The Law of Alts

First off this post has nothing to do with Paladins. Just getting it out there.

As Patch 4.2 started looming closer and now that it's hit, I've been working on my resto shaman to get her up to snuff and do a bit more raiding on her than I did during the previous tier of raiding content. This is a similar pattern to the days of Wrath for me as I focused only on the paladin until she was BiS geared out for non-heroic raid content. Well, that's starting to happen again, although this time I didn't have to get both the paladin and Shaman up to max level from scratch so the whole process is going faster. That and some days I really feel like playing a badass resto shaman as opposed to a face rolling ret paladin.

So in an effort to not get burnt out on Mirax, I took Rhysati to a Bastion of Twilight run today. Her tier shoulders did drop, but I lost on them to a hunter. However, Rhys did get an upgrade for her enhancement set in the form of a new helm. (Which I felt really bad because our guild's main enhancement shaman was there on his prot pally and needed the helm for his main toon.) I feel like my shaman is stuck in the law of alts, but a twisted version as the only raid drops she's gotten in Cataclysm so far have both been for her off-spec. So the main sees gear for the alt and the alt only sees gear for the wrong spec. I love it. Someday I'll be a tiered out shaman again. Blizz just needs to leave a raiding tier in place for a full year so everyone gets bored of it and starts gearing out their alts.

It's Patch Day! Now What?

As I write, Patch 4.2 is going live on servers and I along with everyone else is patiently waiting for the servers to come back up so we can all go check out the new quest hub. The main issue with patch day is what the hell do you do while you're waiting for servers to come back up? I've already read up about the patch on both WoW Insider and MMO-Champion. I even posted to my guild's website with places for guildies to read up about the patch. Then being that there was still three and a half hours left until the scheduled time for the realms to come back up I went grocery shopping which sadly only took me an hour. So now I still have time to kill while waiting.

I think it's the aniticipation of new content that has me bated and dying to jump on and play. I know I'm going to play the new content and probably get burnt out on it quickly, but I still want to play it.

Bittersweet Victory

Yesterday the main tank in my guild ran an ICC 25 doing achievement for the mount as well as to get us our Kingslayer 25 so we can go do a Light of Dawn run next week. However, a a big part of his motivation for doing these runs is to get me my Shadowmourne and our guild the 'We Are Legendary' achievement. For the most part everything went great during the run. We cleared everything, wipes were only caused by people screwing up achievements and thus wipes had to be called. The only downside really to the whole night was me and my silly quest. I'm still on the infusions portion of the questline and am the person in our guild who is farthest along. (We never downed Putricide 25 during ICC's heyday so I could never progress with them until a post-Cataclysm ICC 25 run.) I had already done my plauge infusion a few months ago and thus was on Blood Queen. Everyone held back dps so I could be the first one bitten and so that I could get all three bites in and then we killed her. To may dismay, my quest wasn't complete.

I had read up on the quests months if not a year or more ago when it was looking like we were gonna push for the orange and before the raid lockout was shared between 10 man and 25 man. Due to how long it had been since I had read up on the quest I didn't realize that the buff I needed I got by standing infront of the BQ with the tanks. I also don't play a tank so I didn't even know what the extra debuff they get was callled. So to my dismay I have to do it all again next week when we do heroic mode and have to do the Sindragosa one on heroic as well. Ugh. I feel like such an idiot.

Priestly Ways

I have been having a ton of fun playing on my Level 72 BC dugeon twink Priest, Elscol. She's done Sunwell more than all of my Level 85s combined. She's almost to revered already with the Ashtounge Deathsworn. She has almost as many hit points as the tanks she heals if not more than they have. All in all, she is a little badass and I love playing on her to death. This being said, it sometimes makes me sad that I level capped her and can't (well won't) finish leveling her to 85. Thus I want to make a new priest and level them all the way to 85.

A couple things make the possibility of a new priest a little silly if not hard to do. First off, I have ten characters on my server so I don't have any open slots for a new one. I don't really want to get rid of a character because I have one of each class and I think that's kinda cool. Except I don't play most of them. I think I really only seriously play the Paladin, Shaman and existing Priest at the moment. The Druid and Warlock also get a bit of love, just not as much. The hunter is up at 65 so I probably won't do anything with her and the Level 61 Death Knight is slated to become my farm-bot as soon as I get around to leveling her so that the Paladin can pick up a profession that's a little more beneficial than mining (I don't tank on Mirax so the extra stamina is useless.) My Rogue is my only Worgen and as the newest to the bunch she's not gonna get deleted. Plus if I ever go to level Mirax's Ravenholdt rep I'm gonna need a toon that can pick-pocket. Periodically I get curious about playing a Warrior and I'll admit Victory Rush and quest grinding go hand in hand. Plus Ayrl is supposed to be leveling with Mälik's Warrior, Grizz. This only leaves the Mage, who coincidentally is my only Horde character on this server. Mälik moved his Horde Druid, Moocat, to a different server where we all had rolled Horde alts. I broke up with my boyfriend and his unplayed Troll Rogue is the only character still left in the guild we have on the Horde side. But I don't just want to delete the Mage. I spent way too much gold on her giving in to my desire to know every single pattern that I can on each of my crafting toons. That and she has a ton of patterns in her bank and bags as well as some nice gear that I have no way of transferring to a different character. So I think I'm gonna follow Mälik and transfer her over to our Horde server.

That was the first issues with a new Priest.

The second issue is that I didn't always love playing Elscol. When I first rolled her she was a Dwarf named Escol, though still a Priest, and I had no issues playing her as long as I didn't have to kill things. Oh god, just leveling to 20 was painful. I first started playing her when my ex, his friend and I all decided to start toons together. They both rolled Gnomes and myself a Dwarf. The ex was a Warrior tank and the friend was a Warlock. We had a perfect little leveling party. But after we initially started them all we never played them again together. The friend eventually leveled his lock and the ex eventually deleted his warrior, and Escol was left sitting there gathering dust. I tried to level her several times, always to the same painful conclusion. Then, Mälik rolled a Paladin tank and suddenly I had a buddy to go run Gnomergan with. Except he made fun of how ugly Escol was and a quick trip to the Battle.net site later she was reborn as Elscol, the Human Priest, whose name was finally spelt right. Then the ex and his friend rolled Dwarf Shaman and Duel Spec was lowered to Level 30 and only 10 gold and Elscol now had a Shadow spec for dealing damage. However, this resurgence was short lived as Cataclysm was released and leveling the Paladin, Shaman and Druid from 80 to 85 became more of the priority. However, the mystique of the Priest remained as an alluring thought and once that was accomplished and Mirax was geared for raiding I picked up healing on Elscol again and the rest is history.

So yeah, I'm not sure I want to lose my only Mage on the server and I'm not sure I want to relive the pain of being a low-level Priest. Heck, I'm not even sure what race I would be. My guild needs a Gnome Priest for our Stay Classy achievement, but I can't stand being that low to the ground. I like the spirit bonus that humans get which as a raiding toon will be quite handy. However, I have a human priest already and I don't like having too many characters of the same race. Currently I have 3 Humans, 3 Draenei, 2 Night Elves, a Worgen and a Blood Elf. Also, being a girl I like my characters to look hot or at least pretty. So I have some things to think about. But in the mean time I think I'm going to transfer that Mage.

The Lure of Shiny New Healing Gear

Just looked at the new Tier 12 for Holy Paladins. Sweet Jesus that's an awesome tier set with equally awesome set bonuses. I have been seriously considering making Mirax's MS Holy instead of Ret as we always need healers and usually less melee dps. Between the fact that I keep getting asked to heal on her (I've only ever faced Cho'gall as a healer on any toon) and the fact that I feel like my Paladin is a superior healer to my MS Resto Shaman (who I've also thought about Maining as I do love playing her), becoming a Holy Pally is something I'm thinking really hard about and have been ever since I first found out the new Pally abilities for Cata over a year ago. So when 4.2 comes out next week we'll see what happens.

Toxic Link is a Toxic Problem

Why do people fail so much at Toxic Link on the High Priest Venoxis encoutner? Every time I try to go run a Z-heroic on my Shaman, I get Zul Gruub and inevitably we wipe over and over on the first boss due to people failing to run far enough from me the healer who is usually up against a wall. I can't run through the wall. Trust me I've tried. It's not that hard. Just run the opposite direction of the green line. Like a reverse Blood Queen. But no people keep failing at the concept. 


It's too late for me to be PUGing out anyway. Good night.

Heroic Mode: We Can Do it, Now What?

My guild is comfortably farming Blackwing Descent 5/6 and Bastion of Twilight 3/4 and a couple of us have actually killed Cho'gall and thus the guild can make attempts at Heroic Halfus. I was discussing the issue of heroic raid bosses with the guild's main tank last night. We both agree that the guild can do it, it's more a question of if we should and would the guild want to?

From what I can tell our guild members all want to down raids but their reasons for doing so are varied. Some people are concerned with the lack of raid drops they have been getting. Others want the achievement for the full raid before even attempting heroic modes. Still others just want guild members to show so we don't have to PUG. Personally, I would love to see our guild make attempts at heroic Halfus. I think we can do it and not to mention there's better loot associated with heroic modes.