So… alts?
Posted: May 17, 2013 Filed under: Gear, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation, Transmogrification | Tags: druid, gear, Mists of Pandaria, questing, raiding, reputation, resto, transmogrification, World of Warcraft, WoW 2 Comments »This past Monday, Bashiok let us all know, via a Twitter response, that 5.3 would not be dropping this (current) week.
On the surface, this was bad news for some people. People like me, who have been Valor capped on their mains and/or basically done with Isle of Thunder for a little while now, without much meaningful to do without getting into some avenue of the game that they enjoy less (like PvP, pet battles, etc., etc.).
On the other hand, there are people who feel that things are moving too fast, that there is not enough time to do everything they want, who play lots of alts and want more time for them, who want an extra week or two to hit the VP cap before Item Upgrading becomes available, etc. For these folks, it was great news.
I’m among those in the first group, with Mushan. I’ve been max-VP capped since the 3rd or 4th of May, have nothing to spend VP on, have been done with the Isle of Thunder story for a while, and so on. For me, the wait has been frustrating. I went from trying to let go of the grind to having almost nothing in the game that has real progressive meaning without killing new raid bosses. So I was disappointed when 5.3 didn’t happen this week.
So… alts?
For me, the answer is yes. And, this past weekend, I had a certain alt in mind…
Anacrusa!
Yes folks! I shook a boatload of dust off my druid last Saturday.
This is the same druid that has largely remained parked at the Stormwind Auction House selling leg enchants, or at Halfhill farming motes to make those leg enchants with.
Now why, you might ask, would I want to do such a thing?
Well, you can’t discount aesthetics, for one thing. I mean, just look at that killer transmog she has going on. It’s one of my favorites! (And it took some serious farming to put those pieces together back in the day, too!) Plus, she’s a female night elf, and they look pretty badass anyway, especially with the particular tattooing/facial structure combo that I chose for her at the character creation screen.
Plus, fire trees.
So anyway, that’s settled… it’s been a joy to get to see that gear in action this week.
Aside from aesthetic appeal, playing Anacrusa represented some very new territory for me in MoP. Thus far, I’d leveled two tanks (including this toon), two hunters, and a mage to level 90. Now, this is not necessarily one-dimensional play – I know several people who have four or five max-level DPS toons and nothing else, and that is certainly not me. With those toons, I have three of the four bases covered (yes, I finally put together a Fury spec for the warrior… and it’s NOT pretty, folks): tank, ranged DPS, melee DPS. Additionally, I have my Prot pally and Blood DK in the wings… so in some ways, that’s more of the same. It’s probably also part of the reason the DK is still waiting for me in Grizzly Hills…
Lately, though, I’ve been wanting to do something different. And I may have known that subconsciously, but it took me a while to conjure up an active realization – along with some balls* – that I wanted to do something related to healing.
*I have a rough time jumping feet-first into certain things that require some responsibility that I might fail to live up to, and it’s always been that way. Takes me some internal argument to take a new toon into PvP, for instance. To heal. To tank important stuff. It’s just my nature – I am a timid one at heart, I suppose.
For a while, I thought about my options. I could finish leveling my pally, but I don’t really feel like doing that right now (and haven’t for some time). I could level a priest or shaman, but I really don’t feel like doing that either. Same with a monk. So that left the druid.
Finally, last weekend, I dug her out of the mothballs. I put together something of a really bad PvP set, thinking to myself that I could do some BGs and get some gear. But I never made it into a BG, or at least I have yet to do so. She had over 2000 Valor stored up from doing cooking dailies over the last several months, and was well on the way to some nice reputation with certain factions, so I started working on that a little bit, with the idea that I could build up a set and step into LFR to try things out. Along the way, I made her the 496 crafted pieces, along with the 502 Reborn mace, and I bought her the 476 off-hand, the Darkmoon trinket, and the 522 Valor necklace. I made some more “Crafted Gladiator’s” pieces, and soon stepped into Mogu’shan Vaults.
Over the past seven days, I’ve gotten her ilevel up from sub-450 to 481! All but three pieces are epics as of this writing. Other than a couple of bad experiences (along with the bosses in ToES being very stingy), the T14 Raid Finder raids were fun and rewarding. I grew leaps and bounds as a healer throughout the week – which is good, because I was starting at about as close to the bottom as someone can be without not having actually healed before**.
**I’ve healed before. Not much, though, and not for quite a long time. And never in raids.
The goal, once I got into it, was to be eligible to run some ToT LFR by this weekend. As of this morning, mission accomplished. I ‘stayed Klaxxi’ consistently enough this week to get the Exalted (Shadows of the Empire) ring today, and I also hit Revered with the Kirin Tor Offensive, which enabled me to grab the cloak from their vendor. And getting a couple of Keys to the Palace of Lei Shen enabled me to stay well-stocked in coins, so I was able to roll on every relevant T14 boss and get a few nice pieces that way.
So Anacrusa is now a Resto druid, for the time being. Awesome!
I quested as Guardian, which may seem odd, except for the fact that I already had a full set of guardian gear from when I was leveling, etc. that was good enough to be daily quest-worthy. I found that I was able to pull multiple mobs at once on Isle of Thunder with little problem. It was also much more enjoyable than doing it as a boomkin would have been.
Overall, I’ve had fun with her this week. It was a very fun diversion from the norm and the tedium, and brought new life into my enjoyment of the game. Plus, it was great to get back on my old main and have fun playing her for the first time in many, many months.
Tomorrow, it’s back to the hunter, as we attempt to make some progress in ToT for reals this weekend. I do hope to get Anacrusa through a couple of wings of ToT LFR before the reset, though, because there are a couple of Shado-Pan Assault items that I’d like to purchase for her, but I need to be Friendly with them to do so. We’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I need to make sure that I can still remember how to play Mushan!
…
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Pet taunts on the Isle of Thunder
Posted: April 1, 2013 Filed under: Reputation | Tags: hunter, Mists of Pandaria, questing, talents, tanking, warrior, World of Warcraft, WoW 8 Comments »With Patch 5.2, I got rid of my rarely-used PvP off-spec and set up a questing/soloing SV spec, glyphed and talented for pet healing and a little bit more utility. With the Isle of Thunder containing clusters of mobs with higher health levels, quest “bosses,” rares, solo scenarios, and so on, I felt that it would make my life a little bit easier, and it definitely has.
Pet Growl is great in MoP – very effective in situations like this. Because I’m a lazy hunter, I usually just leave Growl on. Lots of other hunters do the same thing, which makes it kind of humorous when you’re fighting a rare with two hunters on it and the pets keep taunting off one another.
However, I’ve been learning (again) that, when hunters do this in certain situations, it’s not as funny on the other side of the ball.
While the knowledge has always been there, this was really brought home to me over the past week with my warrior tank. Stage 4 opened last week, bringing more “boss” quests per day, and more rares to kill. A couple of these bosses, including Itoka, Master of the Forge, and Metal Lord Mono-han, put a lot of bad on the ground in the form of energized metal, roaming electric sparks, electrified water, and so on. These things are obviously good to get out of, and likewise, kiting the boss out of or away from them is imperative.
As a prot warrior – and hence, on the other side of the ball with regard to the relationship with tanking pets in these situations – I’ve repeatedly been frustrated when hunters keep Growl on when it’s pretty obvious that I’m tanking the boss. It’s pretty annoying when, as a tank, you can’t kite the boss out of persistent bad because the pet is taunting him immediately after you do, every time.
With Itoka, the roaming sparks are a constant nuisance, and Metal Lord’s “Toss Energized Metal” is similar, although in his case the danger circles are static. In either case, constant re-positioning is fairly mandatory, and, as someone who enjoys tanking, I like moving the boss around to give everyone the best chance to do damage and to take a minimum of damage themselves. This is virtually impossible when the hunter either ignores this concept or is completely unaware that it’s a problem.
I do take solace from the fact that, on several occasions, hunter pets have died during these fights, and I’ve been able to resume controlling the boss’s position. But here’s the bottom line about hunter pets constantly taunting off the tank and standing stationary in bad stuff, regardless of whether hunters care about their pets dying:
IT TAKES LONGER TO KILL THE BOSS THAT WAY.
Potentially a lot longer.
When the pet has either of these bosses, and the hunter isn’t spending any time re-positioning it like a normal tank should, the original tank and any other melee DPS cannot do their normal damage to the mob. They could, theoretically – but that would involve taking boatloads of damage due to spending way too much time being hit by electrical charges of one form or another, and likely dying if they didn’t get out in time. The AoE damage on these fights is no joke; even as a decently geared tank, it’s virtually impossible to stand in one of these circles for the entire fight and survive. And even if there is no AoE around for the moment, a tank taking no damage is building up zero vengeance, so his/her damage for that time period is going to be pretty anemic.
And pets don’t have a vengeance mechanic, so there’s absolutely no “win” in pet tanking when there’s someone else there that wants to tank the boss for you.
There have been several occasions over the past week where a hunter pet has taken control of the boss, and I’ve been forced to stand outside the circle, telling the hunter to “please turn off Growl” (if the hunter is Alliance) and tossing Heroic Throw because I can’t otherwise reach the boss. I try to make it obvious, without resorting to being unpleasant, that I. can’t. do. anything. And neither can that ret pally or DK or rogue standing next to me. And the boss loses health at a much slower rate, and it’s just a huge pain in the ass, because nobody can do what they would normally be doing in that situation, other than the hunter.
So, a word to wise hunters: please keep the Growl button on your pet bar. Know when to turn it off – and if you don’t know when to turn it off, it’s any time you don’t need to be the tank on a rare or a quest “boss.” And use Glyph of Stampede, so that it turns off Growl on all of your stampeding pets as well. Because if you don’t, you’re needlessly making your own dailies – not to mention others’ – take a bit longer to complete. Which sucks, because dailies take enough time as it is. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
Bad pun intended.
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An in-game excuse to slack off
Posted: March 28, 2013 Filed under: Gear, Professions, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: Blacksmithing, gear, hunter, Leatherworking, Mists of Pandaria, progression, questing, raiding, reputation, stats, Tailoring, warrior, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »(Writing this on Wednesday evening.)
This past week-plus has been spent not doing quite as much as I normally do over the course of a day or week in WoW, following my previously detailed realization that I am suffering burnout due to over-exposure to the Valor grind(s).
While I continue to cap my hunter, I’ve been purposely slacking on every other toon. I spent a good deal less time doing just about everything that I normally do last week, except for raiding, than I have in a long time, and that was good.
Raiding
We skipped last week’s Friday night alt raid due to some absences, which was totally fine by me. The main group finally stepped back into Terrace and cleared that for the first time, which was nice. We downed Garalon. We’re planning on finishing up HoF this Friday if we can get enough people (Easter this weekend means, for good reason, that our weekend raid is cancelled). We can clear Jin’rokh every week, basically, so that’s good, because many of us need the gear he drops. But Horridon will wait until April, which is fine.
Isle of Thunder and The Thunder Forge
This raid lockout – while still “young” – has been kind of fun, since Stage 4 of the assault on the Isle of the Thunder Throne is now open. While doing my dailies on my hunter on Tues., I finally got to see The Thunder Forge, get my quest to learn how to make Lightning Steel Ingots, and start working on building up a store of such ingots to put toward creating some cool “reborn” weapons.
For some reason, I got all excited about this – perhaps it’s because I’ve been learning recipes for gear from making Magnificence of Leather and Imperial Silk since 5.2 Day One, so it’s nice that my two Blacksmiths (hunter and warrior) can finally start doing the same. Not sure why Blizzard made Blacksmithing this way, since the weapons that can be made after 29 days look like they will cap out at 489, which is hardly current raid levels. I imagine that this might be their reasoning – which I think is flawed, since there’s really no grounds for the penalty – but even if it’s not, I don’t have the interest or energy to hunt for an official answer. At any rate, I’m happy to be able to do those “transmutes” now, since I have a couple of toons that can use weapons of that level – appreciating that, at this point, my interest in gearing up alts via Raid Finder is at something of an absolute all-time low.
Shado-pan Assault rep and 5.2 Valor gear
Last week’s announcement that Patch 5.3 will see the Item Upgrade NPCs returning from their respective vacations was one that, at the time, merely sparked my interest. The reduced costs (500 VP for an 8-ilvl increase per item) mean that upgrades will be more flexible and user-friendly – more like putting a gem in a piece of gear (although not exactly like it) and less like buying an entire new item. Easier to commit to.
That kind of thing, I find interesting, whether it’s the old model or the new one.
However, things were thrown into a different light this evening as I neared the “Honored” threshold (of my ongoing quest to gain rep with the Shado-pan Assault) on Mushan.
When the Valor gear was initially revealed, I glanced at it. Wow, nice trinket. Lot of Hit, but nice proc. Other pieces… most of them upgrades. Nice. No helm or boots… but those can be crafted at a later date. That’s good. Etc.
I bought the neck immediately, and shortly thereafter I purchased the trinket, then the ring and the bracers. Everything was good there – my Hit Rating was a little high for a short while, but it’s under control at the moment.
In the meantime, however, I’ve had some decent luck with a couple of other slots. I got the Thunderforged legs (528) on our very first Jin’rokh kill. Our third kill resulted in the shoulders (522) on a bonus roll. I’ve gotten several pieces in Raid Finder, but the only piece I’m able to use right now is the cloak (502) from Ji-Kun. Nevertheless, I’ve got some decent gear going for me right now, which is helping me stay competitive and contributing to our team.
However, the combination of gear that I’ve acquired from Valor and drops means that I’ve suddenly run into a weird wall. Because of the fact that I still have the T14 2p bonus going on (helm and gloves), and the legs I got are so good, and there’s so much hit (or blue sockets) on the gear that is available to me, I’ve reached a point where my need for Valor Points is rapidly diminishing. Having just reached SPA-honored, I’m seeing a small upgrade with the cloak, which I’ll buy on Thursday. However, the legs are a direct downgrade from my 528s, while the gloves would break my set bonus. So for the next month or so, I really do not need much in the way of VP.
This looks to continue to be the case once I hit revered. At that point, the belt is totally sweet – and will be a must-buy – but the chest is loaded with Hit, Expertise, and two blue sockets with a +120 Agility socket bonus. For real, Blizzard? Beg pardon, but… are you shitting me?? So that’s a big kick in the sack – although it’s still a minor upgrade as things stand with my gear right now, believe it or not, because of the Agility bump. I’ll have to reevaluate when I get there, but I can see myself going “no thanks” when the time comes. And at exalted, the shoulders (with a 700g cost?) are a slight downgrade from Jin’rokh’s, so I’ll probably pass on those too.
All of that to say that my need for VP is likely to diminish rapidly, and is likely to stay that way until 5.3 arrives and upgrades return. I’ll be hitting those babies hard when the opportunity to use them finally arrives.
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A side-note about all of this – and, incidentally, the title-theme of this post – is that this could possibly go a long way toward momentarily easing my demand for VP on my hunter. With no demand for Valor – and I’m talking almost no demand for several weeks – I could possibly just forego questing on that toon for a while. This would open up more time to play other toons for fun, or to simply not play them much at all. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing at this point. I’ve got a strong desire to dig into that copy of Kingdoms of Amalur that’s been staring at me for a while from the shelf.
All I have to do is make sure that I have enough VP to buy the cloak, buy the belt, and be capped for upgrading purposes when 5.3 arrives, and I will be all set. Depending on when that happens, I could conceivably have that taken care of just from raiding, which would be nice. That’s my favorite end-game thing to do on my hunter anyway.
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Letting go of the grind(s)
Posted: March 20, 2013 Filed under: Gear, Professions, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: Alchemy, Enchanting, gear, hunter, Leatherworking, leveling, Mists of Pandaria, questing, raiding, reputation, Tailoring, warrior 12 Comments »
Ha ha ha… achievements.
Early last week, I got a call from my mom, letting me know that my grandma was not doing well, and that she and my dad were driving across the state to see her later that day.
I hadn’t seen my grandma in so long, I’d be embarrassed to admit it here. So I won’t. The tough part was that it was Tuesday, the first of five scheduled work days in a row, because my boss was on vacation (so I was taking up some of that payroll). It really stressed me out, because when my grandfather died in 2008, I had never made it up to visit him in his last years.
Fortunately, I was able to find some schedule flexibility at the end of the week, and after a short shift on Friday morning I made the 315-mile trip to see her. She was, by that time, doing better, and we had a very nice time visiting and talking, watching a baseball game together, and so on. I left mid-afternoon on Saturday, blessed by the experience, and was home in time to raid at 9:30 pm.
It was a hectic week, all told.
…
This, of course, affected my weekly race to the Valor cap. Or, more than one Valor cap. See, not only have I maintaining a capped-pace on my hunter every week since I hit 90, but I’ve also been trying to cap on my warrior, who tanks for our new alt run on Friday nights.
With patch 5.2 having dropped, here is a short list of the stuff I “have” to do:
- Isle of Thunder dailies (etc.) on the hunter, warrior, and maybe another toon each day.
- Run Throne of Thunder (Raid Finder) on the hunter, at least.
- Run heroics / RF / scenarios and/or do dailies to cap on the hunter and warrior.
- Saturday and Sunday night raids with the main team (hunter).
- Friday night alt raid with the warrior.
- Tillers: 5 level 90s at 16 plots per, plus a level 88 toon with four plots, that I try to hit each day.
- Living Steel, cloth, Sha Crystal, and Magnificence of (—) daily cooldowns.
- Somewhat consistent AH activity, although that doesn’t take much time.
This does not include having fun with alts – and right now, that mostly means playing my DK in Outland from time to time.
At any rate, the above list represents a lot of grind. And grind equals time spent, and grind doesn’t always mean fun. And time spent neither making real money nor having fun can become time wasted.
So last Friday, for the first time since I took a trip to visit with family last October, I completely ignored all of those grinds. I didn’t log in at all, because I had to go to work and then drive for more than five hours afterward. Part of me felt a smidgen of “but I need to make time for that before work!” while the rational side of me dismissed that notion as completely ridiculous.
Because it was completely ridiculous.
This may be a relatively alt-unfriendly expansion, but I have six toons in Pandaria in spite of that. I farm 84 plots per day. The Isle of Thunder can be a time sink when you get quests that are negatively affected by long re-spawn timers – or are just dumb quests, like “squash 150 roaches for 5 VP and the chance to kill the final quest boss if you actually do it.” Plus, the rares are fun, but I can’t always afford to let time get away from me while waiting for them to spawn.
I’ve been religiously farming those plots. Religiously doing those dailies. Religiously hitting up Raid Finder. Religiously capping on the hunter, and sometimes the warrior. It has felt like a duty that I was always going to be glad that I completed when I did, each week and with each positive raid result.
However, as I began my drive north last Friday, I had to chuckle to myself. I was free! No dailies today! No raid tonight! It’s sad to say, but it was actually nice to have that time off from raiding, even though it was just one day and I’d only raided twice before on the warrior.
…
Since Saturday night, when I came back, I’ve slacked off on some of that grind, and I think I will be better for it.
Despite new content with the recent patch, I have been starting to grow… I don’t know… bored? tired? of the game. This is probably a sign that I’ve been playing it too much, for too long. While the content is new, the game is basically the same, the way that I have been playing it: lots of grinds.
However, whereas I’ve usually spent days off playing WoW all day when there was nothing else pressing to do, lately I’ve been finding something else to do with some of that time. This is definitely a good thing.
But the best thing is that I am letting go of some of the grinds. I am not going to bust my butt – and test my own patience in the process – by putting my warrior through the same paces that I put my hunter through each week, just to ensure that I can get that next piece of gear as soon as possible. I’m not going to concern myself with getting that sixth toon to 90 unless I feel like it, even if it will help me gather herbs more easily with flying, and will get me the Quintessential Quintet achievement (yes, yes… I have two level 90 hunters). I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure that I have enough mats to use each cooldown, every day, without exception. I’ll still use my cooldowns when I can, but I won’t fret if they go un-used for a day or two, or three. I won’t let myself be bothered if I list auctions each and every day, because I have plenty of gold.
I’ll still play my hunter like I do, getting those dailies done and running RF and raiding and so on. And I’ll still farm my plots most days. But I need to take a break from the job that keeping a well-rounded stable of max level alts has become. I want to spend more time enjoying other aspects of the game – like leveling my DK or other toons, and working on my low-level hunter soloing project some more (sadly, he’s still 19). I also have other games I want to play, and books to read, and guitars to play, and good weather to enjoy, and spring cleaning to do, and… so on.
…
I’m super glad that I made the time to see my beloved grandma last week. I’m also relieved to have been forced to abandon the game and the grind for a couple of days. I think that letting go of some of the job-like aspects of MoP will allow me to enjoy the game more when I do play, and will make me happier overall.
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Throne of Thunder: One week, one kill – Jin’rokh down! (with bonus…)
Posted: March 11, 2013 Filed under: Gear, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, questing, reputation, Throne of Thunder, World of Warcraft, WoW 1 Comment »Saturday night was a good night.
After waiting all week (and for weeks before that) to get cracking on Patch 5.2, I was growing extremely bored and restless. The Isle of Thunder seems to be a place where people are having fun, killing rares, etc. For me, it has been an experience akin to the Molten Front progression experience.
And certainly, since I play a hunter, there’s nothing about it that’s really all that difficult… except for the extreme tiresomeness of hunting for those last few, elusive Grave Guardians to destroy, or corpses to burn, or whatever. The place is really cool – especially since Stage 2 opened today – but it’s also a cluster, crawling with people, which is great, and is also a curse. In fact, a few days ago I was so bored with the experience that I found myself writing a long, stupid post about it at 4am. That one’s going in the trash – you’re welcome.
So anyway, why do I do it, then?
Well, I’m doing it for the gear. And it is a cool place, and it is somewhere new to earn Valor.
It’s not because I need the Kirin Tor’s VP offerings. They sell a few pieces of 496 rep gear, but even for slots where I’m sporting a 489 item, the value of any of those upgrades per VP is ridiculously small.
No, it’s because of the infrequent – but hardly insignificant – opportunities to get reputation with the Shado-Pan Assault (which does have the good gear). And after seven days, I find myself in a good position to be Friendly very soon (2999/3000, in fact). I’ve run the treasure room scenario, done a few other quests for them… and then, on Saturday, we entered, as Bensen put it, The Thunder Dome.
Into the Thunder Throne!… wait, what? Aw yeah, Orb of the Sin’dorei… yeah. I went there.
After the trash, some discussion, and Mushan accidentally initiating the first pull of Jin’rokh the Breaker because I had a keyboard miscue (learn 2 type, and/or don’t have the boss targeted when typing, man!), and eleven more pulls… we got him!
I have to say – and this may surprise some – but this is the first time I’ve gotten a first-week boss kill since at least Icecrown, and maybe earlier. I’m not sure… I can’t remember back that far. So it’s pretty exciting, for me personally, to be involved in a first week / first kill situation.
Unfortunately, for some reason my screenshot addon did not take a screenie of the kill. However, I did have the presence of mind to take the above shot during some down time in Jin’rokh’s room. You know, for giggles.
Overall, I’m very proud of our team. There’s such a huge difference between being here on the first week of a patch and waiting until six and a half weeks after the new content arrives to even enter a raid with a patchwork group, like we did in 5.0. And it’s nice to be in the top 20 on our server for once (not that the server is what it once was, but still…).
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After that, and again on Sunday night, we made a bunch of pulls on Horridon. It’s a much tougher fight, and we may have a gear issue on our team, as far as surviving and, in particular, burning down adds. However, at the end of the night we got to experience the wonder of Oondasta, the heroic world boss on the Isle of Giants.
Here’s the screenshot from our server’s kill. Yes, I died more times than I can remember…
Oondasta died… and killed a lot, too!
For this shot, which was taken by the Multishot addon, my resurrection timer was literally at 1 second when the boss died, but this one looks pretty sick anyway, so I went with it!
But yeah… Oondasta… is pretty hard core. The damage she dishes out is ridiculous.
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During the week leading up to Saturday, I was having concerns about our group. One of our healers was slated to be out for part of the raid, and the replacement was away for the weekend. I was wondering if it would merely be a trash-farming night. However, I was pretty amped for it on Saturday, and spirits were generally high going in. Due to some technical issues, our other healer was able to join us in time for our fourth or fifth pull, and things progressed from there.
My expectations for our group are modest, based on recent experience, and as such, I tend to generally be skeptical of our collective ability to make progress. However, when it’s game time, I’m prepared, hepped up, and ready to kick some ass, and Saturday really proved to be a winner for us. It made for a good raid night, as I mentioned earlier.
Looking forward to killing more bosses and equipping better gear!
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Just when I thought I was out – Part two! Jumping back into PvP
Posted: February 5, 2013 Filed under: Gear, PvP, Reputation | Tags: gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, PvP, questing, reputation, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »If I remember correctly, patch 5.0 hit servers on August 28th. Around that time, I stopped doing battlegounds on my hunter, and I haven’t entered one since.
I’ve generally been content with that omission*. Raiding is my main passion – that, and raid prep – and I haven’t missed PvP very much at all.
*I don’t want to say “decision” because, while I decided not to PvP in patch 5.0 (pre-MoP), I never decided not to PvP anymore on the hunter. I just didn’t decide to PvP on the hunter after that, due to laziness, lack of interest, preoccupation with PvE content, or something.
In fact, now that I think about it, the major time sink that dailies/reputation grinds brought to WoW with Mists of Pandaria likely killed my desire to PvP. After leveling the hunter, I also leveled my bear to 90, then my warrior, then mage. I also have another hunter at 89, and my pally is 88. So it wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice, but PvP became “this thing that I don’t have time for, really.”
However, a singular set of circumstances has forced me to reconsider PvP, and the main circumstance is the quest from the Wrathion legendary questline entitled The Lion Roars, which requires a win in each of the new-for-MoP battlegrounds. When I got the quest, because I’ve reserved my knowledge of the legendary questline to in-game discovery for the most part, my reaction was “are you kidding me?”
My first thought was to go ahead and try the new BGs in my PvE gear, but with implementation of PvP Power and PvP Resilience, I decided that I didn’t want to go into BGs as something to be completely mowed down by the opposition.
In addition to this, I’ve also found myself at an odd point in the expansion. Raiding progress has been slow, and – since I have alts that I enjoy in addition to the hunter – I usually race to the VP cap on Mushan in order to get the Valorous bonus for those other toons. Since we raid on weekends, this means that, other than raiding, there isn’t all that much for the hunter to do from Friday night on, once I cap Valor.
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I’ve slowly started putting together a PvP set anyway, ever since I started JP capping, so I’ve been converting JP to Honor and occasionally buying the Honor gear as I get the opportunity. I have five pieces as of the end of the last raid lockout, and I may begin to actively pursue Honor points this week, if I have the time. Tol Barad seems like a pretty good place to do this, particularly if I hit up several battles this weekend, and I’m hoping to add a couple more pieces to what will be a motley combination of PvE and PvP armor.
I’m actually kind of excited about PvPing again on Mushan, although I have no illusions about my abilities. It’s been so long, and I was never that great anyway. I’m not excited about ripping up my off-spec, which I use for questing and raid soloing, and rearranging my UI for PvP, but I don’t really have a choice if I want to keep up with the questline. And I think I’ll enjoy having something different to do with my hunter on weekends. This should bring some life back to the game for me, something old that’s new again.
I may not write about PvP much after this – particularly if it ends up being a disaster – even if I start doing it regularly, but when it comes to raiding, the show must go on. I really want to move forward with Wrathion on this character, so I will be doing some PvP in the very near future. For better or for worse. :D
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Gear/upgrade decisions as 5.1 nears its end
Posted: January 19, 2013 Filed under: Gear, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, questing, raiding, reputation, World of Warcraft, WoW 2 Comments »Weeks after my initial distaste for the Operation: Shieldwall dailies (and my subsequent December boycott of them, so to speak) wore off, I did eventually start working on them. By the end of December, the areas weren’t such a cluster, and I began to make some progress with the faction.
Other than the ones in the mine, I found that I didn’t really mind the dailies. The beach dailies, while still a drudge, don’t have that combination of traits (“claustrophobic” and “cluster” come to mind) that made my initial opinion of the faction grind so negative at the beginning. And the story quest lines, which exist as primary lore elements – but secondary reputation ones – are actually interesting and enjoyable, for the most part. And since I want to see what happens, as always, with the lore, I’m determined to hit Exalted before 5.2 hits.
As it is, I did hit Revered yesterday after doing a flurry of the story quests that I had never completed after being interrupted while initially starting the one at the Brawl Pub…
Revered
And that presented me with an interesting gear conundrum.
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While I’m not terribly enamored with the Shieldwall Valor rewards for hunters, there is one hole in my gear right now: boots. I’m still wearing the Sha of Anger’s boots. Don’t get me wrong: they’re good boots. In fact, they’re good enough (and/or the Valor boots available at the launch of Mists are poor enough) that I had never been tempted to buy Valor replacements prior to 5.1. Indeed, I hadn’t really been tempted to buy the boots from Shieldwall, either; that is, until I started working toward Revered. Then, I started eyeing them, sort of from afar. Like, “hey, I see you there. Maybe you and I will hook up, if I don’t find something better…”
Ok, that’s not very romantic. But hey, after all, they’re just boots.
Anyway…
As I approached Revered, I started thinking about those boots. See, I haven’t had any luck getting an upgrade. Feng has been stingy in Raid Finder. One’Sock has been steadfast in his refusal to grant me any boots in Raid Finder. Feng has laughed in my face repeatedly during our guild raids when I’ve pleaded with him for boots.
With the rejections piling up around me, those “meh” boots – Odlaw’s Everwalkers – are starting to look more attractive. They are certainly an upgrade. The problem is, the boots Feng drops are a bigger upgrade, because they have a gem socket. For that matter, so are the LFR boots that drop from Un’sok, for the same reason. And I know that one of them will drop boots for me as soon as I cough up 1.75 weeks worth of Valor Points for the Everwalkers. I just know it. That’s the way life works.
So I looked longingly at the Everwalkers for a few minutes yesterday, and then decided to stick to my guns on this.
With 5.2, Item Level Upgrades are going away, presumably until 5.3, which is widely anticipated to be a 5.1-ish, “content” patch (as opposed to a “new raid” patch). The number of weeks away is undetermined, but it’s not that far off.
Therefore, I’ve prioritized Item Upgrades over the Shieldwall boots. As I prepare for 5.2 and whatever it may bring, there is a time limit on the upgrades, so I’m going to cap Valor through that time and get as many key pieces of gear upgraded as possible before then. This also allows for time to possibly pick up key upgrades like the Feng boots (has to happen sometime, right?) and the Elegon trinket. Hopefully, the boots in particular will drop, and I say that because the fight is easy and we will likely kill him every week.
In the meantime, my helm and legs will be fully upgraded shortly, and possibly two or three more by 5.2, meaning that I will have a total of 7-8 by then. Which isn’t too bad.
And then I can presumably buy the Everwalkers with Justice Points once the conversion happens.
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Operation Shieldwall: on second thought… maybe I’ll pass
Posted: December 1, 2012 Filed under: Gear, Reputation | Tags: dailies, gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, questing, raiding, stats, World of Warcraft, WoW 2 Comments »On Thursday night, I tried to do these new dailies for the second time. You know, the ones for the new 5.1 faction Operation Shieldwall (or Horde equivalent).
Thirty minutes later, I was here at WordPress, furiously banging out a post that basically laid out, in rant-form, how this new faction can go ook itself.
I did not post it, though. Sometimes I like to let things settle and allow some sense of reason to set in, so that I can decide if I really want to waste everyone’s time convincing my readers that I’m a completely bitter / cynical / negative / grumpy old man, or something.
Upon reflection, as it was written, I won’t be posting it.
However, I will make a couple of points about it.
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After my post from last Tuesday, I can honestly say that when I logged in to the game that afternoon, I wasn’t exactly excited about turning in the breadcrumb quest that I received. After messing around fixing my addons, and various other activities, I eventually went down there. I was so underwhelmed by the opening crap with Varian* and Anduin (etc.) that I didn’t do anything after I opened up the dailies.
*This part, by the way, was just awful. I don’t know what… I just hated it. It was one of the lamest openings to a faction or questline in the game, in my opinion.
Well, I actually did pick up the dailies. Then I looked at them for a moment in my Log, and then I abandoned them… and I proceeded to go on what has turned out to be a week-long LFR-running binge, interrupted for any significant amount of /played time only in order to level my mage the last 34 bars to 90.
Fast forward to Thursday… I was feeling a little bit annoyed with myself about not doing these new dailies. So I flew down to Krasarang and gamely picked up that day’s duties.
The quests for Thursday required me to go to the mine and do a bunch of crap. I figured, what the heck; I’ll kill a bunch of things, no big, right? So I descended, and killed things, and killed more things, and killed them again, and again, and again. Reliquary dudes were respawning the instant I killed them, every time, without fail. I was never out of combat. And every Mogu spirit was tagged. There were as many player-nameplates down there as there were mobs. It was a complete cluster.
I was never in any danger of dying. I have good gear, and they don’t hit that hard, and so on. But it was a horrible place to try to get anything accomplished.
So I ran back to the top, feigned death (I didn’t bother with fighting my way out; I just jogged and brought the mobs with me), handed in my Reliquary and Pandaren Spirit quests (which I had completed the equivalent of “many-times-over”), and abandoned the others. And I flew back to the Shrine, and started writing my about my disgust.
It didn’t take me long to come to terms with the fact that, in spite of my claims in my post from Tuesday, I won’t be hammering these out every day. I will not be prioritizing this rep, these dailies, or this gear.
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The rewards are higher-level gear than what I have, in every slot. But they’re not the best-itemized pieces. The non-trinket items all have mastery on them, and they’re not high stat-budget (legs/chest/helm/weapon) pieces. The trinket seems to be nice, so I’ll give Blizzard credit for that. However, I’m just not feeling strongly enough about these pieces to deal with the horde of people doing them all at the same time, in such a confined space, with antiquated tag mechanics** in place.
**It seems like every patch, there is something that everyone needs, but only the first to tag can get credit for the kill. And eventually, Blizzard does a “my bad, y’all” and makes those mobs “quest symbol” mobs that can be shared. I don’t understand why they don’t make this the case at the beginning of the patch, when the tagging problem is the worst because the most people are working on the rep…
My main aim in this game is to raid – to raid well, and to raid with my friends. And my gear set, which is currently one of the most complete in the guild, is not one of the larger problems our raid team has right now. So I’m feeling like making the process of attaining these pieces a priority is not necessarily a high-leverage way to spend my time in-game.
And it’s not like I can just avoid the crowds by doing the dailies at 2am. While there are times that I do stay up that late, I’m never in the mood to do dailies when I do. And because of the way my work schedule is heading, I don’t imagine that I’ll be doing that very much since an early morning wake-up is less pleasant with less sleep.
I’m not going to be brash and proclaim that I will never ever do this rep grind. It may happen, eventually, and gradually. However, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not going to give myself too much grief about not making this faction a priority. I’d rather just raid right now.
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Patch 5.1: Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in!
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Gear, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, progression, questing, raiding, stats, survival, SV, World of Warcraft, WoW 2 Comments »Patch 5.1 goes live today, and with it comes some new content and features. Some of the content is stuff I’m interested in, and some of it is not. I’ll get into that in a minute.
For a more comprehensive list of hunter-related changes, check out Tabana’s Patch 5.1 This Week post over at WoW Hunters Hall.
New gear and the Item Upgrade system
New gear usually tops the list with any new content patch, and we get a double dose of that, so-to-speak, with four new pieces (waist, boots, ring, trinket) available at either Honored or Revered with the new factions (Alliance – Operation Shieldwall / Horde – Dominance Offensive) along with the introduction of the Item Upgrade system. If you’re unfamiliar with the Item Upgrade system, read the summary of new features in 5.1 over at MMO-Champion.
From my perspective as a raider in a guild that only started raiding two and a half weeks ago, new gear is great. My opportunities for drops in normal raids have been extremely limited – 3 bosses down, 4 total kills – so my gear set is currently made up of more Valor items, Mogu’shan LFR pieces, and even 463 gear than I would like at this point. As such, without looking at any theorycrafting, I can see that the boots – at the very least – could be an upgrade over the Sha of Anger quest boots. I’ll have to look at the other three pieces before I make decisions on them.
The big thing for me, though, is the Item Upgrade system. I’m ready to log in and upgrade my weapon, like, yesterday. Mr. Robot also has a blog post today about the item upgrade system, although it looks like it may be a short while before the features are fully implemented there. I’ll be interested in knowing, going forward, whether item upgrades will be better than valor purchases for certain items.
I think the item upgrade feature is great – it provides continued uses for VP once the “OMG I’ve got to buy this item” phase of each tier starts to ebb, and it allows people who are having bad luck with drops or are in a guild that is slow in its raid progression (both situations that I’m dealing with at the moment) to continue to progress personally with their gear.
New faction(s) and dailies
On the other end of the spectrum, the new Alliance faction, Operation Shieldwall, brings – along with its Horde counterpart – a bevy of new daily quests. This is where the title of my post comes into play, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Tongue-in-cheek, because I knew that this would happen.
Since raiding with my friends is my endgame, it’s likely that I’m not the primary target of this faction from Blizzard’s standpoint. Like the Molten Front grind in 4.2 (and the deluge of dailies in Mists of Pandaria already), this is part of Blizzard’s attempt to expand upon the escalating Alliance vs. Horde story that exploded with Theramore in 5.0 and has since moved to Pandaria, providing more content and ways to get gear for those non-raiders/non-PvPers/lore-&-questing lovers who still play their max-level toons every day. So I understand that, and salute what they’re doing in that regard.
However, because I’m in a casual guild that hasn’t jumped on progression like I would have liked to in this tier, I’m stuck in a weird place… where I started working on maxing out my reputations (and Valor-capping) from the first week of the expansion, which meant dailies dailies dailies, and jumping into Raid Finder as each new instance opened, and have bought/made BoE gear for myself, and have been ready to go for a while now. And so I’m in this place where I’ve seen all the raid content in Raid Finder, but I’ve only seen the first three bosses in Mogu’shan Vaults on normal mode, but I’ve been doing dailies for two months now, and the last thing I really give a damn about is the Alliance-Horde conflict/story at this point. But I’ll do them because, you know, new shinies…
In reality, though, this may simply be a personal problem. Blizzard releasing more content – whatever it may be – more quickly is something that needs to happen in the greater scope of things. And my choice of guild is my choice, and given the scope of my efforts to be ready to raid seven weeks ago but not being able to run with Nos until more than a week into November, it’s not Blizzard’s fault that their design for VP and casual end-game players has made me sick and tired of their design for VP and casual players*.
*The funny thing is, when I’m playing my warrior – with whom I do not raid – I generally don’t mind the daily grind, particularly now that I am done with dailies on my hunter. For the warrior, the dailies thing is perfect, and now that I’m not doing those same dailies two or three times per day, I enjoy them on him. But on the hunter, I’ve got dailies burnout big-time.
All of that to say, I am not looking forward to doing a half-dozen new dailies each day for Operation Shieldwall. But I will. Because, you know, gear. And because I’ve killed 37 normal or LFR bosses (and used at least 7 coins) since November 8th without a single usable drop. So I probably need those boots.
Hunter class changes
The big change for me here is that Aspect of the Fox has been removed and Cobra/Steady can always be cast on the move. I’m not a Marksman, but Aimed Shot can also be cast on the move if you glyph it.
This change will hopefully result in a very slight DPS increase for Survival. I’ll be honest – with the number of instant casts we have, I’ve found that I rarely have to cast CS on the move. Usually, there is a Lock and Load up, or Dire Beast/Black Arrow/whatever is off cooldown, or I simply have enough focus to throw a couple of Arcane Shots out there, while I move to where I have to drop my flame on Feng, for instance. However, there are times when this could be a great thing (Get Away! phases during Lei Shi in Terrace come to mind). I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out over the next several days.
Once again, for a full list of changes, check the post at WHH linked above. I don’t play Beast Mastery or MM, so I won’t comment on all of the changes.
Closing thoughts
This is not a comprehensive 5.1 post, but I wanted to share some thoughts on where 5.1 sits with me personally. Overall, I’m glad it’s happening today, because I want the ability to upgrade some pieces and to earn some new pieces of gear. I’m not thrilled about the new faction and dailies, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I still don’t care about pet battles, and the Brawler’s Guild seems to be prohibitive as far as getting invites goes (and provides no epic gear), so I’m not excited about either of them. But I’ll be interested to see how the new hunter mechanics impact our ability to be effective as a class at higher levels of raiding, as well as how they affect my play personally.
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Life in Post-Revered Pandaria: everything in moderation
Posted: November 13, 2012 Filed under: Gear, Raiding & Dungeons, Reputation | Tags: dailies, gear, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, raiding, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »
We conquer together
In the couple of weeks since I became revered with every Valor Point-vending faction in Pandaria, I’ve noticed that my in-game hunting life has become more balanced.
As we’ve only just started raiding, I’ve had more than five weeks since level 90 to finish repping up the four pertinent factions, run Raid Finder several times, grab gear and VP from heroic dungeons, and get my Way of the Wok cooking squared away. And since hitting revered, I’ve taken time to work on other toons – including doing dailies on them.
In the beginning, it was all about the dailies, with some heroics thrown in. Then, on October 9th, it was dailies, Raid Finder, and some fill-in heroics. And more Raid Finder the next week. And so on.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself in the comfortable position of being able to pick and choose what I want to do.
Here is what my time spent on my hunter has looked like recently:
1) Mogu’shan Vaults RF, both halves, on Tuesday (and usually again later in the week with guild members). I no longer use bonus roll tokens in here. However, on Tuesday, it goes very fast generally, which means a quick 180 VP.
2) Heart of Fear RF. Ideally, I do this on Tuesday too, but maintenance and work may prevent that from happening from time to time. I got lucky and won the cloak in there last week.
3) Ironpaw daily, every day. I’m too lazy to farm fish to turn in for Ironpaw tokens, so I do the quest each day on all three of my 90s. Since I haven’t been raiding all along, I have a nice stash of these tokens saved up for when things get real and I need to make a lot of the best food.
4) Heroic dungeons. I try to do one per day. Most of the time, unless we get Shado’pan Monastery or Seige, they go really fast for a quick 80 VP. SV hunter AoE gets pretty sick in some of these, and it’s even better when there’s someone else doing mega-AoE damage along with me.
5) Cloud Serpent dailies, if I feel like it – and only the ones that award VP. I’m in no hurry to get exalted with them. Not that I don’t want a mount, but I’m not going to grind it religiously.
6) Sha of Anger, if it works out. I’ve been lax about this, and at this point I’ve only killed him three times where I probably should have killed him twice as often. But I did win the Tier 14 gloves on a bonus roll on this boss last week.
7) August Celestials dailies, if I feel like it, because I actually enjoy them.
8) Shado’pan dailies, if I’m really, really bored.
9) Raiding. Started last week. See previous post. We’ll get there…
While there has been, and continues to be, a lot of uproar about the gating of Valor gear behind reputation, I find myself of an interesting mindset about it, for two reasons. First of all, now that I’m revered across the board, what’s really holding me back is the Valor cap(s, both weekly and overall) rather than the reputation. Secondly, I’m finding that my situation provides for a varied and relaxed playing experience as I work on, among other things, hitting the cap each week.
The way in which the Valor caps affect me most is in the decision-making. 3,000 VP is a tight cap. I’ve already bought one piece, which represented 1.75 weeks of VP work, that I’ve replaced (trinket), and I’d rather not do that again if I can help it. Today, as the reset has occurred, I’m sitting 760 points short of the cap, and I have to make a decision soon. Right now, my best choices, +DPS/VP, are the legs, helm, bracers and ring, in that order. What bothers me is that, in any of those cases, I’m afraid that I will immediately replace them with a drop that has, in most cases, heretofore eluded me. You know what I mean. For instance, if I buy the VP bracers, bracers from RF Stone Guard would make me cringe, while bracers from normal Stone Guard would make me highly annoyed if we are successful in there this weekend. Similarly, the legs from the RF Spirit Kings will almost certainly drop the next time I run it after I purchase them. You can see where I’m going with this.
And what happens with Tier gear? What happens if I buy something and then I get the tier drop in RF Heart of Fear? Or what if I get lucky on the Sha of Anger?
Ultimately, what will happen will happen. I’m just being anal about making the best decision, but it seems like it, and all of the research I’ve been putting into the making of these decisions, will all come down to what amounts to a gamble – or, more (metaphorically) accurately, a roll of the dice.
This week, I’ll kill 12 bosses in RF at least once (hopefully – we’ll see how 2nd-half HoF goes), and most likely the Sha of Anger. I may do a heroic dungeon or two, and a few dailies, but I may purposely stay a couple hundred points below the 3,000 point cap before we raid in case we do kill Stone Guard on normal, so that I don’t have to buy anything before hand OR waste any VP. Then again, this strategy may alter if I pick up a couple of useful pieces in LFR or from the Sha – in particular, if I get the legs from either the Spirit Kings RF or Un’sok RF (Tier!), I’ll probably go ahead and buy the helm before we raid. We’ll see how the next couple of days shake out.
At any rate, I’m sitting in a good place, where my next purchase will put me a hair away from 480, and any additional usable drops this week will be a bonus. And if I want to do some dailies instead of dungeons, I can. And if I want to do some dungeons instead of dailies, that option is there. As I said, it’s a relaxing way to go about it. Much more fun than back in 4.1 when I was banging my head against the Zandalari heroics for both drops and VP (before I was in a raiding guild).
The daily grind isn’t necessarily always fun for competitive raiders, particularly at the beginning. However, I’m finding that I’m not burned out on heroics like I was at similar points in past expansions, and that is a good thing, in my book.
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