Default is X to go down and spacebar to go up while underwater.
Ooh. Shiny. Now I wish I hadn’t spent 60 marks on that spiffy self-sweeping broom, dammit.
Well this weekend I ran Sunken Temple with the Burning Dogs (including Mister Rik) – finished the level 50 paladin questchain. We had to go back down to the basement after clearing the instance, so we jumped down the hole in the center. Pally bubble FTW!
On my priest I ran a bunch of heroics (Cos x 3, OK, Oc, and ToC) and picked up enough emblems to get some nice new pants. In ToC I got a nice cloak and chestpiece as well, so it’s like I have a new outfit. Also did all the Brewfest quests and dailies, although a couple of us tried to 3-man Corin Direbrew and failed so I still have to get that achievement.
I also, finally, got around to starting the Argent Tourney quests and dailies. I’m not sure how it works though - I’m doing all the dailies I can but it’s not very many so far.
For Brewfest I have 97 tokens so far. I think you need at least 250 to get all the achievements (if you return your clothes to the vendor after doing the drunk Dalaran dancing one), so it will take at least a few more days to get those. Then I can take a spin on my new Violet Proto-Drake!
Brewfest is fun and all, but it sort of bothers me that many of the achievements (not just for Brewfest, but for most of the holidays) can’t be completed without a level 80. Heck, I can’t even eat all the unique holiday goodies at Brewfest, since a few of them need levels 55+.
It basically means that you have to have an 80 for a year to get the capstone achievement, not just play and be involved for a year. Talk about your time investments.
You get more dailies as you go along. To begin with, you have (IIRC) 3 days of daily Aspirant quests before you qualify as a Valiant - 3 quests a day; then, you become a Valiant for your own race, and start accumulating Marks of the Valiant - there are four dailies - killing converted heroes, jousting against your own side, and doing mounted combat against the Scourge down in front of Icecrown Citadel all give 1 Mark apiece; there’s also a daily where you fly all the way across Icecrown to pick up a magic sword which returns 2 Marks. Generally I do all the other quests then fly out to get the sword and hearth back to the Argent Tourney tent.
Anyway, once you’ve picked up 25 Marks of the Valiant you have to win a slightly harder joust and then you’re a champion, and can (a) qualify as a valiant for a second Horde faction and (b) do Champion dailies, which include fighting a dragon (this is Threat from Above aka threat, you’ve no doubt heard people lfg-ing for it) for 2 Marks, killing cultists, more mounted combat against the scourge, and jousting against the opposite side (Alliance in your case); all of these are either longer or more difficult than the valiant quests, though you don’t have the long-ass messenger quest at least. Anyway, these Marks are what you can spend on the goodies.
Qualifying as a valiant for the second (and succeeding) Horde faction works just like getting the first valiant did. Once you’ve qualified for all five, I guess you get a handful of new dailies and access to a new quartermaster who sells lots of heirloom/BoA items, which I wish I’d realized before I’d spent a bunch of Marks on a vanity pet.
So if you do it every day, it’s about 28 days until you’re at the end of the process, you could do dailies for a year after that and not buy everything the vendor sells.
They have to do that or the epeen devotees will QQ because lowbies and casuals are gonna be able to cruise around with the Violet Proto-Drake, which makes it not worth having for them.
I don’t think I will ever understand “WoW-Speak”! 
I *wondered[/I why I couldn’t click on those “bubble thingies”, Bosstone!
Thanks, martu for the help!
Quasi
Quasi
I agree, the gap is too big, especially in DPS.
I kinda disagree. I don’t think that there is a world of difference between a bear spec and a cat spec. The main difference IMO is that a tank in cat form probably won’t have the talents to make shred worthwhile and will just be spamming mangle.
A bear and cat will ofetn roll on the same items but the difference is that a bear will gem and enchant differently than the cat.
Okay, thanks for the primer Tom Scud. I guess I’ve finished the Aspirant quests and am now a Valiant for my city (Undercity). I got the daily for running around and getting the weapon, but not for any of the jousting you describe. Unless, because I had already done the Aspirant dailies, I needed to wait until today… I’ll have to check this evening if I have time.
The one thing I forgot to mention is that once you hit Champion you can also complete the Black Knight quest line. Go to the argent tent if you’ve done the earlier quests & there’ll be a new exclamation point for you.
Oh, I don’t even have a different spec. My only dual-spec’d character is my priest (healing spec vs. healing spec 
). I do agree that there is a lot of overlap in gear, but there are enough subtle differences that I find myself ruling out certain items for what would work in a cat set. (Most blatant one is the Stamina emphasis for bears.)
Grats to everyone’s new achievements! (Both in the capital-A and lowercase-a senses.)
Holy guild drama this weekend, Batman!
Out of nowhere (i.e., did not consult any officers or even mention it to them), the GM enacted a new point policy of his own invention :rolleyes: that would determine people’s guild ranks. In reaction to this and other things, a few more people gquit. At this point, we no longer had enough people left to field a full raid without PUGing healers. The GM decided that he would rather go back to being “a regular peon” instead of having to lead, and declared the end of the guild.
Begin panic: now. Where the hell am I going to find a guild with space for a Prot War, **and **a Resto Druid, **and **a Lock, **and **maybe a Pally who doesn’t have time to raid? I put up a thread in the realm forum advertising specifically for myself and my pocket healer (figuring it would be easier to slide a DPS in than a tank or a healer). We got a good response, but it seemed like all of these guilds had raid schedules that really didn’t fit with what we needed.
Then, I happened to be home for a few hours yesterday in between family stuffs, I get a whisper from the new GM of what was currently the top raiding guild on the server. They had just gone through a major shakeup as several players, including their GM, had just had to switch to very casual raiding because of IRL commitments (think 10-mans, two days a week). They therefore were looking to bring in some new people for every role. I had a nice long chat with the GM, then took the offer to my folks. We decided to give it a shot, and see how well we fit together.
The first scheduled raid is tomorrow night… fingers crossed! So far everybody seems decent, and there are a couple of our former guildies here already, who’d gquit before the meltdown. I’m interested to see where progression is at with the departure of some of the old folks and us new 'uns coming in. They’d previously cleared Algalon on 10 and were at something like five hard modes down on 25. Part of our conundrum had been trying to find a balance between going into a guild that had content on farm (where we’d feel like we were the ones being carried) or going to a guild that had the same progression or less than we had at AF (which would seem to indicate some of the same issues with players). This seems to strike a nice balance–we know that the new guildies are quality, but with the changes in membership, we’re still getting a real opportunity to contribute.
I would now like to hand a cookie to anybody who actually read that whole essay. 
Welcome back! Oh, and somebody mentioned using Consecrate in response to your post about fighting the bugs–ignore that. They must have thought you play a Paladin. Warriors don’t have Consecrate.
Also sucks to be anybody who flies over the blue ladies town in Storm Peaks or Netherwing Ledge in SMV.
Interesting. AFAIK I’ll be tanking with another Prot War on 10-mans, so this is good to know.
With a ranged on the head in 10-man, you only need one tank. Using a Prot War on the head means you need two, unless you also want to have that person pick up the adds.
But I’m saying that there isn’t that much time where you should **need **to tell your DPS to hold back. Could just be that I’ve been spending too much time playing with crappy DPS. 
But if threat is really **that **problematic, that you’ve got all those classes pumping out so much threat that they have to hold back or tear off the tank, one Vig isn’t going to solve anything. It’s certainly nice to be able to rip a few hundred TPS off the top of somebody without a threat dump, like another Warrior, but Vigilance is ultimately a stopgap to try to fix Warrior tank threat generation.
Yeah, I know, that didn’t come out that well. My point was that the buffs/debuffs are **much better **coming from an Arms or Fury Warrior who’s specced/glyphed into them, because their effect and duration is so much better.
1.) Gotcha.
2.) Stance dancing is a lot less viable when most bosses hit as hard as they do currently. It’s my understanding that the fights in current content are tuned much more toward high burst damage than they were in vanilla or TBC. One mistimed swap and… squoosh. (I will, FWIW, swap to Arms to get my Shattering Throw and Retaliation off during a heart exposure on XT, for example.) My point is that this is a mechanic that’s mainly designed to be used by DPS warriors, not by tanks.
3.) Piercing Howl… which Prot Warriors don’t have. I can’t offhand remember how far down the Fury tree it is, but it’s definitely way further than any remotely standard tanking build goes.
Heh. You’re right that effective health is more equal than straight-up HP, but, as you have observed, the difference is going to keep scaling up higher, the better the gear gets.
I noticed it right away, but that’s 'cause my main’s tattoos changed. It was weird waiting for the boat with a bunch of identical Night Elf ladies.
Personally, I used the spot on that one bridge in Shatt (jumping off the middle of the north side of the one that goes relatively east-ish, IIRC–and you do have to jump, not step).
It doesn’t help that people are regularly doing full-clears of BB NPCs for Bloodsail rep. I really wish they’d pull the rep off the Auctioneers and Bankers, at least.
Besides the aforementioned “pressing X,” you can also angle your camera straight down and press both mouse buttons.
Thanks, SFG!
Quasi
I’ll take my achievements where and when I can get them.
One thing, though:
That’s casual? Goddamn. I want to join in raiding, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to keep up with a hardcore guild.
That was me - sorry didn’t mean to imply that you had this ability Quasi it was written as ‘note to self’ as in I did this more than once on my pally and felt like an eedjit because of it.
I’ll take that cookie!
Seriously, I’m interested in other people’s guild drama right now. My guild isn’t exactly having drama, but there’s a lot of frustration because we can’t seem to get enough people to field a full 25-man team. We recruit a couple, but they leave because we’re forced to do 10 mans now and they get impatient. So unless we can recruit a bunch of people at once (we’re trying to absorb another guild, but that’s got its own problems) then we’re kind of stuck. And our guild used to be #1 on the server in BC days, so it’s a little frustrating to have come down like this. A lot of us really want to get going with hardcore raiding again, but we can’t figure out how to get people in the door because the current #1 guild (which is…shall we say…significantly more immature in its culture than ours) keeps glomming up every promising applicant.
Not that I want to scare you away from raiding, since it can be a lot of fun, but when I was raiding ‘hardcore’ (back in vanilla) we had 5 hours raids 4-5 times a week, even then there were guilds who were worse.
It’s hard for me to identify with the raiding guild stories. In Burning Dog, we were at a point early in the summer where we could almost field 10-man raid groups, but usually ended up pulling in two or three pug players. Then several people left Wow for one issue or another, and at least one person joined a guild that did more raiding, so we’re back to waiting for more folks to reach 80 again before we can do even casual guild raiding. But hope springs eternal and we’ve got several good guildies levelling quickly, so who knows.
We’re not hardcore (really), 4days/week 4.5hours/day. That’s just raiding, mind you :p, you’re expected to bring your own consumables, and pay your repair bills.
I’ve mostly withdrawn from it. Our calmest officer vanished for several months, and the stress puppy in his place gets under my skin (if you’re that easily frustrated why are you in a progession guild?). That and I don’t like to raid during football games :D.
Casual is anyone who play less than you do, hardcore is anyone who play more. I’ve been called both in a five minute interval