Okay, I’ve run the new IC dungeons but haven’t been paying that much attention – what is the Battered Hilt that people keep talking about?
It’s a random drop from the three dungeons - it’s a quest item that starts a quest that gives a level 250-something weapon as a reward.
I’ve seen it drop once, so far (and lost the roll, dammit).
It’s an item that starts a quest chain that can drop from pretty much any mob in the heroic version of the ICC dungeons.
The quest chain include lots of cool rp and the final reward is an epic ilvl 251 weapon, the best anyone is going to get without raiding ICC10/25.
Specifically, it starts this quest chain.
I wouldn’t mind getting it myself, you can trade the completed sword for a pretty badass Feral Druid mace.
And to elaborate, it is not Bind-On-Pickup (although I’m pretty sure the same character can’t do the quest chain more than once). So, you pretty much have to win the roll against 4 other rollers every time, even if they already won the drop before, because they can be sold for a pretty penny. Hence the pretty much constant “WTB Battered Hilt” spam in /Trade.
Somewhat annoying, and I really hope Blizz considers making the item BoP (and therefore worthless to folks that already won one) or BoA (so you can give it to the alt you want to do the quest chain, but can’t sell it).
Interesting. Is there a reward for any potential class/role? In other words something a hypothetical Holy Priest might want?
This is the only caster mace you can get out of the deal. Don’t know if it’s what a Holy Priest wants.
+Spirit would be nice, but I think this would do fine. Nice to see both crit and haste, most items have one or the other.
I wonder if you can get the druid mace as a Death Knight, or if they force to you take one of the swords. Cause that mace is way better as a tanking two-hander than any of the sword options.
Yeah, I’m afraid that if your class can use a sword, you must take one of the sword options. Lore-wise, it doesn’t make sense for you to go through the arduous process of forging this semi-legendary sword, only to go, “Hey, I’ll trade you for that mace.”
ETA: Quel’Delar was also not designed to be a tanking weapon, it’s meant for DPS. Might of the Faithful is an acceptable DK tank sword, it seems, but that’s about it. It’s mainly intended for Ret Pallies.
On a completely different note, I may not be online for a bit…I’ve been experiencing an infuriating amount of disconnects, and I have tried everything I could on my end to resolve it. It seems like I can connect alright in the mornings, though being in any of the cities has nightmarish lag. At night, however, I can barely log in and type a sentence before I DC. 
I can only assume this is a server traffic issue, and by the looks of the WoW forums, tons of people are having the same problem. Alas! May have to wait till all the kiddos go back to school to be able to play again…
Well, I used the random dungeon groupfinder (nonheroic) on my 80 rogue.
Got to do the Pit of Saron (et al) all the way to the rescue by airship ending. Got two epics, thanks to a generous and patient group. (Pants, Axe.)
When did Rogues get to use axes? (It used to be rogues could use maces, hunters could use axes…)
Anywho, someone had a DPS meter running, and it showed I had only a thousand DPS, while all the others (except for the priest. Heh) hd 2K. I feel so embarassed.
Patch 3.2, IIRC.
Patch 3.2.
Supposedly, Recount isn’t working properly in cross-server groups. Apparently some of the information it uses to track damage isn’t getting sent to everyone, so if you have 5 people using Recount in the group you’ll get 5 different sets of numbers. I’ve yet to see facts, though, only conclusions.
Random dungeon “fun”: Last night, my husband is playing his Resto shaman and gets into a HCoS group. It’s a group in progress; they’ve stopped shortly before the run down the hall and want to do the “kill masses of undead in a short amount of time” achievement. My husband says he likes the DPS output he’s seen and thinks it should be do-able.
Yeah. This turns into “tank charges, doesn’t do aggro-causing stuff, takes massive amounts of damage, needs major healing now, healer gets all the aggro.” No one tries to help the healer get stuff off him. He pops, soon dies again, no achievement because of massive group failure.
I didn’t ask all the details, but they’re at the last boss and wipe because the RNG picks the healer to sleep repeatedly, and Tremor Totem’s ticks are poorly timed to wake him up in time to save the tank. (I suspect the tank had some health/defense/whatever deficiencies.) Tank and a DPS leave. They get another DPS but are waiting on a tank. He asks if I want to go. New DPS goes “WTF? you had two leave on the last boss?!” My husband insists it wasn’t his healing that did it, and the other two members don’t argue that. Finally he asks me if I want to bring my tank in, and I say sure. It takes longer to get there than it does to finish the boss. Easy-peasy, yawn.
I also did the “Instructor Razuvius Must Die” raid quest with my guild last night. We had some kind of issue with the tanks picking up the assistants (one stayed uncharmed for a bit) and a few DPS died right off the bat, but it was easy other than that.
So what return do the new raid quests give anyway? Just 2 frosts, or more than that?
:mad:
May still be a better tank-weapon option than the 232 I’m using now, but still.
Raid quests are a once-a-week thing - you get 5 Frost and 5 Triumph emblems for completion.
Clarification: There’s a new raid boss every week, changed out on Tuesday. You can do the quest on any given character only once in that week.
Well, it *would *be possible, if it were only a coincidence, or if that were a Rare mob version of the ones in the area who had that staff as one of its possible drops.
It really is massively helpful. 
Also, make sure that you disable the new overlapping nameplates option. It’s towards the bottom of the Names section of your Interface options, above the two column of checkboxes for the types of nameplates you want to display, and it’s something like, “Allow nameplates to overlap when there’s a metric fuckload of mobs.” (Not those exact words, obviously.) Make sure that’s disabled, or the nameplates will sometimes get hidden behind each other.
Well hey, that’s a really cool idea. I always forget about the PTR.
I didn’t know Druids could use 2H Maces (or any 2H weapon that had a 1H version–i.e., a Staff or a Polearm would be doable, but not a 2H Axe, Sword, or Mace). Woo, I learned something today!
Have you seen the suggestion forum lately? Positively flooded with requests to make the hilt anything but BoE. If they didn’t change it right after the patch went live, I doubt they’ll ever change it. Shitty binding choice on their part, IMO (especially given the retarded new system of never allowing people to roll Need on upgrades below their native armor class–you’d think that if they want to reserve Cloth for squishies, they could at least reserve the new weapon for people who will actually use it), but that’s how it goes.
Have you tried actually posting to the tech support forum, the one at the official WoW forums? IIRC **Mister Rik **had been having massive lag problems since the last patch, and it turned out to be a Mac-related issue that he was able to fix by rolling back part of his update to the previous version.
1.) Previously, DPS meters counted on using custom in-game chat channels to communicate information. Those channels can’t be used in cross-realm groups, so some of the data is getting lost. The problem is especially noticeable between ranged and melee DPS, who are usually outside of the radius where their combat logs will pick up each others’ damage. A meter is currently only guaranteed to be accurate for the person linking it.
2.) 1k is pretty low, but at least you were in the regular version of the instance. 
Running more dungeons will help you gear up, both with gear from the bosses and, better, Triumph badges. You can also check online resources to see if there’s any way you can tweak your spec or ability rotation (“rotation” is used pretty loosely these days–for most classes, it’s more of a fall-through priority list, where you use the highest-priority ability that’s currently off cooldown). Elitist Jerks is a truly amazing site full of theorycrafters, but it’s geared toward hardcore raiders, so just trying to slog through threads or guides can be pretty intimidating. WoWPopular shows what builds are found the most often for each class–it’s not always going to tell you what’s best for you, but if there’s a talent that no one else takes, that can be a good indication that you might want to avoid it, too. Cookie cutter builds get to be that popular for a reason, after all. WoWWiki isn’t always 100% up to date, but they can sometimes have articles with good suggestions. WoW Insider has a column for each class and will often link to outside blogs that are good class resources. And a good old fasioned Google search is never a bad idea, either.
ETA:
Also a bit over 30g, if I remember the total correctly.
Oh, definitely. 1H and 2H Maces both. I used maces (and polearms) frequently while leveling, since in classic they’ve got better stats for melee than staves. I’ve got a 200-level 1H caster mace in the bank I should probably vendor, since the staves I find have just been so much better.