So much for…

[Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons]. I was convinced to wait and get the [Scryer's Blade of Focus]. and who knows? The [Trial-Fire Leggings] might drop out of Kara this week, or I could save 1.5k and get the Spellstrike pants! It’s only 50 more badges for the blade anyway, and said blade owns face. I won’t be upgrading it for a while anyway.

I got 12 badges today-6 from H-MgT, 3 from Ramps, and 3 from BF. All sorts of fun! If I could keep that pace up I’d be so happy. =O

I did also get [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] today—with all of this new gear, I’m finding it a little difficult to adjust to the increased threat. Hopefully, I can get Subtlety tomorrow-I made a lot of money today (actually did dailies) and one of the chanters in our guild got enough Thrallmar rep during Ramps to get the chant!

[Scarlet Sin'dorei Robes] dropped too, but unfortunately I was pugging and someone else won the roll. =( Oh well. Grats to whoever got it (Can’t remember your name, sorry!)

Anyone have any suggestions/comments towards badge gear?

I will be writing my Netherspite strategy after Kara tomorrow, or Friday morning. Not entirely sure yet.

Kara strats: PRINCE

Part one of a three-part series on some of the hardest Kara bosses; the one difficult Kara boss whom I will not be doing a feature on is Shade, as most people know the strategy for him. =)

This post was delayed because I had to find the pictures to upload to my Photobucket. =)

For the purposes of this post, I’m gonna assume you’ve already cleared through Shade/Illhoof/Chess, so the only remaining trash is Prince and Netherspite trash. (Nightbane does not control any trash.)

You should have little trouble getting through to Prince–just kill through the trash. Not a big deal. Don’t do what I did, though:

Don't follow my example

(Netherspite’s images will be smaller, hopefully…).

The ethereal trash, as you’re probably aware, should be pulled ONE AT A TIME. Otherwise I, being a squishy mage, will have to pay more repair bills. =P

I’ll assume you cleared trash up to Prince okay. Make sure you’re careful with the trash between Chess and Prince, they hit hard!

Okay, now for the important part–how to down Prince.

If, as you walk into the room where you fight him, you move down the right wall, there’ll eventually be a dark spot on the wall. You’ll want your tanks to tank him right about there, maybe a little closer to the door. It’ll be within healing and ranged DPS’s max range but keep the healers and DPS outside of Shadow Nova, while also providing easy access to a “safe” nook for melee DPS to hide in case they get Enfeebled.

Now, there are some dangers with this positioning. If an Infernal hits where the melee DPS is standing, said melee DPS will need to get out FAST in case they get enfeebled, get back where the ranged DPS and healers are. And then…well, they can throw shoes at Prince or something. Infernals hitting where Prince is being tanked will make things hard for heals especially during phase 2 as well.

As for where ranged DPS and heals need to be: there’s one place on the map that will prevent them from taking any damage at all. Even if an infernal drops right next to them, they won’t get hurt. It’s practically foolproof.

Yes, that is ON TOP of the pillar. If you have trouble getting up, stand next to the pillar, jump, then press the movement key that will move you to the pillar. I prefer standing in front of the pillar and using S to back up onto it.

You should be positioned here before the fight starts.

Since infernals deal ground-level damage only, you won’t have to worry about them, and Prince won’t be able to Shadow Nova you either since you’re at max range or near-max range.

Once you’ve got this set up, it’s pretty much a tank and spank, albeit a long one. Make sure you’ve got mana stuff up. I’m not gonna go into detail on mana conservation for other classes, but mages: MAKE SURE your Evocate is up and you have a Mana Emerald conjured, along with some super mana pots. Use them early and often. Try to keep your mana % in line with Prince’s health %–not a huge deal for us, since we can Evocate, but that’s a good way of thinking about it.

DPSers: Make sure your threat’s low enough when Prince hits phase 3 that you can just go all out, cause those axes hurt. You’ll want to pop your trinkets when he gets to phase TWO though, since the tank’s gonna be getting stomped during phase 2. Get through that as fast as you can. Mages, once you get late in phase two, wipe your threat if you still have Invisibility up, cause it’s tough to DPS effectively when you’re near the threat cap. Same goes for other classes that can do so (hunters->Feign Death and so forth). You just need to make sure you have a good cushion so phase 3 goes by quickly too.

Grats all!

And….grats! You’ve downed Prince! 3 badges for everyone! WTP!

Next up: Netherspite…and reclearing trash…

Lastly: What do you think of my UI? =D I may have made a couple *minor* changes since these screenies but it’s pretty close to this right now.

Kara Full Clear!!

We Win!

So yeah. Got Prince, Netherspite, and Nightbane down–in that order. Only one death on Netherspite!

We pretty much own. Here we are in front of Nightbane. =) As you may note, Detlo didn’t quite make it into our picture, but you can still at least see his name. A bunch of caster stuff dropped, thankfully–Galistul got a couple upgrades, and I got rid of another blue in favor of the off hand from Nightbane.

Some great strategy help from Bento: despite a brand-new strategy he gave us on Prince (Comment this post if you’d like the strat, it’s quite good), along with directions and coordination on the 2 dragons (the Nightbane strat was excellent too!), his best advice was to Kythrine: “Okay, here’s the masterful strategy: strip naked and go play with Netherspite” after a wipe.

Of course, I can’t not mention his hilarious practical joke he played on Michelle after the run: as he was playing her toon, he took her toon to the tram between SW and IF, destroyed the hearthstone, stripped her naked, and left her there. =) It was very amusing, when she logged in especially.

I also got my next rank of the Violet Signet–only about 15k more rep till I get the top rank one!

Thinking about buying [Sunfury Signet] to get to Exalted with Scryers. Any suggestions?

As much as I love playing with Vel (especially after today!) I’m thinking about working a lot more on my druid healer. I love druid-style heals, and think it’d be fun to play him to 70. Advice from resto druids on how to play as well as advice from everyone about what to do is appreciated!

23 more badges till I get my Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons! So excited!

It’s so good to be back. I really missed everyone in the guild, and am happy to have returned. =)

What a day…

I ran 3 heroics yesterday–finished them all, too. Think I got 12 badges, total, yesterday. Not only that, but I leveled my alt holy paladin, Syrenicus, to 23 — he’s in Neo Imperela now, along with my level 16 shadow priest, Daulan. Had a great time running WC for once–we had 4 people getting run through by Detlo. Was a good break after H-Mechanar too. Also started a 5’s team–my Evoker’s gear still doesn’t hold up, and we don’t have the best team synergy, but in a couple months I’ll have my S4 wand and gloves! =)

However,the best part of yesterday was definitely gearing up. I got 3 gear upgrades! In H-Mech, the robes dropped from the Cache of the Legion–surprisingly, an upgrade. In H-SP, Quagmirran’s Eye dropped, finally affording an upgrade from Vengeance of the Illidari (the Hellfire Peninsula trinket that I’ve had since 63). And in H-MgT (which was a great run–we had Spartackus, a T6-geared bear tank, as well as some of his T6 guildies come along) I got my Jaded Crystal Dagger! Combined with the Merciless helm I got from BG’s, my gear’s really starting to shape up. I’m only 39 badges away from the Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons too–should get some of them later today in Kara. I’d have them next week if I wasn’t going out of town. =( As it is, I’m still starting to get really well geared, and am a little closer to epic’ing out. =)

My first arena experience

Well, I took part in my first arena match yesterday. Took my 4/5 Evoker’s and my S2 helm into 6 different matches, actually–in addition, I still had my 2/48/11 spec…an interesting choice for Arena, to say the least. Although Detlo and I didn’t win any of our 2v2 matches, they were still rather fun. Arena is certainly a lot different from BG’s, that’s for sure! Still had a good time, though. Hoping to get some S3/S4 gear out of these games (obviously the stuff that doesn’t require ratings.)

My opinion on Kael’thas

A quote from User: Illidan Rocks on WoWWiki:

“As far as Kael’thas is concerned, if he survives after this it will only give Blizzard a chance to warp him further. He now bears little resemblance to the sympathetic character seen in The Frozen Throne. In his first WoW appearance, he’d gone from being an unfairly persecuted hero (or anti-hero), to totally evil. In his second appearance, he’s now evil and a Wretched or zombie. What will Blizzard do to him if he comes back a third time? Unless they plan on redeeming him somehow I would rather he just stayed dead. I feel pretty much the same way about Illidan. I would like to see him as a hero again, and if they aren’t willing to do that with him I don’t want him resurrected.”

Poor Kael’thas. He was such a cool guy in TFT! In fact, he was probably my favorite character. Even in WoW, he was still not (IMO!) evil, just misguided–he *was* still searching for a cure for his people, remember? That’s *WHY* he was working on the Sunwell in the first place! To see him reduced to a 5-man kill quest–that’s just dumb. I’m sorry.

A character with as much depth as Kael’thas Sunstrider shouldn’t be reduced to this! He deserves a chance at redemption. Blizzard has (IMO!) destroyed one of their best characters in current Warcraft lore.

Of course, as much as he deserves a chance at redemption, he *is* officially dead now. Unless he makes another appearance without his head. O.o

AFK…

…bbl. Saturday, to be exact. Not only should I take a short break anyway to cool off a little (although I NEED to grind rep and do dailies!), I have college orientation to attend!

I’ll post when I get back. It’ll be something meaningful, I hope.

I just noticed I officially don’t have any greens! I wonder how long I’ve been that way…

Incidentally, I made it to 372 jewelcrafting today, too. I’m really looking forward to crafting epic gems

Why raiding is so much fun

I was originally gonna write a post in which I did a lot of QQing about my class. But then I realized: NO ONE WANTS TO READ THAT! So instead, I’m gonna write a much better post. (If anyone wants to read my rant, please let me know and I will e-mail it to you.)

It took me a while to think about this–why raiding is so much more fun for me than are 5-mans, soloing, or PvP–but I eventually came up with a few reasons.

A) Coordination: It takes a lot of effort to organize and successfully pull off a 10-man raid. I don’t even want to think about how much work it would take to put together and adminstrate a 25-man. I’m glad I’m not raid leader. Our RL does a great job every week putting this thing together, and it often becomes much more fun than anything else partly because it’s so well organized.

B) Camaraderie: Maybe it’s because the raid’s so well organized, I don’t know–but I really enjoy working with my fellow raiders every week that I’m in the group. We’ve definitely, I think, become fairly good friends, and really have a good time during the raids.

C) Synergy: As a mage, I mesh with many other classes well. For example, locks can pop a Curse of Elements on the target (+80 Fire), paladins can throw BoW, BoS, BoK on me (lots of choices) and sometimes are nice enough to use Judgment of Wisdom on their targets. Hunters have that lovely +5% to all damage bonus, too, which is nice. Shaman totems are amazing: Wrath of Air for the +101 damage, *Mana Spring/Tide*, and the other totem which I can’t remember that adds 3% to your crit chance and 5% to hit. Druids, of course, have the most powerful buff in the game. In the raid last night, there was at least 1 fight where I was over +1000 fire damage buffed, and it was partly due to the awesome synergy that a mage has with other classes.

ZOMG! Prince 40%!

Yeah. Now we’re talking.

Downed Shade first try, only 1 death

He didn’t drop any caster gear (I haven’t seen any caster gear in any instance for 3 weeks)

Downed Illhoof, no sweat. We chose to just DPS down Illhoof and only have our offtank on his minion, which worked really well. Didn’t even have a death, after wiping on him *multiple* times last week.

He didn’t drop any caster gear, either.

Did chess event. First tiime I’d ever done it; wow, it’s really a lot of fun! Finished it first try.

No caster gear dropped.

On to Prince we went, rather confidently. First two tries were good (we kept ranged DPS by the door and ran behind that corner to the left of the door for Enfeebles), but I forgot to put my hit rating gear on. Oops. ^^’

I gotta admit, I really like the fight, despite its being so difficult. (1M health? That’s more than any other boss…justified, I know, but still, it was quite a shock at first!) We did excellently for going into the fight not having done it before as a guild.

Third try, we did rather well too, but were still wiping around 40-50%. And that’s where we stayed for the rest of the night.

Great job to all–Mymichelle, Zerlan, Fingan, Detlo, Wackko, Sinithos, Galistul, Nathanielle, Reanimator, Nightscraper, Raiseplz…went really well tonight

Oh, and it’s proven now–<Neo Imperela> is so leet that we can have out-of-combat wipes. Right after Illhoof, on the way to chess, we were pulling the Spell Shades out onto that wooden platform…right before we pulled, Nathanielle accidentally backed off the ledge, Mymichelle levitated into some trash mobs to try and rez him, and Zerlan jumped down/died/ankhed in order to rez. Good times.

I’m within 2 badges of my new trinket–Icon of the Silver Crescent–now, which is nice! Also ran 3 instances today (2 partially) in order to get my shiny new Kara key! Now I don’t have to wait for Raiseplz every week, lol.

I can’t do Kara next week, sadface…I gonna be out of town during most of the week. Good luck to our raid team.

Still working on the druids with Sinithos; we’re both at level 21 now, and doing really well. Working through Hillsbrad right now. I gotta admit, healing as a druid is really fun, and definitely offers more variety than paladin heals.

So now I’m gonna write all my letters in….

the font that’s used in the mail system for WoW. I spent maybe 10 minutes searching for it on the Internet, and came up with the Morpheus font. Not too horribly difficult to read after you get it past size 10 and off of that tan parchment background they have in game.

And yes, I do plan to use this in virtually everything I do with my word processor now.