal of money for the things I’m looking to get, mostly for my shaman.

If I have time beyond that, I will do the Shattrath SSO dailies on my paladin.  Being the only one with an epic flyer of my 70s it makes things fastest to only do them for her.

And that’s it.  I haven’t done the Ogri’la, Skyguard, or BG dailies in quite a while, and I’ve never had characters skilled enough in either profession to do the fishing or cooking dailies.  I determined long ago that the Netherwing dailies weren’t worth the time spent since I already had my hippogryph mount, and have seen too many people taking up too much space on those dragons to care about them personally.

Back when I was in moneymaking mode for Zerei’s epic, though, I did the Skyguard and Ogri’la quests on all my (then) 70s if I could, as well as the BG dailies…because it was pre-2.4 and before the release of Sunwell Isle and the SSO.  I also was using Zerei’s jewelcrafting more extensively, prospecting, cutting, buying and reselling gems for quite the profit.

The purpose?  Money, mostly, of course.  However, the rep wards from the SSO are all quite good, and I’ve got Zerei and Niemandra both to exalted with them so far, and Vae is working her way through revered.

Catapulted

So Vaexxi, my enhancement shaman, has been level 70 for…about a month?  Give or take a week?  Have managed to get geared up fairly quickly!  Have been to a couple raids – one Gruul’s, one Magtheridon’s, and one Karazhan run.  Got T4 shoulders from Gruul’s, the head turn-in ring from Mag’s, and a new necklace, pair of gloves, cape, and pair of boots from Kara.  Have also managed to get into a couple Magister’s Terrace runs, and a heroic Mana Tombs run.  From those I’ve gotten a new totem (Relic), feral druid leg item (str/agi/stam/int…nothin wrong with that!), new chest item, and yet another pair of boots.

45 Badges ready.  60 more for the main hand fist weapon!

What remains then, still, is leveling engineering for the helm from that, and then farming all those primals for all those other items (bracers and belt especially).

However, it seems to me that her attack power is fairly low.  A little less than 1.4k…maybe I’m spoiled by how much my warrior has (almost 2k)…I dunno.  Windfury hits plenty hard!

I’ve been making sure to keep checking up on maxdps and The Enhancement Shaman and You everytime I need to remember something or figure out what to do with my gear. So far in raids, I’ve been pretty good about keeping totems up and using a good ability rotation (priority= Stormstrike -> Flame Shock -> Earth Shock). I’ve been pretty awful about overwriting my own flame shocks, but regardless she’s done very respectable dps.

Speaking of alts…

In a comment to my recent Shopping List post, Green Armadillo asks about the drive to spend so much time and effort on an alt. I answered him there, but allow me to reveal to you just how alt-friendly we are.

First, if you log on to a character guilded in MiM and type /ginfo into your chat box, it will tell you something to the extent of 120 accounts. This means that with the exception of multiboxers (of which I can think of 3 off the top of my head), there are 120 people in the guild. However, there are approximately 410 characters guilded there. More than 3 alts per guildy on average.

Lastly, it will tell you that MiM was formed on 5-28-2005, by these 4 “founding cheeses”:

(picture taken before MiM was actually formed, but there they are; the one down in front is Gorgonzola) Happy 3rd Anniversary!

Anyway, the number of alts per toon is weighted heavily at the officer end. Between the 9 of us, we have (at 70 alone):

(/edit: ok, I’ve had to edit this like 7 times as I remember/am kindly reminded of others we have. sorry guys!)

3 Druids
3 Hunters
2 Mages
3 Priests
4 Paladins
1 Rogue
3 Shaman
1 Warlock
3 Warriors

Why is this useful? Our raid groups can be radically dissimilar from week to week, leaving us potentially deficient in certain areas like tanking/healing or niche roles like a mage tank or whatever. It often falls on those of us in the officership to make up that slack, and we do it well. With numbers fluctuating depending on respecs, we basically have 3 tanks, 5 healers, and 12 different dps up here to choose from. We make these raids happen, dammit.