Robbed again

Yesterday was a sad day.

Again I went to OS-25, rolled 97 on Tier 7.5 gloves, and was totally robbed by the Raid Leader, a filho da puta paladin called Persecution, that ignored my plights, then removed me from raid, and probably gave them to himself or some other bastard.

It seems that I will only be able to get something from OS25 if I create the raid myself. That might just be the way for the future. But the pain to have to cope with 24 PUG idiots and actually direct them.. oh dear.

Then, I had signed for Naxx25, but the friendly guild we're grouping with has enough locks. 5 had signed, and ofc guildies have priority, so I waited for 90 mins for a chance. Enough said, not sure it's worth the burden of fucking up my family dinners, since they raid too early.

I got 2k arena points and nothing to spend'em on. Got 75K honor and nothing to spend'em on. LOL I'm forced to run Outland instances to make myself exalted with Sha'tar and Lower City to have something to achieve. My bad.

Thank god, there are new challenges.




The Chronicles of Spellborn is out, and the game is very nice, very stable. Great background music, great animations and buildings rendering, much much better than WoW. See for yourself.



Today, I'm installing Runes of Magic. The Youtube videos look awesome.

Naxx25 and a ton of achievements

This week I finally set my foot in Naxx25, courtesy of a guildie invite and of a friendly guild.

We cleared Plague and Arachnid quarter in a blast, and then went to Patchwerk, which came down easily. Finally, we tried Grobbulus with 19, but failed, so called it a night. Anyway, the raid will continue today, so I hope I can see Gluth go down, something I haven't seen with Naxx10. TBH, the more I see of Naxx25, the more I think Naxx10 is harder.
A few reasons:
- Every player that is undergeared causes a lot of difference. 2.5 times more !
- Every player that does less dps than supposed is 2.5 times more problematic.
- Every player that does a mistake is 2.5 times worse, 2.5 times more fatal. That applies to healers missing a heal,
- Every player that has a "lag" spike has 2.5 times more effect on the raid.
etc, etc.
You'll tell me, "OK, but Blizzard makes the instance weaker, in terms of boss HP and boss abilities". Yes, but that is oriented towards the fact that you have 2 healers, not 5, and 6 dps's, not 15. It's not accounting for what I said earlier, which is summarizes as

If things can go wrong in Naxx10, they probably will.
If things can go wrong in Naxx25, they might.



I also found an imba group to run Outland heroics, so I cleared a lot of them. I stopped finally when I was too tired. They kept on.

Finally, I managed to finish my Lockdown achievement, killing every possible boss in Violet Hold HC.

Yesterday was a /cry day, I went out with the kid and missed a Hyjal run. Damn, I'll never get my Outland Raider status.

About priest gear

Now that I haven't got much to do with Netcownt, I decided to gear up and play Tarithel as a shadow priest, not only for dualboxing, but as the main player.
I've noticed a few things.

1) Class unbalance.

With a lock, I needed full-gem,full-enchant, blue/blue heroic gear and tuned pve speccs to reach 1800 dps and needed 80 epics to cross the 2000 dps mark.

With a shadow priest, I use unenchanted, green gemmed, 80 normal or pre-80 blue gear, with 2 70 epic items (Whitemend set) and I can easily achieve 1800 dps on the same targets.

You what's going on ? I know of course, classes are totally unbalanced, as I suspected. Not only lock vs mage (pure dps vs pure dps) but also lock vs ShadPriest (pure dps vs hybrid). Bunch of idiots.

2) DPS scaling

I talked about the Whitemend set. Yes, ofc it was a healing gear, trousers and hat. Each item has 2 gems, so plenty of spell power to enchant. And... it has a set buff, called "Increases Spell Power by 10% of your "total" Intellect".

You know where this is going... A very poor mana 80 clothie has about 800 INT. That translates in 80 Spell power, it's an insane buff that scales with your 80 gear amazingly well, as well as with mages, palas with BoK, any thing that buffs INT in a party or raid. With food or pots, it gives over 100 spell power, which is the same as a lvl 80 25-raid trinket! HA !

Today, I got my T7.5 trousers from VoA-25, gemmed it, enchanted it, and replaced my 70 set with it and a 78 blue hat.. and guess what ?

I LOST 10 Spell Power ! Yes. You heard it right. An epic 70 set matches a Tier 7.5 item and an 78 blue and actually scales better. It looses a few intellect (and crit) but then again, a shadow priest's mana pool scales with its damage not with his mana pool.
(If I have blue gems on the 70 epics, the loss will be more than 30 SP !!!)

Top dps :-)

Finally, I've got top dps in VoA-10 class run.

The funny part is that it was done with PVP spec 0/60/11. Ideally, with a 0/53/18 PVE, I would do about 10%, more, so around 3k dps.
Pretty good for an undergeared lock, considering I've neared 3k dps on two Naxx-10 bosses.
The trick for VoA, ofc, is using demon mode after 30 secs or so and using fire aura, keeping track of the threat. I got up to 92%... also, I was using my private BoK (Guru's elixir ftw) and food, as usual.
I can only hope that 3.1 huge changes for lock talent specs will not degrade the talent tuning I've achieved.

Talking about Guru's elixir, it's an amazing cheap buff. You get your stats increased by 20. But the thing is, the cost is 3 Pygmy Oil's, meaning 3 Pygmys Suckerfish that you catch as trash fish when you are pool fishing, and also shows up in open waters, at least in Grizzly where I go for the salmons.
Add that to me being Elixir Master, so I get to brew further elixirs sometimes, and also Mixology adding 1 hour to the elixir's duration. All in all, a winner.

Arena fun

Nothing like a few arenas to boost some energy.
The last days I've been doing some 2v2 with a guildie holy paladin.
Starting from 1500, it's notorious how Blizzard changed the scoring rules.
Last week, after winning 13:1, we've only gained 19 points.
This week was worse, 5:5.
According to Blizzard, it seems that one has to invest some time in playing, so that the win/loss ratio goes from <1 to >1, ie, playing 10 games a week is no longer possible if you want to go up the ranks and e.g. buy PVP weapons.

I've seen some difficult combos.

Warrior + Paladin: They both can do some massive AoE, fearing, interrupts, meaning it gets hard for a lock to live through it after demon mode wears off. It seems like chain fearing warrior might be the only way here, while pounding the pala continuously.

Shaman + Druid: They heal each other, so the only way again seems to chain fear one, and hit on the other. Usually the druid will be feral, so the shammy should go down 1st

Any combo with a disci-priest: Omg they are so hard to kill. For starts they have Shadow Resistance, then they have pain supression that saves them from a near death and allows them to go full hp again, and then... insta heals, volleys, the hell. It seems that a felguard is useless against these. Felhunter is the way.


Now...an improvement regarding what I've been doing is to use the voidwalker and sack him for shield, then summon the demon that's more appropriate to the incoming comobo, or felguard by default.

Btw, you will agree that lock preparation is a mess.

1 - Buff Fel Armor
2 - Summon pet (or voidwalker)
3 - Buff Soul Link
4 - Create 1st HS
5 - Trade HS
6 - Create 2nd HS
7 - Buff Invi and underwater breathing for all 3 toons.
8 - Create felstone(if needed)
9 - Apply felstone to weap.
(10 - Sack voidwalker for shield)
(11 - Detect combo and summon (non-insta) the right pet)

3.1 will be an important improvement, so that PVP glyphs (shadowburn crit below 35% hp is a must) can be used all the time.

Tier 1 and 0.5 completed and nothing else to do

Due to an absolute boredom while waiting for a proper guild run, I've invested my time in completing my Tier 0/0.5 and Tier 1 sets, since I could solo the bosses and not depend on others.

Tier 1 was a blast, Lucifron in MC dropped the gloves last week, so it's done, I now have an entire 8/8 Felheart raiment.

Tier 0.5 was way harder. I needed the Drakkisath chest drop, and it took about 20 runs for him to drop an 8% item. I wasted about 30 mins in each run. It was a stupid loss of time. Way to go Blizzard.

Then came the fun part, ie, the chain quests to upgrade 5 of the Dreadmist items I had. It was easier than for most, as I had Tarithel in Dalaran, so she could pull Netcownt every 15 mins to a bg and so the trips between Scholo, Dire Maul, UBRS, Algaz Island, Purgation Island, etc, were done in less than 2 days. The last boss at the Best chamber in UBRS was a true challenge, because he would 1-shot kill me if I took more than a few secs to kill his adds. Finally I managed to do it, and now I have a Deathmist raiment. I've only seen Synap the rogue with a tier 0.5 on Chromaggus. I want an achievement for this, screw the fact that DK's can't get it :P

Finally, I now got 762 resilience with my crap PVP gear, not good enough to pwn arena geared dudes, but enough to have a laugh at some. Next season I'll do some reall PVP... hopefully.

I'm again getting fed up with WoW, added by the fact that my guild hasn't got 10 ppl for a guild run anymore, and so any progress towards raid achievements is stalled. Going with pugs.. it's an option, that I don't like at all.

I'm probably going to decrease my online time to a bare minimum.

Chief, Sunwell and utter boredom

After a long ride, I finally was able to become Chief, and as a surplus, learned the entire 160 cooking recipes. Now that's a real achievement.

This weekend, TBC raiding was ongoing on Chromaggus. I stupidly missed a Hyjal past raid, but was able to board on a TK raid to Kael Sunstrider, with a bonus visit to my good old Fel Reaver, and most importantly, I also joined a raid to Sunwell, actually killed Kil'Jaeden and even got a T6 item. The difficult bosses ? The twins, as they are huge spell strikers, and we had few healers. Once we solved that, they came down quickly, one after the other. Kael was actually harder than Kil'Jaeden.

As to bad news, Blizzard decided to reset Arena points after the season's end, meaning my 2K points are now useless for epic PVP gear, so I had to spend them on the crap blue gear. Oh well.. I now have 755 resilience, with a possible max of about 800 with head enchant, etc, got 20K myself and felguard also with 19.5K. Amazing.

Everywhere I look, ppl are now running Naxx for achievements, and I'm feeling a bit down. We can't even set a proper run anymore, healers are afk, guild is now pugging or leveling alts, and I'm not able to see The Eye of Eternity as I wanted, before 3.1. Hopefully it gets better this week.

I only need one more item from heroics, an epic wand from Anub'Arak, and then... there's nothing else for me besides raiding or do arenas seriously.

Meanwhile, I continue to farm UBRS for my last T0 item and Molten Core for my last T1 item.... a poor achievement in deed, of someone bored like hell and with nothing else to do :((

On Lightbringer, I reactivated my 3 70 hordes, but things are not much better in Fylgies. People continue to do silly solo tasks and no guild runs are scheduled.

Ruling Molten Core

Having nearly nothing to do with Netcownt, and not at all inspired to level other toons, I decided to finish my Tier sets.

I had 6/8 Tier 1 when I finished WoW pre-TBC, missing the items from Lucifron and Shazzrah. Luckily, they are the 1st and 3rd bosses of the dungeon, so I decided to solo them, or better, to solo them with Tarithel buffing and following, just in case a renew or prayer of mending is needed.

I had a lot of fun in Molten Core.



I downed Lucifron (twice now), Magmadar (also had to work on the trash hound packs, which are very nice as a warlock training ground) and Shazzrah, which dropped my slippers. So I'm now 7/8 Tier 1.



I also tried Garr, but was a bit tired and it didnt go too well. I have to fight him in lava, felguard got out of LOS, died, he teleported me and game over.

Still, after watching some youtube videos, even Ragnaros is soloable by locks, so... why not going for all bosses sometime ?

I had as well, a few items missing from Tier 0-0.5, namely the mask from Darkmaster Gandling in Scholo and the Chest from Drakkisath in UBRS. Got the mask, but each UBRS run takes nearly an hour, and it hasn't dropped yet.

Btw, Drakkisath is harder than any of the bosses I downed in Molten Core, because he likes to confuse my felguard and come for me instead. Ofc the adds are easier and even fearable, although I prefer to down them both while metamorphed.

Diplomat Netcownt

A few more achievements done, worth mentioning:
- getting Exalted with Sporeggar (took a day of repetitive single quest for killing a bunch of mobs)
- getting Exalted with Timbermaw Hold (took 3 hours to get revered and then all my 250 necklaces saved from long time ago during the Winterspring Saber faction task paid off. Instant exalted, a nice trinket and a mention from Bronzebeard in Ironforge.
- getting 50 kills during city defense. Long live the Horde !
- getting Mercenary of Sholazar
- getting 25 exalted reps.

Soon I'll complete the 160 cooking recipes (3 to go), turn Chef, and get Northrend Heroic Dungeonmaster (2 to go).

I just found out I'm the alliance lock of the server with the most achievements.
Yay !
Ok, 3rd overall in class and 77 overall. Not bad, for someone who hasn't stepped in 25-Naxx or killed Kel'thuzad yet, nor did any heroic runs for specific achievements.

Talking about this, Naxx has been a slow progress. Still, Arachnid and Plague Quarters are done and nearly in farm mode. Construct and Military are on the menu for this month.

Hopefully my back gets better, it's been a living hell to sit for more than 15 mins.