Battle Pets for Warlocks

Now for a happy post that I have been meaning to setup for several weeks: Battle Pets for Warlocks!

You would be delighted to know that there are two rare-ish pets that have been added out in the wild that I believe are perfect for warlocks, especially warlocks who choose to specialize in Grimoire of Sacrifice and are used to having a buddy beside them.

Green + Fire = Win!

 Meet the Fel Flame. The Fel Flame can be found in Shadowmoon Valley in Outlands and they spawn in any "green fire" pool around the Hand of Gul'dan. Expect a LOT of other assholes (including yourself) flying around hunting or camping them out as they seem to have a fairly long respawn rate. These pets are about level 20 if I remember correctly so come prepared!

So mini!

The second pet that I would to introduce is the Minfernal. The Minfernal can be found in Felwood in Kalimdor. They spawn in the area with the big infernals just south of Whisperwind Grove where you will see a bunch of craters on your map. These seem to have an even worse spawn rate than the Fel Flames and again, expect TONS of people in the area. I believe due to CRZ you will have to fight your way to the first spawn.


Also, please note that in 5.1 we will be able to upgrade our pets and unless you are DESPERATE to use these two pets RIGHT AWAY, just catch one, and be on your way to save people a lot of grief. (Or if no one is around...I guess you can catch two)

Truny the Moar Demons!

Should I Run LFR?

We made great progress yesterday, clearing all of MV and the first boss in HoF in a record breaking 90 minutes. Everyone brought their A game and it was highly appreciated, I even ranked on the healing charts for Stone Dogs. Imagine that, ranking for just sitting around watching tv and pushing rejuv every 10 seconds.

Despite all the good and fast, out of our seven boss kills, not a single piece of upgrade dropped for several of us, and that is including using our lucky charms. Zero. Zilch.

On a personal level, this was an absolute waste of time. Regular MV is old content and so is HoF pretty much (anyone worth their salt is already full heroic cleared right?
. For the guild, this was great, we have a head start towards the empress tomorrow and I have a feeling we will one shot Blade Lord Tauralak or whatever the fck the 2nd boss' name is.
Back to selfish loot drama.

Did I need an upgrade? We cleared in record time, and ranked with a pvp blue helm, and the crappy elementium dragonling trinket. Probably not. I know it's just a week of bad luck, but clearing an entire raid and something with not just no upgrades but also a pittance of VP feels pretty shitty. Whoop-dee-fuckity-doo 150 VP that makes my 200 VP from last week go up to 350.

Also, I have completely boycotted playing my druid outside of raid times. No dailies. No heroics/scenarios/LFR. LFR...the only other place where I can *twitch* replace my blue helm with a sub-par purple helm *twitch*. Boomkins just take too long to kill things and I can't be bothered with building a kitty set, as..this all takes time, which we have none of. He's the only one with a maxed out farm but....seriously who the hell has time to kill critters and clear out weeds? Why can't we hire a farm hand to do this for us?

Honestly, getting an upgrade feels...good. Sure sure you can argue that back in the day it would take MONTHS to even upgrade your ilvl 55 blue item to an ilvl 58 blue item and that was an epic excuse, but the game has changed where gear is being rained down and I am just bitching about being unlucky enough to have stayed dry.

Would a 489 helm vs a 458 helm make a significant push towards my mana regen, which has no issues at the moment? Not really. Does the 0.2% extra healing really help when our burst AOE is already kind of crappy? Not really. But......

/whisper: It's blue and ugly.

Then again, it did take me over a YEAR to finally see and win a Fandral's Flamescythe.

It's okay.

Turny the Lootless

The Bug is Dead

This may not be a big deal to anyone since Heart of Fear has already been out for so many weeks and all the top guilds have cleared it on heroic, but we have shuffled our three raiding days to fit in both MV and HoF and I am pleased to say the first boss is dead. I apologize as I do not know the name of this boss, I believe his name is Grand Vizier Maloriak. No wait, Maloriak was in T11....well anyhoo he is the first boss and he has some deadly abilities and some...*cough* fun mechanics that I am actually quite impressed by.

As a resto druid, I spent most of my time DPS'ing and we effectively 2.25 healed this. I jumped in and helped in P2 when the boss did his Hard Hitting Stand Under The Shell Yell ability that ticked for 60k a second. The spiral dancing and MC control were all great mechanics.

Alas, we have not seen any spellpower leather or healer items for several weeks and my Lucky Tokens have been really shitty on the druid. My warlock seems to win something everytime she uses those??

 I do believe HoF is being released in LFR today...that should be a blast.

We then proceeded to get the 2nd boss all the way down to 40% before everyone started falling asleep. I shall update you on our Thursday run when we revisit HoF. I do remember his name, it was Blade Lord Talaraiak or something like that.

Turny the DPSing Tree

No More Horror Stories

Remember the time when a lot of us had an intimate connection with heroic dungeon bosses? Before the JP/VP acquisition change, we spent a lot of times in dungeons and we had a lot of horror stories regarding these dungeons.

Alas, this is no more. How much do you want to bet that you can't even name 5 of the heroics, and at least 2 of the bosses in them? You can? Well...I can't...

How many "defend this wall" type dungeons are there? Setting Sun, Cow Temple, That One In The Tree, and all of the heroic bosses' mechanics don't really matter. These mechanics were put in place for challenge mode and challenge mode only.

I think the extent of our horror stories nowadays amounts to "oh, this person is only doing 30k dps", or "this person is crazy". There aren't any particular bosses that I can think of with a deadly mechanic except for that Spinny of Doom guy in Scarlet Whatever.

Is this a good change of culture? Having us spend less time grinding heroics, and more time out in the world? I think it is, rather than working together, we can complain about other things such as tagged mobs/tagged rares and over-crowded daily zones.

Speaking of rares, why are people so rude?

Here's the deal: no one has any claim on any mob. If you want it, you tag it and you fight it. As a courtesy, you either help the person, ask for an invite to get credit, or sit around quietly and wait for them to die, if they die. If you are on a PVP server, go ahead and try to gank them, if you are on a PVE server, go ahead and flag yourself and hope their AOE hits you. This is all fair play, but as of late, I have been getting a lot of "rude gestures", being spat on, being cursed at.

Really? It's all a game of speed, if you're slow you lose. Though to be fair I do scan the area to make sure no one is ABOUT to tag it then swoop in for the kill. Though this is limited to latency and LoS. My hunter got spat on after having tracked down a rare crane, by an opposing faction hunter going the opposite way. I guess technically I am supposed to "hate" the alliance, but I don't. My latest encounter was some panda lady that I killed, with 2 flagged ally standing on her hoping that I would tag them. Why would you want a level 90 destro lock to flag you especially when your HP is lower than what chaos bolt could hit for?

In these cases, all you can do is /spit back, say "fuck you, have a good day", /wave or /bow then leave.

Truny the Horrorless

Slow Down

I bet you read the title of this post in that male Pandaren voice didn't you?

No?

Well, eat poo!

The very first time I heard this utterance in Jade Forest while I was rushing my way to 90, I knew exactly what he meant. This statement does not provide any lexical hints or subtleties to the Pandaren culture, but it's an early hint of MoP's new gating system. It's not a suggestion to slow down, it's saying "you are going to slow down, whether you like it or not!"

Think about it, VP is now acquired at a snail's pace. To max VP you would have to do 200 dailies, or 2 LFRs and dozens of dailies and a dozen heroics. Apparently all you have to do is just stroll into Challenge Mode and clear everything a few times to cap VP. Easy peasy cause Challenge Modes are just so easy. *Cough* Or if you're not heroic world first raiders, no one even cares about what your gearing strat is because you're not even going to get the world/realm first so you are non-important anyways. (I agree with this point, yet also disagree)

Reputation is now based on dailies and the few basic quests, but you can pretty much calculate the exact day that you will hit revered/exalted with any given faction.

I am not stating any opinion on this gating (yet), but that's how it is. To appease us, the ones who said there was "nothing to do" at end-game, now there's LOTS to do, however, it's also a lot to do spread out over time whether we like it or not.

Think of how it was, we would equip our tabards, grind out reputations and do dailies until exalted and then never pay attention to that faction again once we've bought our ware (many many wares). As with VP, 2LFR halves would net you half of your weekly total and a few easy heroics could finish that up in ONE day. Then you would never run heroics or do LFR again for the rest of the week.

It's a fine delicate balance, a balance that might have been tipped awry due to everything being tied to VP. We are used to capping our weekly VP in a couple hours, not slowly drip feeding it over the course of an entire week. Heck I usually hit 800/1000 every Monday and fail to even cap. But that's fine. Cata VP items turned out to have lots of BiS items (right?) and actually just a LOT of items that we could buy since they would never ever ever drop in real raids. Perhaps my hunter is a special case, having only received 2/3 pieces of "real" gear while raiding T11 and 12.

On a side note, why does LFR reward more VP than the actual raid on a per-boss-capita? 25 VP for a boss kill...really? Has that been ninja-changed, I don't even pay attention anymore.

See, the issue with collecting ALL the VP in one day so we won't have to do anything, only to complain about having nothing to do. See the deadly evil cycle? Let's say dailies rewarded 20 VP each, we would still do them, and cap out much faster. Would we be compelled to do dailies for any excess factions? Maybe. Perhaps less. We would probably find it redundant and tedious to do Klaxxi after we've valor capped and again go back to the "we are forced to do this for rep" argument.

I use that phrase with heavy irony, but it seems some people find this to be true. No one is forcing you to do anything. Did they hold you at gun point? No. Is an upgrade going to help you stay out of fire faster? No. Do you have absolutely no way of obtaining a similar piece of gear? Aha. There's always LFR? No, too tedious? Well, you can uhhh...hmm.

See, I still think we should utilize a secondary currency to purchase random things for those who don't raid- oh wait, those who don't raid don't "need" gear. Bah. You see the dilemma?

With the release of Heart of Fear, valor gear is starting to look rather unattractive and actually slowly grinding out VP to fill any missing pieces is a much more enjoyable experience than facerolling LFR for a chance of loot.

Ideally, what everyone wants is probably for their VP to slowly accumulate at 100 per hour, and their rep with all factions to accumulate at 1000 per hour..while they are offline so they can log in, be "done", then complain about having nothing to do. The end. (I gotta get back to work)

Turny the Slow Tree