Gotta heirloom'em all

They should have renamed the 6.0 patch to the Heirloom Patch. I say this because since the patch went live I've done nothing but try and get heirlooms from Garrosh Kills on all my characters. Some I've gotten through groups I've put together and some through awesome people on twitter organizing groups. I've yet to get one through the new group finder because sadly most of my groups fall apart after one wipe or because people think they can overpower mechanics and as we all know...that rarely works. At least I can cry myself to sleep holding the heirlooms I have.

So a lot of heirlooms, a lot of changes to classes, and a Halloween holiday event. Blizzard has definitely provided us with a lot of content in game to keep us busy until the expansion release date which is almost upon us. Throw Blizzcon into the mix and suddenly October has been a very busy month for most of us! With all this activity it's been fun to see people who stopped playing WoW, finally log back on after a long time. They are usually confused at all the changes and are often asking questions in guild as to how to do stuff or what things are.

Virtual Flexing

A little bit ago I wrote about my low population server and I listed out a few things that I felt that Blizzard could do to help out not just my server but all low pop servers. Included in that list were the suggestions to merge servers and to open the current tier for cross realm raidability. Two weeks ago Blizzard released not just one but TWO things that I feel will help out all low pop servers when they go live in the 5.4 patch. The two things: Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding. Do Blizzard developers read my blog and think I have great ideas? Probably not but at the very least they are finally doing something to help low pop servers.

Plight of the low pop server

I have been on my server since 2005 when it was first launched and in that time my server has gone from being a medium population server (ever so briefly) to being a low population server less than a year after going live. Since then, it has remained a low pop server. While at the time it wasn’t a big deal, the population on the server has steadily declined. During Vanilla, before paid transfers were implemented, most people rolled on a server and stayed on that server until they either stopped playing or found a reason to start over on a different realm. If you reached level 60 on a character, people tended to stay on that server because it was such a pain to re-level on a new server. Once paid transfers were introduced the barrier to leaving your server was removed. Players were free to transfer their characters to new servers to play with friends/coworkers/raiding guilds/etc.

Of course this didn’t affect the larger realms since the higher population numbers meant they could afford to lose some people to other servers without it affecting the overall population. Unlike larger servers, the smaller servers suffered because the realms couldn’t afford to lose so many people. As new people began playing WoW, most would pick the larger realms because the population made them more appealing than the low pop counterparts. Who wants to roll a new character on what appears to be an empty server when they can roll on a busy server that looks to be more fun? Not all transfers were off of low pop realms. Some people transferred to smaller servers to play with friends or because they grew tired of life on a larger server.The transfers in weren’t numerous enough to slow the tide of people leaving.

Pandarian Things

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE lamp pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid. 

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

Coolest Mage Spec: A guide to 5.0.4 Frost Mages

Oh Frost spec. You and I have done our dance for a long time now and we’ve seen many highs and many more lows throughout our WoW love affair. We have been mocked for choosing each other but those people never understood the power of Frost. They didn’t let us raid with them and it was ok, because you and I were better than them and we knew it. We were once the top dog in Vanilla but when BC came out, we were left behind by the other two specs. It was ok because we had our water elemental (Aquamus Prime)and we were still feared in pvp. In Wrath we were given more fight control talents but our dps was miles behind most other classes. Our new ability, deep freeze, only froze things in place for a few seconds and on mobs that were immune to it, it was wasted. Eventually it was made to do damage on immune mobs and seeing high crits on bosses was nice but we were still a rare sight in raids.

When leveling, many mages went frost because it made leveling a lot easier to have a damage shield and plenty of crowd controllability. As soon as most frost mages hit level cap, they’d usually pick a different spec. Why bother playing a class that you enjoy if it can’t bring the dps you need in raids? Because of the high number of leveling frost mages who didn’t understand the class or how to play it right, most people assumed that frost was a lost cause and that only baddies played frost at level cap.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

We have a week to go before the 5.0.4 patch drops and about a month before Mists of Pandaria is finally released. Between then and now we have to do two things: relearn how to play our characters with the new MoP talents and secondly, decide if the new game changes have made the game more or less fun. Hopefully most of you are in the more fun category but I know that for a few of you, the game has lost its grasp on your interest. Don't worry my dear readers, I have played the beta and am firmly in the still fun category. I look forward to seeing everything Pandaria has to offer and having a great time with my guild running new dungeons, raids, and scenarios.

With so many new and exciting features like pet battles and scenarios, I believe that there is enough to keep me interested and playing WoW until the next expansion. I know some people are looking forward to one feature above all others, the pet battles! For others they are looking forward to Pandas and monks. 


But as I said, for some the game has taken a turn that they don't like. For some of these people the game is not the same game they fell in love with. For some real life has intruded (as it does) and while they sadly would love to play the game, they are unable to do so because of real life. Perhaps some have found a different game that now holds the place in their heart that WoW once used to occupy. They have decided to jump ship and are not looking back.

Legendary Encounters

6 months of spending Saturday nights raiding, about 20 actual raids, countless wipes. In the end what did I get out of it? Well that’s easy to answer. I got to spend 20 nights have a great time with some really fun and awesome people. Oh and I also got a legendary staff that is full of awesomeness and win.

Why did it take 6 months to get a legendary for my mage? Well I went through the Twitterland Raiding community which is composed of people from twitter. We didn’t always have the same raid roster every night so we had to spend a lot of time explaining fights and figuring out why people were dying. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough people signed up so we had to spend time trying to pull people into the raid from twitter/real id friends lists and that ate into the raid time. Both of these reasons caused us to not always down every boss each raid night which led to not getting the maximum number of eternal embers/seething cinders/smouldering essences.

I decided to go through Twitter because one night in February(the 18th to be precise) someone else was running a Firelands run and I wanted to join it. Sadly I did not but while I was waiting to hear back I was in the Twitter Mumble server talking to Oestrus who decided that we should just organize our own group. This led to a lot of tweeting and real id friending and before I knew it, we had a Firelands raid. We had a great time and I met a lot of new and fun people who wanted to run Firelands with me whenever I ran it.

I wrote a post about running Firelands with Twitter people back in February and how much fun I had. Looking back at it now, I have had even more fun since then. Not long into the Firelands runs I decided to take a page from my vanilla playbook and spend the night drinking and killing fire bosses. Back in vanilla, I ran Molten Core with the guild on Saturday nights and several guildees and I would drink together and have a great time killing stuff. With Firelands feeling like Molten Core 2.0 I clearly needed to drink! This quickly spread amongst some of the raid members and became our Saturday night tradition. I would drink and some people would join me and we’d have a good time. If we didn’t down everything, well at least we had a damn good time.

I definitely could not have done this alone and so I get to the most important part of this post. This is the part where I thank everyone who showed up to the raid whether it was just once or whether they were there every single night. A big thank you to the following: Rowann, Oestrus, Poneria, Hestiah, Asherrylie, Hempia, Velidra, Rooster, Dee, Lemon, Sidecar, Rofer, Rilandune, Exlucis, Ekinara, Aero, Pix, Kia, Saz, Munificence, Thyro, Penguin, Stellery, Megs, Haitia, Askevi, Lurien, Matticus, Macaroni, Kitsuno, Sikaros, Finalflame, and everyone in my guild who tried to down rag for me. If I missed your name please let me know and I will gladly add you to the list!  

If anyone would like to watch the Livestream I did of the turning in ceremony you can click here.

PUG Etiquette

As a smallish 10 man casual raiding guild, my guild tends to find itself having to pug a person or two for our raids when we don't have enough people sign up/show up for our raids. Now this doesn't mean that we are a horribad guild that couldn't down hogger or anything. It just means that recruitment has not brought in enough people who can show up to a raid. A normal raid night this expansion will often see us with eight or nine guildees online and ready to raid.

This situation leads us to pug a spot or two so that we can raid on raid nights. Sometimes I have a friend on my friends list that I can ask to come to the raid and when this happens, it's not really pugging as you are pulling in someone you know and not a complete stranger. But sadly there are times when our friends list fails us and we are stuck having to resort to asking for people in trade chat. This is not something that we enjoy doing but sometimes it's either pug or not raid.

Community Fun

Back in July 2011 Blizzard announced that they were activating the much talked about Real ID grouping feature that would allow you to group with your Real ID friends for random instance fun. When I heard about this feature I instantly though "Sweet I can run randoms with twitter friends so they can see how awesome I really am and want to be my friends forever!" Blizzard then decided that they would make the Real ID system use your real name and verily the twitter community took up arms against this invasion of privacy. Some of my readers will remember that I posted about the Real ID feature when it was first announced, along with the huge controversy that came along with it. I honestly didn't have a problem with it but I also don't have a one of a kind super unique name like some people out there.

Well the Real ID announcement was pretty cool but you could only run random 5mans with Real ID friends, which was nice and all but the system was a little lacking. Yes you could get a full group of RID friends and not worry about having to pug in randoms but you couldn't run a raid with them or even run a battleground with them. As someone who grew up in one city in one state and then moved to a different city for college and finally moved out of that state, I tend to have a few friends that I am too far from seeing without much planning and travel. Real ID allowed me to be able to talk to my WoW playing friends regardless of the faction that they were playing. This alone was a pretty sweet feature.