Short Update

Been having internet troubles as of late and family issues. Sorry the lack of updates. Happy April!

Mini-Screenshot dump

While I’m waiting for 3.1 to hit (anxiously), here are some pictures of my latest adventures in the land of WoW:

One of my guild’s DKs recently got her awesome mechano-hog and she gifted us with awesome rides where we launched from high places in Northrend to the ground (without dying). Definitely cool.

Yas finally got her Giant Sewer Rat after numerous hours of fishing. I think it exceeded 600 casts. I now have enough magic eaters to last me a lifetime.

And today, I finally finished my Wyrmcrest Accord grind and got my shiny new red drake. I know, a lot of people already have it, but to me she’s quite special. I’ve always wanted a drake mount. 😀

And in other news, as Kadomi pointed out, we rocked the house in Naxxramas. I’m hoping to be present for the Kel’thuzad kill but we’ll see if my schedule permits. I’m excited.

More 3.1 thoughts – brought to you by broken authentication servers.

So Blizz has been slowly adding more info. We’re going to get dual specs? Sweet (and hopefully in time for my slaughterfest in pvp for Children’s Week?) There’s also been some confusing changes which lead me to think Blizzard is smoking something.

1. They’re getting rid of Hymn of Hope for priests. Now I’ll grant that it’s not a very useful spell and I mostly used it for the “lulz” value of having a macro that proclaimed “Change is Here!” every so often. Priests don’t have too many toys to play around with and I’m not exactly keen on having some of my toys taken away without replacement. Can I have a Spirit of Redemption where I can opt to turn into a cat instead of ghostly blue lady? Heck, why not turn my shadowfiend into a cat , he’s just as tempermental as one.

2. “Glyph of Hymn of Hope: Your Hymn of hope provides 2 times the normal amount of mana per time, but its duration is 50% shorter.” Someone at the patch notes department needs to get a facts checker. Are you getting rid of Hymn of Hope or not? Even Blue seems to be a tad irresolute on the subject.

3. Ghetto-hearthers lament! While we are getting our hearthstones reduced to a 30 minute cooldown, it is at the cost of the lovely ability to ‘ghetto-hearth’. Now I’m not too surprised but I am lazy. Where is the love for the lazy people? I’m not sure how the Kirin Tor rings will work with the new changes, but I’m curious (and lazy, above all).

4. Why do the authentication servers fail to work when I want to log on? Seriously. On my day off too…

Azerothian Recession

What are the times coming to when your neighbors and minions are suffering from the ups and downs of the Auction House market? Residents of cities are forced to pawn off their used gear and baubles just to afford training and epic flying. Won’t anyone think of the children?!

Take this for example:

This troll is clearly not having fun. That's sad dancing. Clearly.

What is the world coming to when your only form of enterainment is a floating ball in a box called a “D.I.S.C.O” ball? I mean…where did it even come from?

And what is the world coming to when food prices are jacked up so high that you have to fish for your daily meals…in the sewers.

Mmm...drowned rats. Look ma, we're having supper tonight!

Do your part to help the ailing economies in Azeroth and beyond, spend spend spend (treating your neighborhood Troll Priest to dinner or a free haircut always helps)! We’ll get through this to become a stronger world…of warcraft.

Chibi-Yas!

Ahh, it’s been a good week. I went to Naxxramas last weekend (mastered the safety dance but not the dispel yourself of disease and not die on the platform dance).  It wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be but it does add a lot of different kind of fights that made me feel that Blizzard really might hate healers. I have to dance around, wait around to heal, and try to keep up mind controlled things.

Anywho, that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. If you’ve wandered over by Kadomi‘s blog recently, DotH has fabulous people that never cease to amaze me including making fabulous MS Paint pictures of killshots (for when we forget to do those >.> which we tend to do a fair amount). I wasn’t present for the first one (darn you work) but we finally got treated to an action picture of our Loatheb encounter:

(Much love to Normanitee a.k.a. Narcissus for your awesome pictures)

Yas is the calm troll on the right, not worrying about a thing because she enjoys timing her prayer of healing juuuust right. =D That totally made my day. Shaking tree druid also made me laugh out loud. I love my guild so much! 😀

Six of nine, er, six.

So I got tagged by Kadomi for this quirky little meme.Instructions are thus: Go to the sixth folder of your screenshots folder, and post the sixth picture, then tag six other bloggers.

Like, Kadomi, I don’t really have folders in my screenshots folder but I do have a screenshot gallery hosted on my Livejournal as well as my newly made screenshots folder on this computer.

From my screenshot gallery at LJ:

O hai, sir.

That’s a picture of my original main, Majania, on the Durotan server dinging 60. It was my first character ever and I was so proud despite being a noob hunter. My ex tagged along and helped me on the road to 60 and took a better screenshot of my ding than I did. I’m not sure where it went, but I’m sure I posted it on my livejournal some time.I’m actually surprised I made it to 60 with my gawd-awful laptop at a max of 12 fps. Yikes.

Prepare to swoon , fangirls.

This is me and my questing buddy doing that one quest in Icecrown (?) where you roleplay as Arthas and destroy several soldiers and raise ghouls from their corpses. Bwahahaha. *cough* We enjoyed that one.

So I’m not sure at all who hasn’t gotten tagged by now XD So I’m opening this up to any readers that are interested in sharing some of their nifty or nostalgic screenshots. 🙂

Epic

Because I was egged on to blog about this:

Epic is duoing the normal utgarde keep first boss and not even breaking a nail.

Epic is chasing down the only dwarf hunter in Alterac Valley all the way to the alliance starting zone (I pity whoever followed us, haha) and eventually doing a surprise rose petals shower on him as he tried to hide out by Vann’s room.

Epic is staying up probably too late to chase down troll rogue bank alts and trying in vain to get particular gifts of adoration.

This holiday is win. 😀

3.1 get here nowww

So as I’m sure most of you have heard, Blue announced a few of the exciting changes coming our way for the next big patch. There’s a lot of priest love in this patch!

“Divine Spirit – this spell is now a core ability available to all priests.” Yes, yes, a million times yes! I’d long been a DS priest while raiding in Burning Crusade content and I bemoaned the loss of Divine Spirit when I went to grab circle of healing. Now that  I went for a spec that had guardian spirit, I continue to miss divine spirit. It made no sense to always have one priest be the “assigned DS priest” for the sake of a raid. I had been wishing that this talent would be made trainable for ages and it looks like I got my wish.

“Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).” I really like this, there have been times when I wished to shield every AOE caster before a pull and had to wait on the cooldown for shield while another shield I had applied earlier would slowly fizzle out. And now with Wrath, it seems like everyone’s taking damage all the time. Applying prayer of healing before an anticipated burst of AOE damage helps, but I’d rather keep most of my casting time directed to my tank.

“Several area of effect (AOE) heal spells have been improved: Prayer of Healing can be cast on any groups in your raid party. Holy Nova’s mana cost has been reduced. Circle of Healing now heals for more.” Yessss, I like this change as well. I had been slowly weaning myself off using Circle of Healing since it was less mana efficient and thanks to the nerf, could no longer be spammed. Holy nova still doesn’t present much use to me aside from quick dispatching of rogue undead that stalk me in CoT : Stratholme but it’s nice to know it’ll be getting cheaper to use. I really like that I can use prayer of healing on any group now, this was something that was sorely needed.

“Shadow priest PvP survivability has been improved: Shadowform now reduces magic as well as physical damage. Dispersion now removes snares.” No comment, I don’t play shadow much but it sounds like a decent change.

“Penance – this spell can now be targeted on the priest.” Don’t have this but it sounds nifty.

“Serendipity – this talent now reduces the cast time of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when Binding Heal or Flash Heal are cast.” I like this. A lot.

“We are also working to give Holy additional PvP utility.” As I said to someone earlier, maybe now maybe holy priests won’t be the ones that are in the graveyard sighing in BGs. Not that all holy priests die a lot..just…well, we just tend to not stay alive very well. =D

Also if this change is real and for the 3.0.9 patch as indicated by MMO-champion, then it’s really sweet: “Inner Fire duration has been increased to 30 minutes and can no longer dispelled.”

Finally, priests get some much belated love!

Source: World of Raids

Two more heroics down.

As the title says, I managed to do two more new heroics today, fearsome ones too – Halls of Lightning and Caverns of Time: Stratholme.

HoL – This instance is awesome with stellar dps. Loken is something else though . Half the time I couldn’t really time my getting out of holy novas very well so I had to binding heal a  fair amount. The pulls with the exploding elementals also gave me a bit of a heart attack. I also managed to get a few off-spec gear pieces, which is always nice.

Strat – I went with the stellar dps group and it was fast-paced and actually quite fun. I don’t recall anyone really dying and we managed to get a drake to drop. Now that I actually know that a drake drops here, I want to run it many many times. >.> Of all the drake models in game, the Caverns of Time drakes are my favorite. I remember flying over to Black Morass once and remarking that I would love to have a mount just like the one I was flying. I guess Blizzard listened. A new goal is born. >.>

We also did a quick Violet Hold run (oh Icharon or whatever your name is, I hate you so much, you are a headache and a half) and gathered several achievements – 100 emblems of heroism (woo), and the Got Money on My Mind acheivement.

It was unfortunate that I had to go to work afterwards (curse you, grocery store job of fail) but being able to do ‘hard’ heroics without too much trouble makes me feel happy. 🙂

And a quick shout-out again to Kadomi who is celebrating her birthday. =D Heroic UP WILL drop your sword >.> And a mount.

Wrath raiding…how…

Uneventful?

So this weekend I took my first foray into actual raiding in Wrath. Yea, my guild is fairly casual , it’s fine for me. I wasn’t able to attend the Obsidian Sanctum raid because I had to work too soon after but I was able to get into my guild’s semi impromptu semi puggalicious Vault of Archavon raid. And…wow, five minutes of actual fighting and then…down. It wasn’t even much of a challenge healing-wise except for making sure that my raid frames were properly enlarged. (Still looking for a replacement for X-perl by the way, I might just give up and go with Grid full time).

Pwned in under 30 minutes or your money back!

(Pardon the weird jpeg artifacts, I’m having to deal with Vista’s default image editors)

In other news, I’ve been continuing to fish up a storm on Yasura and up her cooking skills. While I’ve been doing that, I’ve also been stalking the spawn areas for the books for the Higher Learning acheivement. So far I have two, I am…less than ambitious with this goal. If you see a troll priestess chick with her Stinker pet out and about in Dalaran, that’s me and yes, I am partially brain dead from some of the monotony. XD

Future goals:

~ Clear out all these damn fish from my inventory.

~ Cure cancer. Heal the remaining heroics I have left.

~ Blog about real things sometime.

~ More “acheesements”!

On an added note, I’ve found the fishing guide at El’s Extreme Anglin’ very helpful. It has just about everything fishing related and WoWhead’s section on Dalaran cooking dailies is also helpful.