I would go with the suggestions of the other posters as well. Do battlegrounds and Wintergrasp and you can get some pretty decent gear. After dual specs became available a few months back I had a holy pally with max honor and a metric ton of the Wintergrasp shards. I dual specced ret and used up all my honor points/marks/etc and added it to a few dps pieces I had sitting in my bank and I made a mostly PvP set of ret gear. I think the only money I spent on it was to buy gems to complete it. Even though it was mostly PvP gear I was still doing a big chunk of damage in PvE situations.
PvP is good because you have such a hectic schedule you may not have time to sit for very long and join a raid/heroic. I have been in a similar situation myself, that being my wife and I just had our 2nd daughter and we were up and about constantly. I left a raiding guild for a more casual environment, but I still loved to go into BGs because there are no repair bills, you can take your aggression out on anyone who crosses your path, and you can play and leave anytime you want without getting yelled at by your group.
If you ever want ideas for your character builds, I’m sure everyone here will be glad to help.
Neglected to reply to this other stuff in SFG’s earlier post:
I didn’t, I’m afraid. But I check the AH frequently, just in case there’s an upgrade there, and I have yet to find one (okay, there’s a purple DPS plate helm that’s better than the Spiked Titansteel Helm I’ve got right now, but it usually has an asking price of 4000g+, which I can’t afford ATM). Unless there are some quest rewards in Icecrown that would be major upgrades for me (Icecrown being the one NR zone I haven’t quested in yet, aside from a small handful of Argent Crusade quests from that outpost near Dalaran), or else some BS crafted DPS PvE gear that, if it exists, apparently nobody actually ever makes and sells, I’ve gotten the impression that the only upgrade paths from where I’m at are to do BGs or heroics/raids.
Re: the bolded bit - I assume you meant PVP there, not DPS?
D’oh! Forgot about those. While one of my toons didn’t get them until the last day, most of my other toons ended up with multiple stacks, which I just ended up tossing. At least they have some function aside from the achievement, even if it is just cosmetic. I do wish, though, that the resulting sparkle was centered on the toon’s mouth instead of the nose. I did notice that, if one of my druids used a toothpick while in cat or bear form, the sparkle did come out of their mouth.
I’ve heard this mentioned before. How exactly do you reserve a name? Make a toon with that name and then buy a race change later?
Regarding doing BGs: Is there any point in doing Warsong Gulch at lvl 80? That’s the only BG I’ve ever entered (exactly twice - once on this paladin and once on my old tauren hunter), so I’m think that since I’m at least a tiny bit familiar with that one it might be a good place to start trying to learn some PvP skills.
I did witness the following discussion on Krasus’ Landing earlier today - apparently some guy (looked like a ret pally) wanted to join a PUG, though I didn’t get there in time to hear what raid/dungeon the PUG was for, and the other guy seemed to be turning him down after doing a gear check:
PUG Guy: PvP gear?
Guy Who Wants to Join: Yeah, I just respecced from prot and haven’t assembled a PvE DPS set yet. But I’m experienced and I know the fights.
PUG Guy: Well, I’m sorry, this isn’t PvP.
Is PUG Guy’s attitude common, or was he just being a bonehead? I looked at the guy’s gear and he was in full lvl 80 purples, even if it was PvP gear.
Oh, when I made Hexpot last night … I signed her in, sat through the blood elf intro, and then, before I could even run up to the very first questgiver, here came a nelf DK with his PvP flag flying. “Oh for the love of Og,” I thought, “this guy’s gonna whack all the questgivers before I can even get my shoes tied!” :mad: I’ll give the guy some credit, though. He didn’t attack anybody but the guards. He ran into the smaller building to the left of the Sunspire, and since I had targeted him I could see what he was targeting. He targeted each of the vendors in there, and even targeted the various cats, but didn’t actually attack any of them. He seemed to be careful not to aggro anybody but guards. He killed all the guards and then ran off again.
Who knows, maybe he saw my lvl 1 toon materialize just as he arrived and decided not to be a total dick 
Yes and no. You do make a toon with the name, but you don’t have to buy a race change; just make a new toon of the appropriate race after deleting the old placeholder. In the time it takes for you delete the old toon and make the new one, it’s very highly unlikely that someone will grab that particular name.
There’s lots of DPS plate in heroics.
Also, do WG. It’s easy, you get stonekeeper shards from weekly quests, WG marks and honor.
My computer…she eez dead!
As a doornail. As Jacob Marley. As Larry Craig’s political career.
I’m playing a Big Fish hidden object game and…POOF! Darkness. Nothing. I reboot and…nothing. And the monitor’s acting like it’s getting no signal at all.
Grrr…
Got the Exalted Argent Champion of the Horde achievement on my priest, which gives the Crusader title and unlocks Argent Crusade dailies at the Tournament. I want that bridle for my Argent Gruntling to use, so he can have his very own pony!
Hyper teenage boy guildie set up a VoA run tonight. We went straight to Koralon, wiped once, then as we were trying again… “instance will be resetting.” WTF. Teenage boy didn’t check the GD time for WG reset. I was pissed, since I’d blown two of my four remaining fish feasts, and I’m one of maybe 3-4 people who ever bring fish feasts to our raids.
So I wrote up a macro recently and it made me feel kind of clever, so I figured I’d share it. It’s mostly for the casuals and newbies; I expect the hardcore here will have already figured this out or have their own requirements for blowing cooldowns.
If you have trinkets with a Use ability that never actually see use, like if you forget to activate them, forget they’re there altogether, or you just don’t want to bother with worrying about them, you can make a quick macro that automates the trinket usage and gives you a little extra oomph.
Figure out what ability you frequently use to open fights. For Warriors it might be Charge, for Paladins Hand of Reckoning, Feral Druids Pounce, etc. Since I wrote this for my Druid, I chose to link it to Pounce.
/cast Pounce
/use 13
Then just stick it in the action bar slot you usually use for that action. When you go to use it, it’ll also activate the top trinket. If you want to activate the bottom, /use 14. If you prefer, you can instead link the trinket to whatever ability you use for a panic button if you want to save it for emergencies.
That macro’s not what made me feel clever, though. My Druid has two trinkets with Use abilities: one boosts attack power by 304 for 20 seconds, the other boosts attack power by 280 for 20 seconds, and both have a 2 minute cooldown. I want them running as often as possible, since that’s just a straight damage boost, but since they’re the same effect I can’t stack them. So I now have:
/cast Pounce
/castsequence reset=120 13, 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
The first time I use this, it fires the first trinket along with Pounce, giving me 304 AP for 20 seconds, which is usually all I need for one fight. When I go to the next enemy and hit Pounce again, it fires the second trinket for 280 AP. Granted, after that I can’t use any more Trinket Juice for another 80 seconds (hence the third line, to get rid of annoying error messages). If by some chance I don’t have any targets for a full 2 minutes, I know both trinkets will have fully recharged and the macro resets to give me the use of the strong trinket again.
(I actually have more in the macro than that; I set it up so hitting the macro by itself will Pounce, but hitting it +Shift will give me Ravage, which is another good opening attack. Saves me a lot of space on the button bar by folding them into one macro. But that wasn’t the cool part.)
Also, crap, that sucks, jayjay.
On the other hand, when my computer blew up a couple months ago I used it as an excuse to get a shiny new powerful comp. It can be a blessing in disguise.
Holy crap this Cranius guy makes some great storytelling WoW music videos!
Here’s one done with a song called “Wrought” by a Seattle band called Peratus:
And I don’t think I previously posted this chuckle-worthy video of one of his original songs, “Big Blue Dress”:
(I love those dancing gnome backup singers!)
Also, how exactly do you report somebody for griefing? My draenei mage was in the Stormwind AH trying to buy a quest item (a Hillman’s Cloak for the Southshore quest where the guy wants to make you a yeti-fur cloak), and again a few minutes later to buy some tailoring mats. And this was made exceedingly difficult by the Horde player who made it to the AH. He’d AoE one-shot all the auctioneers, and then of course be taken down immediately by the crowd of 80s. Then, apparently, he’d run back to his corpse, and then stand as a ghost and wait for the auctioneers to respawn, whereupon he’d click the “Resurrect now?” but, hit his AoE again, and re-kill the auctioneers before he was whacked again. He did this three times before I gave up and went to Ironforge. (Of course, it would have helped if the braindead auctioneers didn’t feel the need to try to attack the guy themselves - that’s what the guards are for, morons!)
I wanted to report him (actually, there may have been two of them taking turns), but I realized I don’t know how to do that.
Click the “?” icon at the bottom of your screen, pick the “Report Issue” button at the bottom, type up the incident.
It depends on what grade of PVP gear it was, but for the most part the PUG guy was in the right. A set of PVP purples is, for most classes and scenarios, inferior for raiding purposes to even a set of level 80 blues, because the PVP gear spends so much of its item budget on stamina and resilience, and tends to lack key stats like hit. But, more importantly, your average person who’s wearing ONLY honor-obtainable PVP gear probably can’t be trusted to even find a PVE instance, much less do anything inside of it. Ever since Battlegrounds started giving rewards even for failure, quite a lot of people fail their way to a set of purples, just because they’re purple.
After Trick-or-Treating last week, I had left my paladin at The Sepulchre in Silverpine for no real reason. He’s the toon I only play once a week for the BDL dungeon runs. Well the other day I had an idea.
I’ve been trying to get the Black Tabby Cat vanity pet for a long time for my priest, but hauling myself to Silverpine was a pain since looking for the rare spawn that sometimes dropped it was usually a waste of time – most of the time the mob is not there; and the few times it was I was 0/6 for getting the drop.
But since I don’t use my Pally during the week, I can easily park him in Silverpine and just check on him periodically for the rare mob. This morning before worked I logged in, the mob was there, dropped the cat, and I mailed him off to my priest! That was easy!
I’ll probably continue to farm the tabby with my paladin during the week; I think they sell for 500-600 gold since they are not available to Alliance toons except through the neutral AH.
Groooooooan. That’s awesome. (I currently have Worgenlefay waiting for Cataclysm. I think she’s gonna be a Druid. :D)
IMO, it can’t hurt. You might find a quest item you missed, or you might find out the materials for a BS-made item you could use (that would be much cheaper to buy the mats and have the combine done), or you could find that there’s the perfect item in a not-too-hard dungeon or Heroic.
:smack: Yes. Yes I did. Congratulations on being able to decode Megan-has-typed-the-wrong-damn-word speak. You have been awarded this shiny red face of my embarassment. :o
Absolutely! The only downside to WG is that it’s capped at 10 players per side, so you tend to earn HKs/honor more slowly.
It depends on what they were PUGing. If it was Naxx10, PvP gear isn’t that big a deal. If it was TotGC25, no way in hell would I let somebody in PvP gear through the door. Other raids will fall somewhere in between. Generally, PvP gear makes good entry-level DPS gear, but you will get better performance out of Heroic gear (often even blues), especially stuff from ToC5 and H-ToC5. With a PUG, certainly, restrictions are a little bit more lax, but if a guildmate tried to get in on a run with just PvP gear, that would say to me, “I’m perfectly willing to have everybody else carry me, because I’m too lazy to do Heroics so that I can contribute to the group.”
I have longstanding plans to dress myself up all purdy and go whack uber-nub area guards with fish. Sadly, I have yet to actualize this dream.
DO NOT WANT! 
Hope you can afford a new one (or a troubleshoot to replace whatever specifically died).
Fancy!
I used to be this person. Insist that at least some of the mats are supplied by your guild. If people don’t want to level Cooking, that’s fine, but Fishing is insanely easy to level these days, since you can do it anywhere. There’s no excuse for people to not help with farming the mats (or buying them off the AH if they’re particularly lazy).
That’s an excellent idea! Side note to any people just getting into raiding: make sure you get rid of this macro when you’re in a raid, because there will almost always be specific times when you should be blowing your CDs, and you definitely don’t want to be blasting out extra DPS when then tank is trying to establish initial aggro.
I hate to break it to you, but this apparently isn’t considered griefing, even on a PvE server. (Found that out the hard way when I tried to report someone for repeatedly killing all the NPCs in BB, including the Auctioneers. IMO the NPCs with functions shouldn’t get killed along with the guards because the Bloodsail rep they give is so shitty, but apparently Blizz doesn’t give a fuck.)
This is actually my Super Sekkrit Income Method. I have a DK parked right inside the central building (you can target all three spawn points from there). I try to log into her at least once per day, hit a macro to target the Spellscribe, and then I kill it if it’s up. If I get a cat, it’s muled back to the Alliance side and sold for cashy monies. Anything else that drops gets sold Horde-side, and when I have some cash built up, I spend it on Horde pets (snakes, dragonhawks, cockroaches, and prairie dogs), then mule those over to the Alliance side, too, and sell them for an obscene markup.
I’m so happy! 
My guildmaster took me aside and helped me with a few things, including suggesting I grab the Conquest-badge legs and not belt first. And made me some gear. And gave me gems.
I’m looking to change my spec slightly to something like this New Build.
In this build, I avoid Aimed Shot, but take Focused Aim and drop two points in Concussive Barrage to get into future tiers. I’m avoiding Imp. Arcane Shot, so I need this. It’s not very helpful, but it works. I also add Trueshot Aura. I do use Silencing Shot, so I keep it. Right now, I’m all the way up to Imp. Aspect of the Monkey and Aspect Mastery, which I’m loathe to drop, but which just aren’t as god as my other options. I am planning to drop *Arcane Shot *out of my rotation entirely.
The shot rotation will be:
Serpent Sting, Chimaera Shot, Silencing Shot, Steady Shot(1), Steady Shot(2), Steady Shot(3), Chimaera Shot(by now off cooldown). Then add in Kill Shot when useable and Silencing Shot whenever it comes off cooldown.
Basically, comments? Questions?
It may be a while (for the computer, that is). I can’t even get it to boot enough to bring up F10 pre-boot options or (god forbid!) saved HD rollback. And I definitely can’t afford a new one at the moment, or probably to have this one looked at by a professional. I can websurf on supervenusfreak’s PC and the one here at work, but I can’t load WoW on either one (Dwight would have kittens and the IT department here would strangle me). I’m just going to go to Blizzard’s WoW site and suspend my account for now…no sense paying $15 a month not to play.
And when I do get a new one, it’s going to be a GOOD one…up-to-date (the one that died was seven years old) and with lots more power under the hood.
Yeah, it’s definitely a leveling or 5-man macro, not a raiding macro. I just realized I was missing out on trinketty goodness by “saving” the Use abilities for emergencies which never happened or by sticking to trinkets with only passive abilities.
I think, and I’m only guessing, the thought process behind having all NPCs be killable is that if you’re inconvenienced by someone going on a rampage, then it’s up to you (hopefully a group of players) to stop it yourself. That way you’ll have an Experiencesup[/sup] and the game will be that much more meaningful than it would otherwise be if you could totally ignore the player slaughtering guards while you conduct business.
It’s not a bad theory, and I’ve seen it used to good effect in other games. But while it may have worked for Booty Bay in classic WoW, when you could expect 60s to be going through Booty Bay often, the only people in BB these days are level 40s and level 80s. It’s not exactly fair to the lowbies, who couldn’t take down a single 80 if 50 of them got together.
Yeah, at the moment I tend to use my trinky (the other one is passive) for boss fights. I have the same issue with my gargoyle, which has a short enough cooldown that I really should be able to use it on trash as well as bosses, at least in instances like HoL or the Nexus where the bosses are pretty far apart.
Quasi! I keep forgetting to tell you–I took a look at Wolkie in the Armory, and he’s lookin’ good.
That blows.
I know **you **know, I just wanted to throw a reminder in for all the young up-and-comers.
Oh, that’s absolutely the point of world PvP. But IMO this kind of shit is still griefing, at least on a PvE server. Some NPCs (FMs, Auctioneers, Bankers) need to get scaled up so they aren’t such a complete faceroll for a lone 80.
Bingo. The official protocol for GMs on any server, PVP or not, is that if there is a problem with a player, and it has a PVP solution, it is up to you / the enemy faction to deal with it through PVP. This has some glaring holes, the goblin towns being a prime one (what if it’s your own faction killing the NPCs?) but it’s a necessary evil. The GMs would be inundated by people running to them for help with that Jerk Spawncamper if they didn’t do it.
The old PVP scoring system actually had a fix for this in the Dishonorable Kills penalties, which were brutal, but alas, that’s not a concept they’ve revived…
Reminder to Burning Dog Legion:
Wednesday night instance run, tonight, 8:30 pm. Dire Maul-West.
So far I only have Rillian, Mordrin, and Rumpole confirmed: I hope we can get a couple more guildies; it can be hard to find pugs for these old-world dungeons.