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.