Oh yeah, and my night elf priest, Syanalle, dinged 85 earlier today. That makes eight!
I’ve been busy powerleveling Tailoring on her. Since I’ve found Cata, and now MoP, too frustrating on my fire mage, Syanalle is going to be taking over as my primary caster toon, which necessitates her also taking over as my tailor/herbalist (she was already an herbalist, though).
Grats!
Man the nerf to vengeance makes levelling as a tank, well protection paladin at least, a real chore. I zoomed through quests as prot from 80 to 85 but I am seriously considering going shudder Ret as the crawl from 86 to 87 has taken ages, mobs die so slowly. If I could round up about 20 it wouldn’t be so bad but that’s rarely possible.
Or go dungeoneering. A lot of the time you’d even get a bonus on account of being a tank, at least in my server. I think you may have just explained why most of the tanks I get at those levels are pallies.
When did they nerf Vengeance? I haven’t really been paying attention–was it recently? When I leveled my DK tank to 90 (right after MoP came out) I didn’t notice any issues at all. I was doing mad deeps and things were dying as fast as they always have.
Hmm…I wonder…if that happened recently, that might explain why I’m having trouble soloing Kael’thas when I did it just fine the first couple of weeks (and relatively undergeared compared to where I am now, too). I can’t seem to get Capernian down fast enough anymore, and she stunlocks me to the point where her three buddies whittle me down until Kael shows up, and then between his stunlock and Capernian’s, that’s all she wrote.
I’d forgotten how much fun it was to play a decent DPSer, though–my panda monk rips through mobs so fast that she barely has to slow down! As long as she doesn’t pull too many things at once, the only time I have to stop is when I need to take a breather. 
That polearm is pretty imba. Got it on my main’s first MoP archaeology solve, and really only got interested in Pandaria archaeology because of the Cloud Serpent daily.
I gave that spear to my otherwise poorly-geared lvl 85 feral drood alt and tried out a few fights in the Jade Forest.
First Ravage was a 65k crit. :eek: I was in love. The only annoyance is that I find I’m still trying to spam finishing moves on targets that died before I got my fourth combo point.
w00t! Thelois, my human rogue, dinged 90 tonight. And the best part is … I opened the big pile of Vine-Cracked Junkboxes she’s accumulated while picking pockets across Pandaria, and look what fell out:
Bloody hell, that thing’s HUGE!
Now I want a pink ponytailed gnome with that babe and The Little Shield That Could.
worships Bosstone, amazingly dedicated Using the “low resolution” version (which has less stuff than the high-res one) and being able to pile up my three main action bars nicely and move portraits to where I like them, ElvUI has suddenly improved tons.
Nice!!
Blue Post here but in essence:
[QUOTE=Ghostcrawler]
We are changing Vengeance to increase AP equal to 5% of the damage you take for 20 sec. This buff will “roll” so that as it gets refreshed the unused part is added to the new buff, similar to how Ignite or Stagger work. The net result will be that Vengeance stacks by the amount of DPS being thrown at you over 20 sec. There is no cap.
[/QUOTE]
You really need to pull big packs to pump out good dps. For more info Theck talks about here http://sacredduty.net/2012/08/09/we-didnt-need-pants-anyhow-to-tank/ and as he says:
[QUOTE=Theck]
In addition, “new Vengeance” is going to make protection leveling even more excruciating. I’ve been leveling as protection on the beta, and I can tell you that it’s abysmally slow because during questing, you simply don’t have any Vengeance to work with. I made this point rather well in the previous blog post, and I encourage you to read (or re-read) it rather than reproduce it here. Suffice to say, there’s no way in hell I’m going to level as protection when Mists goes live. It’s simply not efficient or fun. I’m going to give in and go retribution for the bulk of it, only switching to a tank spec for dungeons. It simply doesn’t make sense to level as protection when everything dies 5 times faster as retribution.
[/QUOTE]
I tried again last night and got bored after one quest hub, even if that quest hub was interesting involving a cow breach birth. Dungeons are an option but I hoped to quest int he zones I missed on my warlock with this toon.
Yeah, I just did that zone last night. My first thought with the breech birth was “James Herriot would have just stuck his arm up there and turned it around…”
Glad to hear it! Elv’s really been making things more comfortable for me too, rather than having to fuss with a ton of addons.
The biggest hurdle I’ve run into is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly configure Elv to a different spec while keeping all the little personal tweaks. Since coming back to WoW, I’ve only played Physical DPS specs and configured Elv that way. Last night, I respecced my Fury Warrior to Prot so I could tank for my guild, and I had to run the Install routine again to get things set up for a Tank. It tossed all the frames around and I had to spend a bit getting things set up again. On the plus side, now I have a proper tank configuration. I just need to do the same for Healer and Magical DPS and I shouldn’t have any more troubles.
On a related note, last night was the first night I ever tanked dungeons. Granted, my Warrior was only 18 and the instances at that level are nice and easy, but I was still nervous as hell. It didn’t get any better when I was expecting the Deadmines and got Shadowfang Keep instead for our random. :smack: After the first pull and my subsequent first death, I realized I didn’t have Defensive Stance on, and we proceeded to rock the keep (and just about every single drop was a mail Strength piece! Handy, since everyone else in the group was leather or cloth). I wound up coming in at 0.1 DPS under the top DPS in the group, too. :smack:
After that we tried Wailing Caverns, and not only did we do even better that time (especially since I leveled to 20 in SFK and got Thunder Clap), but I was happy to see that the maze on the right side of WC was vastly simplified. It made the dungeon so much more pleasant than it used to be, and having the quests inside the dungeon makes things wonderfully simple.
I’ve been far too nervous about tanking in the past, but after last night I’m much more confident about it. Maybe that’ll change at higher levels, but I understand the Mists heroics are as straightforward as the lowbie dungeons.
Grats on the successful tanking! Being hit in the face is fun.
So bit the bullet and respecced Ret last night. The good was that mobs die much faster and it seems more engaging. Not sure if mobs per second is any higher but it feels like I am doing more which makes a huge difference. The bad was that I can’t solo the elites anymore - NPCScan went off and I charged in without thinking, one special attack later I was dead. LTP noob I guess.
That can vary a lot from an elite to another, or even depending on what the elite feels like doing. The pandas have:
First time I tried to hit one of those who was level 91 it was my hunter and a mage. We weren’t expecting the heals but recovered pretty well once we knew he had them. Bolts of Doom flattened us.
Second time we managed to interrupt all the heals and there were no Bolts of Doom, easy peasy.
Times 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were my hunter and a priest and… well… I think that damn panda is still laughing over our bones. Five heals in a row (damnit, we didn’t have that many interrupts), eventually Bolts of Doom.
I shall have to pay more attention but on my warlock, with the voidlord out, and while specced prot on my pally I could down all the elites even if it took a while. When I died it was usually due to pulling adds.
Your pet has huge aoe damage reduction, which is the only reason that twirly kick doesn’t hurt him. It does about 200k damage per second to players. The bolt of Doom has a minimum range, so it’ll never get cast if you stay within a certain range.
The elites mostly require being aware of what each ability does and avoiding them. Some of them do require interrupts though, and will be very hard to solo if you don’t have one on a reasonable cooldown.
Her. She’s a she-turtle 
And yeah, that’s why I use her as a tank: she’s got a force field that makes the Invisible Woman ennnvious!
makes a note to get up closer and personal with the damn pandas
Speaking of NPCScan, is there a way on this addon to find the location and/or range of the NPC that just pinged? So far, out of 5 pings, only 1 was there waiting for me, the other four were carcasses by someone’s else hands because I spent way too much time searching the area for them.
It puts sort of a faintly-glowing circle on your big map, but I’m not entirely sure if that circle indicates the mob’s location, or simply where you were when the alarm went off. I’ve had that happen plenty of times myself - alarm goes off and I just can’t find the dang mob.
Apologies if this is obvious but you know that you can click the small NPCScan window that pops up with the mob’s details and you will target the rare? You can then see it’s health and whether it has been tagged.
The Golden Lotus grind is too long. I play 4-5 nights a week and I don’t want to have to do it every night but at the moment it is the only way of getting the gear I need.
Yes indeed. But sometimes, even once I’ve got it targeted (and determined that it’s alive and not currently engaged with another player), I still can’t find it. Usually that’s due to the terrain. Unless the mob is gigantic I can have it targeted and still be unable to see it, particularly on pre-flying characters, and especially if the rare has a path that it walks. I have noticed that the MoP rares tend to stay in one spot when they spawn.