Strength in Modesty.

I will put the TLDR at the start to save people from reading if they choose, but this is going to be an “eat your vegetables and take your vitamins post”, so if that makes you want to watch Rebecca Black’s “Friday” in marathon sessions, I will completely understand. ><

For the people who have known me for a while now, they know I am not the most outgoing or extravagant person when it comes to doing things in WoW, I stick to what my role is (Shadow in PvE, Disc in PvP), and then instead of being boisterous in what I can do now, stop and work on mastering how I play these roles in the playstyle that best suits me. Whether it be taking a much glyph much less used in PvP, or figuring out how to maximize your output in PvE, there are areas in everyone’s (including my own) game that they can look at for improvement. Not only for priests, but any class, take pride in what you do in a raid, and how you do it! That way you not only get the satisfaction of killing a normal/heroic raid boss for the first time, but also the satisfaction of performing at a personal best level in doing so; whether it be avoiding every fire trap that spawned, minimizing the amount of overhealing, or setting a new record for out, either damage or healing.

The bottom line to all of this is that, it is ok to pat yourself (and others)on the back for doing a good job when you put work into it.

We seem to have this Shannox fellow down pat.

 

To everyone who has seen their name on the right side of the screen at one point or another, thank you for the job you do. I, if no one else, appreciate the level of play you bring to the table, (healing or dps) and how much easier you make the raiding experience for everyone. So back to earlier in the post, that is exactly what I am doing here. I am giving myself (and everyone else) a collective pat on the back, they deserve that if nothing else.We also have a very benevolent discipline priest in Kaleri, who generously doles out Power Infusion to multiple characters in our raids on given nights, helping them (and the raid) to perform better.

 

/Pat

 

Similar Read(from the healing aspect):  Heal Sniping and Meter Padding

A Legendary Engagement: Darkly, Through A Glass

There are some minor lore spoilers that will be posted in here, not to the extent of a spoiler like Darth Vader revealing himself as Luke Skywalker’s father, but enough to make you say “Damn. Did not see that one coming.”

After we triumphantly dispatched Ragnaros (read: made him run away crying) last night and enjoyed the spoils of war with trinkets and headgear aplenty, I began an undertaking of my own. Last night after Staghelm died, I reached 25 Eternal Embers for the quest, All-Seeing Eye. With due haste, I flew out to Yasmin in Uldum to pick up 3 Sands of Time to complete the quest. All I had to do was return to Anachronos in the Caverns of Time and I could proceed to the next part of the quest. So this seemed simple enough, for many an expansion, Anachronos resided right outside the entryway to the Caverns of Time. Upon getting there, I see nothing but a huge void where a dragon once stood. Perplexed I flew down into the Caverns considering that’s where the quest arrow was pointing. And after looking around briefly, sure enough he was down there residing on top of the hourglass of time.

Chicken.

A thousand years in the Qiraji war, multiple scourge invasions, and the most recent silithid uprising 5 years ago you can hold your position at. But Deathwing comes along and causes one teeny little earthquake and you bunker up faster than Hitler during the final Ally advance.

So after handing my embers and sands to him, he does his whole dragon-laser-eyes-forming-a-crystal thing, and creates the Timeless Eye in front of him. When you pick up the next quest he gives you, you need to physically loot the timeless eye in front of him, it will not be placed into your backpack automatically.

So, you now need to bring the timeless eye to Tarecgosa in Coldarra. Getting from Tanaris to the Borean Tundra can be a bit of a time consuming task, luckily my friend Arolaide (over at dragonsworn.net) joined me for this and summoned me right into Coldarra. Upon taking the summon I was directly put into a cinematic, as I suspect you would as well if you entered normally (because one does not just simply fly into Coldarra). Where Tarecgosa just decides to tell people that if they had any sense left they would leave Coldarra for good.

AS IF! I CAME ALL THIS WAY FOR AN ORANGE AND YOU ARE GOING TO HELP ME GET IT!

2 Priests, 1 Dragon (an on Old Crystalbark to boot!)

Tarecgosa is neutral to you outside the nexus because you are mortal and your intentions of coming here are unknown. Also, despite Arolaide standing RIGHT BESIDE ME, she could not see the dragon above, so she is indeed phased for anyone not on the quest that wants to view it.

Enter the Nexus:

For about 5 minutes or so, the two of us both tried entering the nexus, only for me to keep getting the error “You don’t meet the requirements to enter the instance.” and “You can’t do that while in a group.” Trying to sneak around blizzard’s first line of security for keeping groups out, I dropped the group zoned in, and then re-invited her, only to promptly be tossed to the graveyard outside. And this is of course, where I part ways and say “FULL SPEED AHEAD TO BLUE DRAGONS!” Once inside the nexus, Tarecgosa sits waiting in the first room, and the usual dragon sentries have been replaced with beefed up level 86 elites with 1.2Million health. Also, Tarecgosa is now friendly towards me and grants an buff when in close proximity that restores 1% Max Hp/Mp every 3 seconds and gives a chance for your spells to be duplicated when they deal damage.

Now that Aro is gone, how about you and I make some "lore" of our own?

After triggering her dialogue, she prompts you to follow her down the left corridor of the Nexus, she then cloaks both her and you with an invisibility field as a sentry races past the two of you. You then have to fight an ice sentry (which looks like the old mechanical sentries in the Mechanar) as well as two mage hunter adds that come out at 5 and 15 seconds after you engage the sentry. Deal with the mage hunters first as the only have 115k hp, and if you ignore them, they will chain silence you. After dispatching the security, I got to take a look at the visage of the dragon in humanoid form and in the quick glance I took, I was instantly turned into stone:

The face! My God the face! The horror! THE HORROR!

Continuing down the left corridor, you encounter ice smokescreens very reminiscent of the ones used right after defeating Deathbringer Saurfang in ICC to get to the upper spire. Once past those 4 sprayers, you encounter another sentry and 2 mage-hunter pack, this time at once. Same strategy applied, let Tarecgosa tank the big sentry, while you dispatch the mage-hunters, fear and fade are big assets here. After this you may be depleted a bit on mana and/or health, but unfortunately you do not get a chance to recover much. About 5 seconds after the sentry pack dies, 2 larger drakonid sentries spawn at the end of the hallway. This is essentially your time to recover, because Tarecgosa then turns you into a block of ice so that the sentries don’t roflstomp you. You still get the effect of her regenerating aura on top of you own passive regeneration, so you should be good by the time the cut scene ends.

Shadow priest, on the rocks.

Another ice sentry is at the end of the hall, but immediately after Tarecgosa engages it, it turns and runs up the ramp to alert the other sentries. Tarecgosa immediately gives chase hoping to halt its advance, and since one of your objectives was to accompany her, I immediately popped Darkflight and sprinted up along side her.

Big mistake.

While traveling up the ramp, if you go all the way up the ramp at once instead of in segments, 15 or so odd Dark Wraiths will come unfrozen and engage YOU. My initial action was: “NP guyz I got this lol”, and hit my fade almost assuredly getting ready to watch them attack Tarecgosa so I could mind sear them. But instead, THE FADING, IT DOES NOTHING!, and by the time I hit dispersion it was too late. Back to the graveyard, oh, and by the way, you get to start all over(!). After getting back to this point, I decided to let Tarecgosa run ahead and deal with the Wraith packs one at a time. However, you now have to deal with another pack by letting Tarecgosa go ahead of you. In the room you were in, 3 mage-hunters will spawn. Fear them. Dot them. Kite them. After dispatching them, enter each segment, the wraiths are patterned like a 5 on a 6-sided die. Target the central one for mind sear and go to town. If you are starved for mana, use Shadow Word: Death on one to gain spirit tap, if you have it glyphed. You will need to disperse after clearing the gauntlet because combat wont be dropped. Tarecgosa is now trapped on the right side of the room by two ice sentries. You need to engage either of them to weaken the prison channel they have her in. You need to defeat it by yourself, which shouldn’t be an issue, they both have only half of their maximum health when you engage. When you engage the second one, Tarecgosa will break free and assist you in finishing off the last one. This is mana break time. Follow Tarecgosa to the next spot and immediately start to drink. She is going to channel energy into the ice barrier blocking the activity of the dragonflight ahead, but of course doing so will cause a super mage hunter to spawn, Ceredos. Ceredos is a larger (and admittedly greener) version of the normal mage-hunters in the nexus. He cannot be CC’d, feared or interrupted though, so you get to deal with his silences. Make sure to dispel the mana feed debuff off yourself as it decreases your damage done by 50%. Ceredos’ main ability is called Spellflame. Its a devastating ability that does 66k instantly and 50k every second you stand in it. Fortuneately, he doesn’t cast the spell at you, he casts it at the spot directly behind you when he starts casting. In short, this is all you need to know:

John Madden would be proud.

Having taken care of Ceredos, Tarecgosa breaks through the wall revealing….

The Twilight Dragonflight! (because Ruby sanctum was merely a setback). Also, this is a checkpoint, so if you die on anything ahead, you don’t have to redo all of it. This becomes a Phase 2 of Malygos encounter, where you get to ride on the discs that spawn, except this time your picking off twilight dragonflight instead of scions of eternity. There are two kinds of mobs in here, Twilight Spellbinders and Twilight Invaders. The Twilight Spellbinders are mostly harmless, like having another piece of bacon with your morning breakfast. They have 77k hp and shoot fireballs that deal about 7,000 damage per. The invaders are a bit tougher. They have 271k hp, and while also doing the same weak fireball spell, they also have Shadow Nova, which is a 5 second cast and deals 70k damage if uninterrupted. Since a raiding spec for shadow priests does not have Silence, we can counter this one of three ways. 1) Disperse the shadow nova. 2) Use one of the orbs on the platform he stands on called Condensed Magic, which restores 1000 hp/mp per second and reduces damage taken by 50% when used. or 3) By badass enough to kill him before he gets the cast off.

Bart Simpson would kill for something like this.

Once 3 or 4 invaders are killed, the platform you jump onto moves itself in front of Thyrinar, to which he immediately engulfs in it fire and if you don’t jump to an adjacent platform, you die. After you jump to the next platform, it crashes into the ground up ahead and you are attacked by two smaller twilight invaders. They as well have 77k hp, but do a periodic fire nova which hits for about 8k, and a casting counterspell which finishes after 2.5 seconds. After you take these out, you get another checkpoint.

You then stare ahead at what seems to be 25-30 of the same mob you just fought clumped together. Perhaps they can be negotiated with? So, you start to approach them when Tarecgosa decides to show up and rain down sheets of ice, freezing and instantly killing them all. You then both ascend the platform in front of you to where the giant rift in the Nexus lies, it is here that Tarecgosa is ready to use the Timeless Eye. That is, until Thyrinar decides to make another appearance to stop that from happening.

What a douche. I was getting ready to have tea with her too.

Thyrinar has 1.9Million hp and will constantly cast twilight blast at you that hits for around 14k. Vampiric embrace and Tarecgosa’s aura does heal you for a bit, but you will need to keep Power Word: Shield on yourself in order to not die. Every so often Thyrinar will cast Twilight Restoration on himself, this reduces all damage taken by 50% and restores 10,000 hp and 1,000 mp per second. Every 45 seconds, Thyrinar will cast Twisting Twilight at you. This works like spellflame from Ceredos, only this follows you, and will hit you for 48k per tick if you stand in it. He also calls those smaller twilight invaders to aid him, every time a new one comes up, turn and kill it immediately. After that, its a rinse and repeat to kill him, once Thyrinar gets to 15% Tarecgosa will give you a buff that increases your haste by 100% for 15 seconds (why yes I would very much like that buff, thank you!) to finish him off.

Once he’s dead, Tarecgosa becomes revitalized and drops the Timeless Eye for you to look into. The Timeless Eye then loads you into the Eye of Eternity to eavesdrop on the blue dragonflight council. Arygos and his council talk about the leadership role of the Blue Dragonflight since Malygos’ death.

Arygos, and his bros.

And this is cool until the moderator of the discussion reveals himself.

Shouldn't you be off making people stand in fire in Uldum or something?

Long story, shortened: Deathwing wants Arygos to take over as leader of the Blue Dragonflight but warns him not to cross his path or the madness his father suffered will pale to the fate that awaits him, or some crap like that.

After reporting my findings to Tarecgosa, she instructs me to seek out Kalecgos(!) in Nordrassil.

My meeting with Kalecgos.

So I head up to Hyjal and seek out Kalecgos, who isn’t being shady or anything hiding off at the back of the lodge, meanwhile Ysera is out in broad daylight not caring if shes seen at all. So, I talk to Kalecgos and tell him what myself and Tarecgosa saw inside the nexus. And the he goes all touchy-feely on me.  Starts talking about how the bond they have had has lasted for many millennia, to what us mortals would call ‘siblings’. And warns that such madness being caused by Arygos and Deathwing could put Tarecgosa in grave danger. And that we (mortals) must act fast to stop it from happening.

The fuck? Some ‘brother’ he is. His ‘sister’ is in peril and is telling us to go save his family while he just chills out with the Hyjal guardians in Nordrassil.

Not saving your own sister? THIS IS MADNESS!

Of course this could only end one way:

Sparta, bitch.

I then went to sleep and thought of how terrible my MS paint abilities are.

And then sometimes, an old game will surprise you.

Before the dawn of WoW in the Blizzard genre of things, there was Diablo 2, and life was sweet. Gold meant nothing, and people used a system of bartering(!) to run the virtual economy and gameplay. This game of course never reached the popularity of WoW when it came to the multiplayer facet of it, specifically because of the lack of environmental interaction. I think at its peak when I used to log onto battle.net, you would have somewhere around 450,000 people playing games at any given moment. Nothing to scoff at of course, but it’s still looking up at a game with 11.6 Million people as its player base.

I digress. Before the expansion, the game consisted of 5 characters instead of 7, only 4 bosses instead of 5, and such things like small charms, runes, runewords, and world events didn’t exist, eg: The game was kind of boring and ludicrously hard once you beat the bosses on normal difficulty. And then the expansion came and more people were leveling Sorceresses up to teleport all over the world!

30 different runes were introduced with the expansion starting with the El Rune (level 11) and adding a new rune ever 2 levels (13, 15, 17, etc)  and ending with the Zod (the owner of the same bow in ICC!) Rune (level 69). And the premise to finding these runes were simple, so simple that if you weren’t a math major your head would spin right off. For the sake of not making you go watch paint dry you had to find 2 times the rune before the rune you wanted on average. Basically if you wanted to find an Eld Rune (level 13), you would on average find 2 El Runes before it, and so on up. Only to realize that by the time you get up to the runes around level 45 or so (Eg: here is where the really cool and fun stuff is guys), you would have had to have found hundreds of thousands (and Millions!) of the lowest, more useless runes.

So, in the discontinuous time I have played this game since 2003, I have seen a lot of stuff (crap) drop (much like how everyone in a WoW raid will bum rush the boss when it dies in search of its “goodies”). Nothing ever useful when it came to runs though. However, when I was playing my Necromancer the other day….

“A NECROMANCER?!”

OF COURSE A NECROMANCER.

“But why not a sorceress?! They can teleport like wtf man?!”

Sure a sorceress can teleport, which is cool through Nightmare difficulty. And then you enter hell difficulty and suddenly mobs have immunities. Specifically immunities to lightning, fire, and cold, which gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know those are the same schools of magic a sorceress uses.

Enter the Necromancer.

Necromancers don’t have time to be bothered with such trivial things such as “immunities”. They are also versed in dealing poison and magic damage, which I guess the majority of the bestiary in the game forgot to study up on to protect themselves. Much like Chef Emerill would do if he was a character in the game:

“Immune to Physical? (Stone Skin)” – BAM! Amplify Damage curse.

“Resistant to my magic?” – BAM! Lower Resist curse.

I can also have 60 or more minions at my side which deal a mix of physical and magical.

So while I was spending some free time on my Necromancer, I happened across this:

(Ohm)y aching head.

The hell is this? 8 years later, one of the most valuable and sought after runes in the game, has finally dropped for me. Where the heck where you when people actually PLAYED this game. A moment of excitement! Surely, I can pawn this off and gain some decent gear for my toon, instead of looking like a purple people eater above. Amidst my opportunity I race to the multiplayer screen to log on, only to see the following text upon entry into the realms:

“Welcome to Battle.net! There are currently 18,066 users playing 18,066 games of Diablo 2, and 69,874 users playing 33,259 games on Battle.net.”

?? –  Let me get this right…

“There are currently 18,066 (separate, unique, individual) users playing 18,066 (separate, unique, identifiable by different game names, but most importantly MULTIPLAYER) games…..”

Dejected, I could only arrive at one conclusion:

Multiplayer - You are doing it wrong.

 

 

Reasons I’m Going Insane: Respeccing for the healers!

So, we have been having some… difficulties… I will call them on Ragnaros since getting to him and we are approaching our 3rd week on him full time now. We cant quite figure out what the problem is, but we know for the most part it comes undone right at the second transition phase at 40% when all hell (no pun intended) breaks loose.

So in addition to our post-raid chat wrap on how we performed, I decided to look at my own spec for raiding and see how I could help the situation at all.

I ran a variation of a raiding shadow spec (9/0/32), with one point in Psychic Horror and maxed Mental Agility (3/3). It was the spec below:

Good for throwing a shadow stun on those unsuspecting players in BGs, not ideal for raiding though.

So I decided that I could do some small changes to my spec, the first being to drop Psychic Horror for 1 point in Inner Sanctum (-2% spell damage), which left me wondering if I could reach for the next rank(-4% spell damage) by dropping another point in Mental Agility (-7% cost) yet still be effective and not go OOM. With the way the tier 12 set bonuses are, the first lowering the cooldown on shadowfiend by 75 seconds, in addition to the 1 minute taken off by Veiled Shadows puts it on a base cooldown of 2.75 minutes. Combined with the critical strike chance on mind flay to reduce the remaining cooldown by 10 seconds per crit, you essentially have a trinket built into your spec (it times up nicely if you have the Rune of Zeth or Fiery Quintessence giving your fiend a little extra kick when it deals damage).

After putting the test spec to use, even on a mana intensive fight like Shannox where you are constantly swapping targets to reapply dots, I had no issue with making sure I did not run out of mana.  The current spec I run (10/0/31) looks like this:

Quick to the draw you may say:

“But Srs, Shadow Priests already have 15% passive damage reduction from all sources. Do you really need those talents as opposed to being more mana efficient and increasing your effectiveness?”

Lets take a look.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-2rhoa04afcw2xe27/details/1/

There is a link to our last night of attempts on Ragnaros, with the amount of damage that I took over the course of the night. The total amount is 13,745,672. We’ll subtract the melee damage since that wont get mitigated by Inner Sanctum for a total of 11,950,958. Since this is the damage taken with 2 points in Inner Sanctum, divide 11,950,958 by .96 to find out how much one would have taken with 0/3 in the talent.

11,950,958 = .96x

11,950,958/.96 = x = 12,448,915

So, with 2/3 in Inner Sanctum we can see: 12,448,915

12,448,915 – 11,950,958 = 497,757 damage less taken.

That is 2.5 full health bars of your main tank in damage mitigated over the course of 1 night (18 pulls). And this will apply to the total number of priests in your raid, since we usually run with 5, this means on this given night:

497,957 x 5 = 2,489,785 damage mitigated.

Over the course of one night it might not seem like a lot, but I would bet money if you ask any healer, if you had the choice of playing a comfortable spec, or tweaking a few points to take 2.5Million less damage while having the same level of output, none of those healers are going to say: FUCK YEAH I WANT TO HEAL 2.5MILLION MORE DAMAGE! BRING IT ON!

A small loss in mana efficiency for me, a greater peace of mind for the healers (I hope).

So if you see a priest in your raid, and you see them with talent points in Inner Sanctum, make sure to give them a hug for making the healers’ lives a bit easier.

Welcome to the Fold.

Hello! And welcome to Simply Business. You are reading the blog of Srsbusiness, a shadow priest on the Eldre’thalas server in World of Warcraft. While I am relatively new to the whole blogging field, you can expect that I will keep this site updated frequently with mind drippings for your…. pleasure? Anyways, here are some of the things that you will see on the blog:

– My perspective on current things over a 6 year career in both World of Warcraft and Diablo 2.

– The characters I play and how they help me enjoy leisure time.

– Real Life (!!) tidbits that can make or break one’s day.

– Things I do that make my convince myself, that I am one episode away from Alzheimer’s.

“Enough with the boring stuff Srs! Show me stuff I want to read already!”

FINE! Welcome to the fold, and enjoy your stay!

The Characters behind the Character.

Over the course of my playing time, I have dabbled in most, if not all classes, largely before they made leveling more laughable than Glenn Beck’s  30 minute comedy spots on Fox News. For the characters that I play right now, they consist of a priest, a mage, a rogue and a druid.

For the longest time, I was by and by a hunter, and not just any hunter, but THE huntard. The first 3 years of my playing time in WoW was centralized around my hunter. Starting off as a complete noob, my first spec at level 60 looked something like (6/16/29 [back when 51 points was the max at lvl 60]). I thought counterattack was amazing, and I ran up to people and mobs and whacking them with my Ice Barbed Spear. I became close friends with the spirit healer in Warsong Gulch as a result, but she does make a mean risotto though. After learning the wonders of Scatter Shot, I eventually climbed the old system PvP ranks up to Marshal, and subsequently joined my first raiding guild, <Unrest>. Unrest was a west coast guild on an east coast server, which made raiding someone difficult as I continued through school. The guild was ran in large by a bunch of people who were friends in the same vicinity. We had progressed decently well, but by the time burning crusade and the death of 40 man guilds had been announced, our GM had defected to the horde, and people were generally tired, so my time to leave came as well.

On my new server, I joined a guild called <Cross of Vengeance>, and this became my home for the next three years. This guild started me on a tumultuous journey that has shaped me as a person today. I joined the guild for a few raids on AQ40 and Naxx40 before the BC content came out. We used 8 hunters in our raids. EIGHT! Any more in the group and I would have expected XxLegolasXx to make a guest appearance in our runs. Over the course of the next 3 years I became an officer, left to join another guild on the server, came back after my account was closed due to sharing, became the GM, and rebuilt the guild after the old GM left us with a skeleton, and brought us back up to #2 on the server. Towards the end of this expansion, my priest supplanted my hunter as my main. My hunter is currently sitting dormant on the Windrunner server having not been played for almost 11 months now, still rocking full base tier 10.

The Shadow Priest (mana mana)

Srsbusiness was created on the Eitrigg server and has since spent time there, on Windrunner, and on Eldre’thalas. When my priest was made back in Burning Crusade, I leveled as disc/holy. Yep, I was that badass. My ultimate goal of the time was the become a healer for heroic 5 mans in Burning Crusade, because most of our healers weren’t around for badge of justice runs at the time. Disc was still not a viable spec at the time, but divine spirit had more appeal to me than circle of healing. (Yes, I will take my 80 spirit and 80 extra spell power over that spell and 12% more effect on Gheal.) So my spec was 23/38/0, spirit with Improved Spirit. The staple of the heroic runs became myself and a paladin tank running Shattered Halls religiously. Back when Power Infusion gave 20% more spell damage as well as reducing the cost of spells by 20%, he would run through the gauntlet, grab everything in Magtheridon’s asshole and then get a PI and consecrate on top of them. Combine that with using dps gear after getting to the defense cap as well as it stacking with avenging wrath and you have the makings for a legendary nerf paladins thread. (And they did get nerfed.) Never died, never had a threat issue. The timer for execution started at 55 minutes, and we saved her with about 40 minutes left on good days.

But then of course, people got tired of the heroic runs, so my priest got shelved for a while going through Hyjal and Black Temple as best we could. Towards the end of BC. people again got hit with the burnout and doldrums, so we ended up doing Hyjal/BT/Sunwell in partnership with a family and friends guild, <We Know>. This is when I felt the lasting burnout hit from playing my hunter, and decided I would gear my priest up some before the next expansion hit, because Primal Mooncloth, with its amazing lack of stamina, wasn’t holding up too well inside BT or Sunwell, though I do believe I remember a certain time on Gurtogg Bloodboil it was sustainable, but that’s a story for another time. After gearing my priest largely through Sunwell badge rewards (I love you Timbal’s Focusing Crystal), I decided it was time to try out the shadow side of things. They had just made some recent changes to the shadow tree, including updates like:

Mind Flay now has the ability to critically strike.

and later:

Shadowform now allows your Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague to benefit from haste effects.

HOLY SHIT ON A STICK BATMAN! THIS IS EXHILARATING!

Aint he a chipper lookin' one.

For the entirety of Wrath of The Lich King, I did the content on my priest, from the ever popular rehashing of Naxxramas, to the (arguably) the last good instance Blizzard gave the customer in Ulduar, to the two most God-Forsaken instances in ToC (where are you Reign of the Unliving), and the year-long hell of ICC. Halion wasn’t really a patch-worthy instance that I paid much attention to when they released it, heck I was being a smart ass and coming to raids in a holy dps spec, I was that bored. I didnt always dps though, on few and rare occasion I healed some bosses having little experience on how to do it; Bloodboil, Sindragosa, and a few shots in tier11 highlight the extent of my brief healing stints. (And thank God.) I should also go on to mention that my character started out as a Draenei, because Gift of the Naaru made healing those heroics really freakin’ easy. As of Cataclysm though, and through medical breakthroughs in plastic surgery, Srs is now a furry…. err…. Worgen.

Today, the above illustrated fellow resides in Apotheosis of Eldre’thalas, as one of three raiding shadow priests alongside Dahrla and Arolaide, a triumvirate of dots, dots, and MOAR dots. His handiwork lies is Alchemical and Jewelcrafting trades, and has been seen creating extra potions out of thin air!

The Magus (Seriously, why are you telling me Mage is not correct? [Aka: table pls])

My mage, Merlee, was created to alleviate boredom during my time on the Windrunner server. I had lost any desire I had to PvP on my priest, and after getting victimized by many a frost mage in duels and battlegrounds, I decided I would try my hand at one. Though the PvP aspect never came through in wrath, she still remained a fun character to play. Originally, Merlee was created at the end of the Wrath expansion, and was human, because of that sweet (and free!) PvP trinket. Since moving to Eldre’thalas she has become a night elf (for at the time PvP, and how OP is shadowmeld –> Drink). However, she has not seen much PvP action lately and has been focusing largely on the PvE aspect of being a mage. Main spec: Frost PvE(!) (2/8/31 – Frostfire Ignite) Offspec: Fire PvE (3/35/3) This the main support toon for my priest. Merlee’s home away from home is located in the

Behind every strong man, there is an even stronger woman, or something.

scenic desert of Uldum, where for the first part of Cataclysm she OWNED the entire oasis region with regards to whiptail. If you even though about picking that herb, it would erupt in fire and kindly tell you to gtfo Tauren Druid (seriously, gtfo tauren druid herbalists). After the delirium for creating darkmoon cards had subsided (making a total of 7 decks in all), her herbing is now more centralized in the Tol Barad region occasionally picking Azshara’s veil and Cinderbloom for volcanic potions, trips to Twilight Highlands are of rare feat as need for self supply flasks with Twilight Jasmine has become less of a necessity. This is the toon I bring to the guild’s alt runs in Firelands, BoT, BWD or Throne of the Four Winds. It is a marked change of pace, that I enjoy, from playing the shadow priest (highly reliant on damage over time) as a mage (focused more on bursting damage, reliant on procs) and I feel it sharpens my play on both characters by integrating the playstyles together. As you may have figured out, Merlee is an herbalist and scribe (NOT INSCRIPTIONIST). Which leads me into:

The Rogue (aka: hay rouge can u open dis?)

Seriously.

Rogue – A bandit, mercenary, outlaw, hired assassin.

Rouge – A color, a strip joint in Pre-Industrial France.

THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE PEOPLE. Its 5 letters, no repeats, nothing. It may show up on an elementary school level spelling test even. 5 years of it is enough, please stop with the horrible butchering of this word. My rogue, Tripolar, is an Eldre’thalas native, and was designed to be a twink essentially staying in the lower levels of the PvP brackets to see how many people I could 1 shot with as much BoA gear I could stack. However, I encountered a problem on my priest, I had no way to supply myself with ore for JC, unless I wanted to constantly pay the overpriced rate on the AH.

Winning? Not really.

So, after a few months sitting at 29, Tripolar became my third and final character to reach level 85. She is a miner solely to supplement my priest’s JC, and recently maxed out enchanting, just as a means to dust materials to have on hand for when I need an enchant. For all intents and purposes, I have lost interest in playing this toon at 85, the PvP aspect of the game shifts dramatically in complexity from level 29 to 85, and I don’t have the zeal to play it like I once did. This will more than likely be the first toon I stop playing altogether should that time come. The name Tripolar is derived from the internet meme “winning!” as made popular by Charlie Sheen. His famed response to the question of if he is Bipolar with: “I’m Bi-winning.” lent itself to my creative genius by creating Tripolar, because why stop at twice as much when you could have thrice the amount?! There are rants that will be coming soon about how I loathe melee and feel that rogues (and death knights) have broken the game from within through PvP.

The Druid (aka: I was bored one day)

Whats the deal with this toon you may ask? The header pretty much says it all, after countless hours of archaeology and rescuing soldiers on the Molten Front for the 80 millionth fuck time, I decided to make a druid, Dillay, because I had all of the leather BoA gear I had used on my rogue, and since I didn’t have enough JP or Honor Points to buy a significant amount of gear for another armor class, the druid became the logical choice. I don’t have enough playtime on this toon to log anything other than feral(cat) is easy as hell to level with. Except somewhere I forgot that leveling leatherworking up as a primary

The only thing for certain about this toon, is that nothing is for certain.

profession is worse than having your mother rickroll you in public, in front of your friends, naked. So while I am now level 57, my skinning sits at a skill of 372, but my leatherworking sits at 232. This seems a bit unbalanced, or it could simply be the fact that the devs forgot we aren’t playing vanilla anymore, and MC isn’t end game. Seriously, 16 pieces of leather for a single skill up in the thick leather level range? Not even bountiful bags helped this problem out. Why? Because whenever bags procs on a skin, it gave me a thick hide and 5 extra thick hides (WHICH HAVE NO USE ANYMORE). Tune it down Blizz. Since you’ve made leveling easier, make the beginning professions too. 5-8 pieces of leather tops, so that I dont have to buy stack upon leather stack for 1 measly skill point.

And now you know the background of my characters, hope you will stay tuned for more as they progress through the game with you!