They sucked me back in.

Seeing the trailers for the expansion filled me with nostalgia.  So I went ahead and bought a game care and preordered the x-pac. Rolled up an Monk on Hyjal and created a level 90 Shaman.  I'm only going to play casually. I don't have the time or desire to be a hardcore raider anymore.  But playing casually with some old friends from my raiding days ?  Yeah. I've got time for that. :) So after nearly 4 years. I'm back playing WoW.

Hard Modes

Heroic Halfus down to FnB last Thursday. We spent about 90 minutes or So Wednesday wiping to him, Thursday we got him on our 4th pull, so not to bad.  Last night we started working on Heroic Chimaeron. Had a 2% wipe on our next to last pull of the night. So close. We will get him next week for sure.  We missed server first Heroic boss by a day.  One of the 10 man raids got Halfus the night before. I don't really like how there is no distinction between the two sizes anymore. Say what you want about the difficulty of the mechanics being equal, finding and organizing 25 people is 5 times as difficult as 10.

No 4.0.6 yet..

...according to mmo champion at least.

So work has implemented a new web blocking protocol, which stops pretty  much all game related sites. I can still post to this blog, but most of the sites I pull info from are not available.

So this will just be a quick update post.

< Fire and Blood > downed Nefarian on 25 Sunday night. Now onto Hard Modes.
FnB passed our 3rd anniversary on the 21st of January. We've come a long way from 5 friends who played on an EU server and did a weekly Kara run. Now we are top guild on Quel'dorei, and ranked in the top 3-400 US. Yeah we are by no means world beaters, but for the relatively casual attitude we have, I'm very proud of how well we have done.

One hand giveth, the other taketh away.

The latest PTR build had a lot of changes. The shaman changes are very interesting.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

•Flametongue Weapon procs now deal roughly 20% less damage.
•The Windfury Weapon proc can now trigger 3 additional attacks, up from 2.

Elemental
•Lava Burst's damage has been increased by roughly 10%.

Restoration
•Earth Shield can no longer be dispelled.
•Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman's Spirit, exclusive of short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped. In addition, its effects are now raid-wide.

Glyphs
•Glyph of Hex now reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds, down from 15.

Intial testing was showing that even with the first change of making Flametongue scale from AGI rather than Spellpower that caster MH's were still simming as best in slot.  Reducing the damage by 20% certainly should put that to rest. Increasing WF to give 3 attacks is supposed to make up for that nerf.  I am wondering if this could bring dual WF back into the picture?  We'll see what the testers come back with today.

Raid went well last night. We used the Quick DKP add-on for the first time to award loot. ( I ran it last week to award dkp ) It seemed to work pretty well. We got 5/6 in BWD and through the first two bosses in BoT.  Tonight will be finishing off BoT and then on to ToW and working on Al'akir after killing conclave.

BWD trash dropped Maimgor's Bitewhich was a pretty nice upgrade for me. I also picked up normal Essence of the Cyclone

Turns out Shaman are getting some changes in the next patch.

To the Ground!

So last week we got this message about planned shaman changes.

Shaman

Just a few additions of Glyph in spell tooltips to properly reflect their effects when you use them. Nothing new.

Then yesterday they break the incoming nerfs in a warlock thread.

That was just a nerf to cleansing waters. since Shaman are doing so awesome right now  they figured they should take a whack at our utility. :/

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

•Chain Heal’s effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.
•Hex now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
•Purge now dispels a single effect instead of two.
•Tremor Totem has been redesigned. The totem is now usable under Fear, Charm, or Sleep effects, and pulses much more rapidly, but lasts 6 seconds and has a 1-minute cooldown.

Elemental Combat
•Earthquake damage has been increased by approximately 10%.

Enhancement
•Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).
•Purge no longer has its mana cost reduced by Mental Quickness.

Restoration
•Cleansing Waters no longer fires its heal effect twice when a shaman removes a Magic and a Curse debuff with a single cast.
•Deep Healing (Mastery) has been increased to 3% per point, up from 2.5%.
•Greater Healing Wave mana cost has been increased by 10%; healing done has been increased by 20%.
•Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman’s Spirit, exclusive to short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped.

Actually there are some buffs in there. No one cares about Elemental but i suppose the extra EQ damage is nice for them.

Better Chain Heal is good. Deep Healing was terrible, so a buff there is good. I'll take a better GHW, especially a instant mana free MW proc one.

The purge nerf is BS. Once again PvP hoses PvE. If you can make the Hex change PvP only why not the purge change? 

I'm of two minds on Tremor totem. 6 second duration is horrible especially on a 1 minute CD.  Make fears castable only once a minute then it will be ok. However being able to use it while cc'd is nice for the times when you don't realize that the aoe fear is coming or miss time dropping it. Still the CD should be 30 seconds max.

The change I'm most happy about it  the Flametounge change. As long as they get the numbers right and its not hitting for any less.  I mean my damage is mediocre enough the way it is right now. But I don't want to be running dual flame tongue with a caster MH. Firstly because I don't want to be taking caster weapons from casters, but secondly it just feels so wrong, despite what Elam says. :p

One Month In, AKA: the pain of crafting.

So Cata has been out a month. Patch 4.06 is on the PTR. There have been waves and waves of hot fixes.
What do you people think of the expansion so far?

I'm fairly happy with it. The biggest issue for me right now is what a pain in the ass it is to level Leatherworking. Its crazy expensive, material intensive.

The material breakdown is Savage Leather Scraps < Savage Leather < Heavy Savage Leather, with it taking 5 of the smaller to make the larger.  Heavy cannot be skinned from anything so it take 5 mobs skinned to get one.  The last pattern that uses regularr savage turns green at  490, so your last 35 points all take Heavy.

A few mobs outside of instances will occasionally drop 2, but most skins give a single Savage. So on average lets say it take 5 creatures skinned to get one,  From 500-525 it take a minimum of 8 Heavy Savage to make anything orange, at 510 its 10. Plus any patterns that will skill you up from 510-525 cost 10 Heavy Savage as well. The current price for HSL on the AH is 200g. so that's 2000g for a nominally useful pvp pattern. Each piece takes 10 HSL and 10 volatile to craft. So that's about 2400g to craft. plus they stay orange for only 5 points. Amoritazing the cost of the patterns over those 5 points and that's about 3k per items which will give you 2 skill ups, so 1.5k per point. You can possible sell them for a few hundred gold if lucky, so make that 1400g per point x15 or 21k to go from 510-525.

Lets compare that to Alchemy which I maxxed out on my lv 78 warlock. You can get to 500 making potions and elixirs which take 2 herbs and a vial. Herbs cost about 10g ea, or if you have an herbalist each node, which doesn't need to be killed, yields on average 3 herbs with volatile life thrown in to boot. Now above 500 you will need to make flasks, which take 30 herbs and life so that's 300 g per flask, but as opposed to the LW items flasks you can sell for a profit! At 505 you can start learning transmutes, Where you can take 3 green gems plus 3 herbs, and make another useful item, a blue gem! granted at current prices, this might be a slight loss of 50g  or so, but still better than 1400. lets say you go from 505 to 525 on transmutes.  At a net cost of 50g per point that gasp! 1000g!  20k less than LW, and unlike leather workers alchemists are always in demand for flasks and potions, and  they have transmutes which will always turn a profit as well.

Jewelcrafting is somewhere in between. I haven't maxed it out on my DK yet, but there is not really a reason to. The 525 patterns are not as good as rep items in most cases. 500 is all you need to make your JC chimaera's eyes. The only road block on JC is doing the dailies to get the patterns/eyes. That and the high cost of the common gems used for the dailies.  But ore is plentiful and not that expensive.

I haven't tried Blacksmithing, Engineering, or Tailoring , in cata yet, so I don't know where they rank.  Enchanting was somewhere in below LW as skill ups were only costing me around 400g ea with the scrolls selling for about 25g ea  and a net cost of 375 per point.

Cataclysm thoughts.

So Wrath has ended and Cataclysm has come. Guilds are already claiming world firsts on Heroic Modes. FnB is 7/12 for T11 normal so far which puts us 6 bosses ahead of the next most progressed guild on QD.

Baelor is dressed in an ugly ass set of Blues, and he misses his Sanctified Frost Witch's gear terribly. All my non set epics have been Disenchanted,  My trade skills still need leveling,and I've a dozen new  raid fights to learn, not to mention half a dozen reps to grind up. And that's just on my main!. I've got to level my hunter to herb and skin, and the DK has mining and JC to worry about. plus in never for my 'Lock to 80 even, and he's my Scribe and Alchemist.

To top that off every time I see my nameplate its says Baelor < Recruit of Fire and Blood >.  Now ain't that a kick in the pants? I've been GM of this guild since starting it almost 3 years ago. Taken it from a bunch of casual rerolls into the top guild on server, and I'm an Mother F'ing recruit. Screw you Guild Rep!

Well that's the bad.

The good?  The new zones are fantastic. Aside from going overboard on cutscenes leveling was easy and a logical progression. The new raid bosses are all interesting so far. Leaping from boss to boss on Conclave of Winds is a hoot. Once the early grinding is done, and I can get back to my more sedate pace of outside raid play I think I'll be much happier.