What the 3.2 patch notes *should* say...

As a WoW geek, I actually enjoy reading through patch notes and seeing all the changes in store for the game. However, all the changes are stated in a very matter-of-fact way; almost nothing is said about how the patch changes will affect your day-to-day play or even your play style. You have to actually think about it for awhile (bleah, thinking). After reading some forums and going over the notes, I hereby present what the patch notes *should* say (or at least, what they say to me).

・All heroic dungeons and raids up to Ulduar will drop Emblems of Conquest, for iLvl226 gear. Heroic daily dungeon quests will give you two Emblems of Triumph, for iLvl245 gear. Now you can go back to content you outgear and still benefit from it, even if marginally. Or, you can gear your alts much quicker than before. Also, Emblems can be converted to Valor or Heroism so you can fill out your gear set with items from any category, or still get heirloom items or PvP gear. This will greatly increase traffic in Heroic dungeons and Raid PUGs for people of all gear levels - this will be great for alts and people new to level 80.

・There is a new 5-man dungeon called Trial of the Champion. On the normal mode, every boss will drop an epic item, but no emblems will drop. You can reset this dungeon and run it over and over (probably after you polish off your daily dungeon quest) to get all the epic loot you need from it, and then never run it again.

・The heroic mode of Trial of the Champion drops iLvl213 epics and badges, and will have a 24-hour lockout like other heroic dungeons. If you run only one dungeon a day, this should be the one for maximum benefit.

・There are new 10 and 25 man raids. They are gauntlet-style boss encounters with no trash. They offer gear better than Ulduar, and they drop emblems of Triumph. There are hard mode versions of the 10 and 25, and they all have separate lockouts. Which means you can theoretically run the same raid content 4 times per week! For some (loot hoarders like me) this is great, for others (people that prefer new content as much as possible) its the biggest /facepalm in raid design history. *However, the harder content will be unavailable at first and unlocked after the patch it released, so you will not be able to do insane amounts of raid content at first.

・There is a new battleground to queue for called Wintergrasp. And a mix of all the previous battlegrounds named Conquestsomething or other. And if you like extra-slow leveling, you can earn experience in battlegrounds! I don't PVP so much any more, so it's not as important for me. I will try out the new battleground though a couple times.

This is a huge reboot of the dungeon system for WotLK and I am looking forward to trying the new content with all of my alts, especially the younger ones approaching 80 fast!

Presenting...Bloodshiv!

I've added a new member to my ranks of alts - Bloodshiv, the Orc Rogue!

First I'd like to pat myself on the back for the awesome name, which I was able to come up with all by myself.

Second, some of you may be scratching your heads saying, "But I see you have a level 71 rogue already!" True, true, but that means little to an Alt Fanatic. That rogue was a project with a friend from Florida (I was Vais, he was Myamy, get it?) Where we would level up 2 rogues together. Now he has stopped playing WoW and its no fun to keep on playing Vais alone on a server out of my time zone.

Third, we must all bid a fond farewell to Kurokishi, the noble Death Knight. He left us at the tender age of 62, well before his time. I just don't have enough slots on the realm, I'm at my maximum 10 with my two alliance alts and their bank alt. And I know it's totally weird, but I have almost no motivation to play a death knight.

I can't quite pinpoint why the Death Knight didn't hold my interest. The starting quests were excellent, probably the best quest chains in the game. The class is very powerful, with many unique abilities. I'm sure it will be easy to level when I get around to it. I guess I just see myself hitting 80 and joining the countless other Death Knights, and we all Death Strike and Frostfever in unison like some undead dance revue, and it doesn't really appeal to me. I play so many characters because I like filling that "gap", but with a Death Knight, there is never any "gap", in fact it's overflowing. There are just simply too many of them around - my guild runs sometimes have 4 death knights out of 10 players!

The reason I didn't start on a new realm and deleted a character to make room was the benefit of bind-to-account items and other support. I didn't want to roll a new alt on a realm with no money or anything at all. Sure there's an appeal to that, but it's too tantalizing for me to get all the bonuses I can:
- 2 heirloom swords, one from emblems on honor and one from stone keeper's shards. I even got crusader enchanted on to one - to be honest the heal proc is more valuable than the strength bonus for cutting down downtime.
- 10% XP bonus heirloom shoulders (sure they're cloth, but its just one armor piece)
- 4 frostweave bags, courtesy of my mage tailor.
- Come patch 3.2, the 10% bonus xp chestpiece as well.

I took the advice of many blogs and leveling guides and quested mostly in the blod elf starting area. It was good to be able to avoid the usual Barrens quests and also quest in a better-designed area. I've parked him for now in Orgrimmar - I don't see the point in questing now that I can get a mount at level 20 when patch 3.2 hits (My guess is August 4th or 11th). If his rested XP gets capped I might burn it off, but it would be a disservice to make him run around on his stubby orc legs when he can ride with the wolves instead :)

I actually like daily quests for once...

After a brief spell of Bloggus Interruptus, I am back with another update:

On my main Msmoo, I have been getting more and more involved in the Argent Tournament. Their design for it has roped me in. I can run the two levels of quests (kill 10 scourge/kill 15 scourge, etc) at the same time as the shadow vaults dailys (kill 15 scourge and plant flags on them, etc) - I can do about 12 daily quests but only really do 8! And most of them take 3 minutes or so, excluding flight times. It's hard to ignore that kind of efficiency.

I think the city titles are pretty cool. As part of working towards the city titles, I figured I would try some low level quests to get up some of my neglected reputations quick. I did the starting undead area and all the quests in Brill, the Sepulcher quest hub, and finally the Tarren Mill quests, which I had never done on Msmoo. Those three quest hubs got me from honored in Undercity to almost exalted! It was fun for me to cruise through the quests, one-shotting everything and gleefully plowing through areas I had come to fear as a lower level alt. Although I am almost exalted in all city reps except Silvermoon City, I just realized I have to do a lot of Valiant's daily quests (5 days worth for each city) to qualify to be a champion. I have only Thunder Bluff and almost Silvermoon City championage, so that's at least 15 more days of daily quests regardless of rep...more than I expected. I'll probably get them done over the next month.

I also need the money. I have sunk a several thousand gold into buying up cheap titanium ores and stocking them on bank alt. I have about five hundred ores I think. I am planning on relisting them once the patch hits and titanium will be needed for prospecting epic gems, as well as any new recipes. If that busts, I should at least be able to make my money back. If they sell hot (and I will be listing them the morning of patch day) I could earn up to 10,000g. Well, a guy can dream. But I'm poor at the moment, so dailies help pay my repair bills :)

I'll have an alt update post in the near future. With a new alt member among the ranks!

I am such a loot whore(der)

I admit it - I'm a loot hoarder

One of the most disapraging things you can accuse a fellow raider of being is a loot whore. It implies they are only there for the loot, and that they are so grabby for loot they take upgrades for others when its a sidegrade or offset piece for them, or they just roll on a piece because they can, even if they don't need it at all!

I can remember running Zul'gurub with my old guild, and Jindo's Hexer dropped (I remember the name clearly because this moment left such an impression on me). It was a very nice healing weapon for it's time. Another shaman in our raid rolled with me, and he won it. He already had an epic healing weapon, and I had a measly blue staff. He was just rolling because he could, he wasn't being very considerate of others that might have needed it. I was pretty upset (this was when an Epic was actually hard to get, unlike now when you can sneeze and Blizzard rewards you an epic for it) and since then I have been very considerate of others when rolling for loot. I don't want to be 'that guy' that sucks up all the loot in a run.

I have to admit it though, I am a definite loot hoarder. We run a melee heavy group, and I have been picking up all the +hit caster cloth gear no one needs, as our one dps caster is already pretty well geared. Usually, I will pick up offset gear like this - I already have a respectable Ulduar set of dps caster gear because of this. But now our one rogue is geared up, and leather melee gear is being passed on. So now I have been picking that up too, for an off-off set! (By the way, I have a stack of abyss crystals and I make sure the Loot master gets a shard for every off-offset piece I pick up). Last night a caster staff with something like 158 stamina dropped off of ulduar trash, and even though I had a perfect 1h+offhand ulduar-level healer setup, AND I had a +hit staff from Freya, I still scooped it up after we made sure no one needed it. Why? For PVP of course :)

I can't stand seeing perfectly good gear get sharded, and I can use caster cloth and leather, and melee dps leather. At the moment, I have a compete healer set, caster dps set, a hodgepodge leather melee set, AND a pvp caster dps set. Lets just say I have a very full bank and bags.

On the raid front, Mimiron is really putting us to the test. We need a little more sustained dps, a little more healing, and a LOT more coordindation and awareness. Phase 1 is flawless, phase 2 someone dies if they get too focused on burning down the boss or healing, phase 3 gets chaotic, we need to get Mimiron grounded more, and we need to handle bombs better. We have gotten to phase 4 with everyone alive only once, and the closest we have gotten to killing him is something like 7% on each body part.

It is getting frustrating, but now we have a weekly reset. I see it as a nice chance to get a break from attempting the same boss over and over. We can get some easy kills, a couple loot upgrades, and the try Mimiron again after a rest from him.

I'm thinking we may not beat all of Ulduar (and certainly not hard modes!) before patch 3.2 comes out. It would be nice to, but then again it will be easier once we start getting conquest badges and some gear higher than that in the instance. Some people may see that as 'ez-mode' but we're not that hardcore a guild, and its perfectly fine by me if it helps us down that damn robot and the bosses after him.