Are You Ready for 4.1?

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.

Daily Thoughts: It Was My First Time and…

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.

Daily Thoughts: Some Jewelcrafting Tips & QQ

I’ve been making money hand over fist selling WotLK uncommon and rare gems since the middle of WotLK. It was a massive cash-cow and once I got a little bit of gold saved up from farming ore, prospecting, and selling cut gems I switched to buying ore and speeding up the process by a metric ton. Although I also eventually had herbalism, alchemy, tailoring, blacksmithing, inscription, and enchanting, nothing ever came close to the sustained profits from selling those WolTK gems for me – and still hasn’t. (more…)

Daily Thoughts: A Brief History of Me – TBC

I started WoW midway through The Burning Crusade after a friend/roommate offered to buy me the game if I’d play. Prior to this, the idea of spending reoccurring money to keep playing a game seemed ridiculous. Although I enjoyed Warcraft 2 and 3, I thought, “why would I keep paying for one game when I could just buy a new one every few months with the money I’d be spending”? But, given that the initial cost was zero and the first month was free, it became a fairly no risk decision to give it a try. So I created my account, made a warrior, and was a terribly bad noob.

My recruiter was horde so naturally I followed suit. This is something I am eternal grateful for because who wants to be dirty alliance? (At first I wondered if bashing alliance could be bad for reader retention, insulting half of players and all… then I remembered Alliance can’t read – they only communicate through garbled letters and occasionally say “me luv u”.)  My class choice was fairly split between Paladin and Warrior. I wanted a beastly, 2-handed axe wielding monster of damage output and eventually decided on an Orc Warrior. My first choice was ThornDrumheller after a character from one of my favorite book series, but it didn’t work out. I had recently watched 300 and took my next choice and named this fresh orc “Threehundred” on account of not being able to use numbers in a name. This was a first among a great many bad decisions that I made on my noobish trek through beginning WoW.

The warrior began (and still is actually) as a fury warrior. Without too much direction after the first few levels (and a couple of RFC runs when able) I eventually learned dual wield and promptly ran around with a dagger and a shield. In my defense, the dagger had the best damage I’d found at the time, and it just seemed to make sense that I’d live longer wearing the shield. He struggled all the way to level 26, eventually dual wielding daggers, and found himself in Hillsbrad. After 26 grueling levels, having to stop and drink repeatedly, I parked him in the Tauren Mill Inn and never played him again. Ok, so I did eventually, but that’s a later story. I liked the overall feel of the melee damage dealer but wanted self heals. Naturally, I moved onto my Paladin.

Back in TBC, you didn’t have to declare a talent tree ahead of time. You could sort of pick points as you went along. I sort of picked points that seemed immediately good regardless of the tree I was going down. I ended up mostly holy and the eventually had a proper holy spec. Of course, this was awful. I just didn’t know it yet. I quested about 40 levels in holy spec. This was a long, long grind. At some point real life got a little too busy and I ended up taking a long break from Wow. I think I was level 63 at the time. I never participated in any raids during this time. I did watch a friend of mine do kara and thought it looked pretty cool, but , level 63’s can’t raid.

Before taking my break, I also did a great deal of PVP both as holy and ret. I honestly probably would have hit max level during TBC instead of not getting there til later. Instead I left Paladin floundering in Outlands for a good several months, awaiting the day I’d return and bring it to greatness!…or at least max level.

Daily Thoughts: Fears of Tanking – The Conclusion!

This is the third part of a series I’m doing on my fears of tanking Cataclysm heroics. If you haven’t been following along you can read the FIRST PART and SECOND PART now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. To quickly summarize for those too lazy to go back and read the past posts, I had expressed a general hesitation in jumping into tanking the relatively serious Cataclysm heroics, particularly with unsatisfactory gear. I finally decided on an acceptable gear level for tanking a heroic: An item level of 333 and at least 130k health. This coupled with at least the cheap versions of the spec appropriate gems and enchants should put me in a place for success – as long as I don’t suck!

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Daily Thoughts: An Interesting Patch Note for Warriors & PVP

I put up the original 4.1 patch note text HERE and you can find updated notes on blizzards blog http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2356431. Although there are a handful of other changes from the original notes (shown in red on their blog) there’s one in particular that I think could potentially be a sign of things to come.

  • Colossus Smash now ignores 50% of a hostile player’s armor (PvP), but continues to ignore 100% of a non-player character’s armor (PvE).
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