Bizzarro WoW: That guy again!

When I was young and more noobish than I am today, I rolled a night elf warrior. On an RP server.

He was full of ambition to charge forth and slay this or that in defense of his homeworld, or hometree, or something.

He dutifully killed imps and spiders, dying several times along the way, eagerly lapping up the rewards and kind words of his quest givers.

And then came the fateful day that he left the relative safety of the Shadow Glen (not terribly safe back then with all the red mobs and me having less than half a clue of what the fuck I was doing) and headed out on the road to Dolonaar, carrying some satchel of goods for the innkeep there.

4.3 on the PTR – soon

As the clever title implies, patch 4.3 will soon be tested on the PTR.

The complete notes can be found here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3608419

A few spots are missing information, particularly mages, but there are some goodies available to commence QQ or celebration.

Patch notes for PTR builds are subject to much change, so don’t shoot me if none of this applies with the next test release. I won’t cover everything, I’ll focus on the general and fun/WTF stuff.

(There was also a nice blog post from the crab about some of these changes and even a few that didn’t make it to the patch note page: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3615095)

Not Helping: Cooking, Bathroom, Math

A little hodge podge of kitten-related hijinks.

Kittens not helping with cooking:

A family gathering was planned for Saturday.

What would you like us to bring?

“Side dish.”

OK, flip through the WoW Cook Book (seriously, I have it and use it) and find Festival Dumplings.

Raid in Review: By just a matter of days

And lo, the nerfs did come down from on high.

And there was much lamenting and gnashing of teeth and verily, the weeping of the damned could be heard echoing unto the heavens.

“Why couldn’t it have waited just one more week?!?!?!”

/sigh

I think we could have had it without the nerf last week.

Oh well.

Anyways, here’s my post-nerf impressions of Firelands.

…

Beth’tilac

Bizzarro WoW: The Twittery

As the post title suggests, I spent some time this weekend on my Alliance characters.

I decided since the druid was at full rested XP she deserved setting aside the AH ledger and stepping foot in to a dungeon.

(Funny how the bank toon was the highest level, amazing what the daily cooking and fishing dailies will do for you at the lower levels.)

My gear is rather craptastic as my last few levels were gained via the aforementioned dailies – the best (and only) gear reward to be obtained through them was my fishing hat. As such, I decided that entering a dungeon queue as a healer might not be in the best interest of my party.

Good god, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

…

My first foray in to the low-level Alliance dungeon finder netted me a fresh Deadmines.

Out of my league

I’m sort of bad at melee DPS.

As a result, I often begin leveling melee toons (think I’m on my 6th warrior) and about the time things get complicated (fighting in a party, so level 15 or so) I tend to lose interest and wander away.

This is how my DKs end up as gathering toons. I’m relatively safe in plate zipping about, picking flowers, and hitting rocks.

But we’re at a situation in the guild where it would be awfully handy for me to have a third character to raid on when a warm body is needed and they’ve managed to get both my mage and priest saved to the same Firelands raid.

A normal BoT was being run.

They needed a warm body.

My DK is level 85.

He’s also ilevel 301.

Tokens for Tier

Start with the tangent: Rag down! Unfortunately post-nerf but still down. Next raid in review I’ll talk about the post-nerf vibe.

Everyone is abuzz about T13 gear not being available through Valor Point purchase in 4.3, it will only be available through raiding.

Warning: long post.

Before I get into my thoughts on it, I realized that the only place I had seen this tidbit was in a paraphrased article on MMO Champ so I had to track down the original leak. There are blue references on the forums to it, but it’s not part of any official announcement I could find. The MMO article did link back to an interview between Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) and Ten Ton Hammer. This appears to be the source.

The Blue Words

Per GC in the TTH interview:

Bizzarro WoW: Quick Peek

I’ve been crazy sick (a blog post in its own right about me finally getting antibiotics…) so don’t have a lot of stuff to say.

That isn’t entirely true.

I don’t have a lot of coherent things to say.

But expect something in the near-ish future regarding the announced 4.3 goodies.

As soon as what I want to say makes sense to me.

Anyways, here’s a snapshot for my future curiosity about how my little bizzarro characters are faring.

I am trouncing conventional (and my usual) wisdom of leveling each of them as dual-gatherers.

Raid in Review: 2 to 3 or 3 to 2

ZOMG.

This might actually be posted on the right day!

Sort of funny how similar themes pop up over night in the blogosphere.

I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but head over to these posts from last week for more information about 2-healing versus 3-healing in 10-man raids:

Reputation Grind

Orangeslice > Other Sodas

And it all started over here: Murloc Parliament with the reply at Screaming Monkeys. (Hey, look at that! More blogs for me to read!)

The discussion is about when and the reasons why a group decides to drop from 3-healing content to 2-healing content. (There was also a lot of discussion about the “right” and “wrong” ways to do Baleroc. Maybe I’ll do a post outlining our strat seeing as how it hasn’t changed much since our first kill.)

To be truthful, this is a decision that can only be made on a guild-to-guild, fight-to-fight basis. There is no blanket statement of “every guild should be able to 2-heal every fight in current content at X point of gear/experience.”

So anything I say is strictly from the perspective of my guild and our gear/experience.

Bizzarro WoW: Wooooooooo!

I swear, the only reason I roll draenei females is to hear the cute noises they make when they get smacked around.

That and I’m a fan of the /waggle.

Anyway, here are some of the Wooooooooo! moments that I’ve had leveling this gaggle of alts.

Bags

When I rolled my first night elf warrior (poor, poor warrior), I struggled with bag space. It actually took me a while to figure out how to sell stuff to the vendor (FYI – clicking on the Buyback tab does nothing for you if you haven’t actually sold them anything yet) and I was just accumulating so much crap so quickly. By the time I limped in to Darnassus (nasty incident with the lamp post behind me), a friend was ready and waiting with a gift of 5 gold and a parcel of bags.