Monday 29 December 2008

Good Times!

So I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are looking forward to the New year ahead.

I know I am!

So a week without WoW and Saturday night I'm back with a vengeance! Or so I thought!

Didn't really do anything when I got back, too tired from an 8 hour drive back from Newcastle visiting my g/f's parents.

Sunday however I was back in Zul'Gurub getting rep and clearing some of the bosses in there for gold with a Mage friend of mine. It seems that the trash is fine to solo clear, but some of the bosses are kinda silly - and much harder than Onyxia! Well not much harder, but certainly hard enough to warrant me getting pwned at 10/15%

I mean I cant even pull the bat boss.........*looks annoyed* and I recon I could solo her if I had some mechanic to interrupt her heals.

But I did manage to hit exalted with Zandalar Tribe.

Anyway its much quicker with 2 people there. Still no Raptor mount dropped for my mate, as I already have it. I'm hoping for the Tiger mount - but the only time I've cleared them was with a shaman friend of mine.

Speaking of Shaman' Our 3v3 team has formed - just gotta get invited and we're set to get a good rating!

Team will consist of me, a resto shaman and an Enhancement Shaman. Can't wait to get my teeth stuck in.

Anyway also I managed this morning before work to get exalted with Timbermaw Hold!

That puts me at 34 factions to exalted and only 6 away from the title!

Oracles next for 35, then I have to decide where to go next for rep. I'm tempted to try the Steamwheedle Cartel Bunch of factions - I recon when 3.0.8 comes they'll be reasonably easy to get due to the rep changes Blizzard are introducing that will not reduce rep gained based on level for killing mobs. Better pack lots of tan lotion in the bags for spending hours and hours in the Tanaris deserts!

No raid progression this week as the guild are on a raiding holiday until the 4th jan. Other than doing the Archavon in Wintergrasp - but that's not a real raid boss - he's a free loot bot!

Anyways - watch this space as we return to our usual service...

Upcoming posts will deal with arena at 80, and the mysterious Ghost-Hit-Cap for Ret-Paladins!!

Saturday 20 December 2008

Christmas Break!

So its that time of year again!

I'm off to spend Christmas with my Girlfriends Family!

I hope you all have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year!


Friday 19 December 2008

Naxxramas 25-Man Update

Hey guys - Just some quick updates and thoughts on Naxxramas 25.

So with the instances all reset this week Rage entered Naxxramas and cleared 3 of the 4 wings in 4 hours.

Death Knight wing all bosses cleared no wipes.
Plague Wing all bosses cleared no wipes.
Spider Wing all bosses cleared no wipes.

Last night we were 2 men down for the night due to no-shows and cancellations but our raid leader took us to Naxx none the less to see if we could get through it.

Patchwerk is a wall. A big fat wall of PAIN.

I mean don't get me wrong, we've gotten past him already last week, but 2 people missing and its just pain city.

This is NOT a dps for melee and no-matter what we tries it just ended every try with the melee going down hard and fast.

Its so unforgiving. Its a DPS race - but the healers cant heal anyone but the 3 tanks. melee have to keep themselves under 8/9k health or die a horrible insta-gib death.

Anyway so we moved on and took down Sartharion then the raid disbanded.

My first egg from the Oracles hatched today, and I got the White birdy non-combat pet out of it.
Bought another one - and just gotta play the waiting game till I can get the other 2 non-combat pets and eventually I imagine the Mount.

PS - If anyone is after the "Red Winter Hat" the best place to get it is normal Nexus - 2/3 level 80's can skip most of the mobs as long as you've got a ret-paladin/warrior/druid - well any melee class that can take a beating from 3/4 mobs at once. The mage boss in there seems to have a 100% drop rate of the hat. Much easier than years past.

PPS - Has anyone seen a blue "!" running around in Dalaran on the mini-map called "Frostie"?

I saw it twice last night...I cant find any mention of it anywhere on the web and nothing on the WoW forums either.

Please tell me I'm not seeing things!!!

Wednesday 17 December 2008

Character Customisation and Kel'Thuzad

Hey guys! Pretty happy here today! Hope you're all getting ready for Christmas!

So last night Rage managed to take down Kel'Thuzad in 25-man Naxx!

It was so funny!! Kel had like 60/70k health down and we had about 10/15 people left up and all our tanks died! The adds went after the remaining healers then the remaining dps.

BAM! Kel'Thuzad goes down!

Who's left standing?

Our enhancement Shammy and a hunter!

It was so funny - Vent erupted in the biggest cheer I've heard in a long time! We were all shouting louder and louder as his health went down lower and lower!!

Was awesome! A long night of tries on him but we were successful!!

We popped to Sartharion after and took him down fast - I think we'll try him with 1 or 2 of the other dragons up soon! I cant wait for that challenge!

Anyway as many of you may have noticed the Winter Veil has arrived in Azeroth and I've been spending my time when I'm not raiding getting the achievements done so I can pick up my title "The Merrymaker" I'm only 3/4 achievements away from that. One of which I cant get till the 25th anyway.

Also character customisation has come to the European servers, and being how I like to experience everything the game has to offer, so I paid my £12 and dove in head first!

See if you can notice what I changed on Firelight!






Monday 15 December 2008

Factions, Factions and More Factions!

Hey Dudes! Its been quiet on the WoW front these past few days so just been working on getting rep for that elusive Achievement: 40 Factions to Exalted.

Currently I'm sitting on 31 Factions to Exalted:

Alliance: - Darnassus, Exodar, Gnomeregan Exiles, Ironforge, and Stormwind.

Alliance Forces: - Stormpike Guard (Alterac Valley)

Alliance Vanguard: - Valiance Expedition

Classic: - Argent Dawn, Cenarion Circle and Wintersaber Trainers.

Shattrath City: - Lower City, Sha'tari Skyguard, Shattered Sun Offensive, The Aldor, and The Sha'tar.

The Burning Crusade: - Ashtongue Deathsworn, Cenarion Expedition, Honor Hold, Keepers of Time, Kurenai, Netherwing, Orgri'la, Sporregar, The Consortium, The Scale of the Sands, and The Violet Eye.

Wrath of the Lich King: - Argent Crusade, Kirin Tor, Knights of the Ebon Blade, The Sons of Hodir and The Wyrmrest Accord.

So I got 9 Factions I need to get to exalted.

Factions at Revered:

The Kalu'ak - 20206/21000 - Will get this tomorrow.
The Oracles - 6232/21000 - 8 Days of the 3 dailys left.
Zandalar Tribe - 11429/21000 - I might go see if i can solo the mobs in there for coins/bijou's.
Timbermaw Hold - 1143/21000 - This is Slooooooooww..... Gave up a bit on this at revered.

Factions at Honored:

The League of Arathor - 2253/12000 - The Endless Grind....
Hydraxian Waterlords - 11296/12000 - LFM to MC - Must be over 70.
Steamwheedle Cartel - All 4 Factions Honored.
(Frenzyheart Tribe - Will switch to Frenzyheart once I get the protodrake from the Oracles)

Factions at Friendly:

Silverwing Sentinels - 3281/6000 - Anyone else hate WSG Rep Grind?
Explorers' League - 4689/6000 - How do you get rep with these?
The Frostborn - 553/6000 - And these?
Darkmoon Faire 2115/6000 - Mission Impossible!

Factions at Neutral:

The Silver Covenant - 0/3000 - Not implemented in game yet as I know.
Magram Clan Centaur - 2136/3000 - Zzzzz Kill a zillion centaurs..
Ravenholdt - 5/3000
Shen'dralar - 660/3000
Thorium Brotherhood - 2090/3000

So 4 at Revered, 3(4) at Honored and 4 at Friendly equals 11.

So I guess I have to choose the easiest.

This is the order I plan to do them in:

1 - The Kalu'ak
2 - The Oracles
3 - Zandalar Tribe (if i can down the trash in ZG)
4 - Timbermaw Hold - Groan - can you say slow grind?
5 - Frenzyheart Tribe - Once I get the Green Proto-Drake from the Oracles.
6 - Scryers - I'm exalted Aldor at the moment, and I imagine Scryer Rep Items are really cheap right now, but You have a hard slog to get to exalted due to only being able to do 1 quest for some basilisk eyes.

That's as far as I can predict right now - its a big old task now. Lets see what happens in the future and if any new factions appear sooner or later. I just don't wanna get to 39 factions to exalted with nothing on the horizon!!

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Solo'ing Instances.

Hey guys! Just wanted to write a blog post about something I've always tried to do to the best of my ability as a way to prove myself as a decent ret-paladin.

So at the weekend I thought to my self "Now I'm 80 and decked out in some nice epics its time to go see Onyxia again. I'd been to see her at level 70 and solo'd her but that was in beta, before all the nerf's.

Would it be possible again?

In short: Yes! As usual the trash leading to Ony herself proved to be more of a pain in the butt than the dragon herself. She had just over 1 million health, and contrary to popular belief you can melee her in phase 2, she went down in just under 20 minutes. Easy as pie. For the most part I played it safe. Using seal of Light and Wisdom when required. I switched out to Seal of Command for a few seconds here and there when she wasn't doing anything particularly nasty.

The whelps went down fast with the new consecrate ticking for 4/500.

So that got me thinking, a few days before I'd gone and cleared out most of Normal Ramparts in Hellfire Peninsula, I wonder if it'd be possible for me to solo a level 70 Heroic?

Obviously I'd only have to do the bosses and given my level I could probably skip the majority of the trash mobs.

Does anyone think this could be possible? I might try tonight if I get time to go have a stab at heroic Ramparts.

Edit - I've re-enabled anonymous comment posting again.

Monday 8 December 2008

Weekend Updates - Armageddon

Hey Peeps! Its been a busy weekend in Azeroth more than usual as I was able to get some good time in playing! Man I hate the cold weather in this country!!

Anyway What did I get up to? Well quite a lot I managed to get done:

Sons of Hodir - Exalted! Now I gotta save up for my Grand Ice Mammoth

Sholozar Basin - all quests cleared and I've started my rep grind with The Oracles.
(leaving me with 10-15 quests left in Icecrown to get the Loremaster of Northrend Achievement)

Finally decided which toon to level to 80 next, the switfly changed my mind;

I got my mage to level 70 (from 68) in Northrend really REALLY fast. Only to then run out of rested bonus. What I've decided to do is level each toon in the same area (Borean Tundra) to start off with till I run out of rested bonus, then switch to the next toon.

This will maximise XP received for killing mobs all the way to 80. Well that's what I think anyway! HA!

Rage started our domination of the 25 man content Yesterday! Starting with Archavon (man that dude is cake!) and we cleared out the Spider Wing and the Death Knight Wing.

The encounters were a little harder, but having more DPS, more Tanks, more Healers meant that we either took the various bosses down first time, or on the 2nd try. The hardest to co-ordinate was Instructor Razuvious. Getting 4 priests to time their Mind Controlling was a real challenge the first time, and even then we got him down to 30/40% before the wipe was called and we got him 2nd time. The night ended on a high for me when the 4 horsemen chest contained:

Armageddon
Two Hand Sword

554-831 Dmg Speed 3.40

(203.7 damage per second)

+101 Strength

+108 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 58.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 100.


Wow! I nearly fell off my chair! I've gone for the Berserker enchant on it (Damn that cost me a lot - those Abyss Crystals cost too much, and I only had to buy 6!!) which has a chance to increase Attack Power by 400 at the cost of 25% of your armour.

I'll get a proper test of that sword tonight in Naxx as we clear our the other 2 wings.
I also got these from A Noob! (Anub'Rekhan)

Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal
Feet Plate

1580 Armor

+67 Strength

+82 Stamina

Blue Socket

Socket Bonus: +4 Strength

Equip: Improves Critical Strike Rating by 66.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 43.


I've put some random purple gem in there, and Icewalker to keep my Hit rating capped(its dropped to 290 now)

I just need to find a nice new trinket and some rings!

Look at that thing! ITS HUGE!!!!


(its so big, whilst on my back, the tip of it scrapes along the ground!)

Friday 5 December 2008

Quickie.

OK I've updated my gear and picked out all the haste gems and replaced them with Strength Gems.

Cost me a fair bit. The quicker the epic gems come in, the quicker the blue quality gems will drop in price!

Oh I know what i mean to ask - I read somewhere that there was going to be a glyph that converts 10% of the AP bonus from Blessing of Might into Spell Power?

Did I dream that? Cos I cant seem to find it anywhere yet....?

Thursday 4 December 2008

Changes...

OK so thanks to all of you that commented on my last post. Great info there and I'm going to make some changes to my gear tonight. Such a shame you cant remove gems and re-use them later.

I was under the impression that haste was the way to go for Ret due to what I'd read about horde Pallies in TBC, but it appears I was slightly wrong about that. (thanks Tim!)

So I'm gonna swap out all the Haste gems for Strength gems or crit gems.

I'm just over my hit cap so I don't have a problem there are the moment. (no hit gems but 1 hit enchant on my boots)

I'm still unsure about a few things:

1 - Should I swap the 2/2 Improved Retribution Aura (increases damage done by my ret-aura by 50%) for 2/2 Vindication (reduces targets attributes by 20% for 15sec)

2 - What weapon enchant should I go for? (Josh says Berserking - and is what I'm going to try - Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes increase your attack power by 400, but at the cost of reduced armor. - 20 Infinite Dust, 15 Greater Cosmic Essence, and 10 Abyss Crystal's DAMN!)

3 - Where have the +Strength Enchants for Bracers and Gloves that I thought we'd see in Wrath? Or am I just stuck with AP enchants now?

4 - Should I pick a slower weapon over a faster one? If either what speed is good?

I'm kinda doing my gord in about this at the moment! Did you guess?

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Question That I Have..

Just a quick one - 2nd post today - I was talking to a fellow Raiding Ret last night and he asked how my DPS was in raids and to be honest overall its been 2-2.5k. He was shocked about this and said he was putting out 3.2k dps.

I was a little shocked - looking at his gear he has more or less the same as me, and I'd go out on a limb and say I was better geared than him.

Check out his armory link (if its working....) and compare it to mine.

I cant see what I'm doing wrong. I've tried reading what I could get my head around here. (Great site for Ret btw)

Can anyone find a spell rotation for me? something that will get me to improve my dps by 1k? Does that even seem possible?

I still have upgrades to come as well - I'm almost exalted with Sons of Hodir - should have that by next week and I'm saving up mats to get the +115 AP weapon enchant unless you recommend I go for something different? (using +85 AP at the mo)

I'm WAY over my hit cap I think (142 is the cap still?) I'm running with 296 (9.03%) Around 4-5k AP in raids 35% odd crit in raids, with 200 odd Haste Rating. (cant remember off hand)

Into The Obsidian Sanctum...

Hey guys! More raid news from a quick raid we had last night.

Our 10-man team formed up and we were told to head to the Chamber of Aspects.

"What?"

"Where's that?"

Were most of the replies - including myself in that! Ha Ha!

The Chamber of Aspects, if you've not discovered it yet, is a large room at the bottom of the dragon tower in Dragonblight. It has 5 "doors" that least to 5 caves for each of the dragonflight factions (Red, Green, Blue, Bronze and Obsidian)

The only one that is open at the moment is The Obsidian Sanctum.

In here lives 4 dragons; Sartharion, and his 3 buddies, Shadron - Tenebron and Vesperon.

Basically you get more loot if you can defeat Sartharion with either 1, 2 or 3 drakes still alive and in the fight.

We just cleared all 3 drakes tonight and the trash then killed Sartharion.

The 3 drakes are basic tank and spank, with a special ability that needs to be followed.

Each of them with spawn a portal that the whole group will need to go into apart from the Main Tank and his Primary healer.

Once inside the portal there will be a mob inside that needs to be killed asap. (Or in one of the portals a bunch of eggs that need to be nuked down or when you pop back to the "real world" each of the eggs will turn into a whelp than needs to be killed before you can start DPS on the mini-boss again.

Sartharion himself is a fairly straight-forward fight - the usual dragon thing - watch the tail and dps don't stand in front of him or be cleaved. Every now-and-again an emote will pop up saying "The lava surrounding Sartharion churns" and some lava waves will spawn from the sides and sweep across the area you're standing. These waves MUST be avoided or upon contact a fire elemental will spawn and you have kill that before returning dps to Sartharion. Elementals also spawn that have to be off tanked.

Our first try on this guy was a success with 2 people dead very early on so he's not difficult really you just need to make sure you stay out of the way of the waves.

Here is a pic of his corpse!


After we went and had 1 shot at Malygos just to see what it was all about and to prepare for the future when we're geared up a bit more. Wow that seemed like a slap in the face! Cant wait to down this dude!

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Naxx 10 Man Cleared! Kel'Thuzad Explained.

So as the title suggests we cleared Kel'thuzad in Naxx last night in 10 man.

It felt really good to defeat a proper challenge again after the level 70 stuff was nerfed.

I know its not the 25 man content, but its still an achievement in itself for a casual raid guild.

The fight itself is a really interesting one, but very straight forward.

Phase 1 - The group run into the centre of the room and the fight starts. The room itself is a large circular room with seven or eight alcoves dug out into the walls with portals in the ends of them.
In these alcoves undead mobs spawn:
Skeletons - these have really low health and can be one-shotted with any of my abilities
Abominations - these need to be tanked and nuked down.
Soul Reavers - these banshee's move really really slowly towards the raid and do 8k damage to anyone who gets into melee range. These need to be nuked down by that ranged DPS classes.

These mobs will come randomly and attack the group - its not hard - you should not be wiping in phase one!

Phase 2 - After 2/3 mins of the undead mobs attacking Kel'thuzad stops channelling his portals and the undeads stop spawning and he joins the fight.

At this point the raid should spread out - and be more than 10 yards apart if possible. This is a MUST!

Kel'thuzad has 3 abilities during this phase:
1 - single shot shadow bolt - hits 1 random target for a reasonable amount of damage.

2 - Multi shot shadow bolt - his most, if not all, of the raid for a few thousand health.

3 - Iceblock thing - This will wipe the raid if you're not careful and is the single most important reason why the raid need to spread out. The affected target will be encased in a tomb of ice which will do 105% of the players health as damage over 3/4 seconds. It cannot be bubbled out of, or ice-blocked out of. Anyone who is with 10 yards of the affected player will ALSO get this. So its really bad if you have your healers all stood together and all 3 of them are affected - Yep thats a wipe!

Your healers really need to be on-top of their game to keep the affected player alive. As a ret-paladin I was helping out a lot with the healing where i could - if I got an instant cast heal i would top up the health of anyone who had low health - bearing in mind that my Flash of Light can crit for 3/4k while raid buffed. So that's quite a lot of healing for a dps to do. It really helped us out last night.

Phase 3 - at 40% Kel'Thuzad will cry out for help from the Lich King who kindly obliges the lich with 2 big nasty bugs. Each of these should be tanked by the off tank. You cannot kill these dudes as they have the same health as Kel'Thuzad. (2.5 million if I remember correctly)
These guys have a buff that increases there damage by 15% each stack - this can stack 99 times.
Both our tanks last night were Paladins, so when Kel was down to about 5/10% our off tank went down as he just couldn't stand up to the damage those things were putting out.
When phase 3 starts - its a dps race - pure and simple. Kill Kel'thuzad as quick as you can or your tanks are going to get killed by the bugs.

Phase 3 isn't all that difficult - we had more problems getting through phase 2 without loosing a healer from the ice-block.

Prior to the Naxx raid we went and helped out in Wintergrasp so we could do the 10-man boss in there Archavon. Wow is he easy in 10 man. Having seen the 25-man and that being one shotted - its really free epixx!! If you've not been yet i suggest you group up and go there as soon as you can - its really fun.

Anyway here are a couple pics from after we owned Kel'Thuzad!



Monday 1 December 2008

Latest Achievements.

Hey Guys!

Just thought I'd make a post about the latest achievements I'd gotten, or been involved in getting!

Its been a busy weekend - and I had planned on posting about my latest gear upgrades and some other bits, but I don't have any of my pictures here at work so I cant. Maybe tonight or tomorrow!

Anyway I've been involved in some pretty cool stuff over the weekend so lets break it down:

PvP Achievements:

1 - Black War Bear! Yes that's right, I joined a group of 30/35 people and after a bit of waiting for everyone to gather oh a hill just north of Thunderbluff. Its about 12am server time and we're hoping its quiet as the last thing we wanted was Horde interference.

There were about 3/4 hordies in TB who didn't get involved, and one poor soul who just happened to be passing and flagged lol SPLAT!

Cairne Blooodhoof went down in a few mins and with in the glory of our battle we decided to move to Silvermoon to take down Lor'themar Theron. He was cake.
Next we went to Undercity. Travelling via the sewer it seems if you've not completed the quest chain in Dragonblight then you cant enter with your comrades.

Sylvanas has a few interesting abilities including the ability to vanish, ice block everyone then appear ranged and start taking potshots at the group. As we got her down a shaman turned up flagged just as we were running out of the room. Ha Ha! he went down so fast! 33 vs 1 is a bit unfair!

That left Thrall. We quickly over crowded one of the Zeppelins to Ogrimmar and flew across the sea. We re-grouped outside the west entrance to Orgrimmar. Once we were ready and buffed we rode in - killing guards on the way.

Finally we met some resistance, the last 3 bosses had been cake with only 1 or 2 horde turning up.

We were mid fight and suddenly 20/30 horde came in and wiped the raid. But all was not lost. During the scuffle I manged to complete another 2 achievements:

10,000 Honorable Kills.
That Takes Class (got the DK kill I was waiting for!)

After about 10 minutes of waiting as ghost the horde finally cleared off and we got back to work.

What I and a few others were surprised about is that the Troll leader is in Thralls chambers and has to be tanked/defeated as well, and annoyingly there is no achievement for killing him.

Thrall went down eventually, followed by Vul'jin or whatever his name is (Who has an annoying ability that turns everyone into a frog!)

So that snagged me "For The Alliance" and I got my Black War Bear!

I also managed to get 300 Shard things from instance bosses and some pvp in Wintergrasp and snagged myself a Black War Mammoth!

PvE:

I've cleared all the instances in Wrath on heroic now (5-man) and our guild have cleared all 4 wings in Naxx and took down Sathiron in 10 man last night (spell check pls!) although I wasn't present.

I joined a 25-man group for Archivron in Wintergrasp - man is that guy cake! we hit the enrage timer though but still managed to get him down with only 4 people left standing! Cant wait to get him down with the guild so we can get some proper loot from him - was a bit of a farce at the weekend - people needing when they shouldn't have - stupid master looter released during the fight so missed out on the kill. So I got my first Emblem of Valor as well.

I've gotten my t7 gloves from badges, and now I'm saving up for other bits - like neck/rings/trinkets.

I've managed to replace pretty much all my gear now with epics from heroics or naxx. leaving me with just 2 blue quest-trinkets/heroic drops and 2 level 70 rings from Black Temple.

I also leveled my Blacksmithing on Saturday and crafted myself a new epic helm - cost me a small fortune though! 6,000g or there abouts all in to get to 440 B/S and including the mats for the helm.

Crazy business! There goes my plan to get a Grand Mammoth from Sons of Hodir rep.

Anyway that's enough for now!

Edit: Added the pics!