Ding!

Saturday morning (well, I guess it was actually early afternoon, since I went running in the morning) I devoted to getting my priest to level 100. He was half-way through 96 when I started, but all of it was rested. I recently discovered that you can buy potions that increase your experience earned by 20% in your garrison for just 100 resources, too! And for some reason I hadn't replaced my heirloom weapon yet either, so that was another 10% to experience. In all, a lot of extra experience.

I started off by running the two daily quests I had from my inn. Queues went pretty quickly since I was queuing as a healer. I had read that the zone Spires of Arak also has an additional 20% bonus to experience, so I headed there. I made sure to do any challenges I came across (~80-90k exp from one!) and open any of the 'treasure' items (~20-30k exp from one!). Still, I should have done a bit more reading on how you get the additional buff.

There are two quest lines in Spires, one with the Arakoa in the north and one with the Goblins in the south. I started off doing the Arakoa line, got about halfway through, and then for some reason switched to do the Goblin quests in the south.

After I had finished the Goblin quests, I went back up north and the very next quest I did was the one that provided the bonus experience for the zone. Woops! It still went pretty quickly though:

Getting to 100 means doing the Harrison Jones quest line alllll over again which I am not looking forward to. Bleah. Hopefully at this point I remember them well enough that they should go pretty quickly.

I spent a little bit of time in Ashran on Sunday with Crescendo and within maybe 30 minutes had gotten 4 pieces of PvP gear! Of course, then a Nemesis group joined and our group mostly fell apart. What's a Nemesis group? I'll tell you tomorrow!

The Weekend Update

Despite having a 4-day weekend, I actually didn't have that much time to play this weekend. For some strange reason people get really excited about doing social events on long weekends. Weird.

Anyway, some quick updates!

We tried some 3v3 arena last night and, despite making some early gains we ended up with a losing record overall. For whatever reason, 3s games rarely seem close / competitive. It seems like 75% of our games are over very quickly and are pretty one-sided, whether it's us doing the killing or getting killed. 2s, on the other hand, I'd say that about 90% of our games feel close and competitive, like either team could win; I'm not sure what the difference is.

One thing we definitely struggle with in 3s is when I get focused. As a feral druid, I'm somewhat of a glass cannon. Outside of bear form, I have a single defensive cooldown which reduces damage taken by 50% for 6 seconds. There are two charges and a charge regenerates every 2 minutes. Both of my CCs (cyclone, roots) have cast times. I have a stun on a 30 second cooldown.

As a comparison, hunters have 2 charges of Deterrence, which reduces damage by 30% and deflects all attacks, but renders the hunter unable to attack and, I believe, unable to be healed (which sounds bad, but if your healer is CCed you aren't getting heals anyway!). These regenerate every 3 minutes. In addition, they have an ability called Roar of Sacrifice which, when cast on a player, makes it so they cannot be critically hit for 12 seconds (they also cannot crit themselves). This is on a 1 minute cooldown. Add in the fact that hunters are ranged and so can try to kite when in danger (as opposed to feral druid, who has to stay in melee range to do any damage) and even use abilities like Disengage (which can cause players to be rooted, if you take a certain talent!) and they have even more damage reducing abilities. Freezing trap is an instant cast, though can be missed; do deal with this, some hunters take Binding Shot, which stuns the player if they move more than 5 yards from the tether. Otherwise, they generally take wyvern shot, another CC (1.5 cast time).

Rogues, as a second comparison, have evasion (1 minute cooldown, dodge increased by 100% for 10 seconds), cloak of shadows (1 minute cooldown, immune to spells for 5 seconds), vanish (disappear, breaking movement impairing effects, 2 minute cooldown), and preparation (resets the cooldown of the three previous skills, 5 minute cooldown). They also have a variety of CCs, including blind, kidney shot, sap, gouge, none of which have a cast-time.

None of this is to say that feral druids are helpless or bad. They are certainly in a good spot right now. I just feel like I have less tools to deal with being focused, and I end up getting flustered. It is definitely a weak spot in my game right now!

I actually had an invite to try healing in 3s from one of the hunters we had previously done 3s with, though he was going to play on his rogue. I accepted, because it's definitely something I'd like to try doing in the future. As we talked a little more about it, waiting for a second DPSer, we realized that my rating was about 300 higher than his. He then asked if I wanted to just try 2s, in which he was ~1850 ... feeling bad about saying no at this point, I said sure, but warned that I might not be very good since the majority of my experience is healing in RBGs. We played 3 games and lost all 3, though two of them were really close and could have gone either way. The second game was against a priest/lock combo and the priest spent half the time using Dominate Mind on me which was really annoying! Overall though, a positive experience, I think. We stopped after 3 because the rogue felt bad tanking my rating, ha.

We did pretty well in 2s overall, going 14-11. We ended on a nice little 3 game winning streak which was good, because we certainly had some frustrating games in the middle. In particular, we had one game against a Windwalker Monk (melee dps) and priest healer that ... I have no idea, still, how we lost. The priest was essentially oom for what seemed like forever, and even with all my cooldowns up I couldn't get him down ... and then we lost. Mind boggling. I think sometimes when we realize another healer is OOM, we get tunnel vision and stop playing the way that got us there in the first place. Too focused on trying to DPS down the healer, we stop CCing the DPS or switching when it's useful. We both ended with our rating over 2k and my partner got as high as 2030 (highest yet!).

I also spent some time leveling up my priest, who is now 96! I realized that there are potions you can buy in your garrison for just 100 resources, that increase the amount of experience you gain by 20%! That certainly helped.

This weekend, both my normal 2s partner and my wife will be out of town ... so this is what's on the agenda:

1) Level 100 on Crescendo. This should be pretty quick, I think. Couple hours, tops.

2) Rated Battlegrounds! Right now the cutoff for top 10% in RBGs is 1819, and my rating is currently 1788. I have had a really high success rate in RBGs recently it seems like, so I am hopeful this is pretty easy to get. Top 35% get the title Soldier of the Horde and top 10% get Defender of the Horde. Guardian of the Horde is top 3%, but requires 1950 ... not sure how reasonable that is, but we'll see!

3) Finishing up my quest to get 500 Gnome honorable kills in "world" pvp ... the title of Gnomebane awaits!

If I get all that done I might check out BRF or start working on Crescendo's pvp gear.

Odds and Ends

Over the weekend, I tried to run through Highmaul again to get my weekly allotment of Abrogator Stones. I don't know if I just got lucky last week or unlucky this week or what ... but I must have tried at least 10 groups over 3-4 days before we were able to defeat the second to last boss, Ko'ragh. After spending so much time in the LFR tool, I began to wonder if Normal and Heroic Highmaul were on the same raid ID. I asked in the next group I joined, and they told me that it was possible to do both every week and get loot from them both! Fantastic! I just doubled the amount of potential Stones each week.

So I joined a heroic Highmaul group. The first boss went down pretty easy. I believe the mechanics for most bosses are the same in heroic and normal, but the damage and health are higher in heroic. And, of course, the gear is better. Unfortunately, the first boss was pretty stingy and didn't drop any stones. The second boss is a really easy fight for melee - you just stand around and dps. There's nothing to dodge, the boss only moves occasionally ... easy to put out good dps. In fact, I managed to top the meters again!

Heroic Highmaul

I did learn, later on that weekend, that Recount does not always accurately record DPS, but I don't think that was an issue for this boss. #1 in heroic! Wow. I actually used the bonus roll you see in that screenshot and got exactly what I needed - a good trinket! But again ... no Abrogator Stones. At this point I went to wowhead and checked the comments on the quest; turns out you can only get them from one difficulty each week. Bummer. I stayed in the raid to see if I could get any other upgrades (the iLvL for gear in heroic is 670-675, higher than my PvP gear) but we wiped a couple times on the next boss and then the group broke up. I'm currently 50 stones short which will probably take 3 weeks.

PvP-wise, I needed two more pieces of gear (keeping in mind that one of my rings is the PvE because it has better secondary stats) for a full set. I was going to be 200 conquest short this week, but on my second RBG win of the week I actually got a piece of gear! I went about 4-5 weeks without getting any gear until last week, when I got non-set pants ... which I didn't need. This week's piece of gear though? One of the pieces I needed! I am now fully decked out in PvP gear. We also managed to break into the 1800s in 2s which was pretty exciting.

I did a couple more dungeons with my priest last night, got up to level 85! In one run, we somehow managed to accidentally pull a boss while already engaged with a large pack of mobs. What ensued was chaotic, frantic, and totally awesome. Check out chat!

Take note of my sweet transmog!

And lastly, I know that I mentioned I had hit exalted with 4 of the Pandaria reps, but I'm not sure I ever showed off my new mounts! I'll spare you a picture of every new mount (some of the reps gave 3 mounts), and instead just do one for each rep. Here is the Klaxxi mount:

He is SUPER excited for this picture

The Shado-Pan tiger (1 of 3):

Apparently I got a little carried away with hitting the space bar before the screenshot

Order of the Cloud Serpent:

The lightning is constantly moving on this one!

Golden Lotus (1 of 3):

The animations for this guy are hilarious

MOAR ALTS!

Gearing up for PvP was incredibly quick and easy. Between the Gladiator's building in my Garrison, Ashran, and winning a couple PvP matches here and there I have a full outfit of 620 PvP gear (highest you can get with honor points, as far as I can tell). Now I just need more conquest points ...

So, while I'm waiting for my Arena partner to hit 100, I've started leveling my Priest. Mostly because I want to be able to make my own bags and enchants, heh. I started off simply doing quests and then started queueing for dungeons. Finishing a dungeon takes ~10-15 minutes and you sometimes find a group that wants to continue doing dungeons, so you just requeue as a group. It is much faster than leveling via quests. My priest is just a smidge under 78 and I actually made a point to find a Priest trainer to get dual spec so I can get into queues faster as a healer.

The healing spec has changed a lot. I didn't have a chance to try it out yet, but there are now three 'powers' (for lack of a better word) you can activate. These powers have an affect on the other spells that you can cast and basically give extra damage, healing, etc. It should be an interesting experience healing for the first time with them.

So ... apparently I should have done a liiiiittle more research on the matter

My brilliant plan for some time now has been that I would select a pair of useful professions on my boosted Mage. Originally I had planned on Inscription and Gemcrafting, but once I got into the expansion and realized how much ore I had, I decided it made more sense to get Blacksmithing instead of Gemcrafting. Blacksmithing allows you to create iLvl 630 weapons and then upgrade them to (at least) 640 - this seemed like a relatively easy way to get a nice weapon and then, if there was nothing else to do with BS, at least I could sell gear in addition to the ore.

So I got my Mage to level 91, killed the NPC that drops the profession quest items, completed the Blacksmithing quest (inscription, too), and then created the Forge in my Garrison ... and after an hour, I was finally able to figure out which weapon I would craft first!

Blacksmithing Weapon Plans

And the answers, my friends, is none of them. Why none of them, you ask? Because none of them are usable by Feral druids! Well, I guess that's not technically correct. I could use a dagger. But that seems like a great way to ensure my druid hits like a wet noodle. Why isn't there a 2h mace?! Or a staff?! Or even a polearm!Gah!

So uhhh, yea. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

My boosted alt has better stuff than I do

I didn't have much time last night so I wanted to hop on the Mage and see what that was like. As you'll recall, I boosted my level 1 mage to 90. The whole thing was rather interesting. When you first login, you're in the Blasted Lands in front of the portal to go to Draenor. You have a limited amount of spells/skills and you see a giant popup telling you what's happening:

You start with an epic flying mount that and the ability to ride it (something my Priest/Shaman didn't have). I'm not sure how they decided on purple, but he's pretty handsome so I won't complain.

Heck, boosted alts even have the ability to ride flying mounts in Pandaria, something I didn't even purchase on my druid because it costs a substantial amount of money - ~5,000 gold, if I recall correctly. They also start with full 22 slot bags! My druid is still using 18 slotters #sadface.

All their gear is green, but far better quality than what I had when I hit level 90 on my Druid. The blue quest rewards are still upgrades, but not the massive jaw-dropping ones from before. As you complete quests, you also gain additional abilities. I have no idea how they decided what skills to hand out when, but I've finally got Blink and Polymorph so now I feel like a real mage! I logged off before finishing the opening quest-lines so I haven't been able to pick professions yet.

One tip - make sure to log in on your boosted character after you boost him so that you start earning rested XP. I never did that before last night so I get no bonus XP!

I know I said we'd talk about Garrisons, but ...

Ding!

Man, so much cool stuff happens at level 100 that I think I forgot to take screenshots of most of it! All of a sudden you have like 18 different quests in your Garrison (ok, I admit that might be a slight exaggeration).

The first quest I saw was to upgrade my Garrison to level 3. Unfortunately I did not have enough Garrison Resources to do so immediately, but I don't think it will take too long to acquire the rest - only need about ~400.

The second quest was to enter the Proving Grounds. I only knew what this was because I had read a bit about it on Reddit, though I'm still not quite clear on what purpose it servers. Essentially you have to pass certain levels before trying different raids, I think? Either way, I gave it a shot on the Bronze Tank level (Bronze, Silver, Gold are the levels that I know of). I failed the first time because, well, my gear sucks. I am largely wearing gear from questing through the 94-95 zone because I didn't want to skip anything. It also probably didn't help that I forgot to use one of my skills that increases Dodge by ~65%. Oh, and I hadn't even selected my level 100 talent either! So uhhh, yea. I managed to barely beat it the second time after selecting the talent that consumes three stacks of Lacerate and then reduces the amount of damage you take for, I think, 12 seconds? I don't really know what completing that will do for me, but just by entering the proving groups I was given a very nice upgrade for a weapon and then got even luckier when it rolled the weapon upgrade (the DPS went from ~160 to ~273!).

There was a third quest in the major Garrison hut that is a daily quest to collect Apexis crystals. There is a solo one for 800 and a group one for 1000. I believe these are used to upgrade gear, but I don't know how much it takes yet.

In addition to hitting 100, I finally managed to get a high enough ilvl to run Skyreach. I got two pieces of gear from the run (both great upgrades) and then a third when I handed in the daily quest from my Tavern. In addition to that, the long quest line for the epic ring starts in Skyreach, so once I finally got around to handing that in I was given this beauty of a ring:

All in all, a lot of nice upgrades in a short time. Hopefully I'll have time this weekend to try and run Molten Core. For the 10 year anniversary of World of Warcraft, Blizzard re-opened MC and completing it gives you a sweet mount and an epic hat!

Tanks for nothing

As you may have gathered from a couple previous posts, I've done several of the new dungeons. At first I didn't really plan on checking any of them out until I hit 100, simply because I was pretty nervous about trying to tank (and I had heard that queuing as DPS took forever). However, after getting a couple of the daily dungeon quests I decided to give it a shot, anxiety be damned.

As you can imagine, the first try was pretty rough. I didn't even have all my skills on my bar until I entered the dungeon (woops). In case you were wondering, yes, it is kind of difficult to read ability tooltips while you're tanking! Several people died along the way, but we managed to finish the dungeon, so I guess that worked out alright. I got better (and less nervous) the more I tried to tank, and at this point the only thing I get concerned about is when I try a dungeon for the first time.

One thing that has made running the dungeons immensely easier than when I last played is the Looking For Group tool.

I've only used this for dungeons, so I can't comment on how it works with PvP or Raids, but it's pretty straight forward for dungeons. You basically select what roles you are comfortable playing and then select your dungeon (there is also a "Random" option that gives you a small amount of gold). It selects your two current specs by default (from left to right the options are: Tank, Heal, DPS, Leader).

You'll notice in the screenshot that I am currently unable to queue for the highest level dungeon, Auchindoun. Each dungeon has a minimum iLvl gear requirement and mine was a tad too low! It's an interesting mechanism to ensure everyone is capable of contributing, and I've heard all the heroics / raids are like that as well.