Moving (again).

Rather than go through countless posts and clean the blog up, I’ve just created a new blog over at http://feardotwin.wordpress.com

Its the same setup but focused on the Shadowpriest/Warlock aspect on WoW with the upcoming WOTLK expansion. I had a blast posting about Moonkin, Shaman, Mages, etc., but after leaving the Alliance side of Silvermoon and re-rolling Horde on Sisters of Elune, there will be a lot more Shadowpriest/Warlock talk and a lot less of everything else.

Thanks to those of you who read the blog and hopefully you’ll continue to do so over at Fear.DoT.Win!

Fooking.. or Cishing?

The art of leveling your cooking and fishing at the same time.. it’s a beautiful thing. How in the hell did I just find out about this 2 days ago??

http://www.almostgaming.com/wowguides/wow-fishing-and-cooking-guide

That is the guide I’ve been going by and so far Abigore is up to 225 skill for both with both quests completed to max out at 300. This tells you where to fish and where to get the recipes to cook those fish.

Normally I’d hate fishing (and cooking) but with their importance in TBC I’m assuming they’ll be equally important in WOTLK. This guide made it pretty painless and easy so I’ll most likely max both professions on all 3 of my SoE toons.

Happy Fooking! .. err.. Fishooking? Cishing? Cookishing? I dunno.. you think of something to call it.

Forsaken no more.

According to the splash screen, there will be a 12 hour extended maintanence tonight. We all know that this will be the introduction to patch 3.0 and the end of TBC as we know it. This will also bring an end to Arena Season 4, although Arena will still be around to store points for Season 5 at level 80.

I’ve toyed around with Shadowpriest and Prot Pally specs but haven’t given a lot of thought to my Mages spec.

You see, Saturday I responded to a snappy post made on the Forsaken guild forums as I thought that 7 or 8 people (myself included) were being called out for playing on another server isntead of helping people gear their alts and/or sitting online while no one else was on (see; Farming Played Time). The outcome of this post resulted in the 7 or 8 of us being /gkicked from Forsaken rather than being talked to about why we felt the way we did. Rather than fish around for another guild, I’m just going to continue enjoying myself on Sisters of Elune where it’s drama free. I’ll still discuss Mage changes and what-not but I’ll be playing my Mage a lot less.

No need to cry over spilled milk (QQ Tauren) so lets just move on to more positive things! Abigore is 47 and Aubigore should be 46 once I turn in my last ZF quest. Tanking ZF was a bit of a task and honestly my first challenge. I find myself running out of mana fairly often so I’m trying to figure out when to swap to Seal of Wisdom during trash pulls.

We got some bad news today that one of our triple xp partners is going through training at a new department in their current job and will not be able to play during our normal hours for the next 4-6 weeks. Rather than only play with them on the weekends, we’re going to quest seperately until 58 and then just run instances on the weekends when they get free time. They’ll be questing with their boyfriend (who is another triple xp partner of ours) while I’m at work and then my wife and I will play catch up when I get home. Questing as a Prot Pally might suck so I may respec to Retribution until Outlands with tomorrows free respec.

Not-so-WoW Related.

-Blew a tire on the way home from work Saturday which set me back a little over $200.

-My 6 year wedding anniversary was yesterday and this used up the money I had for us to do anything.

I demand a kharma recount.

Almost Vampirically Touched.

Rather than make a few smaller posts covering the Blizzcon information, I’m going to wait until afterwards to do one larger post covering Mage and Priest changes.

Outside of the class updates, Dual Speccing was confirmed for a future content patch as was the possiblity of an Outfitter-type UI. Also confirmed for a future patch was a build in threat meter like Omen and the possability of guild achievements. Who doesn’t love time sinks?

What I’d like to see in future patches -

• Having holiday weeks for battlegrounds instead of just the weekends. A lot of people already play during the weekend and this would draw players in to time sinks during the week. WSG and AB are already a slow honor and rep gain and some of us PVP on more than one toon.
• A remade fishing mechanic. Lets face it.. Fishing in WoW is boring (much like fishing IRL, IMO) and is a hassle to level up. It’s more time consuming than the other secondary professions and I don’t understand the concept of skilling up slower as you get better at it. I wouldn’t mind the current mechanic if it skilled up faster but if I’m going to waste hours upon hours fishing, at least make it fun.
• Adding antidotes to First Aid to remove curses, diseases & bleed effects (removing anything similar from Alchemy). I remember leveling my first Troll Warrior and dreading the fight against poison mobs so I’d carry stacks of anti-venom. If you normally solo without a class that cannot remove said debuffs, we should be given a way to remove them on a similar cooldown to Bandages.
• Heroic versions of old world dungeons. I’m pretty sure the reason this hasn’t happened is itemization. The insane amount of gear they’d have to come up with and ways to make them unique would be entirely too much work but i’d be happy if it were just for tokens to turn in for gear or rep or maybe dropping larger amounts of gold as another option instead of doing dailies.

Overall, I can honestly say that I’m excited about the expansion even though (on paper) a few classes I play seem to be getting nerfed. I’m really stoked about 10 man raids since I prefer raiding with a smaller tight knit group of in-game friends over a larger group of people that only want to show up for loot.

On a smaller scale, I’m also looking forward to changing dances and hairstyles on my existing toons. Sure it’s pretty minimal in the overall scheme of things but these are characters we’ve all been playing for awhile and I also play on an RP server. Having a character get older and graying their hair just seems really cool.. and so does having a male Undead being able to dance like a male Gnome.

Enough about WOTLK and Blizzcon..

Abigore is up to 47 and should easily hit 50 or 51 tonight. Our group is doing the Jintha’alor quests before hitting up Mara (both sides) for quests and gear so we might hit 52 with any luck. I’d like to be in Outlands before the patch on Tuesday but that all depends on the other groups play time.

My wife and I have 11 days to go until we can transfer our toons back off from Twisting Nether. I can’t honestly stress enough how awful that server is. They have some progressed guilds but it’s an RP-PVP server ran by PVP players who grief RP’ers all day. Why even waste your time rolling on an RP PVP server JUST to PVP. There are dedicated servers for that. Why roll on a server and grief the people who still PVP but also RP? It doesn’t make any sense.

I picked up Fishing and Cooking on Abi and got both to around 120-ish last night. I took my wife’s advice and leveled them together (something I had never done in the past) which is 100 times easier. Stupid me couldn’t grasp the concept of catching fish and then cooking then to skill up BOTH in the last 2.5 years of playing WoW. GG Nubsprinkle.

In guild drama news, I was called out on the Forsaken guild forums for playing Horde alts on a different server isntead of logging in to help gear someones alts so I told them to either pay for my subscription and tell me what to do with my free time or to piss off. I’ve given up on them at this point. No one wanted to do anything when I was on so some friends moved to Sisters of Elune. I’m having fun with them instead of wasting money on consumables and wasting time in Kara and ZA to gear their alts. It’s my money. It’s my time. Replace me.

Stay tuned for a full Mage/Priest Blizzcon update post on Monday!

Blizzcon & RaidComp.

So it’s Blizzcon weekend and also my 6 year wedding anniversary. We tossed around the idea of flying out for Blizzcon for it but we didn’t feel like fooling around with the ticket issues.

Either way, I’m sure there will be a TON of frequent updates on their end all weekend long and I’ll be paying close attention to MMO-Champion to relay all of the Mage and Priest changes here on SW:B.

There are already a few updates about the game in general but nothing Mage/Priest specific to post here.

The last thing I wanted to bring up was the new feature over at MMO-Champion called RaidComp. This allows you to drag and drop all class specs in to a 10 to 25 man raid box to reveal all available raid buffs and debuffs that can be applied. This also tells you if you are bringing more than 1 class that provide the same buff if you’re in to min/maxxing your raid team.

I was surprised this wasn’t firewalled at work (yet) so I toyed around with it using the 6 classes that our friends play in Vae Victus and 4 other classes I’d like to recruit in WotLK. It’s definetely a great tool that I know a lot of raiding guilds will be using in the future.

You can check out this awesome new tool here:
http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/

For a more detailed (see; better) explaination, visit Matticus here.

ShadOwned!

No new Mage or Priest updates to blog about today which makes this rather uneventful.

On the other hand, Misery’s latest blog is tickling my brain with a possible Shadowform/Divine Spirit solo build for the WOTLK 70-80 stretch. I’ve never even considered something like this before but with the recent changes to Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, it’s easily manageable to skip VT altogether for leveling purposes and replace it with Devouring Plague in your rotation. GG Misery.

The newer Shadowpriest, Abigore, is up to 45 thanks to a ZF run so I can finally start putting points in to Misery. Starting over is tough lol. The Prot Pally, Aubigore, is up to 42 (almost 43) and man, I love Holy Shield. With Holy Shield I no longer have to blow mana judging Righteousness on single target pulls unless I see that the DPS is catching up on threat. Pally tanking is a lot of fun so far.

I have an early night tonight with the morning shift tomorrow so I don’t know how much progress I’ll be getting on either toon. I’d like to squeeze in at least one run somewhere but if not, I’ll be ok. I think I have about 11 days left until I can transfer Morthius to Sisters of Elune so thats also exciting!

Amp/Damp Magic & Devouring Plague Changes.

Mages Amplify/Dampen Magic Changes

• Amplify Magic bonus to heal effects has been reduced. (480 to 255 for Rank 7, 240 to 128 for Rank 6, etc …)
• Dampen Magic malus to heal effects has been reduced. (480 to 255 for Rank 7, 240 to 128 for Rank 6, etc …)

Priest Devouring Plague Changes

• We increased the damage coefficient of Devouring Plague to be similar to other damage over time spells. We also lowered the base damage on ranks 7, 8, and 9 to partially compensate for better scaling. Overall this will unquestionably be a buff to the spell’s damage, but I wanted to state this clearly lest you just see the base damage in a future build and think we nerfed it.  

   

   

The Amp/Damp nerf is minimal in my book. It’s way to situational as it is and nerfing it will make me use it even less.

I’m already and Undead Shadowpriest so I’ve had the benefit of DP since level 20. The damage is pretty nice, the additional healing is usually an un-needed bonus but the overall mana cost is horrendous. I see that they’re trying to boost Shadowpriest DPS and steer away from the “utility class first - damage dealer second” mentality and I think giving us all DP is a step in the right direction as long as they reduce the mana cost and cooldown (which is what they’re doing).

In other news, Aubigore is up to 40 but I haven’t had a chance to try out Holy Shield. One of my friends that I play with in our triple XP group is having computer problems so until it gets fixed my Shadowpriest is on hold. According to her boyfriend (another triple XP friend), she should have her replacement laptop in a day or two so thats optomistic.

My goal is to be 60 on either my Paladin or Shadowpriest by patch day and 70 on both by the time WotLK releases. Both should be easily doable. I’ll also be transferring my Warlock from Twisting Nether to Sisters of Elune in about 2 weeks so thats exciting. It’ll be nice to finally have a source of income.

*All blue information taken from MMO-Champion.

El oh El.

As seen on Penny Arcade, THIS is the stupidest idea I think I’ve ever seen.

Last time I checked, gamers can digest real food without the need to toss it in a poorly marketed container. I understand the marketing of energy drinks because most gamers enjoy caffinated beverages but if I want to eat something I”m not going to reach for an overpriced canister of PB&J flavored.. something-er-others..

Maybe it’s just me.

Dual Spec Choices.

With more information coming out on dual speccing, I’m starting to consider where to go with my off-specs. The way things are looking now (albeit things change all the time) it seems we’ll be playing Horde or Sisters of Elune in WOTLK at first which leaves me with a Priest, Paladin and in 14 more days I’m transferring my Warlock over.

With my Priest I’ll be sticking with Shadow for PVE and whatever world PVP I get myself in to with the new zone but a RL friend of mine has a Pally and Rogue that is interested in doing some 2’s when the new season starts. I’m considering going Discipline for my offspec to heal in arena for his Ret Pally or his Rogue or tweak my Shadow spec to be more PVP friendly if we do 3’s or 5’s instead.

With my Paladin, I’m sticking with Protection for PVE without a doubt. I’m loving Pally tanking and I’ve heard it only gets better once you get Holy Shield and Avengers Shield. I’m sold. If I offspec it’ll be for PVP which will be Retribution without a doubt. The Retribution tree is looking sweet and I can’t stand PVP’ing as a tank spec.

I’ve always been a fan of all 3 Warlock trees but I’m most excited about the Affliction tree as it stands right now. It seems to have the most balance of all 3. Destruction is starting to appeal to me as well so I might go for Destruction for PVE and Affliction for farming/PVP. I’ll have to toy around with the specs a little and go from there.

Once I get back to my Mage, I have full intentions on staying Fire for PVE and most likely Frost for PVP - Living Bomb sounds tempting in PVP though.

I haven’t been logging on to my Mage lately to avoid guild drama and the friends I’d be playing with are playing on Sisters of Elune at the moment anyway. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t go back to Silvermoon until WotLK.

I really like the idea of having 2 specs. I felt the wrath of respeccing for PVE and PVP and the cost adds up unless you keep up on doing your dailies but sometimes you don’t want to feel like you HAVE to do anything extra.