Matticus asked us to post our haircuts, and, well, who am I to say no? Turns out those Undercity barbers are amazing - managed to get a little reconstructive surgery done on Queklain, as well…
Before:
After:
And after! Take off the straps, add a couple eyes, scrape some of the unnecessary flesh off the angry-looking jaw, and - oh yeah - give me a putrified green dye job and give me the haircut I probably had when I was alive.
That’s the ticket!
Well, I can log on… and get to the character list.
And I can click on myself, and I can log in.
Clearly I’ve completely logged on, as my armory profile’s reset to reflect my totally untalented state. And, heck, I can hear Shattrath!
… But I’m stuck looking at Kael’thas and Illidan.
A quick look at the list of addons I have ready to roll before 3.0.2 hits Live. It’s a mix of addons confirmed to work in 3.0.2, addons that are new to me but are replacing things that don’t work in 3.0.2, and addons that I simply hope will work in 3.0.2.
Echoes of Doom is upon us! But I’m not here today to talk about specs or talents, no no. Friends, I’m here to talk about titles.
“The longer the title, the less important the job.” - George McGovern
Maybe you, like I, never managed to get Champion of the Naaru or Hand of A’dal. It’s a damn shame, too - perhaps the groups were too hard to round up, or perhaps (like me) you just got into raiding a little too late. Never fear, though - you too can have some text appended (or prepended) to your name after Echoes of Doom and Wrath of the Lich King, largely through Achievements.
What are some of your options, you might ask? I’m glad you asked.
I’ve broken the titles up into those obtainable after the patch but before the expansion, and those only available after the expansion - however, be sure to read the post-expansion list too, as the ones listed all have steps you can take prior to the expansion in order to get a head start. Read on, dear reader…
I love when other people do all the work: Anna of Too Many Annas has posted a guide to guides on 3.0/WotLK. Go get educated! Learn what you have to start QQ’ing about know to be the best!
Well, second best.
I’ll also plug my own guide, on reaching the (spell) hit cap at level 80 without setting foot in anything harder than a heroic.
Okay, gang, I have a dilemma.
Right now, as you’ve probably noticed, my background is entirely in DPSing - warlock, hunter, (shadow) priest, and two enhancement shamans. And as anyone who’s hung around on the Blog Azeroth chat can attest to, I am absolutely enamored with Death Knights. And, last but not least, our guild needs tanks. Like, badly.
You can probably see where this is going.
I don’t want to be that idiot Death Knight that gives DKs the same kind of name that huntards give to hunters. (Deathtard?) I want to be able to tank, and I want to be at least good enough to tank a 5 man, and that involves me not being completely unprepared: I need to learn to tank.
Obviously there’s not anything I can be directly pointed to that explains how to tank as a Death Knight, since they’re not widely available yet (or maybe I’m wrong and someone’s got a lot of this info down based on the beta, which is fine as a starting point). But what I need are some of the following - what you, my readers (all 16 of you), would consider good general tanking resources on these subjects:
Gearing a tank
Keeping people alive
Taking it in the face and living
Death Knight-specific resources, if they exist
I’ve enjoyed reading Allison Robert’s WI articles on tips for new DKs (part 1, part 2), but some more general articles would be good too.
Last night was raid night once again; this time, we piled back into Kara and one-by-one knocked down Nightbane, Attumen, and Netherspite. None of them dropped anything I can really use now; some of the stuff wouldn’t be bad (in particular, Nightstaff of the Everliving is a big ol’ chunk of spell damage and Spirit - remember, warlocks have to start caring about Spirit! - post-patch) but I didn’t think to actually check and see what the post-patch stats were until after we’d already left the tower.
Oh well. Kerst claims it’s dropped pretty much every time our guild’s fought Nightbane. Which, of course, means we’ll never see it again. ;)
I did, however, have enough badges after clearing those 3 to get a shiny new toy:
I may look into socketing in a few more +hit gems after the patch; unfortunately Suppression goes from this (+10% to-hit) to this (+3% to-hit), meaning I go from needing 76 spell hit to be hit capped on bosses to needing 164. Argh.
This is something I definitely need to look into since I’m supposed to go to ZA next Monday, as a couple of our DPSers will be out. My goal is to have as much of my gear as I can get enchanted by then.
I may not have won the Gnaked Gnome Race (look for Squeaktoy), and hell I may not have even made it all the way to Booty Bay before everyone left for the evening (blasted alternate route… full of Defias Divers), but it was hella fun, foshizzle!
EDIT: Here’s a gallery with some screenshots I took.
Unfortunately that was probably my last shot at a beta key, unless someone feels like hookin’ me up (my birthday’s on Tuesday, hint hint ;)).
Man, I thought Wowhead was sexy before, but now? Now it’s the Scarlett Johansson of WoW databases.
Today, Wowhead introduced their Item Comparison Tool. Not simply a tooltip side-by-side comparison machine, it actually sports a number of features, including:
Comparison of, seemingly, as many items as you can fit on your screen.
Side-by-side comparison of actual gains. Wowhead takes the stuff you’d get from every item, takes it away, and shows you a summary row with the actual gains from taking one item (or set of items) over another.
Make your own set! You can add premade sets to the comparison tool and compare them in their entirety, but you can also drag and drop items to make your own sets of items and compare them against one another.
Weight scales - you know those nifty weight scales Wowhead has, where you can choose to see which items are ‘best’ based on class, spec, and optionally any tweaking you’d like to do? Yeah, that’s incorporated here too - you can add a scale and see at a glance which items will perform best for your given criteria.
Oh, and the 3D viewer’s integrated too. You can choose the race and gender to view an item or items on, including whole sets - such as the Death Knight starting gear on anyone you like.
Oh, and any comparison can be linked to. How fun is that? Just as an example, I decided to pair up some possible main-hand/off-hand combinations, a staff that could potentially drop, and - for giggles - the warlock version of Atiesh. As you can see, according to the default Warlock - Affliction weight filter, I’d probably be best served by (out of these options, anyway…) the Nathrezim Mindblade/Orb of the Soul-Eater combo, then the Staff of Infinite Mysteries, then Atiesh, then the Greatsword of Horrid Dreams/Orb combo, then the Archmage’s Guile/Orb combo, and lastly the Mana Wrath/Orb pairing - you know, the one I’m still wielding. Whoops…
Too bad I can’t get an Atiesh! That’d be fun to wander around with.
First off, I almost finished my Arcatraz key tonight. Almost. Sadly my group for Heroic Bot (sure, I could run it on regular, but hey, free badges) fell apart before we even got in the door, with two people not having keys and our 5th spot (a dps, go figure) rotating madly, and our tank and healer both losing their connection… but none of that matters. Look at this guy’s guild name:
Exciting! But then came the most important part of the night. On my way out to the Plaguelands with Van to go rock Stratholme’s face off, I was put on the sub list for Kara, then - wait for it - onto the actual raid for Kara… then given a raid spot in our Kara runs! (One of our hunters is completely way overgeared even for Kara; there’s nothing there he needs at all anymore, so he gave me his raid spot. Thanks Chopper!) Here’s a couple of pictures to illustrate how the night went:
The first time we fought this guy, the dps was a little unfocused (mostly all fighting different flares) and so I ended up playing a decently long game of Bejeweled. (If you don’t have this addon, you need to get it. It is made of win.)
And yes, that’s the corpse of Prince Malchezzar. Everyone did fantastic on all 3 attempts at this guy - it’s just that the first two times we had horrible random luck. The first time, I and two of the healers both got hit with an enfeeble - almost exactly when an Infernal landed. Whoops, time for more Bejeweled. The second time, his axes made short work of a couple people, and when the infernal finally landed too close to the ranged group that indicated “hey guys, let’s move,” there was literally nowhere to go - there was about a 1-inch path between infernals where you weren’t getting completely wasted.
On the other hand, Terestian Illhoof was so much fun. Seed! Seed! Seed! Seed! Taptaptap Seed! Seed! Seed!
Plus I feel pretty good in my performance - all the way up Kara, on both trash and on bosses, I was pretty consistently second on the damage meter, only falling behind our rogue. And, yes, I did come out with a new ring (from chess of all things), a definite upgrade to one of my old quest reward rings.
It was a great night. :)