How goes it?

Thodin has recently completed two quest lines for some phat lootz.

Last night a few real life buddies and I finished the A Ghost in the Machine questline and I picked up a nice helm.  I socketed it with two Inscribed Noble Topaz (+4 crit and +4 str) and some other gem that I can’t remember right now that gives +4 str and +4 stam.  I pretty much pimped it out.

The other day I also finished the Damaged Mask series of quests.  It starts with a drop you get off of Fel Corruptors in Blade’s Edge and ends with killing the Hound-Master which was pretty much cake (I had myself, a 70 hunter, and a 68 shadow priest, and a bunch of Ancient Helper friends).  I had a decision to make on this one, should I go with Natasha’s Choker for DPS or Natasha’s Battle Chain for tanking?  In the end I went with the battle chain, because I’m starting to get more into the tanking role now that I’m 70, and until I can get the Steam-Hinge Chain of Valor and 490 def, this is a pretty little tanking necklace.

I’ve started the Karazhan key quests, though I keep getting sidetracked so I haven’t even been able to finish the first two quests in Deadwind Pass.  What a slacker I am.

In altish news, Natasya hasn’t seen much play time this week.  Lord knows how much she will see in the coming weeks, because I think I’m going to roll an alt over on Velen to have some fun with Gitr and the rest of the WoW bloggers gang.  I hate leveling Hordeside, the Barrens kills me!  I’ll let you know when I actually do start this new alt.  Hi, my name is Thodin, and I’m an altoholic.

Well that’s all for now.  Be sure to tune in next time when I’ll tell you the meaning of life.

Public Test Realm Patch Notes (2.1.0)

Anyone who reads WoW Insider regularly has probably already seen these patch notes, but there are a few that I want to mention here. 

First up is something seemingly insignificant, but very beneficial to myself and fellow bloggers. 

- Screenshots captured using the Print Screen key are now saved in JPG
format.

Awesome news, because I’m lazy.  And it’s very annoying searching through all my screenshot files in Photoshop when I can’t get a preview of what they look like.  Having them captured as jpegs is music to my Photoshopping ears.

Next up we have the introduction of new areas, quest lines, and factions.

- The Consortium and Protectorate need your help! Players with Honored
or higher reputation with the Consortium should seek out Protectorate
Advisor Rahim at the Stormspire in Netherstorm or Commander Ameer at
the Protectorate Watch Post in Netherstorm to get a briefing on the
most recent nefarious activities of the Ethereum.
- Skettis is now available. Players will need a flying mount to reach
this new area.
- Nether Drakes are now in the game and can be gained by continuing the
Netherwing faction and quest line.
- Ogri’la is now available. Level 70 players can find this new quest
line in Blade’s Edge Mountains.

I’m sure that plenty of people are very excited that The Black Temple will be opening up, but that doesn’t excite me as much as new quest lines and single player content.  I’ll say that again.  Blizzard is releasing new single player content (!!!) for level 70s.  I love Blizzard for this.  Now maybe instead of grinding my life away for an epic flying mount, I can follow the Netherdrake quest line (me and everyone else, amirite?) and actually experience something fun and meaningful along the way.

Also cool is this,

- Warlock and Hunter pets will now be automatically dismissed when
you summon a mount. These pets will return on dismount. This does
not affect pet happiness for Hunters.

While I don’t play a hunter with a mount, I actually ran into this problem last night while questing.  My friend Dodin (70 dwarf hunter) and I were doing a quest, flying around on our mounts, and we wondered how he got into combat.  We realized that though he was flying high, his cat was running around on the ground aggroing everything in sight.  This was less than ideal.  So, good for this new improvement.

Various other interesting fixes,

- You can now interact with wanted posters while mounted. (This was wicked annoying.)
- Sounds and voice-overs have been added to all Outland dungeons and
raid zones. (It annoyed me that there were nearly no sounsd in some of the dungeons.)
- Holding down the shift key while mousing over an equippable item
that you can use will now show you the tooltip for the item you
currently have equipped in that slot as well (much like how the auction
house currently works). (Basically stealing from EquipCompare, but it’s cool cuz now I don’t need another addon.)

So yeah.  Woo for new patches with cool new stuff.

Now that he’s 70…

… what has Thodin been doing?

Much of the same, pretty much.  I finally finished all of the quests in Nagrand last night (well, all that I’m aware of), and I’m ready to move on to Blades Edge Mountains for gold questing now.  I spent the weekend helping guildies and friends with quests, and also grinding ogres for Kurenai rep and Osh’gun Powder so I can get my the 18 slot bag from Halaa.  These are two of the goals I’ve set for myself at 70.  Get a Halaani Bag (easy) and get a Talbuk mount (hard).  They will be mine.

I still need to start my Karazhan attunement (I’m a slacker) and I want to start going into more of the level 70 instances.  I was talking with my guild’s raid leader over the weekend, and he said that to be a viable tank in any of the higher level dungeons (Shattered Halls, Shadow Lab, etc) I need to be prot specced.  Now I’m presented with a dilemma.  I pride myself on being a good tank even though I’m not prot specced, but I know I’m missing out on some aggro management and survivability perks of the protection tree. 

Right now I’m not even that interested in getting into Karazhan and getting any phat epic lootz.  I’d like much more to finish questing in the last three zones (did I ever mention I love questing?).  Problem is, as a protection specced warrior it’ll probably take me two minutes to kill a mob that I could kill in 20 seconds as arms specced, which will severely hinder my questing progress and maybe even some of the enjoyment I get from questing.  My friend said that I could always switch specs back and forth, but at 50g a pop that’s gonna become pretty annoying.

Ah, the troubles that face us when we grow up.

And now that I’ve hit 70, I have more time to level Natasya (or Acateus) and work on getting a second 70.  It will probably not be very much fun from 20-60, but we shall see.

Into Nagrand, Ding 68!

Thodin finally made it into Nagrand. It’s awesome. Definitely my favorite zone so far. I was pleased to see my old hunting buddy, Hemet, camped along the road. He has some quests for me to slaughter a bunch of native creatures. I’ll do so with pleasure. I went to Telaar and grabbed A TON of quests. Seriously, I have atleast a million quests for Nagrand in my quest log now.

I’m glad I finally got here, because one of the first things I did was the Ring of Blood quest from which I got the Honed Voidaxe!! Such a sweet axe. Whoo. This thing will probably last me until 70, or atleast until I get the Crow Wing Reaper (which will probably never happen, more on this later). If you have a good group, you can do this quest in one go (gotta kill a bunch of bosses in a row) and it’s well worth the effort. Also, I dinged 68 whilst running Mana Tombs, which was sweet.

As an aside, has anyone else ever noticed that there are no books anywhere in Outland? I enjoyed reading the many different books in inns and scattered all over the place in Azeroth. Now, I have no reading material. Maybe Blizzard just wants people to concentrate on questing. I guess that’s ok.

I don’t really mind questing when I have scenery like this to look at.

Moving on from something awesome to something ridiculous, I’ve done a couple of instances lately and I would like to talk about them. I ran Mana Tombs a few times, which was ok. The shield I wanted didn’t drop, but that’s ok because I’ll run it a few more times (still have to complete that bloody escort quest). Mana Tombs is ok, Sethekk Halls is not. Why, you ask?

Because Talon King Ikiss is an ASSHOLE!!

Seriously, this guy is utterly ridiculous. I actually like Sethekk Halls as an instance, until you get to the end and have to face this jerk. Before yesterday, I had never been in Sethekk Halls. Now I have atleast 10 attempts on Ikiss under my belt because he’s friggin impossible. He polymorphs a random person (usually me (the tank) or the healer). He has an arcane blast volley that hits everyone in the party for 1500. And most ridiculous of all, he blinks away from the tank and does a 6000 dmg arcane explosion that pretty much kills anyone in his LOS. Now, you can avoid being hit by this AOE if you run behind pillars in the room, but you NEED TO RUN BEHIND THE PILLARS! If you don’t you die.

So, polymorph (wipe aggro), blink away, ridiculous AOE, party dies.

I hate this guy. When he blinks away and AOEs, I don’t know what to do. I’m usually polymorphed at the time, so its very hard to get aggro back when I’m a sheep. If I do manage to get aggro back, he polys me again (which causes him to run away from me and wipe aggro AGAIN). If I manage to hold aggro and not be polymorphed, he polys the priest and I die. It’s ridiculous.

Now, we got him down to 5% one time when I was in a group with a druid because we eventually decided to have him try to tank (druids immune to poly). It worked for a while, but people couldn’t get behind pillars in time apparently, and we all died.

In conclusion, I hate Talon King Ikiss, he is an asshole and he needs to die (so he can drop his Crow Wing Reaper and my quest item).

Not yet in Nagrand…

I was all ready to step into Nagrand last night, buuut I didn’t.  I don’t know what it is about Nagrand, I just can’t wait to get there.  It looks like an awesome zone.  I’m very excited to go there when I get home from work tonight.

I was sidetracked last night by a Mana Tombs run.  A couple of my guildies wanted to go, so I said, “sure I’ll go” because I have never been there, and I’m always up for learning new instances (and also, I wanted to get The Shield of the Void from Pandemonius).  We finally got a full group together, but then we had to wait around for 10+ minutes for everyone to arrive (this was probably the first sign that this PUG wasn’t going to work out too well).  Eventually everyone got there.  It was me, a guildie (Vilhemriker, 69 warrior), a 68 mage (my IRL friend), and two PUGgers, a 69 priest and 68 oomkin drood.

Everything went smooth, we downed the first boss with no casualties (except I didn’t get my shield), but then we got to a hallway after Pandemonius and things started to break down.  There was one pull that had 4 or 5 mobs, and our priest had the bright idea to try and MC one of the mobs (we were doing just fine with mage sheeping and me offtanking).  This failed miserably and we wiped.  The priest blamed it on the mage (“he iced too close to me”).  I blame it on foolish ideas, but what do I know I’m not a priest.

After the first wipe, Vil took control of the group and got everyone in line, and it started to go a bit smoother.  We had another wipe because of the stupid Nexus Stalkers fearing people into other groups, but the rest of the instance went pretty well.  The Nexus-Prince Shaffar fight is a biotch, though.

I did manage to get Nexus-Bracers of Vigor which I wasn’t really that excited about, but they are a sidegrade for my Bracers of Might, so I can’t complain.

All in all I think it was a good experience.  Note to warriors: I never use zerk stance so I didn’t know about this, but I was pleased to discover that Berzerker Rage can actually cancel fear.  Stance-dancing ftw.  I’m glad I got to learn the instance, because I will be back (still need the shield and I need to finish the escort quest).

Well that’s all for now.  This weekend I plan to get into Nagrand and start questing there, as well as do my level 10 hunter quest on Natasya.  There will be more updates soon (with more picture and screenshot goodness, don’t worry).

Almost out of Terokkar

So here’s the first of what I hope will be many updates about the life of Thodin.

First of all, let me just say that I’m glad I was able to grab Hatebringer in the Underbog.  I had 0 skill in 2h maces when it dropped, but nobody else wanted it, so I said “sure I’ll take it.” It took me about 45 minutes to level my skill from 1-320 or so (intellect buff and Hamstring spam FTW).  I’m very happy that I took the time to level the skill up though, because now I’m a friggin killing machine.

Speaking of awesome gear, I have decided that I need Terokk’s Quill.  Anyone want to go to Sethekk Halls with me?  Look at the damage on that baby.  Whooo boy.

Anyway…

The thing I love most about WoW is doing quests.  I love quests.  I love the lore behind quests.  And I also love the humor and references that Blizzard puts in their quests.  Which is why, even though I wasn’t too fond of killing a bunch of sand gnomes, I thought the “Fumping” and “The Big Bone Worm” quests were pretty awesome. 

If you’ve never heard of Dune, then you won’t really understand what I’m talking about.  But that’s what’s great about some of the quests, if you know what they’re making reference to it makes it that much better.  In Dune there are these giant sandworms that are called to the surface by “thumpers” (aka “fumpers”).  What was especially cool were the names of the quest rewards and the name of the “big bone worm” (Sandworms in Dune are also known as Shai’ hulud, and the big worm’s name is Hai’Shalud). 

The quest rewards make reference to characters in Dune, mainly Muad’Dib, and the Reverend Mother (I can’t figure out the Shani reference).

Well that’s it for now.  I’ll be working on the Addons page today (I took some screenies of my setup and Addons), and other things here and there.  I know this place doesn’t look like much right now, but I’m just getting started.

Question:

Does anyone know how to get a Thottbot or Allakhazam item link to work?  What I mean is, I’ve seen in some people’s blogs and on some sites, when you hover over the item’s name, it’s stats show up (just like in the Armory or something).  I don’t know how to get this to work.  Do I need some special functionality in my blog?  Am I just linking wrong?  Any help would be awesome.