Dual-spec is good

In my last post, I mentioned my AH Buisness. This is how I finance my alts, their epic flying mounts and all professions blizzard created. I hardly farm mats, I buy them. And when dual-spec hit the puplic realm, of course I bought it for my "main" charakters (priest, paladin and warrior). By now I have seven charakters with dual-spec and when I play the others, they will get it,too. So you could see: I am a BIG fan of dualspec.

Why? Because I am able to swap spec when needed and have all the glyphs ready. Here is a little story of it:
Friday I wanted to go Ulduar 10 with some old friends but a few guys decided to do other things and so all my planning has been futile. I logged onto my rogue and saw a Deathknight searching for one more DPS for Nexus. So I thought: It may not be Ulduar but my warrior could use the belt for his DPS- Set. Of course I got an invite (or I would not share the story) and got portet right after.

Great! We had a mage, a hunter and a disc priest for healing. The tanking DK had a lot of tempered saronite and was wielding the arena axe. *gulp* Somehow he sportet 30k HP but I guess his avoid was abmyssal. The mage was decent and the hunter was well equipt... well, at least for the end of TBC. *narf* He was wearing his "early-BT" raid epics, even when there are so much better crafted pieces around. The healer had medicore equip, no enchants but definitly knew his buisness.

We started the instance and slowly made our way down to the frozen boss. The mage aoe'd even single targets ("I have lag, I hardly could do anything beside aoe."), the tank was trying to get himself killed (but the healer prevented it) and the hunter did not a single misdirection but keept shooting the wrong (read: not tanked) target. At least he used his feign death quick. Myself was fiddeling with the buttons, pushing randoms skills and still topped the charts (afterwards I checked rawr and I was close to the calculated DPS so I guess I did something right). We killed the frozen boss after some time and procceded to the next boss.

And here drama begins:
The trash was taken down and the tank charged the boss. Everything went smooth until the first transition. Noone went after the blue lady and I ended up tanking her. It seemed as if they wanted the achievement but when I finally got the blue girl down I was the last one alive. We entered the instance and repeated the fight. In every single aspect ... including the wipe ... *sigh*
On the third try I asked for a killorder and suggested to kill blue first. The others agreed and 4 of us survived the transition. Too bad, our healer had died because the tank had switched to single target mode...
Try #4 ended when the tank died because the healer had bad luck getting interrupted and he did not use a single cooldown. And now I was pissed.

I declared to tank the boss myself. The DK asked "Do you have more life than me???" Well, I did not because I gem for thread but my avoid is better. Although I did not make a sharp remark (like: "No but I have a brain") the mage whispered me ("Not more life, but more skill" .. he was happy after the boss because finally he could bomb without aggro issues).
First try was a wipe because I blew all my cooldowns in the first transition and in the second transition the healer had bad luck again. Second try the lady went down but I was a bit nervous.

The rest of the instance I keept tanking. We flew from boss to boss and did not wipe once again. At the endboss I got a bit nervous because the priest did not dispell the roots but I survived the enrage easily because I blew all my cooldowns.
When we tried to get out of the instance the DK took a wrong exit and got smashed, luckily he was to far away to get us into combat.

I did not get the belt (and in the run next day I was unlucky, too) but without Dual-spec the run would have been over at the second boss. So: CHEER FOR DUALSPEC! :)

cheers

chaoskas

AH Business and a little suprise

Yesterday I logged in for some AH Business and maybe do some dailies with my hunter. The latter has some nice gear from the AH and fellow guildies thanks to the BoE Epics from Naxxramas and now tries to get some reputation items.

When I mean "AH business" I do the following steps:

1. I log onto my mage,
2. grab the daily jewelcrafting quest,
3. empty my mailbox until I have only 5ish bagslots
4. do the daily
5. port to ironforge
6. play the AH
7. hearth to dalaraan (saves 10s for the Rune of Teleportation)
8. return the daily and log off.

Only by doing this my mage got up to lvl73. Maybe I do the cooking and fishing dailies someday, too. Just because the reputation for the Kirin Tor and the Design: Runed Scarlet Ruby. ;-)

And because I am a JC with lots of Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Tokens I was happy when I read, that the epic gems are just to be introduced. The design's will be purchaseable whith the aforementioned tokens and the raw gems can produced by inspecting titanium ore. Too bad there was only one stack of titanium ore in the AH yesterday. But I think I will invest in this kind of field :-)

And the suprise yesterday? Well, I was not in the mood to do the dailies with my hunter and so I logged in with my warrior to do the daily fishing quest (to be honest I did not know what to do and I have this quest since weeks). And while I was fishing I saw a group for Utgarde pinnacle (heroic) which was "ready to go". After a few minutes of thinking and two more requests I applied and get an invitation.

But there were only four people in the group. Apparently the healer left just a minute ago (and went offline) and now the group was searching for a healer. *sigh* So I prepared to finish my daily, return it and "disconnect" right after. To my suprise they found a healer and two people were already on the move to get us ported (and none of them was the healer! Suprise #2).

Suprise #3 was the healer who was dressed in Naxx25/Ulduar drops and quite good. The other DPS was ... well, I thought it would be a joke. All three with the usual lvl74 blues and no enchants but atleast a few crafted epics now and then *sigh#2*.

We started and -Suprise#4- we steamrolled this place. The DPS was *great* for their equip (1.5 - 2.5k. I saw Naxx25 people do worse) and when someone (especially the mage) got aggro he would do something smart to survive. Skadi managed to kill the mage but the druid quickly brezzed him. It was a demonstration of teamplay and we completed the run in less than 30 minutes! And for some icing on the cake I got the Meteorite Whetstone. *yeah*

It showed me (again) that gear does not matter much when smart people are on the keyboard. I had a blast and I think the worst player in this group was me because I lost aggro sometimes. Well, that's why I love this game: once in a while you find four strangers and the fun you get from this is worth everytime you are trapped in a PuGfh.

cheers,

chaoskas

Breaking the silence

Well, I once decided to make this blog just to talk a bit about my hobby. The first stories went fast but then ... well, then RL hit me hard and I had the time to blog OR to play. I decided to do the later and almost forgot my password for the blog (Hail to the recovery!).

But I think, blogging maybe as funny as playing and it helps a lot to get rid of the bad mood after a bad PuGfh experience. At the official forums I found some "Hearthstone-stories" and i saw other people with the same needs. There are so many smart people but unfortunalty they are only a few against the hordes of the "un-skilled and learn-resistant". It's kind of sad.

Anyhow:
As mentioned before I played. And I played a lot. As my wife tends to say: I played too much (well, that's another story).

I leveled my warrior to 80 as prot and it was a blast. He tanked serveral heroics but somehow only when he is DPS he get the items he wants. And he never gets them easily. I went into Utgarde pinnacle 8 times for the sword, 9 times into Violett hold for the legs and 7 times into CoT4 for the shield (which never dropped but I got into a PuG which killed Saph+Kel and I was the only one who needed or wanted the Wall of Terror). *happydance*

Also my Hunter reached the levelcap and is now busy by leveling his pets (2/5 so far). I was Beastmaster by heart for 80 levels but when I switched to survival I never looked back (by now), Explosive Arrow is so much fun :-) I spend serveral thousand gold to get his equipment and to skill leatherworking but now I log in only for a daily or two to get some reputation. Well, my expectations for a fresh lvl80 are much higher than others I guess. ;-)

But now I am a bit unsure what to do. My wife quit playing and so my druid remains 73 and spends his time maxing his tradeskills. I leveled a couple of alts and even created a new shaman and gave him some heirloom items (those for shards, I don't have the emblems to get the "real" ones). The logical choice would be the rogue as I have quite a few lockboxes and I want to open them by myself (silly but that's me ;-) ). But it's quite boring with shadowstep and I didn't get the concept of mutilate by now (he is dualspec as 6 others, too ;-) ). Any suggestions what to try out?

Cheers
chaoskas