Well I did it lol.  I went elemental to help fill a gap we had in the guild for ranged casters.  I have been running heroics like a mad man over the last week to try and get ready for 25’s this week.  I really thought I was ready.  Man was I ever wrong or was I?

Let me start of with my stats so we are on a even footing for all this.    With self buffs no totems I am currently at 1855 bonus damage, 19.99% to crit, 338 haste rating,  226 casting mp5.  Let me say up front I had ZERO mana problems.  In fact the only time i drank was if I died.    So having lasting sustainable dps is not a problem.

The trinkets i am using are both proc based.  In this WWS shows both proc often enough to warrant keeping them.  I am looking to replace the haste one with another proc’ing spell power trinket.  WWS LINK

Patchwerk is a DPS race there is no way to pull agro it is all about how fast and how hard you can dps.    With the amount of lag experienced in the current 25 mans I tend to go for the wait for the CD rotation as opposed to putting in a lightning bolt every rotation.  It is normaly only about a half second wait for a CD if any.  I on the longer CD waits i do put in lighning bolts as to not be doing nothing.    I put out 2285 dps for the fight.

Having just recently changed to elemental spec I don’t feel like that is too bad.  However compared to my guildmates I am VERY low.  I don’t want to be a hinderance to the guild progression but I personally just feel very behind the 8 ball on this one.  I know elemental shaman are getting some nice buffs in the next patch but that does not change the fact we have some seriouse short comings in the raid environment we are in currently.

To start with my rant going to start with trash.  The trash dies SO fast i barely have time to drop totems then cast one rotation before the mob is dead.  As a elemental shaman my only AOE is a totem that i have to RUN up to mobs and drop a totem near them to do AOE damage.  Lucky for me I missed all the cleaves and whirlwinds the trash do so i didn’t get one shoted any.  Every other ranged dps class has the ability to AOE from range.  Hunters have volly(i know it is getting nerfed but they still have it) Mages have blizzard or flamestrike, Warlocks have sead of corruption, Druids have hurricane,  Shadow priest have mind sear.

I miss so much DPS time having to run up and drop a totem.  With the speed the trash dies by the time I get back into position to DPS the skull or first target is pretty much dead.  I feel completely gimp on trash.  My biggest loss of DPS comes on the 2,3,4th targets were there health is so low I don’t have time to do a proper rotation.  Should i just be spamming lightning bolt and ignoring my other spells on trash.  Going to have to mess around with it over the next few weeks to see how I do.  I also feel i am wasting GCDS using flame shock to much I need to find a reliable mod to track the dot so i can cast more Lightning bolts in its place.

So what would be a cool shaman AOE spell.  Druids already have the one that i would say best fits a shamans abilities in there hurricane.   In wrath of the lich king we are very fire based with lava lash, lava burst,  etc.  What about a Volcanoe type ability.  You could target were you want the volcanoe to apear it would burst up out of the ground and spew lava on surrounding targets for X amount of damage per tick.  I am just pulling stuff out of my but trying to comprehend why we don’t have a  ranged AOE.  All the AOE spells we have are either on a long CD or are a totem.

I need to do some more testing and also finish off my 4 piece tier 7 bonus to really get a complete fell for how I am doing compared to my guild mates.  Pretty much everyone in the raid last night had 2 pieces or more of tier 7 and are in full purples.  Were I am in Half purples half blues and only 1 piece tier 7.

So wish me luck and better dps in the future.  I did get 2 upgrades last night so we will see what kind of improvement they are.  Too bad they were purple to purple upgrades and not blue to purple upgrades.

I love the Dark Legacy comics.  Check them out.

Well after much waiting season 5 has finally arrived.    Let me just say this up front I am not a big pvp guy but i do like to arena.   They feel like little tiny chess matches.  Who is doing what who is it we are facing what are they going to do.  I find it  a lot of fun even if i loose lol.   If i could arena to get honor points i would.  I find the BG’s  completely biased to one side or the other.    From the alliance side i find the battle ground chat offensive and does absolutely no good for 95% of the BG’s i have been in.

OK back to arenas now that i got that little rant out of my system.  Currently 2v2 healers are a absolute JOKE.  If you are taking a healer into 2v2 plan on them getting nuked so hard they will want to cry home to mama.   I found this out the hard way lol.  We went 0 for the century with me playing resto.  A quick respec to enhancement and let the winning commence.   My set up is arms warrior and enhancement shaman.  We do great against clothy teams. Lock/priest , Mage/shaman, Mage/warrior.   We pretty much 2 shot any clothy we came up to.  The big difference is the druids warriors and Death knights.  They are a much harder challenge.  So we will see if season 5 just becomes a repeat of season 4 were druid warrior teams ruled the field or will death knights/paladins take the warriors place.  Only time will tell.

I am personly enjoy playing with my 2’s partner so we are going to tough it out together through the season and see how things progress as we get more and more pvp gear.

I am planning a 3’s and a 5’s team as well.   For 5’s planning on Warrior,ret paladin, DK, Priest , Shaman would be my ideal set up.  Use the DK to bring the opponent to us and nuke away .  For 3’s i am still up in the air with what i want to do.  Probably Warrior DK, shaman or Warrior paladin Shaman.  Updates on the other teams as the weeks contine

Now if you go to my armory don’t laugh to hard 90% of my losses came as me trying to be resto and not enhancement

Put together a kill video from our last naxx 10 man run enjoy.

Well i am nearing the end of my dailies WOOT.  This will be my last week I cant wait till it is all over with.  I am a shaman and a scribe.  I was looking at my last weeks worth of new inscriptions and this is what i have left to discover.  Sorry foul language coming after this list.

Minors:

• Glyph of Astral Recall
• Glyph of Renewed Life

Majors:

• Glyph of fire elemental totem
• Glyph of mana tide totem
• Glyph of elemental mastery
• Glyph of chain lightning
• Glyph of earth shock
• Glyph of Healing wave
• Glyph of lava

How fucked up is that ever single one of my last set of glyphs are all fucking shaman glyphs.  I don’t know if I am just that unlucky or if blizz did it on purpose but this is the first time i have looked at what i have left. I just got a bug up my butt and installed a mod that lists all the missing recipies and that is what it showed.  Sorry for the rant but this is just messed up.

My guild is in a unusual situation.  We have to many tanks and almost to many healers but we are lacking ranged dps.  It feels like almost every raid we make up the only ranged we have is one hunter or one warlock and the rest is all mele dps.  Not sure how this happened but it has happened.  we are still recruiting healers but we are in need of ranged dps baddly if we want to move onto harder 25man content.

sorry just a quick blurb thought it was weird

First off let me say I love cooking in wow.  It brings all kinds of great little buffs or just allows you to not have to buy food and water.  I do how ever have a few gripes with the new system.  It is better than the pure luck of getting the recipe you want when you want it but it is highly frustrating in the sense that it takes so long to do it.   I got all the bop recipes in BC in about a month.  To get all the northrend recipes it is going to take me twice that long.

The fault i find in this is that the recipes are bought with Dalaran cooking awards.  This is fine if you also didn’t have to use dalaran cooking awards to get northern spices to cook up endgame recipes and to also level your cooking.  if you happen to be a hard core raider then 10 food min a day sometimes isn’t enough.  Now you can make the lesser versions of the food but if you are banging up against hard content that sometimes isn’t enough.  Now i do understand the content is easy sauce right now i am talking about the content to come.

Next part of my rant EVERYTHING IS GREEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  i have been cooking a min of 10 per day and i am lucky to get one point in cooking this is just total bullshit.   I know i can make all the good recipes for my self but it is a completest part of me screaming for me to get to 450 but it just isn’t happening.

END RANT…….

Well spent the last 6 days in sunny florida on a working vaction.  Back in action tonight running 10 man naxx.  Post up the loots later on.

Wow naxx is alot of fun.  We went in expecting to wipe over and over on bosses.  In reality we had 2 one shots a couple two shots.  Heigen the unclean took a few trys to get learning his dance.  The biggest challenge we faced all night was Patchwork.  He hits like a truck the 3 healers we had it was pretty much all we could handle.  That is the idea with him he is designed as a gear check to see if you are ready for the rest of the instance.  The good news is we are!

We also cleared both the plague quarter, and the arachnid quarter.  Big grats to Drak for the guilds first T7 loot he out rolled my 92 with a 97 lol.  One other cool thing is we learned the safety dance as well

I didn’t go the night loot less tho got me a very nice set of boots.

Let me just start off by saying the new way to get reputation is really amazing.  This is one of the best things blizzard has done in wrath of the lich king.  Being able to put on what ever tabard you need to gain reputation with and go do ANY level 80 dungeon is so great.  For instance last night heroic halls of stone full clear.  I hit revered with wyrmrest accord but the others in the group were all grinding a different reputation.  There is no more of running steam vaults over and over and over just to get reputation.   This is a wonderfull change and i think will keep me running more dungeons than I ever did before since i dont have to find a group for a specific dungeon.

As of right now I feel really good about my shaman.  I have cleared what people call the hardest heroic in the game.  I still want to run every heroic not for gear but for reputation.

Well it finally happened.  Had about 4 1/2 days played to get from 70-80.  I dinged 80 on 11/24/08 and my guildies pretty much said go respec and lets run some heroics.  Did heroic Violet hold and even got the special accivement for 100% on the gate and not using any of the drops to make her easier.  That instance is alot of fun but sucks on heroic if you wipe on a boss you have to beat the prior bosses again but dont get any loot.   So if you need something from there good luck.  I am personally only going to do it once unless some begging is done.  That place is FTL big time.   Next up we ran heroic utgarde keep.  Had some troubles in there our tank just didn’t have the HP to survive the second boss if i got repetedly knocked down.

So far being 80 feels alot like being 70 with just new stuf to do lol.

Just for my own personal reference my stats when dinging 80 are as follows.  (this is resto spec my primary spec,and self buffed with totems)

Bonus healing 1568
Crit Chance 11.34%
Haste 47
Mana Regen 456/358 MP5

I pretty much bought every BOE on my list they were surprisingly cheap I had a few of my leather working buddies craft me up some pieces as well.

At first running the heroics this just didnt feel like enough.  Once we got the strats down my second time in alot of the heroics it was much much better.

Well level 77 couldn’t of come any faster   I can fly again and it is just as good as i remember it to be.  Sorrry so light on the post been busy leveling lol.

q

Well after waiting through vanilla wow and then burning crusade it finally happened.  My favorite thing from the origanal warcraft series the giant swiming turtles   this is my new favorite hang out i spent some time there just fishing and watching these huge turtles.  Call me weird if you want but i can’t helm my self.

Well my shaman is now level 74.  I have finished off  howling fjord and borean tundra.  The quest lines in both areas were fantastic.   I could not be happier with the quest lines.  They are much more in depth than the burning crusade ones were.  I am really glad they waited two years it has been well worth the wait.  Going to put together a bunch of screens in the next few days of my favorite sites around northrend so far.

Gear wise i have gotten several huge upgrades for my shaman.  gained almost 500 AP and 5% crit so far.  The mobs are really starting to fall like flys.   I have gotten a couple pieces off my gearing your resto shaman posts.  Gotten a crafted piece and a couple of rep pieces.

So far my dungeon experiences have been very good.  The dungeons are very short, the trash is varied, and the bosses each feel unique.   I have been lucky and bee in either guild runs or partial guild runs and pug a couple slots.  My one true pug experience were there were no guildies and friends and the people i was in there with were not guilded together was VERY bad.  We did not even get the trash down before a boss.  I hate to point blame but these wipes were all on the tank.

I have completed Utgarde Keep, The Nexus, Azjol-Nerub, and Drak’Tharon Keep all the dungeons have been amazing and i cant wait to run them on heroics in a week or so.  I have been looking for a Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom group for the last few hours and have not had any luck.  I am currently only level 73 so going any further down the dungeon list i have a really hard time dps since all the mobs are 4 levels or higher above me.

Well my first day in wrath was pretty amazing.  Other than the suspense of UPS not showing up till 3 in the afternoon lol.   I pugged the nexus once and ran it again with my guild.  I also did a guild utgarde keep run.  I have really enjoyed the expansion so far.  I also leveled my death knight to 58 and finished up the starting area.  So much fun.   Here are some of my screens from my first day in wrath of the lich king.

Just a quick update on my horde side experement.  I dinged lvl 10 today on my troll hunter.  I completed my hunter pet training quest and went out and tamed myself a boar.   I am using a cat on my alliance hunter so i thought seeing the difference between the ferocity and tenacity pets.  More on that in future posts.  Here is a screen shot of me and my new boar outside of ogrimar.  My mage is still level 10 and after playing the hunter i think i can make a MUCH quicker run to 80 on a hunter than i can a mage so she is getting shelved for a while and being used as my banker.2

Thanks to inscription i have a couple of decks to turn in this time around so should be fun    I have never done much with the darkmoon fair in the past.   I figure it is about time to get the pets that they offer now that they don’t take up bag space.

Just hit 350 fishing woot!   Stats to get to 350 fishing are 1421 fish caught and a total of 1584 things caught.  I should have enough with lures and the +20 fishing pole i have to fish off the docks in northrend waiting for utgarde groups.  From here on out it takes around 15+ catches to skill up so i still have probably 400+ fish to catch.  My original thoughts on 1000 fish to get to 375 was WAY off.  in fact by the time it is all said and done i will be closer to 2000 fish caught.

Little short post today with just one question on my mind.

What is everyone going to do with there last 7 days in BC?

Personally i am going to be chilling with friends doing a couple of profession dailies and leveling up my fishing some more.  I am 100% ready for wrath.  I have high expectations of my self and of my guild.   I have my first 2 weeks pretty much planned for what i want to be doing.  This is a exciting time to be playing wow.

See you all in northrend.