Fishing in Patch 3.1

Patch 3.1 is here! ... and there are many new things to see and do. First and foremost, I want to touch on one of my favorite things in WoW; fishing! Fishing has changed DRASTICALLY this patch, and in my humble opinion it is all for the better. The most notable change is that you can now fish anywhere, so long as your fishing skill is at least 1. Now, if your fishing skill is 1 and you choose to fish in Northrend, you can. No fish will get away anymore. In exchange for this, you catch grey junk items that vendor for a few copper. Personally, I would much rather chill in Dalaran fishing up junk than to go back to old world and fish up Raw Longjaw Mud Snapper. Perhaps that is just me. The good news is that you will also gain skill from fishing up junk. Before now, you did not gain skill because your catches simply got away if the area was too high for you to fish in.

Now, my fishing has been maxed on Riven for a long time, but I've dreaded having to finish leveling it up on Itami and other alts because it is so time consuming, and because I would not be able to fish in Northrend for quite awhile yet. With this change, I've nearly maxed Itami's fishing (it was at 325 when the patch hit) in a couple of days and I'm almost finished the achievement at the Dalaran coin fountain again. Awesome! Also, I can do the new fishing dailies on her as well. Two chances a day at new fishing loot = awesome!

I plan on catching the new sea turtle mount on both Riven and Itami. Granted, Riven has the Glyph of Aquatic Form which makes her swim very fast already, but having a cute turtle mount is too irresistible! For this reason, however, I'll probably attempt to catch the turtle on Itami first. Perhaps it's just what I need on Riven, though, to finally win the STV fishing tournament and get Riven her Salty title!

In the PTR, some datamining found not only new and adorable fishing poles, but also cute bobbers! One looked like a rubber duck, one like a murky head, one like a gnome head and more. Unfortunately, nobody has figured out where these come from yet, but I am hoping and hoping that they will be discovered soon because they are sooo cute! Not only that, but they will make fishing in a tight spot like the Dalaran fountain a lot easier when there's a lot of people there. Last night there were so many people at the fountain, I had to trace my fishing line to figure out which bobber was mine!

To top it all off, the fishing cast time has been lowered from 22 seconds to 17, thus making it that much faster to level your skill and get the fish you need for cooking. The only downside is that the pools most likely respawn at the same rate, so if you happen to make rounds in a particular area, you may find yourself waiting a bit for pools to re-pop once you fish them all.

If you like making Fish Feasts, Wintergrasp now has fishing. Everything you catch in Wintergrasp is fish that are used in Fish Feast, with the exception of the new giant clams. These clams contain ~3 Succulent Clam Meat or Northsea Pearls (perhaps even a Siren's Tear if you are very lucky!) and they stack even if you don't open them up. Huzzah!

All and all I'm thrilled to death with the fishing changes and really excited about collecting all of the poles, the sea turtle mount and the many flavor items that you can get as rewards. Let's not forget you can also get epic gems too, which is hella cool since they haven't put any new player crafted epic gems in game yet with the exception of Dragon's Eyes. W00t.

And then there was WRATH...

I live! It's true! .. and I do apologize for not having posting since Wrath of the Lich King came out. Needless to day, I've been a bit busy since the latest expansion.

There's so much to write about Wrath that I don't really feel I should talk about it all in one post. I suppose I should just give an overview of what I've been up to the last few months.

Raiding
As of right now, my guild has essentially conquered all 5 and 10 man content in Wrath of the Lich King, including Naxxramas, the Eye of Eternity and the Obsidian Sanctum. At the time of my writing this, we have complete all but one of the Heroic Glory of the Raider achievements. The only one we are missing is The Immortal, which we are trying desperately to complete before the drake reward is removed in patch 3.1.

Questing
I actually have not done all of the quests in Northrend yet. I have been a bit lazy since I got 80 on Itami and am basically just going through Icecrown at my own leisurely pace. I made it a point to do all of the Northrend quests with Lukahn, so I only do them when we are both unoccupied by other things.

Heroics
Heroics have long been one of my favorite parts of WoW, so naturally, I have been doing a lot of them. I'm happy to say that I completed the Glory of the Hero achievement on Itami a number of months ago. It was a fantastic challenge and of course it rewarded my favorite color of the proto-drake mounts: red!

PVP
While I do not PVP on Itami, I do greatly enjoy doing so on Riven. I have not PVPed much in Wrath outside of Wintergrasp so far, and it is just as well. Wintergrasp is a ton of fun and probably the best thing Blizzard has ever done with PVP. Strand of the Ancients is also new, but I have only played it 2 or 3 times so I can't really give you an opinion on it just yet. :) Thus far, I have not really found any motivation to do arenas since BC.

Etc.
And that right there is my quick overview of Wrath of the Lich King so far. I do have to say that I am extremely pleased with the expansion and overall I think it is a lot better than the Burning Crusade. Perhaps it is just nice to be back on Azeroth. What's my favorite part of WotLK so far? It's hard to say. I'm really happy with the extra goodies they added to both primary and secondary professions, the zone designs (Howling Fjord is without a doubt my favorite zone.) and the option to do all dungeons as both 10 and 25 man raid groups.

I've got some plans for this blog. Maybe I'll get around to designing an actual layout for it. At the moment I'm playing with The Valiant's website design. I'm thinking of maybe using blogger to give TV a "real" update blog. We'll see!

In the future, I'll make a new Feral Druid DPS guide (since my old one is obviously obsolete) as well as an Enhancement Shaman guide since I've never written one up before.

Stay tuned!

Wrath, Character Doodles & Brewfest

The Lich King is coming! Not so long ago the release date for Wrath was revealed, and I feel fairly confident that Blizzard is set on meeting this deadline. Beta builds are changing constantly, and while things still aren't balanced, I know that it is constantly being worked on. So, on November 13th, we will most likely be playing Wrath. I'm pretty stoked because this date is 4 days after my birthday (November 9th!) so it's like a slightly belated birthday present. And what is better than that, knowing that my birthday is always completely uneventful? :)

I haven't played Beta quite as much as I would like to due to constant server instability. Every time I log on I have to re-allot my talent points, and then I spend some time in Dalaran and then go to a zone to do some quests and test out my skills. Usually by the time I get to said zone, the server is going to shut down or has crashed. Yes, that's life on the Beta. Oh well! I'm still very lucky to be testing it!

So this coming Sunday I'll be heading to California and staying there until after Blizzcon. I'm really stoked about seeing all my friends and also meeting my guild master. (In fact, his birthday is tomorrow. Happy Birthday, Austin! Even though you don't read this blog. I don't think anyone does. Haha.) And since I am on this topic, I drew this picture of his toon for him as a gift:



I'm trying to figure out why I didn't actually post any pictures in this blog before. I think I just didn't realize I could upload images onto the Blogger server. I'm a nub, right? I mean I have Photobucket and my own domain and all that crap, but I just didn't feel like using them. Since I bothered to post that here's my druid and my shaman:





I had a really good time drawing those, so I'm starting to think I should sell them or something! I don't know if people would pay me for my doodles, though.

So anyway, Brewfest is going on. It's definitely one of the most fun WoW holidays. They nixed the ram mounts for tickets this year and now if you want one, you have to farm this boss in BRD. The cool thing is they added a Brewfest kodo mount that you can get too. After a couple of days of Brewfest so far, I've killed this guy literally about 20 times a day. So far I've seen 4 rams drop and 1 kodo, and of course tons of the trinkets. Everyone wants the kodo, of course, since it is new and we're alliance, so whenever the ram drops it's like an effort to get someone to take it. Haha. Well, I'm hoping to get my druid a kodo before I leave for California, but I don't know how good my chances are. That doesn't mean I won't keep trying! :)

Since my last post, my shaman has been lucky enough to score a few of the things I was hoping to get before Wrath. Namely my T6 chest, Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape and (at last!) an Amani War Bear. All that's left now is Cursed Vision of Sargeras from Illidan, which continues to elude our guild completely. I still wouldn't mind Mounting Vengeance from Sunwell trash, but it's not a huge deal either way.

I'm really looking forward to Blizzcon and to the ExPac release in November. Huzzah!

Wrath On the Horizon

Wrath of the Lich King will be out sooner than later, and I'm really starting to think about what I'd like to accomplish in game before I begin my ascent to level 80. I don't think we are going to get to see much of Sunwell; much like what happened with the old Naxxramas, but I'm hoping that we'll at least get to kill Kalecgos and Brutallus. We're also still farming Illidan and hope to complete at least one set of Warglaives. Personally, I'm after 3 more items from Black Temple before I'm basically content until Wrath. My T6 chest, Cursed Vision of Sargeras and Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape. The cape I could probably live without, as the ZA haste one is very good for me too, but we'll see!

I've been doing Zul'Aman bear runs for a few months now and have yet to win the roll on one. We've gotten 8 bears so far. We try to keep the same group of people but it keeps changing, and new people come in and win the roll.. but oh well. That's how the cookie crumbles. Regardless, I really hope I can get a bear mount before Wrath, because once Wrath comes out, it'll no longer be attainable.

That set aside, my guild leader, Austin, who is awesome, gave me a beta key, and I have been checking out beta for the past few days. It's been a great experience so far and I've hardly done anything! I did all the death knight starter quests and they are incredible in every way. Every single person should at the very least level a Death Knight to 58 so they can experience some of the most fun and lore-rich quests in the game. I cannot stress it enough!

The main city in Northrend, Dalaran, is extremely beautiful. It is my new favorite city in WoW. It will not disappoint. It is full of rich details and vibrant colors. The shops and objects are incredibly ornate. I spent hours just exploring and zooming in on objects. It is really wonderful. Get a port there as soon as you can.

I have not been to every zone yet, and I am unsure if I will level my shaman to 80 in beta. I want to save some discoveries for when the expansion goes live, of course, things are subject to change drastically in the beta to live transition. Right now, I am enjoying breathing in the fresh air of a new land. There are too many exciting things to talk about in just a few paragraphs.

I am elated to say that Lukahn and I will be attending Blizzcon. I spent two days trying to buy tickets with no success during the huge debacle, but Austin, who I have mentioned is awesome, managed to get through and get tickets for the both of us. Huzzah!

Illidan Down, Resto Fun & Other Goodies

The guild has reached a new milestone, so it's high time I wrote about it. Last month we completed Black Temple. Yes, we finally killed Illidan! It still hasn't really sunk in for me. To be honest, it was kind of anti-climactic. I think the reason for this is because we worked on him for two solid nights, and then he was dead. For our guild, Illidan proved to be much, much easier to kill than Kael'thas and Archimonde. Granted, Kael'thas is still considered the most complex fight in game pre-Sunwell, but he honestly makes all following encounters seem simple in comparison. Poor Illidan. Regardless, I'm thrilled that we completed BT and we have many Illidan kills in our future. I'm sure we won't stop farming him until we have at least one set of warglaives for our warriors and/or rogues, and I won't rest until I've scored myself a delicious Cursed Vision of Sargeras for my shaman. :)

Since I stopped raiding with my druid, I decided to mix things up a bit and play her as restoration for awhile. Riven has been feral for about 2 years and previously she was restoration for about one year, but this was when there was no treeform or lifebloom, and my main heal was Healing Touch rank 5 (with lots of +heal gear stacking!). Oh, the good old days. How I don't miss them! Seriously, I remember pvping as resto back in those days and it was utter hell. Now if you PVP as resto, it's freaking amazing. I don't even have any resto resilience gear and I run into BGs feeling practically invincible. Then again, there's a lot of dummies in BGs, and it is almost too easy to avoid being focus fired when you're hiding in the crowd throwing up HoTs. Arenas? Probably a different story entirely. I'm willing to give arenas as resto a shot as soon as I get some gear for it. Right now all of my PVP gear is feral. I have to say resto PVP is extremely fun. I just wish I could switch between feral and resto with the push of one button. ( I hear that's a possibility for the expansion! ) I think I still prefer feral for PVE purposes, but damn if I'm not having a blast healing as well! Speaking of druid specs, I haven't tried balance since pre-moonkin ( Hurricane as 31 pt talent ftw? ) so I'd like to give it a go again someday just so I can dance around as a fat bear-bird. The only problem is I really don't have room for the gear! ( Oh, the bane of being a druid! ) I want a 51 point talent that gives me some sort of unlimited bag space... I'm totally serious. T_T

The summer festival was pretty fun this year. I got Itami the Brazier of Dancing Fire Sluts and a Summer Dress, as well as the blue skies tabard (Although I'm wishing I got the Flame one instead.. matches my piece meal gear better but oh well.) We farmed for the scythe and the pet from Ahune and I never did see either, but we did get about 20 of those healing cloaks. I also got Riven that neck that's identical to Choker of Vile Intent. Since she's not raiding anymore, she's glad to not have to spend the badges on a "for when I need to substitute in some more +hit gear" neck. What's silly is that even with T6 equiv gear for feral in her bags, she's still stuck with Mithril Chain of Heroism from Karazhan as a neck piece. It's really the fault of poor itemization, and the fact that we never killed Kael enough to score the only AP+crit upgrade pre-sunwell ( Telonicus's Pendant of Mayhem or whatever it is. ) There's always these items that seem to last us forever despite their lower iLevel. Shard of Contempt is just damned ridiculous for being a heroic drop ( and I am so very grateful for its existence! )

In other more useless news, I scored a Phoenix Hatchling on Riven last night. I've lost the roll on at least 3 of them so far so I'm very glad. I'm a pet collector although I've really been slowing down because Riven is plum out of bank space and still "needs" a bunch of PVP gear. Still, the baby phoenix is a must-have. I honestly really wanted it more for Itami, but I don't know when I will be taking her to Magister's again. She's exalted and has everything else she wants from there, while Riven is after Shattered Sun rep, badges and a couple more trinkets. Healing that place sure is a bitch, but it's great practice for me as resto spec and I have very understanding guildmates! Overall, though, Magister's Terrace is an instance where keeping control over the enemies is key. ( Alas, it was still a pain in the butt keeping our bear tank alive through Kael's constant 5k fireballs and zero forms of interrupt. )

Oh yeah, I opted into Wrath of the Lich King beta this past week. I'm crossing my fingers that I get the opportunity! I've been playing long enough that my input is actually valuable. C'mon Blizz!

Life in 2.4

The past month and a half or so has been a fairly busy time for me. I'm happy to say I've had a lot of success with changing my main character and I don't regret it in the least. Some people are annoying about it because it is "EZ Mode" but that doesn't really matter to me. I've been having a blast and I'm so thankful for it.

As soon as 2.4 hit I hopped into the 25 man scene with my shaman. On my first trip to Hyjal, the same night of the patch, I scored a Claw of Molten Fury. It may have even been a server first! What luck I had there. I was dual wielding Fool's Banes at the time. On my first trip to Black Temple I got myself a Rising Tide which I offhanded for a few weeks until a Syphon of the Nathrezim showed up. I'm still using this combo and it works great, though my long term goal is to get a 2nd Syphon and dual wield them. It's not a huge loss if I never get a 2nd as Yo's Sim says my current combo is fairly similar in terms of DPS output, but I can dream, can't I? ;)

I've had great luck with loot; more so than I deserve. I'm going for all non tier 6 gear since piece meal rogue gear is superior for Enhancement at this point in the game. Most of what is the best for me is stuff other classes want to throw to the DE pile, so in that respect things are often in my favor. I get great upgrades without stealing what other people want (most of the time) and I save stuff nobody else wants from being Disenchanted. The only item that severely eluded me was Bow-stitched Leggings, which we never saw after a hojillion trips to Hyjal, but we finally got them just this week, on the same night I hit exalted with Scale of the Sands. (Take note, my previous raiding character was just a little bit from exalted and we never saw them drop when I was raiding as her.)

Enough about gear! I spent a lot of time doing the Shattered Sun dailies. What a fantastic way to get gold. Right now I'm completely burnt out on said dailies, but I'm grateful for the gold I got from them. I think I will really need it when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. I am terrified to know how much it will cost to 'activate' epic mounts in Northrend. My current guess is 10,000 gold, but it could end up being more.

Jewelcrafting has been a boon since 2.4. Everyone is getting new gear and the price of gems skyrocketed. The cost of superior quality patterns, however, has stayed about the same. Most are 300-500 gold while certain ones (such as Teardrop Living Ruby) are close to 1,000 gold. Since I made so much gold doing dailies, I decided to invest in a lot of blue patterns. I have all the Living Ruby patterns except Teardrop now, and of course I have all the Hyjal and Rep patterns. Being able to get patterns from Hyjal rather than Shattered Sun also saved me a lot of gold. There are people asking for Jewelcrafters in trade channel pretty much non-stop, and I've gotten as much as 15g for cutting one blue gem in terms of tips, so I feel the patterns I've purchased were worth the money. Since we just got the epic gem vendor recently, I'll have to keep an eye out on how the price of blue gems fluctuates and whether or not I can make a significant amount of gold cutting epic gems over blues. Time will tell!

Also on the subject of Jewelcrafting, the price of green gems has gone up quite a bit as well. At first I used the Brilliant Glass recipe until I ran out of green gems to use. Of course, after getting a few talasites, which sell for about 9 gold now, I stopped using the transmute. While you can't do much with Deep Peridots, you can pretty much guarantee a good 4 or 5 gold for some of the Blood Garnet cuts. Since Brilliant Glass takes 3 of each green gem, getting a talasite is an enormous loss. As it stands I can get more money for 3 cut Blood Garnets alone; not even counting the other 15 green gems it takes to make! Sure there is the chance to get an epic gem now, but it's probably a very small one, and not worth it if you have a surplus of Badges of Justice, anyways.

On the raiding front, we're currently working on Illidari Council. It wasn't too terribly long ago (after 2.4) that we downed Reliquary of Souls and Mother Shahraz for the first time. For us, Reliquary proved to be quite a pushover. We were so stoked over our success. This happened after we lost some folks, had some mains changed and things changing around, so there was a lot of tension in the atmosphere about our progression. Since then, I think that things have smoothed out some, though we seem to constantly have people leaving now for real life issues. The answer seems to simply be to recruit more people for back up, so we have a lot of new people coming in lately. I think this will help to stabilize our progression for sure, but we have to teach a lot of new people the ropes, and of course get them geared up with Shadow Resist for when they get to go to Mother Shahraz with us. I think the thing I admire about my guild is their determination and persistence. I'm the type of person who, alone, could be crushed under stress fairly easily. I'm not a leader type but I do quite well at following directions from those who are. I sincerely want to do my best for myself and for my guild, so I will always strive to improve how I play and to help my guildmates to do the same. If I make a mistake, I generally know about it and I feel horrible, but I do my damnedest not to ever make the same mistake again. I consider myself a 'competent' player although I sometimes wonder if other people think otherwise. I believe that's mostly just me being paranoid. I want people to feel that I'm reliable. I try very hard to be!

Class Change and New Stuff in 2.4

It's been awhile, so time to write in the ole WoW Blog again. Lack of posts has nothing, of course, to do with lack of play time on my part. In the past couple of months there's been some big changes in the game for me. Most importantly I decided to change my main character. Rather than make a 'current' alt my main, I created an entirely new toon.

I already had a 70 tauren shaman, who I enjoyed greatly, but found little opportunity for anything other than solo play with. (As far as I am concerned, the horde population on Silver Hand is practically dead outside of a bunch of super casual players and like 1 or 2 hardcore raiding guilds.) I finally decided "oh the hell with it" one day and rolled a draenei shaman on alliance, who I vigorously leveled to 70 in something like 9 days and 4 hours of played time, over something like 2 and a half weeks. I now have an itch that my tauren shaman's destiny is to become a bank alt. It's really too bad because I love horde and I love tauren, but there is just not enough life on my server's horde side. But yes, my main is now my draenei shaman.

As far as the main changing decision goes, I still love my druid. I just can't enjoy 25 man raids as one anymore. There's no room for my play style. It's the way Blizzard has designed BC raiding and classes. 40 mans kinda gave more room for group customization, but they are now a thing of the past.

Now, to talk about something slightly more interesting, I'm really rearing up for patch 2.4. These days, since the majority of my guildmates are pimped out in T5/T6/etc+ gear, it's sort of hard to convince anyone to take my nooby shammy into a normal 5 man. Heck, people don't even want to do a heroic 5 man because it's so easy to get a bunch of badges from Kara or ZA, and it will be even easier when they drop from 25 man bosses in the new patch. One thing I can look forward to, however, is the fact that EVERYONE is going to head to magister's terrace 5 man when it comes out. Magister's has some amazingly great gear on both regular and heroic modes, including some of the best new trinkets in game. And we all know about how much people salivate over trinkets. Ra-kaww! Trinkets! Power in trinkets! Yes, I admit I have a weakness for trinkets, too. It is probably because epic instance drop trinkets are so damn hard to get. In fact, if I could have any item in the entire game on my druid, it'd be Tsunami Talisman, which I know I will never ever get because dps trinkets hate my guild so much that we are usually lucky to get each one to drop maybe 2 times ever. They might as well be legendaries!

New dailies, and a new limit of 25 dailies per day. Crazy! I just hope they're fun. I have to admit I enjoy bombing run dailies, but a lot of others I don't like. Monstrous Kaliri is probably the most annoying mob in the entire game. They are unnecessarily obnoxious by design. Why, Blizzard, why? I think most of the Ogri'la dailies are annoying and lacking in the fun department. Of course, my idea of a good quest is "go pick up 10 glowing fungus" and "kill 5 regular bird and 5 dire bird". Sure they are simple, but they're not -annoying-. They don't have some mechanic to them that makes me hate them after doing them 5 days in a row on a daily basis. Daily quests are done frequently so they shouldn't be painful. That being said, I really hope the Isle of Quel'Danas does not have the blood elf equivalent of Monstrous Kaliri. You know a good daily quest? Booterang. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the best daily quest ever. Oh and the cooking quest to pick Mana Berries.

There's lots of new badge loot. Some of it is to fill in itemization gaps, and some isn't. The most exciting for me, of course, are the new fist weapons. Honestly, I hate fist weapons, but these are so good for enhancement shamans, and so easy to acquire, that I am willing to set aside my hatred of them for now. In the meantime, I will probably be working to farm myself 2 very sexy Poor Man's Netherbanes (i.e. - Breeching Comet) from heroic sickly-Kael'thas in Magister's Terrace. And did I mention I like trinkets? Shard of Contempt is nothing short of amazing. I think I was supposed to be talking about badge loot. Oh well. Here are Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality and Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality.

I've just stooped to gushing over new loots now. It's extra exciting when you're gearing up a fresh character, though. :)

It's always stoked when a new content patch is about to come out. I am not, however, looking forward to updating my addons. That's a whole other beast to tame. The point is, stuff like the introduction of the new island and instances are like miniature expansion packs. This time, they're not just adding an instance a small fragment of the player base will see (Black Temple), but a new regular 5 man, new heroic 5 man, new dailies, new 25 man and more. That's not even counting some major class changes. I think 2.4 will be a much busier patch day than the last few. It's kind of like when they added AQ and all the Cenarion Circle stuff into Silithus. It basically was there to tide us over until the Burning Crusade, and it worked like a charm. Everyone was in Silithus all the time for months. I just hope the servers can handle it!