Soooo… after waiting in vain nearly an hour for the cheese to spawn for the cooking daily, I got bored and quaffed an Underbelly Elixir. Here is the end result.
Bleah. This has happened to me, apparently:
Guess I’ll be checking back and not playing in the meantime. Boo.
Glad they got that G4/G5 issue patched for you, Tom!
I may have spoken too soon - was able to get into the character screen but not actually into the game this morning. I’ll try again without a bunch of other stuff open when i get home from work.
Woo! Devastate is awesome. In case you didn’t notice, it completely replaces Sunder Armor–you can pull that off your bars. Going forward, your priority should pretty much be Shield Slam > Revenge > Devastate on any single target. If you’re trying to stack sunders and you’re not worried about threat, you might even want to put Devastate at #1 until you’re up to five.
Doh! I was thinking use sunder to get teh stack up then use devastate. I hadn’t made the connection that devastate adds a sunder. No Wow for me this weekend, away visiting my parents …
Yup, Devastate is pretty much just Sunder Armor *plus *damage.
Well, I finally got brave enough to try tanking on my paladin last night. I mentioned that I was trying to get up the courage to do it, and a couple of friends (amazing raid healer and amazing boomkin) agreed to go along with me and point and laugh :). We picked up one more from the guild (amazing hunter–all these people are ICC geared, and I’ve still got blues in my tank set) and we joined the queue to grab one more random person. Got a rogue (also ICC geared). Eep!
Eep x 2: we pulled Culling of Stratholme! For my first tanking experience ever. “You’ll be fine,” says my friend the healer.
And so we set off. And damned if I wasn’t fine. I don’t take much credit for it, though–things were going down so fast to the onslaught of DPS that I really didn’t have to do very much. Healer friend assures me that I’m not that hard to heal: “A little spikey, but that’s to be expected.” So we actually made it through and got the drake (nobody needed it, but it was nice to beat the timer). I thanked my friends for making me look good, and they headed off to do the guild AQ40 run.
So I figured, okay, I’ll try it again. On my own this time. I joined the queue, and two seconds later I had a group. Eep!
We got Drak’tharon Keep. I immediately told my new team that I was brand new at this and asked them to be patient–they said they would. They also asked me if we could try the “Better off Dred” achievement. I said, “Uh…sure. We can try. But like I said, I’m new, so no promises if we fail.” They were fine with that.
First pull–I forgot to put my seal up. Sigh. Looking good! I apologized, put it up. Second pull–I have no idea what I did, but my entire first bar in Bartender (you know, the one with all the abilities I use often?) disappeared, and I couldn’t get it back! I stood there like an idiot while my team killed the mobs. I told them what happened, they offered a couple of suggestions but nothing worked. So I logged, turned off Bartender, and we started again.
The rest of the run went okay–and we actually did get Better off Dred! I was pleased to be able to help them, and they were very appreciative. “Hey,” they said, “would you mind helping us with one more?”
“Uh…sure. Which one?”
“Abuse the Ooze.”
“Uh…sure,” I said, thinking that was the one in Gundrak, with Ek.
Next thing I know, we’re in Halls of Stone. I hate Halls of Stone. I suck at that gauntlet encounter on my raid geared DK tank. And here’s my little noob paladin? “Uh…guys…I’m not sure I can do this,” I tell them.
“You’ll be fine!” they assure me.
I logged again, this time completely quitting WoW and restarting, and that fixed Bartender. So off we set, me with great trepidation.
We killed the gauntlet (I sucked–I kept running out of mana. I thought paladin tanks didn’t run out of mana if they kept Divine Plea up) but we got it down. Off to the achievement.
Actually, it was quite easy. All I had to do was hold on to the boss while they killed the mobs. I was even able to help them (they didn’t realize that you had to let the oozes combine, so they were killing them as soon as they spawned). We got the achievement, and they were so happy and grateful. So was I–I thanked them for being patient with me and putting up with my learning curve, and they assured me that I’d done fine and that they could tell I’d tanked before.
So my first two tanking attempts ever went…pretty okay, all things considered. I’m looking forward to trying it again. I need to figure out what’s up with the mana issue, though. Any ideas? I was using Divine Plea whenever it was up, and I switched to judging Wisdom instead of Light which helped some, but I still had to use mana pots a couple of times.
Grats! Do you have 2 points in Spiritual Attunement? Plus you don’t have to keep casting Divine Plea it is refreshed on melee hit so it should stay up unless there is a long wait between trash pulls. I use Class Timers to keep an eye on the buff.
The warlock trainer game lockup I mentioned above? It happened to me with the warlock trainer in Goldshire, in addition to the one in Northshire. It appears it may be somehow related to the fact that, until level 10, the game auto-accepts every quest you click on and auto-adds new skills to your action bars (part of the new “beginner-friendly” features added in the previous patch). So since it’s the trainers that are locking me up — I can get as far as clicking the “Train” button on a new ability — I’m entertaining a theory that the addon causing the problem is my action bar modifier, Dominos in my case. I’ll try disabling it before I train again at lvl 6 and see what happens.
Well, you already know that I popped my raid cherry with BDL last Monday. Last night I finally had my first go at the Random Dungeon Finder on my main, Eilyssana 
I befriended a lvl 80 druid a couple weeks ago who had been away from the game for a while, and I bumped into her again last night. She persuaded me to come run randoms with her and her boyfriend. We couldn’t do heroics, since her boyfriend’s shadow priest was only lvl 78, so we did normals, which was fine with me - I’d actually prefer to familiarize myself with the dungeons on normal difficulty first, before running them in Heroic mode. I ended up running four randoms with them. It went like this: Halls of Stone, Gundrak, Halls of Stone, Gundrak.
We did well - not a single death in any of the runs. We had a different tank on every run; the tank on the second HoS run was a gnome DK, and after a few fights I had to ask him to mark himself because I kept losing track of him, what with the huge corpses on the ground - he’d take off for the next fight and I wouldn’t see which direction he went. After each run we invited everybody to continue with our core group of three, but the only one who stuck with us for more than one random was a DPS warrior who did the last two dungeons with us. Being lvl 80, I did have a few problems with occasionally pulling aggro from the tanks, who were all lvl 76-78, though since I’m melee DPS and I was always right on the other side of the mobs from the tank, that wasn’t a big issue. My druid friend, though, also lvl 80, several times pulled mobs off the tank with healing aggro. But I was proud of myself: I spotted this immediately every time it happened and used Hand of Reckoning (a pally’s “Hey you! Attack ME!” ability) to pull the mob back to the dogpile.
Question about the Emblems you get for running randoms (Triumph, in this case): Apparently, you only get them for the first random? We downed every boss in both dungeons, but I still only had the 2 Triumphs at the end. I assume it’s the same with Frosts on Heroics? How is that supposed to speed things up? Two Emblems/day means several months to accumulate gear, if you’re just running randoms and not raiding (Keliraeda had 7 Triumphs after Naxx on Monday).
Yep, for normals you get two Triumphs at the end, and for heroics you get two Frosts, but only for the first random of the day. If you want more Triumphs, you’ll need to run random heroics (where you get a Triumph for each boss plus two more at the end after the first one you get Frosts for).
Nicely done, winterhawk11!
This is my FAVORITE HATE FEATURE. No, you fucking game, ***I ***will decide what I put on my bars and where. Don’t you fucking put that shit down there, which means that I have to UNLOCK my bars to drag it to where I actually want it. UGH.
<3 Congratulations: You are awesome.
It’s supposed to be that way. Frost badge gear is intended to be reserved mainly for people who do the hardest content. (Same applies to whatever the current top tier is.) Heck, in previous tiers, you had absolutely no way to get *any *of the top badges without running that raid.
Other topic: I also played my troll fire mage (now lvl 23) a bit last night, and spent waaaaay too long in Stonetalon Peak. I’ve mentioned that I like using a leveling guide addon called “TourGuide” … every now and then I start to think whoever wrote the guide must have played a paladin and had no idea of the limitations of low-level casters. The particular guide I was using last night was “Stonetalon Mountains: Levels 23-25”, indicating that this section of the guide should get me from level 23 to level 25. So still being only 30% of the way through the guide, when a character using the guide can be expected to still be level 23, the guide was sending me against level 25 mobs that travel in pairs. Mobs that also happen to be highly magic-resistant (the Sons of Cenarius and their Treant Allies), with other nearby mobs (the Daughters of Cenarius) who have, to my surprise, the ability to dispel magic (“Hey, where’d my Arcane Intellect/Frost Armor/Mana Shield go?”).
The strategy I came up with for handling the Sons of Cenarius was to sheep the Son, and then try to burn his treant down. You would think a freakin’ tree would be vulnerable to fire, but nooooooo… (I tried Frost and Arcane spells too, but they weren’t any better). On top of that, I had Polymorph “miss” on the same Son of Cenarius three consecutive times, which meant I had to run like hell every time to get out of combat (no mean feat when there are hostile cats and slimes all over the place). So assuming Polymorph worked, and every spell I cast actually hit, I had barely enough mana to take down both mobs. More than once I was forced to pop a fresh Mana Shield and stand there getting beat on while channeling Evocation to get back enough mana to cast the last couple spells I needed to kill the mob …
I finally finished the quest though, and without dying, which was truly amazing (and a testament to my Mad Skillz™). What’s puzzling me, though, is on this mage I can’t seem to buy a critical hit with a Fire spell. Seriously, he’s a Fire mage, but he’s getting more crits with his opening Frostbolt than he is with his Fireballs. And the few Fire spell crits he gets always seem to come when the mob is down to 50 or so HPs. Golly geez, that 209 damage crit was sure handy there :rolleyes:
Nice job! As far as mana - do you have Blessing of Sanctuary on yourself? Between Blessing of Sanctuary, Divine Plea, Spiritual Attunement and (if needed) Judgement of the Wise, you shouldn’t have mana problems. I guess you could use Seal of Wisdom instead of Corruption; that would gimp your threat a bit and do less damage but increase your mana regen.
Congrats! Are you interested in doing heroics on Kel? I’m sure we could get some BDL’ers to run a few with you. Also, if you or other DPS start pulling aggro from tank, in addition to Hand of Reckoning don’t forget your Hand of Salvation. It drops the target’s threat by 30% over 10 seconds and as an added bonus, won’t put the mob directly on you (unless you have the second highest threat).
Didn’t get to play last night so I’m looking forward to getting on this evening! I’m in the mood for an ICC pug if I can find one.
To make sure I understand you: If I run Heroics and kill all the bosses, I’ll end up with a small pile of Triumphs, plus 2 Frosts? That makes a bit more sense then. But this would seem to indicate that, prior to the RDF, there were no emblems at all awarded for killing bosses on Normal difficulty?
I know I had BoS up, and Divine Plea. I think I have Spiritual Attunement, but the Armory is down right now (at least it is for several characters on my realm, who come up as “don’t exist”) so I can’t check. I used what’s supposed to be the most popular prot paladin build, though, so I’m sure I do.
I don’t think I want to gimp my seal, since I have the libram that takes advantage of it. I think I just have to learn to manage my abilities better.
Correct. You ran normal dungeons to complete quests and get gear that drops off the bosses.
1.) IMO, as a low-level Mage, that’s really how you should be handling any group of two or more enemies when you’re solo: sheep one.
2.) How attached are you to leveling as Fire? If you’re not particularly dedicated to the tree, I’d strongly recommend switching to Frost. It’s survivability (especially in the form of snares at lower levels) makes leveling a lot easier.
1.) You get two Emblem of Frost for the first random Heroic you complete on any day. Further random Heroics after that award two extra Triumphs. So, yes, doing a bunch of them will get you two Frost plus a bunch of Triumph.
2.) Prior to the random LFG, you only got the badge dropped by each boss on Heroic–no bonus at the end, and no badges at all for normal. And the bosses only dropped Heroism badges early on, until they instituted the policy of making everything drop the previous tier’s badges.
Yes, this is mostly correct.
For normal Northrend dungeons, you get 2 Triumph badges for the first random of the day, and no badges from killing any of the other bosses. After the first random, you get no badges period.
For heroic dungeons, you get 2 Frost badges for the first random, and one Triumph badge per boss. For each subsequent random the same day, you get one Triumph badge per boss, plus two more from the last boss (total of three Triumph badges from last boss).
So you can only get a maximum of two Frost badges from random heroics, or two Triumph badges from random Northrend normal dungeons, per day. To get more Frost badges, you have to either:
- Run the raid weekly (from which you get five Frost and five Triumph)
- Run ICC raids (two Frost badges per boss from 10 and 25 man version, plus one more from one trash mob leading up to Dreamwalker)
- Do the ICC raid weekly (from which you get five Frost and five Triumph)
So the maximum number of Frost badges you can get in a week, assuming that you clear ICC on both 10 and 25 man, do the raid weekly, finish the ICC raid quest, and do a random heroic every day, is (if my math is correct) 84.
IceHUD’s been updated! About to try it now.
And the latest client patch got flagged as Malware by my AVG. I assumed it was a false positive and allowed it anyway, but I’m gonna be pissed if something slipped through while I was patching!