Malygos 25-Man DOWN!!!

Well happy! 4 hours of tries and we eventually got him!

Grats Rage!

Mana Issues with Ret?

Hey guys! Just wanted to take a few mins to talk about something that seems to be bother a few peeps.

Josh @ Eye for an Eye posted about his mana issues and having to go for Glyph of Consecration to over come this.

Now Glyph of Consecration increases the length and cooldown time of Consecrate by 1 second. Meaning you spam it less often.

Rather than use Glyph of Con. I use Glyph of Seal of the Martyr/Blood. This increases the amount of mana you receive from Spiritual Attunement by 10% while the seal is active.

This little awesome glyph keeps you topped up in fights like Patchwerk where you don't(shouldn't) receive much healing. (don't get me started about random 14k Chain-Heal procs you shamans!!)

Reading the comments about the glyph on wowhead.com it seems no-one agrees and now has me 2nd guessing something that seems to help me keep my mana going.

The only time I ever have to consume a potion is if i'm solo'ing stuff now. In last nights raid for instance we cleared 3 wings of naxx-25 and I didn't take *ANY* potions - not even health pots.
I'm wondering if I should start carrying around DPS potions for the last 20% of boss fights when I pop wings or when Heroism is up.

I'll list what Glyphs I'm using later in case you're interested.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Last night I was invited in the Naxx as someone dropped out at the last minute.

Once again all that dropped was stupid Protector T7.5 items, but I manged to get to 60 something Emblems of Valor so just purchased my shoulders that way instead.

I did however get 1 loot item:

Aged Winter Cloak
Back
154 Armor
+38 Agility
+57 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.
Equip: Increases attack power by 110.
Equip: Increases armor penetration rating by 28.

Which is lovely! I had the emblem cloak before so this was a nice crit upgrade for me.

I also got gems fitted to my t7.5 shoulder and legs, and enchanted my new gloves:

Crude Discolored Battlegrips
Hands Plate
1436 Armor
+75 Strength
+82 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 74.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.

This was the last piece i needed to get me over the hit cap again which is now sitting at 294 meaning I can possibly play with some new boots/belt/neck or something in the future.

I also went for the Massacre enchant for my Axe - controversial? +110 AP is pretty nice!

I'm sitting at 35.1% crit now unbuffed and way over 3k Attack Power.
(In raids fully buffed I'm hovering around 5k AP and 40-45% crit depending on Druids!)

Cooking Achievements Completed!

Well almost!!

Hey guys! Just wanted to talk about a few things that I've done lately.

I've completed all the cooking achievements - well there's one left - the 100 cooking tokens one.

I managed to scour the face of Azeroth in search of the last 13 recipes I needed for the 160 recipes achievement, and managed to get them all without having to get the chimera chops or the Thistle Tea recipe.

If anyone is interested I could list what recipes I have. Maybe I'll make a post about it!

I've kinda not got the will to level my alts at the moment. Which kinda defeats the object of me being on a raiding break - this has not been helped by having computer problems.

I bought a new case and a new heatsink/fan for the cpu and tidied the cables to promote air flow in the case - just need to buy an additional 120mm case fan and I'm set. Got a lot of things to try out tonight in the hunt to work out what the problem is that's causing the crashing.

I hope I can get it fixed soon - thankfully it only seems to crash the PC when I'm travelling around Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor and not in Northrend at all.

Chef Firelight the Elder

Hey guys! I hope you're enjoying the Lunar Festival!

Well as you can probably guess from the title I've managed to get another 2 titles to add to my collection!

Lets start with my thoughts on the Lunar Festival Achievements.

All of them are very easy provided 2 things;

1 - You're level 80

2 - You can get a group to kill 1 boss in a heroic.

The running around seeing all the elders really couldn't be easier - just time consuming.

As for the opposite factions city elders - I'd suggest you either go very early in the morning, or with a large group. Thankfully even though I did mine at like 11am on Saturday we didn't meet any resistance at all and were able to get in and out - no problem.

Other than going to the other factions cities there are no Battleground achievements this holiday(unless you count going to the elder in Wintergrasp)

Most of the instance elders can be solo'd easily by a level 80. I did the majority of the instances with a Mage guildie (Hi Umari!)

So come Saturday afternoon I was Elder Firelight!

So that brings me to the Cooking Title: Chef

Like everyone else who wanted this title we were waiting for the extra recipes to come with the patch.

Then it was just a case of getting the last 8 points to get me to 450. This was expensive - thankfully I was able to get a couple of guildies who had spare fish for me.

All in all a pretty successful weekend when it came down to it.

Aside from my computer problems - I'm really at a loss now - when I run WoW in windowed mode the game will randomly restart my pc in certain places in what appears to be Kalimdor.

I re-installed WoW - that didn't work.

I re-installed Vista - that didn't work.

I updated all my drivers and that seems to work OK but I've been running the game in full screen mode. I wouldn't mind if the PC was old - but the kit is only 2 months - well not even that.

Lets see what happens, but I'm slowly starting to loose my rag!! Gaaahh!!!

Oh and before I forget I listened to the WoW Insider podcast over the weekend live and was in the chat and Mike Schramm gave me a mention on air!!

Big Big Thanks to Xaodaria!

Just wanted to make a quick post about something that's just happened in game!

Let me just fill you in on a couple of things. I've been running UBRS on and off the last 2 and a half years trying to get my Lightforge Spaulders.

They dropped once for me and a warrior ninja'd them back when I was level 60. Ever since then I've been running that instance whenever I could get a group together.

Since 3.0.8 I've run UBRS 8 or 9 times and The beast has only dropped some cape and Finkle's Skinner. Every time he went down, those items dropped.

So I thought I'd raise a ticket to the GM's to ask if The Beast's loot table was bugged.
(Don't laugh! It was worth a try!!)

So when the GM finally come to talk to me I'm in UBRS again with a couple of guildies....

"*Jumps out of the bush and screams Buu!* Greetings Firelight, I am Game Master Xaodaria. Do you have a moment to discuss your ticket?"

"Aah!! You scared me! Yes I do"

"What seems to be the problem?"

"In a lot of runs, and i mean a lot, The Beast is dropping the same items over and over"

"Yes the shoulders have a lower drop chance than the other items."

"But after 3 years of coming here they only drop once?"

"Yeah, they are rare."

"Oh I'm killing him now again, fingers crossed!..........

....Wahey!! They dropped!!!!"

"Did they? :) "

"Yeah" I don't believe it! You must be my good luck charm!!"

She then asked me to stand still and she dropped a Chocolate cake into my bags!!

I ate the cake and I was explaining this on vent to my guildies and the rogue in the group asked if I could ask her to make Drakki drop the shadowcraft tunic -which then dropped!

While we were fighting him I noticed that the GM had /cheer 'd at me, and there she was!! Standing there for a few seconds!! The first time I've seen a GM in game!

So she asked if I needed anything else and I said "You couldn't make the legs drop for me too in strat could ya!!" as a joke, and after she had gone I went to Strat and they he dropped the legs!!

That was probably just luck to be honest, but it was a fun few mins that's for sure!

So Happy Birthday Xaodaria I hope you have a great day!!

And here's me in all of my Dungeon 0.5 set!

Edit: Oh and in case you didnt notice I'm back to a man again!!

Loremaster!

Logged in yesterday to find that I had the Achievement Loremaster!

One Happy Paladin!

Reputation Update and Leveling Alts in Northrend

Hey peeps! So its nice to be just chilling out instead of worrying about if I can afford raiding mats etc.

I've been a bit burned out lately from all the raiding again, but as my gear is almost maxed out to the best it can be right now raiding should be relatively cheaper from here on.

Anyway I wanted to talk about my rep grind to 40 factions exalted today and some alt leveling stuff.

So I finally made it to exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood - which is number 36/40, leaving me with a real hard decision on where to go to next for rep.

I guess the cheapest way would be grind Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch Battlegrounds. I'm currently Honored with AB, and only friendly with WSG. I'm not sure how long/how many BG's I'd have to run in order to make exalted with both of these factions - I imagine it'd be quite some time. Months maybe? Can anyone tell me how long it took them to reach exalted with AB/WSG?

The next factions to look at from the old world are;

1 - Hydraxian Waterlords. I'm fairly confident I can solo most of the trash in Molten Core and will have a go at the weekend if that's possible. Not sure how much rep you get for mobs in there - at least 3.0.8 is hitting tomorrow so I'll get more rep from the mobs.

2 - Magram/Gelkis Clan Centaurs. After tomorrow getting one of these to exalted shouldn't take too much time and will be reasonable good money grinding too as the mobs drop lots of cloth. obviously I can only do 1 of these factions and not both.

3 - Steamwheedle Cartel - again this is kinda hard work but as its going to be virtually impossible for me to get the Bloodsail admiral title I might consider grinding rep for these guys once 3.0.8 hits.

I'm exalted with all Burning Crusade Rep Factions apart from Scryers, and there's no point switching to them as I will loose credit for the Aldor.

So that leaves me with Wrath factions;

1 - Explorers' League - At the moment there is only 1 repeatable quest to get to exalted and I think I read somewhere it would take 156 days to get there from Friendly.

2 - The Frostborn - As above.

3 - The Silver Covenant - No quests at all from these guys in game at the moment - I imagine they'll either be linked to Ulduar or Icecrown Citadel raid instances when 3.1 and 3.2 come out. Actually thinking about it, I imagine the Explorers' League and the Frostborn will be linked to Ulduar.

4 - Frenzyheart Tribe - as with the scryers/aldor you can only have exalted with 1 faction at any one time.

I think I'm going to try for the Hydraxian Waterlords first to see if its attainable solo then one of the centaur rep factions - preferably the Gelkis one as I have to do some quests for the Loremaster achievement in Kalimdor. Unless of course when I log in tomorrow I've already got it! I've been working hard on doing as many quests as possible on Firelight to get as close as possible to the 730 quests required. I think I was up to 680 odd completed.
What was odd though on the PTR was I was much closer to the 700 required in 3.0.8 than I was in Live. Curious...

So last night whilst watching episode 3 and 4 of the new 24 series I picked up my boomkin and started questing again. She dinged 72 just before I logged off for the night. I tell you what Shadow Meld is awesome when you suddenly get ganked by a lot of mobs!

What I'd been doing up till know was switching between my Mage and my druid - questing here and there - but I've decided to level Gwindle up first as she's got 2 very profitable professions on her: Enchanting/herbalism. Then if I make good time my Mage will be next.

Currently I have zero desire to level my warlock. I'm not sure what it is, but I just don't feel like it would be as entertaining leveling a 3rd caster toon. Maybe once I've played with my Death Knight some more. Although I probably will level my locks Alchemy - the price of Mana/health potions at the moment is ridiculous.

Betrayer of Humanity

Wohoo!

Got me my new Axe last night from Kel'thuzad!

Betrayer of Humanity
Two Hand Axe
606-910 Dmg Speed 3.40
(222.9 damage per second)
+66 Agility
+121 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 87.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 57.
Equip: Improves attack power by 226.

This is awesome! Shame I cant afford to do anything with it enchant wise just yet.
Might have to plumb for the 110 AP enchant till I can get the mats together for berserker.

I also got the T7.5 leg token which I need to get some gems for and some new gloves (neither which I have equipped so I cant check the stats)

Is anyone else having issues getting hold of Red Wrath Gems? There are never any on the auction house!! I was however lucky enough to get one of our guild Jewelcrafters to pick up the +16 Strength gem pattern for me. So at least that's one thing I don't have to worry about.

So from last night I've taken on board some of the things Stoico had to say on my last post and I've started crafting little things like the belt buckle and putting them on the AH at a reasonable price. but not undercutting. By this morning one had sold already! Now if only I could stop spending it all on Dark Iron Ore and running to BRD and handing them for rep - mind you I'll be done soon!!! 3k rep to go!!

Anyway things are going to slow down a bit here for a couple weeks, I will update where I can about my progress on new stuff I do.

Wipe Nights

Hey peeps! Been quiet round here for a few days, just not much going on really - I'm planning a 2-3 week raiding break to cool off and level my alts to make some gold for raiding as it seems I'm pretty broke right now in game!

Anyway I wanted to take a few mins to talk about wipe nights after Rage has had a few problems downing Malygos 25.

So 10 of us had cleared him a week ago after 4 or 5 attempts as I said earlier.

So Monday night we gathered 25 of our finest and headed over to Malygos. Where we spent the whole 3/4 hours wiping. our best try was about 4/5% left.

Everyone seemed to get what was going on, but something was causing chunks of the raid to get killed either in phase 2 or early on in phase 3.

So 4 Hours, 2 flasks, 20 food items later and probably about 150g in repairs we called it a night.

Total cost for the night? At least 250-300g in mats/repairs.

I didn't raid on Tuesday night due to having to grind some girlfriend rep, but the same thing happened - 3/4 hours of wipes on Malygos. That enrage timer is a real pain.

Now I have no problem throwing away that sort of gold on progression raids, but I imagine a lot of other people do.

Not being a great grinder, and having maxed my rep with all the daily quest giver factions I don't see the point in doing dailys other than the cooking quest. (Further more it seems that to get 40 factions to exalted is not retro active. If you're exalted with Aldor, as soon as you drop below exalted, if you had 35 factions to exalted you'd loose 1 and drop to 34. Confirmed by Blizzard)

So this leaves me a little short to say the least. I've tried playing the Auction House, but it seems that in order to get a long in this you have to spend a lot of time in the AH, this just bores me to be honest. I do my daily scans on the AH so maybe one day I'll try it properly.

So what this brings me to is now the fact that I have to take a break from Raiding to level up some alts. I guess the hardest part will be not spending the gold on mounts!!

I have to say that I wasn't expecting to start raiding so soon. I think I had based my expectations on what happened to my raiding group when TBC hit 2 years ago and the fact I didn't start raiding again for 4/5 months after the expansion was released.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation where you have to stop raiding to gain gold, and what did you do about it if anything.

Set Bonuses, Ghost Hit Rating and Librams....

Well It seems that Jacob was right in the comments for my last post about Ghost Hit Rating being hotfixed in the server restarts - only the EU servers got them 24 hours later so my tests were still valid at the time.

I've done some more tests with my current gear and I need another 1% Hit Rating to be capped. (Or I put on my old legs for the time being till I get something else with 79 Hit rating on it.
Its only 1% so I'm not so fussed. Didnt seem to affect my DPS too much last night.

We finished off Naxx and moved to Sartharion again last night - the Kel'Thuzad fight was very messy at the start and somehow I managed to get killed very early on by Kel's ice block thing - and not receiving any healing. Kinda annoying but I've not been to Kel for a couple of weeks, so the rest of the team managed with out me it seems as he went down FAST!

So Stoico asked earlier have I tried any other gear that would mean I loose my 4x set bonus. Well to be honest I've not gotten any replacement gear yet to replace any of my t7/t7.5 stuff.

I use maxdps.com for as a guide to what is good or not good for replacement dps items.

As for Librams, I'm using the +damage to crusader strike one from Naxx-25 as according to maxdps.com its a 1dps increase compared to the grizzly hills one (which I had been using till 2 days ago)

Ghost Hit Rating Experiment

Hey guys! So we did a 3 wings in Naxx last night and I got some new legs to replace the Staggering Legplates. This meant I was loosing 80 hit rating.

So this meant I was 79 Hit rating off the cap. So it was time to test to see if I had the ghost hit rating.

Off I ran to Ironforge - removed all the gear I had with hit rating on, cleared Re-count and started swinging away.

20 mins later I came back and had a look at the stats:

As you can see I missed 4.6% of the time out of 500 hits. I took this to mean I would need only 5% Hit rating to reach my cap.

So I had limited time, but I threw on all my gear and started plugging away. I was only able to do 100 swings before I had to go to bed, but managed to get the following:

As you can see with 5.73% hit rating out of the 100 hits I had no misses. (I'll run a more comprehensive test(bear in mind I wasn't doing any special attacks - it was just auto swing on both tests)

So did I do something wrong? Does Hit rating affect Dodge as well?

Here's a screenie after the Noth the Plaguebringer fight....4115 DPS! nice!

Malygos 10-Man Explained.

Hey peeps!

Last night Rage were supposed to get together and go take down 25-man Malygos.

Sadly we were missing a few people so we did 25-man Arcavon instead then split into 2 groups - 1 moving to naxx and the other moved to the Eye of Eternity.

I was picked for malygos, which was really cool because I'd not witnessed this fight properly before. So I'm going to try to explain as much as I can remember from the fight.

Phase 1.

The tank will grab Malygos - please allow him a few seconds to grab aggro. The rest of the raid should stand in the centre of the area bunched up. As Malygos is being tanked a star will appear and make its way to Malygos - if it gets to him it will give him a 10/15s buff that increases his damage by 50%. This stacks so don't let any get to him or your healers will have a hard time healing the tank. So you have to kill the stars before they get to Malygos. Once destroyed they drop onto the ground a lightning field that if you stand into it you get a 50% damage buff. So what you wanna do is kill them as they come to the raid. That way you get a stacking buff - each of them giving +50% damage - the most we say in 10 man was 3 of them (total 150% damage increase) which was pretty sweet.

Phase 2.

At 50% malygos gets annoyed and summons a load of blood elves of discs that have to be killed before phase 3 starts.
There are 2 types of these blood elves - 3/4 or each type.
The first type that move along the floor and the second that fly in the air.
The ground ones have to go first - once they die they drop the discs they're on and the melee classes can jump on the discs and fly up in the air and kill the flying ones.
While your fighting the ground ones, the flying ones will be firing crap all over the place that hits for 14k damage unless you're hiding inside one of the Arcane bubbles that appear on the platform. These bubbles only last a short while - getting smaller and smaller, but thankfully more appear for you to run into. This phase is really easy - as long as you stick to the bubbles if your on the platform. (people on the discs flying around wont get hit by the 14k arcane bolt things) Once all the adds are dead we move to...

Phase 3.

At this point Malygos is REALLY pissed! and he blows up the platform!

OH MY GOD!! We're falling to our death!!

Thud! Wow I was caught by a dragon! Cool!!!

So Your dragon has 6 abilities.

1 - Fires a fire bolt at Malygos that puts a combo point on him and does fire damage over time(which stacks)
2 - Does a damage to malygos based on the number of combo points you have up on Malygos
3 - Same as 1, but Heals the target and puts a combo point up.
4 - Sets off an AOE heal based on the number of combo points up on the target
5 - Fire shield - This protects you from Malygos for a certain amount of damage based on the number of combo points up on Malygos.
6 - Speed buff.

The entire raid should just do the following (apart from the Main Tank)
Press 1 twice so you get 2 combo points up on malygos, then wait till you have 85 energy and press 2.

Just keep doing that and eventually you can be doing 100k dps due to the number of stacks of the fire damage up on Malygos.
If Malygos ever targets you and you get the warning - press 5 to protect yourself.

The Main tank should mark himself with a raid mark and target one of his/her fellow raiders and start spamming 3 till he has 5 combo points up and then press 4 to do the AOE heal.

While he is doing that he should also be move around Malygos or the Lightning Fields will kill the raid.

Everyone should stick together - then provided you have enough time after phase 1 and 2 then its a cake walk.

So that's the basics of the fight - i suggest you watch the Tank-Spot video on YouTube as this is a really good video tutorial.

Anyway so I got my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title - so I'm happy!

After the raid my 3v3 team did some arena matches and after a few matches things started to gel together quite well. Although our enhancement shaman kept getting ganked quite fast early on in the matches. Eventually after some macro's being written for my hand of protection we started winning some matches. I still deplore rogues in pvp. Yes that means you, you stun locking sunofab****.

Once we've done some more matches I'll report on it more.

Happy New Year!

Hey Guys! Hope you all had a good new year and didn't get too inebriated!

I had a quiet night in as my g/f was working till 2am New Years eve sadly, but it was OK, I had some beers and played some WoW, Guitar Hero: World Tour, and Rock Band.

Anyway I wanted to talk about a few things today so here we go!

First - I've not had a chance to do any 3v3 yet with my team so that'll have to wait for another day.

Second - Ghost Hit Rating. Does it exist? Is it Real? Personally I don't know yet - I'm planning on doing a test to see what my current hit rating is with no Hit gear on on a dummy in Ironforge and see what happens. Many blogs have talked about it already so I wont go into too much detail, but it would appear if you had Precision (+3% Hit rating) pre-wrath then you should still have this buff although its not shown anywhere. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it!
If this is the case it means that I can drop almost 100 hit rating from my gear and not worry about it so much - In my case this would be getting the t7 (or 7.5) legs as I'd loose 80 hit rating.

Third - Titles!

Currently I have 13 Titles on Firelight;

Firelight the Merrymaker - Completing Winter Veil Achievements
Firelight the Hallowed - Completing Hallows End Achievements
Master Sergeant Firelight - Old PvP Rank from Vanilla WoW
Firelight, Hand of A'dal - Kill Lady Vashj and Keal'thas Raid Bosses Pre-3.0
Firelight Jenkins - Complete Leeeeeeeeroy Achievement in UBRS.
Firelight, Champion of the Naaru - Complete quest line to kill Magtheridon in TBC.
Ambassador Firelight - gain Exalted with all 5 City Alliance/Horde Factions
Firelight the Diplomat - Exalted with Sporregar, Timbermaw Hold and the Kurenai.
Firelight the Seeker - Complete 3000 Quests.
Firelight the Explorer - Explore Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Outland and Northrend.
Firelight, Guardian of Cenarius - Exalted with Cenarian Expedition and Circle.
Firelight the Argent Champion - Exalted with Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade.
Firelight of the Shattered Sun - Exalted with SSO + 1000g

Ones I'm currently Pursuing:

Champion of the Frozen Wastes (just need Malygos for this one)
Loremaster - Stupid Kalimodor quests....grrrr...

I quite like the title systems, its pretty cool - another way to say "Look what I did" to your friends.

Do any of you have any different Titles? Or are you going for anything special?