Surprisingly fun to solo with, mainly on account of reflective shield. I love me some reflective shield. Makes me feel like a schoolyard bully: “Stop hitting yourself! Why do you keep hitting yourself! Come on, stop hitting yourself!”
(It is kind of odd that the entire talent tree is built around one spell (Power word: Shield). Is there anything like that in any other class?)
I don’t understand the hate for BoP. You need to go through some type of progression to learn how to get the most from any toon you’ve got, so why not get your gear then? If you’re talking about leveling gear, the I doubly don’t get it, as you’ll get what you need from quests, and bonus instance drops when you’re questing in there. You change it, you kill tradeskills as anything other than raid bonuses, you give me an easy path to wealth, and you create even more twinks. You also make pugging much more risky, someone is less likely to pass or greed on stuff if he can give it to his alts, or worse, sell it.
I’d rather instance run any day than rep grind. I’ve still got to complete both my main’s and my alt’s Northrend rep grinds. If I never see the Sons of Hodir again, I’ll be happy, and the Tournaments worse, and getting at least your race to champion isn’t really optional any more.
Glad you liked it, thanks!
I love Spell Reflect the same way. (Which is why it’s a damn shame that there are so few bosses it works on.) I always cackle to myself when I pop SR and see a spell flicked back to hit its caster.
How is Discipline spec for solo questing? I’ve been thinking about dropping my secondary spec in Shadow in favor of Disc, but I don’t want to gimp my questing ability too much. I levelled 70 to 80 as Holy and that was a marathon!
This is probably a moral failing on my part, but I love it when I’m grouped with someone (same class and spec as me) who left our “social/raiding guild” for a “heavy raiding” one… and I’m doing 10% more DPS 
Not sure about high levels. I’m running a level 39 and finding it very survivable (I’m able to solo mobs 5+ levels above me and deal with crowds of mobs 2 levels higher), but it’s probably a lot slower than shadow or another dps build.
I have run into a quest where the slowness is a problem - it’s a thing in Desolace where I have to put down a ghost magnet, and in order to do it safely I have to clear off a bunch of undead and necromancers from all around. Anyway, by the time I get my magnet set up, the skellies and necromancers are all repopping.
It makes you more durable while leveling. Check out my Disc 57/Holy 14 secondary spec, which I use for tank healing in raids or for soloing on dailies and the like. The talents do things like boost your stamina and shielding, increase the effect of insta-cast spells, improve your mana usage and regen, speeds spell casting, boosts crits, and so on. You may not have the pure damage dealing of shadow but you yourself are much tougher and a better caster, and as a bonus, you can use the spec to heal a tank in a raid.
Heh. My favorites are always the 13yr old pugs from the heavy guilds who go on and on about how good they are, and start dropping numbers. Numbers that I’m beating in a 5 man. The best part is letting them know that I’m not a main raider, and the main raiders kick my ass.
Did a little bit of shuffling in my vanity guild, deleting three of my alts and creating three new ones. My main reason being to have better class/race/sex diversity. I looked at the 10 toons in my guild and thought, a) 8 female toons and 2 male toons; b) 4 humans, 4 draenei, 2 night elves; c) do I really need 2 paladins and 2 warriors on the same server?; d) no hunter, no druid.
So … I deleted my lvl 20 female human rogue and replaced her with a male gnome rogue, deleted my lvl 13 female night elf warrior and replaced her with a male night elf druid, and deleted my lvl 13 male draenei paladin and replaced him with a male dwarf hunter. So now the sex balance is 6 females/4 males, and I have every Alliance race and class represented:
Human female paladin 80
Draenei female shaman 24
Human female warlock 4 (actually my bank/AH alt)
Night elf female priest 9
Draenei female mage 20
Draenei female warrior 22
Human male death knight 59
Night elf male druid 13
Gnome male rogue 8
Dwarf male hunter 4
For those who care/are interested, here’s a gallery of all my Order of the Rik toons 
I update the pics whenever a toon gets new gear that gives a significantly different appearance.
My pally has a new hat, as I finally sprung for a Spiked Titansteel Helm to replace the inappropriate Brilliant Titansteel Helm I’d bought earlier (all that gold down the drain 
)
I was working on leveling my new druid yesterday and encountered what I think may have been a bug/glitch. I was doing the quest Ferocitas the Dream Eater, and had an inordinate amount of trouble fighting my way through the Gnarlpine Mystics because, not only were they respawning at an ridiculously fast rate (as in, I’d kill one, loot the corpse, move on to the next one, kill it, loot it, and then while I was sitting drinking, the first one I killed has respawned and is now shooting me from behind with its spells), but for some reason I wasn’t getting the usual “a few seconds to get away from a newly-respawned mob before it aggroes” - I was getting attacked immediately by mobs respawning next to me. Pre-immediately, actually. The Mystics were respawning, aggroing on me, and beginning to cast their spells before they had even completely faded into existence. Normally when you see a mob spawning near you, you get a few seconds to move away before the aggro triggers, but not this time. I had translucent, barely-visible mobs already winding up to cast at me.
The result was that quest took a ridiculously long time because I couldn’t “clear a path” to Ferocitas because the situation I described was forcing me to keep running like hell away from him. I finally discovered a “back way” to sneak in and whack Ferocitas. The reason I think there was a glitch somewhere is that I’ve done that same quest with at least six other night elf toons, including other druids, and never had that much trouble.
And then there’s the Ban’ethil Barrow Den. God I hate that place! I’ve now been through there with seven night elves and at least one human, and I still can’t figure out where the hell I’m at when I’m down in there. Though I’ve figured out I’m fine until I have to start killing the shamans to find the drop for that ghosty druid guy. I know where to find the four Relics of Wakening in the chests (for the quest that originally sends me in there), and I can easily find the path from the entrance all the way down to the physical form of Rageclaw at the bottom. But when I have to run around killing shamans until one of them drops that item (can’t remember what it’s called now), I get so turned around that I get completely lost and can’t find my way back to where I need to go. I went through 23 Ice Cold Milks and a handful of Refreshing Spring Waters that mobs dropped down there simply because I had to keep killing the same mobs over and over (I didn’t have Bear Form yet so had to use spells) because I was going round and round in circles. The only solutions I can think of are to just sit in one place for an extremely long time, killing and looting the nearby shamans as they respawn (as opposed to running all over the place hunting them down), or nag Blizzard to do something about the fact that the minimap in absolutely useless in places like that. I think somebody else here already mentioned that - the dungeon spirals down down down into the earth, but the map shows all the passages smooshed flat, all the same color, with no indication of depth, and what looks like an intersection is really one passage crossing over another with no way to get directly from one to the other. :mad:
I’d argue that frost mages are built entirely around shatter. Even more than disc priests are built around PW:S.
The Barrow Den drives me bonkers too. I may just avoid it. I get so lost there and everything has respawned by the time I get un-lost.
I love Hodela in the tux. Very classy. If you have the Carbonite add-on, there’s an box you can check in the options to force the minimap to be a map of the indoor area you are in. I’m at work so I don’t remember exactly whether the option is under Map or Map Minimap. It’s very helpful for indoor areas and instances.
First Kara run last night. This was the first time most of us in the pug other than the RL had ever seen the inside of Karazhan. We cleared the first floor and ended up 6-manning Moroes and co. with 1 geared 80 DK tank, 1 holy priest, assorted DPS. RL was pleased by that since most of the pug was in the early 70s and we didn’t exactly have a lot of CC to keep the adds off the tank (in fact, I ended up kiting adds away from the tank to keep them busy). Then we got Wizard of Oz, which was fun and I got to use the Python line, “NO SINGING!”
People had to go to bed after that so we’ll do a fresh run later this week with as many of the same people as we can. Getting warm bodies and dealing with loot ninjas and drama, though, made me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. A lot.
Afterward, I went to Sholazar for some peace and quiet while solo questing, and I’m looking forward to getting Hemet’s gun and seeing what all this Oracle/Frenzyheart hullaballoo is about. 
And Elemental Shaman are pretty heavily invested in Lightning Bolt. I’ve seen chart-topping Elementals with about 66% of their damage from that one attack (for comparison, Explosive Shot is my largest damage contributor at ~45%).
A-HA! Remember that naked sunbathing gnome on the Dalaran bank steps I mentioned who is always there and never moves? She moved! She moved! I was doing my traditional placing of a Tiny Ragdoll next to her, and she up and ran off! Holy crap! I had to follow. She ran from the bank steps to the Violet Hold, talked to Archmage Lan’dalock, then ran back to the bank steps and went to sleep. So it would appear she does actually have a purpose: checking to see what one of the VH dailies is (she didn’t talk to Archmage Timear, so my guess is she’s looking for a specific daily to try to get a specific piece of gear).
Speaking of Archmage Lan’dalock, Blizzard clearly had some wiseass assigning names to the toons in Dalaran. Yesterday I overheard another NPC referring to somebody named Lacenleather (it was Linda Ann Kastinglow - a great name for a mage - on Krasus’ Landing who said it).
I’ll try that out. I have Atlas, but that only works for instances.
Hmm. Okay, I suspect Lacenleather was the name of a player character who’s probably Exalted with the Kirin Tor. Because Arcanist Alec just said, “Totemkai, wonderful to see you. Wonderful.”, and a /who revealed that Totemkai is a player toon (and yup, I see Alec just said the same thing with a different name). I’m only Revered with the Kirin Tor, so I don’t get addressed by name, I guess.
While you are correct that the person being addressed on Krasus’ landing was most likely a player (I got that treatment for the first time yesterday after getting exalted with Kirin Tor), Blizz does like the funny NPC names.
For example, the two new raid gear vendors at the Argent Tournament are Champion Isimode and Champion Faesrol. No doubt a jab at those who claim that WoW is now Easymode and all you have to do to win is Faceroll.
Every sane person does. Barrow dens are kind of like mazes, only more sadistic. The problem is that the WoW minimap flattens all elevations–the tunnel running over your head looks exactly like the tunnel running under your feet. IMO, they should shade the passages to make the map more three-dimensional.
Some NPCs will asskiss when you’re Exalted with their faction. I’ve always found it hilarious. And while Lacenleather is a player, there are other silly names. For instance, did you notice that one of the wandering NPCs in Dal is a Troll named Juwannamana? Then there are the two new NPCs used to turn your character’s XP on and off–their names taken together sound like “best in slots.”
I just spotted him yesterday, coming up the bank steps.
Shatter isn’t a spell, though. It’s a talent that You Better Get, specially in combination with Fingers of Frost. Shatter gives you extra crit chance against frozen targets, FoF makes your next two spells count as if the target was frozen; that means they can’t walk, shatter counts and your insta-cast Ice Lance can do something decent. But neither is a spell.
Frosty the Snowgnome (and his colleagues from other races) should be able to combine Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Frost Nova, Water Elemental (with his own nova), Blizzard and Frostfire, at the very least. The instant Fireballs are nice, too (from Brain Freeze).
At last!
I strolled into the cave where Artruis hangs out and saw that he was yelling, so I headed in hoping to find a group of Alliance toons I could join up with. All I found was an empty room with the corpse of a dwarf. A mouseover on the corpse showed he was “Resurrectable”, so I raised and healed him up. It was a dwarf hunter, and so once we were all patched up we teamed to take on Artruis, saved Jaloot, and now I can finally do Oracles dailies 