First official raid and gear problems

Yay, Sartharion down, and two bosses in Naxx's Arachnid Quarter down.

And today, VoA and my first Gladiator gloves ! YAY !

But... as I said before, something continues to be dead wrong with locks. Or at least with this lock. Once again, I went flat out dps on some mobs, like Sartharion drakes, and still I was about 10% below a guildie mage with the so called imba arcane spec with no epics, no enchants, and less spell power (200 or 500, counting Fel Armor).

I go on forums, and there's a lot of talk of ppl whining about the same. The difference may vanish for equally 213 epic items geared players, but for entry-level raiding, it sure is huge.

One way is to use my imp more. As it was my 1st time in wotlk 10-men, I'm still a bit uncertain about imp survivability, but guess I'll have to activate it, giving me 150 dps more. Even so, it's not enough.

My spec is 0/13/56, should maximize single target dps.

I could use 0/41/30, the so called 90% popularity spec, with felguard cleaving each and every mob.

Problems with this spec ?
- Glyphs are too different, instead of Immolate+Conflagrate Glyph.
- I'll have to use Felguard+CoA glyph, and use CoA+Corr+Imo+Incinerate spam. It may help my dps, but it will remove the 10x1.3K HP blood pact offers. On the other hand, we got a warrior in raid, meaning shout, that doesnt stack with blood pact.

Lunar Achievement and lunatic thoughts

During the last days, I've been completing the Lunar Festival Achievements. Task done.
I've also geared up, running mostly guild heroics, and having a nice time.
That said, I've now got enough badges for a T7, and I've bought a few epics, having a total of 5. I've also have ~1900 sp while hit capped, both for heroics and 10/25-raids. It feels good not to miss a hit.

DPS-wise, many talent points in demonology were fun for PVP and some PVE, but I'm not so confortable in being a meleee dude and charging mobs for the imba fire aura damage in heroics. In raids, it would probably be not so great. Still, I dearly miss 0/55/16. Fel synergy should help but...well, the amazing demonic pet would also be a nice raid buf.. we shall see.

So, I tried destro fire specs.
- 0/41/30 with felguard was in my mind, but that means a pet control that i'm not so fan of, playing hunter, where I have to watch for his hp, meaning loosing time. I might try that later when my gear is better.
- 0/40/31, with imp out, using CoE,Imo,Corr,Incinerate and Conflagrate on bosses, and AOE rain of fire like hell in trash. It was nice to have 30% crit as base, but surprisingly, dps didn't go up much. Also, survivability was not so good, and mana issues came up a bit.
- 0/13/58, with imp out, and the fabulous Chaos bolt, plus utilities like spell -near-imunity, self healing and self-mana regeneration. The result was nice, and I'm now able to do nearly 1900 dps in VoA-25 and around 2K in some heroic bosses. In PVP, things are also not so bad, since the conflagrate now speeds up the next incinerate and chaos bolt. The bad part is a loss of 200 spell power and 12%crit, which has impact in my AoE/trash dps. But tbh, my overall dps was much better than with 0/40/31.

Thank god for recount and dummy targets and shame on Blizz for charging some 50 gold per respecc.

PVP-wise, been doing some more arenas with Tarithel; last week was better, I won 3 or 4 out of 10, all against the same team of a pally + priest. They pwned Tari, but then I pwned both of them. Destro rocks. Also been doing WG. It's a dumb battleground, much more difficult to control what happens than in WSG/AB. It's also laggy and slow inside the fortress. But it gives honor and gold from dailies, plus VoA.

Achievement-wise, I'm now exalted with Wyrmrest and Oracles. I'm doing a daily run in STV to become Guardian of Cenarius, 3 more runs and it's done.

A crazy, lunatic thought came to my mind, which is to become Hero of Shattrah, requiring me to switch from Scryers to Aldor. But after doing a single repeatable quest, taking 15 mins to do it, and learning that I need 130 quests to get out of Hated.. ZOMG ! No chance.

Finally, I've been practising Shadow Priest with Tarithel dualboxing. Not so bad, I can do above 1K dps with 70 gear (1200 sp +/-)!

Badging and a nice site

I've started doing heroic runs with guild. A slow start, but it's starting to get going. No epics yet but slowly going up the ladder on Kirin Tor reputation. With revered I get a nice mace.

On another topic, a nice site with a synchronized world wide view of achievement status of every WOW player: http://wow-achievements.com

A lucky Salty

Weee another title, Salty Netcownt, and another major achievement, this time a profession based one, fishing.
Coin mastery was not that hard to get, neither was the rare fish. A few days of Dalaran fising and that's it. Then I went to Elwynn Forest and got my 15-pound mud snapper in less than one hour. To celebrate the Salty title, I returned to Dalaran and in 10 minutes I looted the Giant Sewer Rat. Now, the only fishing achievement that remains is the damn Old Crafy from Orgrimmar... to say the least, fucking horde aren't letting me fish, they attack me even though I'm naked fishing. Oh well.. three hurras for www.elsanglin.com

WTB dps

On the upside:

I went to SSC and downed Vashj at the 2nd attempt with 15 ppl. Nice.

I also went Zul'Aman and downed Zul'jin, completed the ZA quest line with some effort with Tarithel pulling mobs for me to talk to the guy in the hut. I won the Blood roll, but the Lich, RL, made a mistake (did he??) and gave the head to a 70 that whined about me rolling...fucking idiot.

I made a foolish 2-men attempt on Broodlord but failed miserably, and did a nice 2-men trial with Onyxia that went fine until she body pulled respawned trash during Phase 2. It seems soloable with Metamorph'd lock, if that damn elite doesn't show up. It also takes a lot of time for the pet to down Onyxia to 65%. If I start dps'ing, threat goes up, she turns up on me.. but surely seems that the head will be mine soon.

On achievement side, I'm going for the Salty Fishing title. Got Mr. Pinchy with about 50 attempts, but no Magical box yet. Oh and got some more rares in Outland. And a first rare in Northrend, Trekkie. It's the little dead robot in the pictures.


On the downside:

I started trying to run daily heroics.. a few things happen...
a) A bunch of undergeared guys who should know what do do gather up, but fail at the last boss, repeatedly. Waste of time.
b) A bunch of guys gather up but aren't even able to start the damn thing. Waste of Time.
c) I join a pro-group that humiliates me miserably, and they tell me so, while carrying their fucking ez mode epics. I complete the daily in 30 mins but most probably enter their black list as "yet another dude who can't dps".

Using flasks+spell power food helps marginally.. I'm watching mages do 3.8k dps on an 80 elite boss while I suffer to get past 2.0k dps. In heroics, I'm simply not able to go more than 1.3k-1.5k dps. Spec was 0/55/13, with the so called insane raid buff... well, in a pug, no one cares about it.. changed to 31/0/40... no real change in dummy testing. 1.7k dps on 80 dummy, about 1.5k dps on boss dummy with hit-cap.
I'll try deep destro or deep affliction but honestly... I don't expect a big difference. Something is dead wrong.

Long story short, guild isn't active enough to run a fucking heroic, ppl are pugging, and I'm not in the mood for heroic pugs.. so ? May be I'm leveling a DK and going solo achievements for WoTLK until we start doing some guild raiding.

A positive on this, is that I now know every damn hit number for warlocks.
78 hit for heroics (with 3/0/3 hit talents)
157 hit for heroics (with 0/0/0 or 0/0/3 or 3/0/0 hit talents)
368 hit for raid (with 3/0/3 hit talents)
447 hit for raid (with 0/0/0 or 0/0/3 or 3/0/0 hit talents)
Things change with a draenei but in short, that's about it.

Amazingly, hit what was so difficult to stack in TBC and it's so easy now, my blue-gear build gets 368 or 447 easily. Ok, 368 easily with little dps/intellect drop.

AQ chain quest line (continued)

A bit of progress on my quest line.

Yesterday I went to Molten Core and looted the Draconic Chapter VIII from Ragnaros.
And later I went to BWL, talked to Vaelastrasz and looted the Red Scepter shard from Nefarian within 5 hours.

It was a bit complicated because it was a guild run, with "special previledges" for guildies and friends (guildie got the head offered which pissed others off, me included), and there was another red shard looter, probably a Loremaster with nearly 5K achievement points in raid. Luckily, I soultstoned myself during the Nefarian fight, died due to lack of healing, but ress'ed at the last moment, ran to Nefarian and looted it.
It was a guild run from Exiles of Fate, the guild I left because of Kiz the bastard mage that stole DKP and was forgiven by his friend officers, leading me and all men with a sense of justice out the door.

Loremaster Netcownt

YES !!!

I'm finally a Loremaster, with 730 quests done in Kalimdor, and over 3000 quests overall. Yesterday I completed the Final Goal in Icecrown, with 140 quests.

On a side note, Loremaster's Colors tabard is absolutely ugly, and totally unrole-play... after all, an exclamation point is an interface widget, not an Azeroth symbol.

That said, I've completed the most important part (for me) in Northrend, that is, to get to know all the places and all the stories outside instances.

Now comes the utterly boring part, ie, gear up in order to raid.

I've restarted 2v2 arenas with Tarithel, but they are harder than in 70's. In 70 Arenas I would beat about 50% of the teams with 1500 rating, but now... forget it !

It's a little stupid there's no 1v1 arenas. After all, arenas in real world were actually 1v1.

For a few days, I'll level up skills and do some achievements, and then, heroics, lets do them.