Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Get into Zul'Gurub

With Cataclysm the vanilla raid instance of Zul'Gurub is going away. It's time to get back in there for fun and profit.

Most level 80's can solo the instance and the final boss is one of the easiest to kill if you have any type of self healing at all. If not bring one friend who can heal and you will be golden.

So, why would you want to get in there?

1. Mounts. there are two mounts that drop off two different bosses that will never be seen again. The tiger mount and the raptor mount. Highly coveted (especially if its the one only the other faction has access too otherwise) and actually good looking land mounts.

2. Tome of Polymorph Turtle. The only place to get it in the game is from the optional hydra boss in this instance. Boss goes away and so does the book. Not only that, you get an achievement for fishing up the boss in the first place.

3. Gold. Not only do the mobs and bosses drop a good amount of gold, they drop lots of items that people still use to level professions, like cloth and herbs. Also the raptors have a chance of dropping a razzashi raptor hatchling non combat pet. I guarantee those will skyrocket in price once the instance is gone. Finally bijous and coins drop like rain and they can be sold to people who want to farm the reputation to get exalted with the zandalar tribe before Cataclysm.

3. Feats of Strength. Both the killing of the end boss Hakkar, and getting exalted with the zandalar tribe are achievements now, but when the instance goes away they become Feats of Strength. Get it now or forever QQ your eyes out.

With less and less to do and the old ways of making gold starting to dwindle, Z'G is one of the best places to spend an hour or two. It's fun and profitable and it resets every 3 days.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Every time,

Every time I post something that is like an "end of the world" post, the next day Blizz comes along and fixes it.

Its not like they listen to me, its more like they wait till people like me make some noise then they yell "PSYCHE!" and reverse position.

They are just playing with my emotions I tell ya.

Anyway, the day after my last post Blizz announced a talent in the unholy tree where Runic Empowerment no longer refreshes a random rune, but speeds up your rune regeneration by 100%. Predictable rotations at faster speed for unholy and super fast proc decisions for frost.

Blood tanking still has the random runic empowerment, but it wont affect them so much because most of their runic power goes for rune strikes not death coils. The main thing they need to fix for blood tanks is that so many of their cooldowns rely on runes. The quickest way to get a rune is to throw a death coil, but you still have to hope for the right type of rune. If blizz fixes that aspect of dk's I would be satisfied going into cata.

And by the way, the new system for dks will definitely put a bigger gap between the good ones and the bad ones.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Dk's just got messy

4.0 is on the ptr right now and all the class changes (up to this point) are on there. Glutton for punishment that I am I downloaded all 15 gigs of it and copied over my DK.

I chose my talents and set up my bars and proceeded to barf diarrhea of a "rotation" all over the ebon hold dummy.

First I purposly decided to not train runic empowerment so that I could try to see how close to live the new rune cooldown system plays.

Even with RE not trained the "rotation" is clunky to say the least. With SS only costing one U rune and festering strike (FES) costing B/F runes it becomes a mess to start out your rotation. You have to PS,IT, to get up diseases then you want to SS x2 for damage then you have a FES to use a B/F rune set then you have a B rune left over. OK so you BS ONCE and never touch the button again. How pointless is that?

OH and don't forget that Death Rune Mastery (each spec has its own name for it) is passive so it cant be skipped.

The problem with this is that you will always have a single strike that hits the hardest and want to use your death runes for that strike. That means that any "rotation" you had went from 10 seconds and repeat to about 30 seconds. Try to memorize a rotation that long I dare ya.

Now enter Runic Empowerment. HOLY CRAP! It's like a chimp is behind your computer randomly mashing buttons on a console hoping for a food pellet to drop out of a chute. The only difference is that instead of food pellets for the monkey it makes A RANDOM RUNE reset its cooldown.

So bye bye "rotation" and hello "priority". Even then its crap because you know that the priority would be Diseases up, DC if sudden doom or you're gonna rp cap, SS, FES, DC. What it turns out to be is every time you DC it pocs RE so you hope an U rune shows up so you can SS. God forbid a F or a B rune shows up. You have to see if the other of the B/F pair is up so you can FES. If not is a U up and is it close to time to refresh diseases? Do you wait for the other of the pair to show up to do a FES. Oh and did I mention that FES extends your disease time by 6 seconds? Oh and even better you can have a Death rune pop up. GREAT! so now you got to decide if you want to hold that D for a FES or use it right now for a SS. Choose wrong and you have runes sitting there not being used.

But, don't hesitate! If you take too long to decide its a dps loss. Split second decisions for hours on end, how fun. NOT!

Runic Empowerment is a mess. It was a good idea to give us a way to shorten our rune cool downs, but the randomness of it will make for huge swings of good and bad damage. I hope they address it before it goes live.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

In Memorium

Some of you may know that I live in the USA and work for a major airline.

Today is 9/11 and I would like to say that no matter where you stand on the responses from both (many) sides of this tragedy, we should all send out good wishes and sympathy for those who have lost friends and family on that day and since.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Still working on that hard boss

We have been clearing ICC on Wednesdays and Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays are left to try for RS HM or if the composition isn't there then break into 10s.

Well, guess what happens. Farm content is clear and then people have other stuff to do. My totalitarianistic mele section leader decided this week that we will be ignoring ICC until we down RS (I say YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!)

Mostly we have not been able to get solid tries on the boss because we are lacking in the right composition of tanks to healers to dps.

In other news, I was part of our 2nd or 3rd RS 10 HM kill getting my achieve. After the post about getting burnt out feeling like there was nothing left for me to do I got an ironbound proto, ICC 10 man drake, ICC 10 LK HM kill with bane title, and a RS 10 HM kill. I still have RS 25 and LK 25 HM kills to go and hope to see them before the expansion.

Also with ZG going away I am desperately trying to get my tiger mount. Since I am running that every 3 days I am now running the druid boss in sethekk halls and attumen in kara for those mounts too. If you run ZG make a point of killing the fish boss for tome of polymorph turtle. There is a good chance of that item going away also so I am hoarding all I can for that eventuality. They will only go up in price.