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).

Warrior Woes

It’s always said that warriors are the most gear-dependent class in the game.  This doesn’t really bother me all that much, because half of the fun of WoW is getting new gear.  What does bother me is trying to figure out what stats will benefit Thodin the most.  Especially when I hate doing all sorts of calculations.

Do I want more Strength, Attack Power, Crit?  I’ve been going crazy lately trying to get the most AP out of my gear, but after searching through the forums (::shudder::) I’ve found that for my build (Arms with a bigass 2h mace) I should concentrate on my weapon’s top damage and my +Crit.  A lot of my gear has +Crit on it (though some of my socketed stuff has a lot of AP gems in it, I might start switching those out in favor of +Crit).  Also, I’ve found out that Agi is pretty much worthless for a warrior’s DPS, so I’ll keep that in mind.  And apparently 1 Str=2 AP, and I think I tend to overlook +Str. 

One of my basic philosophies about this game is to not get way too caught up in the technical aspects, but lately I’ve found that I’m not listening to my own advice.  From what I read, it seems that the route I’m taking is basically ok.  I think from now on I might just start to concentrate more on +Crit gems and such (+Crit and +Str gems would be good).  But the most important thing for me is to just have fun playing the game the way I enjoy playing it.  I know I’ll never have the best tanking gear or the best DPS gear, but I do know that I will always strive to make the most of the gear that I have and allow my skills as a warrior to make up for anything people think I’m “missing” in my stats.

Speaking of tanking and DPSing, I just worked out a talent build for when I hit 70 that I think will allow me to tank and DPS pretty well.  We shall see.

Anyone have any comments or suggestions?

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).

Pally Bubble-Hearth FTW!

I entered this comic into Blizzard’s WoW Comic Contest a while ago, and it grabbed an honorable mention (which is awesome).

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version.

Some people get it, some don’t.  What do you think?

Blog Maintenance

If you’re coming here for the first time and you notice that the everything looks a bit funky, it’s because I’m stil trying to finalize the layout and features and stuff.  I was trying to add a feature called MyBlogLog to the sidebar, but it seems to cause the entire sidebar to move all the way down the page, under the posts.  Which is less than desireable.

This is what I’m talking about:

Recent Readers

View Entire Community
Provided by MyBlogLog

It’s a pretty cool thing, but it doesn’t seem to want to work 😦 .  Oh well.

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.

Get to know Thodin!

This is actually the text of Thodin’s character page.  I’m posting it here because, well, right now I need posts.  And I think telling you about my main will allow you to get to know me and my playstyle better.

Right now Thodin’s home is the Allerian Stronghold Inn, and he’s getting really excited to move on to Nagrand (exalted with the Kurenai, here we come!).  He’s currently working on becoming best friends with the Aldor, if you wanted to know.  I’ll probably explain in another post why I chose them.

Well, without further ado:

Thodin (a badass dwarf warrior) was my first real character in WoW (I played in the beta as a Tauren warrior named Torr, he was pretty badass).  I started playing WoW when it was first released that fateful November (which seems oh so long ago now).  I got my three college roommates into it, and we pretty much became addicted.  I took a break from the game for a while, because hardcore raiding didn’t have much appeal to me (and there wasn’t much else to do).  As such, I wasn’t able to get much epic gear at all, which actually works to my advantage in Outlands because I actually want to replace all of my gear!

New Kid on the Block

Behold!  Another World of Warcraft blog has joined the ranks. 

I’m a big fan of blogging.  I have a personal blog that I update (semi) regularly even though I don’t seem to have many readers other than friends and family.  I read a bunch of other World of Warcraft blogs, and I was inspired to created my own WoW-themed blog for two main reasons (neither of which include becoming famous).

1. There are no dedicated warrior class blogs as far as I can tell.
2. I wanted a place to “collect” information about WoW so that I have one central point of reference for everything that I need.  Whether it be a leveling guide, a warrior talent spec, or a list of weapons I want to acquire.

It is an added bonus that anyone who comes to this blog will also have access to all this WoW goodness.  Win, win, as I see it.

I’m not going to make any claims about what this blog will be.  Because to me, blogs can be anything, everything, and they should always evolve and change to fit the needs of the blogger and the readers.  I’m not going to pigeonhole myself into “The Barracks is a blog for warriors only, other WoW players need not come here” because that 1. limits my readership, and 2. limits my creativity.  Besides, I know that I enjoy reading about other people’s WoW adventures, so I’ll probably do a good bit of “journal keeping” for my characters here as well.

Ergo, at this point you can think of The Barracks as a warrior’s insight into World of Warcraft.

And speaking of warriors, allow me to introduce my main (who is level 67 at this point and almost ready to leave Terrokar forest). 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present, Thodin!  Dwarven defender of the Alliance! 

I hope you enjoy what you find here.  If you have any suggestions for new content or you have any tidbits of information you want to share with me, you’re more than welcome to get in touch with me.  Feel free to take a look around and let me know what you think of my little piece of WoW pie.

Captain Placeholder

This is a test post.

So I’m putting test stuff here.

There will be better things here eventually.

• like… stuff
• and more stuff…

QUOTES!

Following the success of Heroes of Azeroth, the initial set for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game (TCG), players have eagerly awaited the first expansion. On March 31 and April 1, Through the Dark Portal Sneak Preview tournaments will give players their first glimpse of the new set almost two weeks before the official release.

Definitely links.

Enjoy.

Ooo look, a picture!