Back from the edge!

Hey people! Sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been hectic during February, however, I'm back :) and already have a few posts lined up.

Generally, WoW has been good to me. I haven't gotten much done in the way of raiding, but gearing for bear is going great. I'm sitting at 36k health self buffed, which, with a paladin or a priest, quickly becomes 40k and upwards. Dodge is pretty good too, as I'm comfortably just under 40%.

Unfortunately, some instances (particularly the new icc ones) have a few hard hitting spell casters... which is a worry for all healers, when I'm going allong happily, not taking much damage, and then KAPOW! a huge fireball burns my tail stump off!

The only damage reduction I have for spells coming in, is that 140 damage reduction Essence of Gossamer gives me when it procs. Now, that's not alot, and really, I'm considering enchanting for some shadow e.t.c. resistance. Anyone know anything else that can be done to reduce this?

Trigger happy dps, and hunters who don't know when to use feign death... Plate wearing dps, particularily warriors now, with two huge 2H weapons, running in, E-peen flying high, don't seem to understand the concept of tanking! I'm sorry, I'm not an all singing, all dancing bear tank you may have in your 25 man icc raids. I'm heroic and emblem geared. Get a grip, because 11k dps is not neccesary to get a group through even HoR. You only need a combined group dps of around 12k to get you through that stuff! So, you have two options here DpS... Either slow the Hell down, or get smooshed by a loose add. Your desision. Just remember, 0 health = 0 dps.

I'll finish of my few drafted posts later,

Vralk, Guardian of Cenarius

Guarding Cenarians

This is a little guide towards helping you do that all impressive druid title 'Guardian of Cenarius'

I don't think there is much more reason to it than this:

I'm a druid, I want a druidy title... As a tank mainly now, something protector-ish would be great! *Look at achievments* Guardian of Cenarius. Looks great, just the kind of druid title I was looking for. Only problem is, you need to be exalted with two factions. Not just that, the factions are old school factions.

As a druid who started seriously leveling after the Lich King made his frozen butt a threat, I've not done any reputation grinds that someone who had seen level 60 or 70 caps will have done. All I've done was friendly with both the Circle and Expedition.

So, where to get started.

At the time I started the grind, I was still getting together my bear gear. So I didn't have much health, this meant I started with the Sillithus grind.

So, what to do.

When leveling, I spent a large amount of time here anyway, so I had done most of the quests. I'm not going to go into much detail here, because there's alot of quests, and the best way to get them done is to start tracking low level quests and get going. While doing these quests, you do one for gathering Twilight texts. (Sorry for all you Vampire fans, it's all about elementals here!)

You collect these in bunches of 10, then hand them into someone who truely appreciates your work. This then rewards you with a bunch of rep. Next to this person, is someone who accepts three abysall crests, for again, a bit of rep. These are repeatable, and going to be your main source of reputation. If you have a bank character, you could do the missions given by someone else, doing the Logistic's assignments, where you just buy a whole load of Gem's, leathers e.t.c. and hand them in. I didn't have the gold at the time (nor really do now), but this isn't a very quick way to grind it.

At level 80, when you find a cultist camp, you will find a bunch of, you guessed it, cultists! Next step is to kill them all. Run around, single shot mangling them in cat form, or whatever you do (for moonkins and some trees, it's possible to double wrath them, or single shot them with starfire) then loot them. collect only the coins, texts and clothing (head gear, shoulders, and robe) keep going untill you have killed the entire place. They'll start to respawn soonish, but you should have gathered atleast one set of cultist robes. Now look for the Lesser stones dotted around the camp. Go to it, talk to it wearing all three pieces (if you don't, you get zapped for a large amount, I was hit for around 3k, does anyone know if it is a percentage hit?).



Talk to the stone, and an abyssal lord will appear. kill his sorry butt, and then loot the crest. do this for all the sets of cultist clothes you have (depending on the elemental that appears, some of the clothing is destroyed). Then, if you've been slow, there will be alot of respawns for you to kill, this means you don't have to move to the other camp. If not, simply go to the other cultist camp, and repeat. (There is a camp within spitting distance of the cenarion flight path, and again one north west of that). When you get bored (or set yourself a timer for this if you get bored easily, I went for half hours at a time), rock on back to the refuge, hand in all of your crests and texts, vendor anything you have picked up (there will probably be alot of it unless you selectively looted texts, crests and clothes)

Eventually, and trust me on this, it'll take a while, you'll get to exalted! hooray, half way there!

Here's a few tips for breaking up the grinding:

• Take breaks, you'll go insane otherwise! every three or four trips, take a break, do something not involving WoW, eat something, have a drink, just shut your eyes for alittle.
• Queue up in the LFG tool as a DPS. Queueing as a healer or tank is a very short wait, so doesn't let you do much grinding. This is bad, as you don't do what you need to!
• Listen to some music, preferably fast, or something you can sing to, again, this helps to break up the grind, and make it less of a grind. I even have my own grind music for just these occasions!

Now for the higher level bits, You have two options really for this.

You could grind this in Borean Tundra with our little PETA friends. The mobs around Kaw, the mammoth killer respawn very quickly, and they drop Nessingwary Lackey's Ears, which you can turn in to a very sadistic druid for some Expedition rep. I don't know what he does with these ears, but I'm pretty glad he doesn't tell you.

The other option, is to go to Outlands. Go and do the quests there, and hand in Unidentified Plants, and you'll get to honored pretty sharpish. From here, the only way to raise your rep, is to do more quests, or hand in Coilfang Armaments. The heroic Coilfang Resivoir instances will still give you rep, and so will normal Steamvaults. I grinded out normal Steamvaults, because the naga will drop coilfang armaments, and you still get rep for killing them, the bog lords, and the bosses. When you first go into the instance, kill them until you get 'Orders from Lady Vashj' This starts a quest, accept it, and go back out the instance, to the outpost leader in Zangramarsh.

After this, go into Steamvaults (preferably normal, as it is quicker to solo) and kill all the naga you can find! Tips for this place really, are:

• Don't over pull, it's easily done, and very easy to get over confident. Remember that some of the mobs stun, heal e.t.c. when you are stunned, you can't dodge! so you only have the base 5% avoidance chance.
• Remember to activate the control panels behind the Mechagnome boss and the Hydromancer lady! beyond those doors, are about 25 more naga, and the final boss! that's a lot more Armaments, and the chunk of rep you get for the boss and his friends!
• Again, don't get too bored, however, if you go into the LFG tool, you'll be teleported to the nearest GY when you get back from the instance.
• Remember to run out and RESET the instance once you are done with each run. You can't just run back in, it doesn't work, and you'll just be running around an empty instance, wondering why there are no mobs until you realise what you forgot to do!

Eventually, after a large number of runs (I took about 20-30 I think) You'll get exalted with the Exped! Now all you have to do, is go to your character pane, and click on that title of druidy epicness, and feel pro in your random instances!

:) Enjoy your grind, it's worth it at the end!

Vralk

Obliterating Oculus

So then, after a huge read up into bear tanking, gearing up, and making a phenomenal number of new macro’s, I’ve finally ventured into an instance. I decided to go for a level 80 normal instance, so that if anything went wrong, our magical guild healer could keep us alive till I got it back together.

After long debate of which instances we did and didn’t want to go to, Oculus, surprisingly was chosen! The first few pulls went smoothly, and we easily smote down drakelings left, right and centre. The first boss went nice and easily as well! I just made sure, that every time he pulled us all in, I backed off towards the cages, and then everyone knew where they should be standing very quickly J

The drakes, since we had all done oculus e.t.c. before, and there were no achievements for anything in normal, we decided to go for five amber drakes to make it go quicker, as opposed to going for the typical set up of one red and green, and three amber. We landed on the centrifuge ring, and I must say... There’s a lot of moving for a bear tank! Given that I have virtually no resistance to frost, except for the Frost aura our healer kindly donned, I had to get out of the blizzards sharpish. All said, as long as I mangled and lacerated two out of the three mages before they started to blizzard, I could keep aggro on them all simply by growling and IFF’ing the un-lacerated mob... The big guy was easy, as maul hit him, and a few swipes made sure he followed me when I moved from the blizzards.

Now... once that was complete, the next boss. He fell quickly, although there was a little slip, where I forgot to move from the laser. That’s right, I was nearly shot down by a laser! KFB (Kentucky-Fried Bear) isn’t that tasty, I guarantee you, but that big blue drake man seems to think otherwise.

The trash was easy getting to the next boss, as we had a lot of dps there. Only real issue I have with this boss, is that the mobs are just slightly too far away from each other. I did work out though, if I tag the boss with IFF, then he summons, and if I’ve enraged, I’ll have enough rage to charge in, then hit at least two out of the four mobs instantly. From there, I’m normally able to get a decent amount of aggro before anyone reaches the mobs. The boss himself however, isn’t too bad, I just have to be very careful about that empowered arcane explosion! All in all, a not too bad boss.

Now then... The big bad dragon. Was fine, as we simply had to do it as a dps race (given our drake set up) which, considering it was a normal level instance, was no issue. High dps, and a quick kill made for a very happy group!

Now that I’ve dabbled in tanking, I have to say, I really enjoyed it! It’s harder than healing by any means, but overall, feels a lot more rewarding. I’ll keep tanking, and keep posting to you all about how I’m going with it.

Just also want to say happy birthday to the blog Druid main! Well done Ice!

Vralk

Stepping into the Arena.... for PvE?

The bane of my life. It always has been, and will probably always be PvP. I’m not the quickest on the uptake, but when it is raids, I can reasonably predict what damage is coming, from where, to who, and how hard. In PvP, it isn’t that simple. You can’t look up boss mechanics, you can’t just step up and be carried through the fights, you have to fight it through, drastically adjust, and more importantly, move tons!

Yesterday, I made a 2v2 arena team called ‘Cenarion Combat’ and we stepped into our first arena. My friendly Paladin and myself, a lonesome tree. Proudly displaying our ‘guardian of cenarius’ titles, we were promptly steamrolled by another team. I really do mean steamrolled. The paladin got stun locked, and I was nuked by an unfriendly warlock. Things couldn’t have ended faster if I had tried. It was all over too quickly, and we queued up for round two. This went equally badly, but we kept going until we realised what we had to do for different scenarios. I now, some-times even start stealthed! I know, right? Crazy tree!

We’ve won some games, and lost some, but it’s a lot more fun than I expected. AND, I’ve made a paladin friend!

The reason I’ve done this, is to get together some gear in an alternate way. If my arena buddy and I group up, then do a few matches, we can do some instancing when we get bored or frustrated! Then, when we come back, with some fresh emblems and a little more gold, we can go back into the fray, trying to get some arena points. This to me, seems like a really good way, getting emblems for emblem gear, and arena points and honor for PvP gear. The PvP gear I’m aiming for is going to bolster my Tank set, as there is no shortage of stamina and agility on the feral stuff! I’m still healing a lot, and doing the weekly raid all easily, so I’ve not lost my branchy touch. I’m just trying to get a nice tank set before I jump into the world of tanking incase I make a huge mistake, I’ve aways got a moderate amount of gear to fall back to to save my behind!

Bark and bite,

Vralk

Bearing with boredom

The leap into bear form is going pretty smoothly, but I’m still at only 28k health in bear form, which seems miserable, since I run around healing warriors and paladins with 33k health! I’ll get there soon though.... as soon as I get rid of this damned healer chest! Hehe. Ashen verdict is being reasonably nice to me, although I haven’t been able to get together another rep run, not even in 10 man. I’m soo close! All I need is another two mob kills, and I’m done. Then I’ll have two nice shiny healer rings, and two epic level tank rings.

Anyone got any opinions on what are nice enchants? The new disenchant tool is pretty handy towards hoarding the infinite dust and abyss crystals I need for the enchants, as things like blood draining require 40 infinite dust! That wouldn’t be too hard to get off of the AH, or to grind 78-80 greens and get a disenchanter to help out, but when I’m trying to put together a whole tank set, I’m not too keep on forking out thousands of gold for infinite dust, especially when people sell them in stacks of one all the time!!

Making gold is going pretty well, as there is still the need to get potions for raids, and everyone keeps swapping glyphs until the cookie cutter spec is found. I’m pretty fond of all the gold people can spend on random things, but I am definitely NOT a fan of how high the AH prices are on my server... It’s making nearly everything so much harder!

Also, thanks to Icedragon’s spectacular effort at druid main to put together some instance guides, I’ve not got Essence of Gossamer for my gear! I’ve never been able to complete the instance before, let alone heroic mode, (hadn’t tried since 80, and the LFG just never put me in there) but I went in this time, with knowledge I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. I knew exactly what to expect, and we even got a few achievements for killing the first boss with all of his guardians alive! Boy did we all feel pro!

Leaves and Love,

Vralk

A new twist to the branch!

Ok, so I haven’t posted in a while....         Now I’ll explain why. I’ve recently been getting back into the flow of WoW, after an extensive break. I’m 80, with a new shiny healer set, and I’m just losing interest. So, I’ve decided to get together a tank set. I found tanking with my death knight a blast! And now, I’m going to try it out with Vralk. I’ve already gotten a few of the leather items from the new WotLK instances, heroics, and working (really close now) towards Ashen Verdict friendly for the rings.

So then, how to get started tanking... I think I’ll start with a few normals with guildies, something nice and easy to begin with, not too many mobs at once, and easy to heal through. I’m thinking maybe even some of the lowest level ones I can find in the LFG system. From there, I’ll start to get some heroics in, probably not using the random dungeon button quite yet, as I’m not going to be ready for the Rise of the Lich King heroics for a while...

Getting a lot of gems e.t.c. with honour and badges, and I’m considering going to get a 2v2 arena team! I don’t know whether to go feral and try to learn catting/bears, or if I should just stick to trees and run round healing my partner. I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon. The relentless gear for ferals has a healthy amount of stamina, and I’m sure I’ll love that. The only difficulty is, with my reduced play time, getting in the matches for any arena points, if not to get our rating up, will be challenging. I might have to stick to using whatever gladiator gear I can from arena/honor/badges for now, as I’m still using my healer top for tanking! I might also give naxx and Ulduar a whack, as I’m pretty sure a lot of people won’t mind a healer rolling offspec on that ilevel of gear.

That’s all for now,

Bark and Bite,

Vralk!