April 25, 2011 - Alternate Image Gaming

All indications point to 4.1 coming tomorrow 4/26/11. You are not prepared! Or are you? Wow Insider has a pretty comprehensive guide to 4.1 HERE. Of course there is a ton going on here most important of which is NOT a new raid instance. The Firelands raid and the associated Hyjal healing will likely come with patch 4.2. This means that unfortunately, there’s probably still no dailies in hyjal. If I discover I’m wrong and the Hyjal rep dailies ship with 4.1 I’ll be sure to get a guide going pronto. Of course, we are getting new heroic dungeons, the Looking for Guild system, and a veritable ton of class/instance/gear balances.

One thing I’ll make sure to do tonight is prospect all my Obsidium/Elementium ore, cut the uncommon gems, and vendor them. Notes indicate that uncommon gems will no longer vendor for 9 and will end up being a much lower amount. This will drastically lower the value of the gems that aren’t used for select craftables or the JC daily as well as lowering the price of the ore they come from since there is no longer a high “minimum” prospecting value. Is there anything else you’ll be doing at the last-minute to prepare? Finishing gearing an alt to be ready for the ilvl 346 required new heroics? Something else?

You can find the most current patch notes on Blizzard’s blog HERE.

No, I wasn’t tanking this boss, but some accidental fire mishaps ending up with us writing a letter. Besides, I don’t usually include a screen shot, be grateful.

So it was my first time and I rocked it! Just a few days ago we’re about to start forming up our raid for the night and noticed our sign-up list was lacking some key features. Namely, we were missing a second tank. I actually could have taken the easy way out and let our shaman take his alt Paladin. He is completely capable and geared almost completely in epics. If you’ve been reading, I did have a series of blogs about being scared to tank. This shaman of ours really wanted to gear his main and also really doesn’t like tanking. I decided to take up the challenge and let big ugly things beat on my face for the next 3 hours.

And beat my face they did. As I can recall, there was only 2 wipes during the night caused by my tanking. First was a death during the Omnitron encounter. You could also blame that on the healers for not keeping me up, but with relatively sub-par gear, my CD usage could have been a lot stronger. The only other wipe was a complete result of my fail. We were working on Throne of the Four Winds and I was tanking the frost boss. Never before had I been subject to such a constant slowing effect while switching to the other platform and started running for it too late. Missing the tank swap can be (and was) pretty fatal. Outside of that, things went pretty smoothly. Of course, I was the off tank so I had the pleasure of raid DPSing on my DK for 3 of the 6 bosses we fought that night. All in all, raid tanking – both bosses and trash – was dramatically easier than tanking a heroic. I’d be willing to wager this is due to having a group of competent players as opposed to a random collection of potential douches that don’t expect to
ever see you again. Whatever the reason, I won’t have any qualms with tanking some more in the future.

It can be pretty nice occasionally, though, to not tank or heal some raids. Just getting to pewpew/smashsmash a boss and move out of stuff occasionally is a lot more relaxing.

Day: April 25, 2011

Are You Ready for 4.1?

Daily Thoughts: It Was My First Time and…