World of Warcraft and the Latter-Day Geek

[Zehava]

Never saw any of Black Temple. Went into Zul'Gurub with a few guild members as fillers for another guild that needed some more participants. Only went once and only downed a couple of bosses.

One trip to AQ40 cemented my hatred of 40 man raids.

Back before I quit the last time our guild was working on Zul'Aman (10 man), Karazhan was a weekly run (all but the last 2 bosses). Got an invite to Gruul's lair once, ported in, waited 30+ minutes for people to show up. One of the people got bored/pissed off and pulled with about 10 people AFK inside the instance. Wiped and the "raid" broke up. My hatred of 25 man raids was well established then.

Nowadays we have trouble getting together 10 people for the lower raids, we usually have to pick up pugs or some of our other friends who used to be in the guild but moved onto raiding guilds when most of us stopped playing. Though we did do 1 run of ICC10 trash clearing for rep, need to do more of that to get people to at least friendly and get the first ring reward.

Yesterday was the second week in a row that we downed Onyxia 10. This weeks raid on our server in EoE (Malygos) and we are thinking of trying that (tonight would be the last day for that).

I could never be part of a large raiding guild, too much drama and too stifling of an environment (must have the perfect spec, must have a certain level of gear that we won't help you get in order to be in the raid, etc.). It's too much work, I play to have fun.

Shit the only reason we use master looter on our raids is the pugs we have to pick up. In Karazhan we only had one rule for loot: 1 epic per run unless an item drops that you can use and nobody else wants it. Sometimes people would make out with 3 or 4 pieces as nobody else needed the drop.

The weekly raid quest (and the 5 frost & triumph badges it gives out) will definitely get us to see more content.

[Sock Puppet]

I finally got my first T9 piece and got fully hitcapped without food/elixir (minimum 341.09, Jeeeesus). My Shaman still has her health points in the crapper, but at least according to wow-heroes my gear score is high enough for Ulduar 10 to be "medium-hard." () If I had enough time, I could have a full T9 set by now just from doing random heroics. Oh, well.

Sapphiron is a fun fight with a good group. Too bad most people don't want to run Naxx anymore.

[Zehava]

Yeah that 17% to hit for spell casters is a bitch.

Melee (non dual wield) and Hunters have it much easier at 8%. Dual wielders are 12%.

Fortunately almost all the new 5 man caster gear (at least cloth) as a shit ton of hit rating. I was easily able to get to 15% w/o geming for hit.

[Kael]

So, while the dungeon finder is my best friend when it comes to heroics and northrend dungeons, some pretty appalling stuff happens sometimes when you try to level through dungeons. Paladin tanks who 'forget' to put up Righteous Fury, or who refuse to use Consecration. DPS who won't wait for the heals to get mana because they think they're invincible in their heirloom gear. Heals who think that heirloom gear means they can dps the whole time and not bother healing. Fun times.

I tried tanking with a druid, but apparently they suck at it. Especially at lower levels. Healing with my shaman is going much better, and I discovered the awesome that is Healbot. I'm going to heal with my druid until around 40 or so, then maybe try tanking again.

[Kael]

I'm definitely facing an uphill battle on my DK tank. DK tanking seems pretty complicated, at least compared to my warrior, but thanks to a number of AoEs and great threat generation I think I can get a handle on it. No, the problem is all the other DKs out there.

Queuing as dps for a random Outland dungeon with dps spec and gear, only to end up with a DK who queued as tank just to speed up the wait time who neither knows nor cares what he's doing, in dps spec and gear and doesn't even turn on frost presence until people are yelling at him and either getting us killed or nearly getting us killed until I take over tanking and tell them to sit in the back and dps, taking over the job of tank as best I can in my own dps spec and gear. Not once, not twice, but three times in a row, with three different DKs playing the role of complete fucking newb. Turns out a dps-speced tank who knows what the hell they're doing makes things a lot better than one who does things like ignoring casters who are hitting the healer and not bothering to re-acquire aggro on any mobs they lose. There are not enough facepalms in the world.

I wondered why DKs have such a bad rap as tanks. Now I know. There should be a quiz or gear/talent check or something before it lets you queue as tank.

[Zehava]

I've been fortunate enough not to run into DPS DKs queuing as tanks. Yesterday though I did run into my first afker. Four man guild group doing our daily frost badge random. We get a rogue as the off man. He stealths and remains at the instance entrance. It took us a couple of pulls to realize that he is just going to stay there and roll on everything that drops.

Well shit we can't kick him for 15 minutes, luckily this is Halls of Stone so there is plenty of trash. As a tank I gather a bunch of mobs and we all run out of the instance. Net effect, 1 dead afk rogue. We then proceed to kill trash until the 15 minute debuff is gone and vote kick him. Four manned the rest of the instance.

And for something funny...

A couple weeks ago we were trying to run heroic Halls of Reflection with a person who used to be in our guild. He still runs with us on occasion as we are so much fun. He's tanking on his warrior and for some reason the whole run is fail after fail after fail. At lest a half a dozen wipes on or before the third wave. We are all going WTF, we know this is a hard instance but we've never had this much problem even the first time we tried it. I find out this weekend that he hadn't updated the tool bars on his off spec so he was using low level skills.

All in all though, any more all I'm using the LFD finder for is my 1 frost badge run a day. I've gotten pretty much everything I need for the main specs on both my characters, and even a good deal of off spec gear, so it's not such a big deal to get emblems anymore.

[Sock Puppet]

So they've finally upgraded the Armory, and I have to admit, it's pretty slick now. It now shows characters as they actually look in-game, and you can spin them just like in the character screen. Here's my sexy goatfooted Shaman. (Yes, I know I don't need that much hit rating - I just don't want to regem the T7 piece before I replace it, and the Icewalker enchant is there for the crit.)

If anything, it shares too much freaking information. You can see not only achievements, but also recent progress toward same (sometimes a little erroneous - I've cooked Rhino Dogs before, ffs), bosses killed, and even gear recently acquired.

[Leesifer]

I am playing again. Got my huntard up to 80 and even have some epic gear.

In a guild which just plays for fun but they are happy to run us noobs through dungeons for gear, which is nice.

Now I'm just trying to finish up all the quests I can solo and then I'll ask them nicely to finish off the group ones.

[Zehava]

I've been playing my horde hunter on Earthen Ring this weekend. I forgot how much his gear sucked. Leveling is pretty fast with the two heirloom items. I actually created a horde toon on Boulderfist, mailed a few heirlooms to him then did a paid transfer to Earthen ring.

Hunter is 68 now and playing around in Northrend. He's out of rested XP though so I'll side line him again for a few days and go back to my druid on Boulderfist.

[Kael]

Switched to DPS on my warrior, just needed a break from tanking all the time. His DPS gear still sucks big time, but a few days of heroics will fix that right up. Since I'm dual-wielding Edge of Ruin things aren't too bad. The only major Northrend factions I still need to get to exalted are Ebon Blade and Sons of Hodir. Got his cooking to 400 but his fishing is still lagging behind at just under 300. This is the only character I am an achievement whore on (he's above 4000 achievement points, my next highest is 650), so I don't feel too bad about spending time fishing rather than running more heroics or 10-mans. I do need to get one of my four mid-70 characters, shaman, two DKs, and a hunter, up to 80, though, if for no other reason than to have a few options when Cataclysm hits. Of course I plan on running a goblin and a worgen, so that's plenty of stuff to do there.

Tanking on my druid is finally becoming bearable (!) at around lvl 30. Healing is still fun on both my shaman and my druid, maybe one day I'll start a priest too.

[seebs]

I recently got a chest and shoulders (cloth spellpower gear), which I'm rotating among two clothie casters, a druid, eventually a priest, and might even use on a pally occasionally.

[Sock Puppet]

I thought about just getting cloth heirloom gear and using it on every SP using toon, but I realized with my latest reroll that I'm getting more Stonekeeper's Shards than I have any use for. Plus I don't give a crap about collecting pets and whatnot, so I can use my Champion's Seals as well. By the time I'm ready to go nuts on alts I should have enough currency to get class-appropriate armor for whatever I want to level up. I'm thinking of starting with plate with AP for a retadin and a DK.

[seebs]

The issue in my case is that I don't have the attention span to gather millions and millions of shards or whatever to afford a ton of heirlooms. (And I don't get that many stone keepers' shards, nor am I willing to go into an autoflag area to buy heirlooms.) But I may play enough more to get a couple more of them at some point.

[Sock Puppet]

On this character, I haven't focused on PvP at all, but just doing one or two Wintergrasp battles a week and collecting shards from heroics or VoA, I've managed to collect nearly 600 shards. That's three heirloom pieces -- the only other thing I'd spend them on would be resilience gems or PvP enchants, neither of which I give a crap about (I'm sure there are great Elemental Shaman PvPers out there, but I absolutely suck at PvP with this spec). Even just getting the shards from PvE exclusively, you can actually buy that stuff when your faction controls WG Fortress with about 99% chance of avoiding PvP -- hit the portal about 10 minutes before the next battle, and nobody from the opposing faction will be anywhere near you. Visit the vendor, port back to Dalaran, zero PvP. You can hit a flight path to wipe your flag if you don't want to wait the 5 minutes. You can also fly in WG now while the battle's not on.

You can also get both XP bonus heirloom pieces (plus weapons that don't have bonus XP) from Argent Tournament seals, 60 per item. Much as the dailies get tedious after awhile, they're easy and there's no flagging involved.

[Zehava]

Individual experience may vary but I've never run into a problem in Wintergrasp when I fly in to buy a few heirlooms. This on a PvP server no less. Even doing the daily fishing quest "Terrorfish" innumerable times, I've only ever run into a ganker once.

Really if you are going to be healing on those toons the cloth caster gear is good enough. A spellpower weapon would be nice as well. What is most important is the +20% XP bonus, that speeds up leveling immensely.

ETA (after Sock's comments): Stone shards can be a good source of cash as well, if you are strapped for it but do a lot of heroics while your side has Wintergrasp. 30 tokens will get you 10,000 honor which you can use to purchase uncut epic gems from the PvP vendors in the capital cities. The uncut gems typically go for 120-150g on my server (Boulderfist). Cardinal Rubies and Majestic Zircon being the best sellers. Getting these cut into Runed/Bold Cardinal Rubies (over 200g ea) and Solid Majestic Zircons (~200g) nets a nice profit.

[Bella]

Has anyone tried grinding rep for another faction in order to gain the mount for that faction? I'm a level 31 blood elf trying to get an Orgrimmar wolf mount (it's an RP server, I want it for RP reasons) and I am having a devil of a time. I am 1/3 of the way into Revered and I've done ALL of Durotar, the Barrens, the Sepulcher, and almost all of Stonetalon. I've heard you can gain Exalted before 40 but there aren't very clear instructions as to HOW, except "do all quests" which isn't helpful.

[seebs]

It can be hard. I've done it, though -- so my tauren shaman can ride a chocobo.

There's doing all the quests, and there's rep hand-ins. Be sure to turn on tracking for low level quests; there's a ton of side quest stuff.

Do remember that other Horde factions give 50% orgrimmar rep, and keep an eye out for quests which give rep with Horde -- that's the same rep with all five factions.

[Nightson]

Well, Alterac Valley is good for getting rep but that's not much of an option for you at 31.

[Sock Puppet]

Org is probably the easiest Horde faction to grind rep for, but I agree, it's still a pain. You didn't mention Mulgore -- as seebs mentioned, you can get spillover rep from doing all of those lowbie quests. At 31 you can do Thousand Needles as well; that's mostly Thunder Bluff rep, but again, you get the spillover for Org.

Personally, I gave up going for classic faction rep while leveling, and just wait until I can do Argent Tournament and get Exalted with all of them without really trying. Ambassador is a pretty cool title.

[Kael]

My wife got Ambassador on her paladin at ~40, Alliance side. IIRC she did all the cloth turn-ins she could too. It does take some effort, but it's cool to have at that level, since everyone else is like Sock and myself, and we just wait 'til 80 and get it at the tournament.

[Bella]

Thanks for the advice. I started Thousand Needles and am about 1/3 of the way through. I will do Mulgore soon after. Should I do Brill in Silverpine also?

[seebs]

The really low-level stuff can be awesome just because, once you have a horse, it's super fast and super-easy (you one-shot everything), so it doesn't take long.

[Leesifer]

w00t! Just did TOC 10 normal and got some very nice gear.

[Zehava]

Originally Posted by Leesifer

w00t! Just did TOC 10 normal and got some very nice gear.

My guild (with some PUGs) completed ToC10 for the second time last week, first time with no wipes. As the only cloth caster present I got several nice upgrades.

We then proceeded to run Onyxia 10 and wiped on the trash. Off tank got a little zealous in pulling.

Also beat the first boss in ICC 10 on what was supposed to be just a rep farming run. Couldn't beat the second boss (well probably could have eventually but it was late).

[Sock Puppet]

Got my Looking For Multitudes achievement and the cute li'l Perky Pug pet. My daughter will squee when she sees it.

I don't think anybody has posted PuG Bingo yet.