Hey, I see you around all the damn time, never realized you were on Elune.
Wave to Meholick sometime in Dalaran. 
Will do.
And** Mil0**—man, you know your stuff. I don’t have the rep for the head enchant yet, and I haven’t even found the Sons of Hodir for the shoulder enchant, but I’ve respec’d, re-gemmed, re-enchanted a couple of things, and it’s made a dramatic dps improvement, as promised. Just with what I’ve done so far, my spell power increased from 2100ish to well over 2400.
I’m holding off on the belt buckle, because I’m only about 14 Emblems of Frost away from upgrading my belt, plan to get that next weekend. When I do, I’ll get the buckle and a gem. I’m guessing spell power or crit chance are prefered options, depending on what color the gem slot turns out to be.
WHY do they have to insert dungeon/elite quests right in the middle of nice, normal, LONG (and thus more helpful to finishing a zone’s quest achievement) quest chains? Nagrand Slam is going to be hideous. There are two nice, long quest chains and right in the middle of both of them is an Auchindoun kill. Zul’Drak is horrid…there are multiple open-air elite quests and that’s almost all I have left there.
I mean, I’m an 80 DK but I still can’t survive solo against a 150K elite (let alone their personal armies).
Don’t ever gem a pure yellow gem (+crit or +haste), and really, you should never be gemming Potent Ametrines (+sp/+crit) unless you get to very high levels of gear (i277 with some i264). Gemming as a mage doesn’t have many hard and fast rules, because as your stats increase the corresponding stat weights change.
So, at the level of gear you’re rocking, I would suggest that you stick with gemming Reckless Ametrines (+sp/+haste) in Red/Yellow sockets and Purified Dreadstones (+sp/+Spirit) in two Blue sockets that give you the best socket bonus in order to active the Chaotic Skyflare meta gem. Other than that, I wouldn’t socket any blue gems unless the spell power bonus is +7 or greater.
I ended up doing the arena quests in both zones to finish them up - that allowed me to skip those dungeon and elite quests:
Nagrand: Ring of Blood
I soloed these on my lvl 80 paladin. My gear was “meh”, having never set foot in a NR heroic at the time. Fairly easy fights for a lvl 80; the last one is kind of tough, but doable.
Zul’Drak: Amphitheater of Anguish
I also did these at level 80, before I started doing heroics. However, they weren’t soloable (I didn’t even try). I paired up with another paladin (who was also in pre-heroic gear), and we made it through everything except the final fight, when we ended up having to group up with some other people who were there. That first quest in the chain (The Champion’s Call) is just a breadcrumb quest from a goblin in the Dalaran Underbelly, and isn’t required to obtain the second quest from the goblin in Zul’Drak. The second quest sets up your first match in the arena.
In both cases, the arena quests were enough to get the required quest total.
Started questing through Northrend with some RL people, but it is super-frustrating and almost had me in tears. Both of them are way more experienced with the game than I am, and play it differently. They tend to jump on their mounts and run through a village and deal with the resulting following mob when they can, whereas I slowly drill my way through a crowd to get where I need to go. Plus I’m pretty sure everything is just second nature to them, so one gets bored and goes ahead with a quest we both need, and by the time I get there he’s already done it and not really killed anything so I run in, trying to catch up, but have to take down mobs.
I like doing instances with them, but it’s because we have to stick together. I find I’d much rather have all 3 of us doing our own questing but queueing up for instances a lot.
Okay, this pissed me off yesterday.
I’m chain-running heroics with my pally to gear up (got my first T9 piece!). Surprisingly, the RDF put me in PoS – surprisingly because I wasn’t sure I was geared for it yet, but I know that the RDF checks gear and I’ve done PoS plenty of times on my main so I was confident we would be ok.
So we all zone in and immediately, one of the dps drops out. While we wait for a replacement I distribute pally buffs to everyone. No one says anything. Then – poof, a loading screen and I’m back in Dalaran. “You have been removed from the party.” WTF? Without even a word to me, apparently the group decided they can do better. I was pissed!
Got in a nice ICC-25 GDKP run on Saturday, thanks to Daed–walked out with over 8k gold and my Shadow’s Edge quest items (I’ve been forgetting forever to pick up the quest so that I could actually have the bloods looted to me). I’ve also been working on leveling a DK alt with Mining and Herbalism to collect mats for Sleu’s JC and Alch, so while that’s somewhat tedious, I’m pulling in extra cash there, too.
I know I’ve mentioned before not taking Herb and Mining on the same toon–my plan this time around was to focus on Herb, but grab any ore nodes I happened to catch. But even with only occasionally checking my ore tracking, my Mining was keeping pace very well, so I set out to see if I could find an addon that would make my life easier. And I did. And it’s AMAZING.
Tracking Plus is an addon that will automatically cycle between two or more tracking types, in the order you specify, at the interval you specify. You can set a number of exceptions to determine when it will stop or resume switching (e.g., turn off while in combat, on a taxi, in a city, in an instance, or not mounted). It supports all forms of tracking, whether specific to profession, class, or race.
I have mine set to swap between Find Herbs and Find Minerals every two seconds (the minimum allowed by the abilities’ cooldowns). I have both kinds of nodes set up to display on my minimap by Gatherer, and I also use the Gatherer HUD to give me an idea of where I’ve been recently and where the items I’m focusing on are clustered. I ride around and keep a sharp eye on my minimap. When I see a node, I can easily run to it even if the tracking swaps en route. To deal with special circumstances, I have two macros: One that manually toggles the swapping on and off, and one that sets my tracking to either herbs or minerals depending on whether or not I’m holding a modifier key. That way, if I’m about to enter a cave, for example, I can turn off the swapping and make sure that Find Minerals is active.
Heirloom gear can be purchased by any character with the badges to buy it. (Because Emblems of Heroism no longer drop in-game, you’ll have to downgrade a higher level of badge to buy them. IMO this should be Triumphs, NOT Frost. Even once you get all of your Frost badge gear, you can still buy Primordial Saronite to sell.)
Heirloom items are BoA–they can be used by any character on your account. Once you buy an item, you have the standard two hours to sell it back to get your badges refunded… *unless *you mail the item. Mailing the item to another character than the one that bought it will make it permanently bound to your account. (They made this change because too many people were buying gear just before playing their alts, then mailing it back before the two hours was up to get a refund, so that they could essentially maintain multiple sets of Heirloom gear for the price of one.)
On the same server, you can mail an Heirloom item to any character on your account–even cross-faction. (I have done this, and it works.) Note that only Heirloom items can be mailed this way–if you try to mail anything else, it won’t work. It’s also possible to use Heirloom items on another server from where they were bought, but you can’t currently mail them. Moving the items to another realm requires transferring a character with the items in inventory. This may or may not be worth $25 to you; personally, it was absolutely worth it to send the Cold Weather Flying book, a couple of other Heirloom pieces, and a bunch of mats from my main’s server to the server where I was leveling my Mage.
There is no limit to the number of characters you can use a piece of Heirloom gear on, nor how many times it can be mailed. Note that the experience bonus and item scaling will only work *up to *level 80; there’s no point in equipping a level 80 character with WotLK Heirloom gear for Cataclysm.
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
That’s all really interesting–a bunch of stuff I’d never thought about or noticed. Un’Goro Crater, Sholazar Basin, Tanaris, and the Badlands are all zones that are pretty strongly associated with the Titans: you have all kinds of old structures. As for those big pillars–you also find them in the Storm Peaks, e.g. the one that has all that Titan machinery inside of it.
Sounds like you’ve got a problem with mismatched play styles. This is a problem I’ve seen before with playing with real-life friends; just because you enjoy each other’s *company *doesn’t mean that you’re going to like to *play the game *the same way. Right now, you’re trying to mash together two different models, and it’s not working. If you want to play together, either they have to adapt to your way of doing things, or you have to adapt to theirs; you can’t keep trying to do both. Honestly, though, it sounds to me like none of you will be happy doing things a different way, so you might just be better off questing separately and doing other things–like instances or Battlegrounds–together.
So close on our first 25man BQL kill, oh so close… 11%. We got her next week though, I can feel it. Hopefully I’m the only shield tank and the shield drops, that thing would look so pretty on my tauren.
Picked up Last Word from Professor last night and I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I’m currently using The Facelifter and I like the expertise, but I don’t want Last Word to go to waste. Maybe I’ll just slap a Mongoose on it and use it for 10man.
My hunter isn’t leaving Scholozar Basin until I tame Loque’nahak. It may take me weeks, but that cat will be mine!
…or I’ll level to 77 and chase Gondria.
Congratulations! Have fun collecting your souls. 
Just FYI, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that in Cataclysm, they’re fixing the “you can only track one thing” issue. I can’t provide a cite because I don’t remember where I read it–I suppose I can try getting two gathering professions on my level 13 Goblin mage and see if it works. But I think it does.
Had a pretty good weekend on my DK–I’m up to 40 Shadowfrost shards now (it was quite depressing that one week 9 of them dropped, so that started making me think it was going to be that way every week…at which point the RNG decided to laugh at me the following week and only drop 4. Lately we’ve been moving along at at steady 5, so if that keeps up I’ll have my Shadowmourne in two weeks. So excited!)
I finally made a big decision, too–for awhile now, I’ve been slowly realizing that the most fun I’m having in the game these days is tanking our guild’s ICC25 alt run on Friday nights. Even more than the progression raiding on my beloved mage. My DK tank is almost as well geared as my mage (only having to compete with one other plate-wearing tank instead of a whole slew of clothie DPS and the odd boomkin will do that). So when they added “DK tank” to their recruitment notice, I took the plunge and sent a note to the raid leader letting him know I was interested if they wanted me. I had planned to hold off and swap at Cataclysm, but I was afraid they’d get somebody else in now and I’d lose my chance. I figured given that my DK is the best-geared Horde DK tank on the server (and the second one isn’t even close) and that they know me, my reputation for attendance, learning fast, and tanking the alt raid, I might have a shot. And they accepted my offer! As soon as I finish my Shadowmourne (because I and the alt-run leader promised that the alt-run folks would get to roll on the chest loot), I’ll be taking up my position among our guild’s tanks, and my mage will move into the alt run.
It feels weird…really weird. My mage has been my main since the first day of BC. I adore him. I’ve written stories about him. I’ve never even had a serious flirtation with another alt. My pally tank is fun but I never thought of him as a main possibility. But my DK (who is, RPwise, my mage’s son) is just so much fun, and tanking is a blast. I’m looking forward to it!
Wooo! Good luck. Although I’d abandon any hope of the shield dropping–as far as I’m concerned, the damned thing doesn’t exist. 
Last Word is the one with the proc that gives you Strength and a bonus to healing on you, right? IIRC from my research, the uptime on it it something above 90% for most fights, if that helps you make a decision.
Gotta get all my Primordial Saronites, first. I have a couple of BOE items to get made and one last Frost badge item to buy (somehow I was completely misremembering the stats on the tanking belt), so it’ll probably be later this week or next week before I can start buying them, whether with badges or with cash.
Oh boy, I hope so. This addon makes a decent temporary fix, at least.
Welcome to the wonderful world of main-character tanking. Moohoohahaha. And fingers crossed that you finish your Shadowmourne ahead of schedule!
I had a bunch of fun yesterday playing my level 46 night elf hunter on Argent Dawn (my RP server). I did very little of my own questing; instead I helped out a guildie, a level 26 paladin, with his paladin hammer quest (remembering how difficult it was for my own paladin when she was doing it). He’d already done Deadmines to get the Oak Lumber, so we traveled to Blackfathom Deeps and completely cleared the naga outside of the instance twice, and then entered the instance and slaughtered most of the naga in there, and that darned Corrupted Kor Gem never dropped. Not sure what’s up with that. We decided to give it a rest, and in any case now he knows where to look and he can handle those non-elites outside the instance by himself just fine. So then it was off to Shadowfang Keep for Jordan’s Smithing Hammer. Thelsamar was the northernmost EK FP he had, so we met up there and I led him from Thelsamar, through Wetlands, Arathi Basin, Hillsbrad Foothills (getting him all the FPs along the way), and finally into Silverpine Forest. We decided in Thelsamar to roleplay the entire adventure, and that was a lot of fun. I’m turning out to be pretty good at that 
Of course, I had to “downgrade” and use my slow mount the entire time, so that he could keep up with me. We found the hammer, and then flew back to Thelsamar to collect Jordan’s Ore Shipment from that ogre encampment.
That was fun. I tried, as much as possible, to let him fight the mobs he could handle by himself; I always get frustrated when a higher-level character helps me out and does all the work for me. This paladin is also this guy’s very first toon, so I want to let him have as much fun as possible, and learn as much as possible. He’s not getting better at using his class abilities if he’s just standing there while I one-shot everything for him.
This is a primary reason I avoid questing with other people. For me, personally, the game doesn’t “start at max level”; questing is what I consider the core of the game experience, and I love it, and so I just don’t grok the “rush rush rush through everything to get to end-game” mentality. I want to fight my way through to my objective and “earn” the reward. I’ve rolled so many freakin’ alts, and I’ve never gotten “bored” doing the same Old World quests multiple times. I honestly don’t get how some people think it’s boring to do those low-level quests repeatedly on different toons, but it’s not boring to race to the end game and then run the same dungeons and raids over and over and over and over.
I do realize though, that I’m apparently in the minority there. For me, it’s about the experience (not XP, but experiencing the game world and the adventure), not about impressing people with my “elite gear”.
On another topic …
What is up with this question I keep seeing people ask on various WoW-related sites:
“What are the gold sinks in Cataclysm?”
For some reason, every time somebody asks that it sounds to me like, “I’ve accumulated a large amount of gold. When Cataclysm launches, I would like to immediately spend this gold on something I can display in SW/Org to impress the nubs with how awesome I am.”
Well, sort of. Gold sinks need to be in the game, or the economy would explode. However, if they’re not appropriately awesome, no one will bother to spend any money on them, thus defeating the purpose. So wanting to know what the gold sinks are is wanting to know what some of the coolest new optional features and items will be.
280% flying? Gold sink. Northrend flying? Gold sink. Multi-person mount? Gold sink. Multi-person mount with vendors? Even bigger gold sink. Rings with teleports? Gold sinks. Wanting to know what the new gold sinks will be for Cata doesn’t make you a douche. And if you are buying these things just because you want to show off… So what? It’s a game. No one else is starving to death because you have all the money.
They probably just want to know how much they need to save up/hang on to so they’ll be able to buy anything they might need in the expansion. So far I haven’t seen any, BTW–flying all over the Old World just happens with your normal previous training (and from what I’ve heard, they’re not planning to change this), there’s no equivalent to the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth or the motorcycle, and I haven’t heard anything about a new Dalaran ring (though I would be very surprised if they didn’t introduce one).
ETA: I want to know what the gold sinks are so I know whether I should blow 16K gold on the Traveler’s Mammoth or hold off and wait for the new shinies.
The one I’ve heard about is that 310% will be a trainable rank of flying. Anyone who currently has a 310-speed mount will learn it automatically. IIRC, current flyers will then scale with the rider’s level of training. (I don’t know if this will apply to 100% flyers, too, or only 280% ones.)
I’ve also heard that there will be no new flying training required to fly in the old world, beyond the base ability. (I seem to recall one of the Blizzard staff making jokes about “Old Weather Flying.”)
I cannot wait for this. I’d love to ride around on one of my flying carpets, but I hate giving up the 310% speed of my violet protodrake. This change will allow me to break the carpets out of mothballs!
Yeah, I can’t wait to be able to start using a random selection of ***all ***my favorite flyers, instead of just sticking with the sparklepony since it scales.
Had a good weekend, all things considered. Respec’d my main in accord with the advice give above for a dramtic dps improvement, bought heirloom chest/shoulders/staff for the WoW version of the infamous Oakbrow Farwalker (known as Oakbrow, since WoW doesn’t seem to do the lastname thing) and leveled him to 35. He’s a boomkin wannabe at this point. Mostly running random dungeons as a healer, doing some questing. Finally, took a baby hunter to level 10 and got his pet, a scarred crag boar now affectionately called “Hambone”.
On Kahbume, I still need one boss from The Old Kingdom to finish off one of the Nothrend Dungeon achievements. Also need two raid targets for my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title–still need Malygos (never did get around to opening that ticket), and Kel-something or other. Got the SARwhtever guy in the weekly this weekend. On the downside, the Boomer is broke. Spent down most of the gold I had, so I’ll probably do a bit of farming to bolster the bank account.
**
SfG**–aye, Emblems of Frost are far too precious to be trading down. I’m hoarding mine carefully, gonna probably spend them on a T10 belt first, since that appears to be the biggest stat-increase. At the moment, I can only seem to acquire about 19 Emblems of Frost per week–2/day for first random heroic, and 5/week for the weekly raid target. Sometimes I get an extra one for one of the VoA guys. Want to say I got a couple as other quest rewards, too, but think those were non-repeatable quests. I’m guessing to get more emblems I’ll have to move in to ICC raids?
I’d also be happy if they made mounts instant cast like the Druid flight form. I’d love to use other mounts more often, but swift flight form is just too darned convenient to give up. Sadly i’ve not heard them suggest any such thing.
OMG! It’s raining! How do I fly in this?! HELP!
