Not in a good way. Never seen this before on Velen.
Happened the other day when patch 3.3.5 came out … go figure.
Sometimes, we get some weird stuff… this falls on the cooler side of weird.
I sorta picture a scene outta Crocodile Dundee with a twist… “Now -that’s- a gun!”
It’s half her height for goodness sakes!
And for anyone who wants to know where to find such an awesome big gun…
Fury of the Raging Dragon is from a quest chain in Borean Tundra. It is, btw, available for both factions – which is just a bit of extra awesome-sauce.
With some of the changes that came out in 3.3.3 I unexpected found myself with a useless dual-spec.
My healing spec was always holy/disc and my dps spec was disc/holy (I know, so adventurous right?). Well, Discipline is good for pvp and that’s a lot of my soloing with Everonna. Anyway, discipline dps was nerfed something serious, and I found myself with what are effectively 2 healing specs.
So I did something I thought I’d never do… I went Shadow.
I always considered Shadow totally pointless. I mean, if you want to play that way why not just make a warlock? I already have some locks, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out.
I WAS SOOOOOO WRONG.
Not to say that I know it all with Shadow Priesting, cause I’ve barely scratched the surface, but having played pretty much every class in the game at this point, I’ll say that I have NEVER seen a caster class that works like this.
Of course, that could be because I’m not exactly dressed the way a Shadow Priest should be… but who knows, maybe it’ll start a trend! I’m still wearing my holy gear since I don’t have another set of gear, so my mana regen is insane from my spirit, but I have no hit rating (cause heals don’t miss).
Soooo… I was reading on how to best gauge S.P. dps and the article said “Go to Ironforge, turn on recount, and cast spells nonstop at the heroic dummy for 5 minutes exactly.”
For anyone who has ever played a mage or a lock… you might get caught on the same phrase I did… 5 MINUTES?!?! 5 minutes of ‘nonstop’ spellcasting even on my frost mage (major mana efficient) ain’t gonna be a whole 5 minutes cause she’ll OOM for sure.
Decided to try it anyway.
So guess what… my Shadow Priest didn’t OOM after 5 minutes of nonstop casting. Not even close, I hadn’t even used any of her mana regen cooldown spells yet cause there was no worry of running out at all.
The combo of the healer gear with the insane amount of spirit, and the talents and spells for crazy Shadow Priest mana regen, created a sorta hybrid dps’r who apparently just never runs outta mana (but will miss sometimes). I wonder if the sustained dps that lasts… well, forever, is a tradeoff for missing. Who knows?
In the meantime I’m trying to figure out how this class works and I’ll be looking for drops that are more dps relevant, but I’m totally surprised at how different this spec is than what I imagined. It’s really nothing like a warlock at all!
One of the guys (Cole) in the Velen guild of Family Ties sent me a collection of photos he took while leaping off high buildings in the game.
Rather interesting perspectives!
Hi, my name is Berengaria and I am an achievement-aholic. I have currently been working on my 25th exalted rep. This time I’ve been spending hours and hours killing Wastewanderers in Tanaris.
You need 21,000 pts to get from revered to exalted and you get 5 pts for every two kills. So, as you can see, Its a long, slow process. If I get tired of working in Tanaris and saving all my wastewander water pouches, I head over to Ferales, taking the boat from Feathermoon Stronghold to the Forgotten Coast. There you find a goblin with 2 quests that give you 25 rep per turn in. You don’t get any rep for kills, so you actually end up with less rep for your time, but sometimes I just had to get away from the wastewanderers.
Well, last night I finally finished getting my 25th exalted. HOORAY! I’m done! NOT! Now the achievement for 30 exalteds pops up. Oh well, I still have 2 of the Steamwheedle faction to work on. Which means more wastewanderers and water pouches. Sigh.
I’ll wait awhile before I start grinding again. Its exhausting , I know I can stop if I really try. Maybe I’ll just taper off first instead of going cold turkey. But if you see me in Tanaris again it may be time for an intervention.
We’ll see.
So we did a little ToC run last night and got a few drops pop up. Unfortunately, none were usable by the crew.
Greaves of the Grand Paladin
Binding of the Tranquil Glade
Carapace of Grim Visions
Belt of the Churning Blaze
These hands I’m keeping, just in case I can find a stone that would make up for the loss of spirit and int that my current ones have. I like the haste these have.
Handwraps of Surrendered Hope
Ah well, better luck next time I guess.
We tried it once on heroic right before this one, but died really really fast. It’s the rogue poison clouds. We’ve got to find a way to work around those. Still drawing a blank. I’m <this> close to making our warlock kite/tank him around the room while we kill the others.
Well thank goodness we didn’t get Paletress as one of the random bosses last night!
We were really hoping for Zul’tore – since he was the last boss we needed to down in ToC … and we got him!!
He was actually really easy.
Just a basic fight, nothing major or significant except for the fact that we all dinged the achievement at the end of it
We got 3 pieces of mail & plate caster gear that has to be trashed.
Greaves of the Grand Paladin
Leggings of the Bloodless Knight
Helm of the Bested Gallant
We had Denaiden with us last night and she got a couple of upgrades out of there.
Helm of the Violent Fray
Girdle of Arrogant Downfall
So that’s a good thing, we had hoped she’d get some drops out there.
Of course, Nexian is already saying we need to do it on Heroic.
We really should do it on heroic to get the achievement, but man I’m not looking forward to an even more evil and deadly Paletress…
Of course, we’ll eventually do it on heroic.. although there isn’t a single upgrade for Everonna (my healer)… it’ll be nice to get the achievement and use it to get Denaiden some upgrades.
Well, don’t exactly know what happened last night. Nor do I understand what happened in CoS last time. In fact, I’m pretty much confused in general right now.
What the heck is wrong with us?!?!
Is there some syndrome that works out to ‘get better gear, start to play worse‘?
So we beat this instance two times in a row, and last night we wipe on Argent Confessor Paletress half a dozen times??
I just don’t get it. I mean, yes, she sucks. She’s a hard boss to fight, particularly from a healer perspective. As the healer, I have to be healing and dispelling her magic and heals over time. It’s really lousy.
A mage who could spell steal her renews would help a lot, but that’s not going to happen.
Anyway, the point is that we DID kill her before. Suddenly last night not only did we get trashed on her, she wiped the floor with us.
Very irritating.
So when we decided to run ToC for the first time after a bad-luck night in CoS farming, we knew it would be a learning experience. We also were prepared to have some difficulty not knowing this dungeon and being one man short, but we did it on normal to compensate.
I was a bit disappointed by this dungeon, but I’ll get into why toward the end.
After we got over our panic about being watched by major NPC’s in the game, we figured that with all these mounts along the walls and racks of lances that we’re doing mounted fighting.
We ran over and grabbed lances, mounted up, and put up our shields to wait.
We watched as group after group of opposing faction fighters came in the gates. I’m pretty sure I recall Shablani saying that someone needed to learn to lock the gate
Anyhow, they all set up in there forming little packs against the walls, and we weren’t sure if we’d get to pick our first group to fight or if they’d start fighting us. Turned out they picked for us and one group came forward to fight.
The next few minutes were pretty much just like doing the Battle Before the Citadel daily quest out at the tournament with a group. Not hard, you can also switch to a fresh mount just by riding next to one of the others ones against the wall and clicking on it – you’ll hop over and have a full health mount.
As a side note – if your mount dies and you still have aggro on someone you’re fighting, you’re probably dead too. If you die, you can go back quickly, run in, mount again, and keep fighting.
After we’d killed all the mounted opponents, all the horses and lance racks along the walls despawned. We took that as a hint that we’re done with the lances and switched back to our normal weapons.
The next stage was regular boss fighting – some with adds, some without.
The first group was 3 elite mobs, two were casters and one a rogue. We didn’t know what the casters were, but decided to take them out first. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong caster to target first. We didn’t realize the Tauren we were fighting was a healer – after a couple of minutes fighting a mage with everlasting health, we turned to the Tauren (shaman?) instead.
The fight lasted forever. As in, my cooldowns were coming back up. Probably close to 10 minutes and the tauren still had full health. We finally mistepped and wiped. We came back, targeted the healer from the start, kept interrupting heals, and took all 3 mobs down in just a couple of minutes.
Next was Eadric the Pure. He was the easiest by far. He’s a pally and does 2 things aside from melee – both of which he announces in raid warning messages.
He periodically announces he’s going to cast Radiance and you need to shield your eyes. If you turn away from him, put your back to him, it doesn’t do damage. If you keep facing him you get stunned and take damage. My easy solution was to just heal facing backwards, that way I didn’t have to interrupt my heals to turn around.
He also did occasionally throw his Hammer of the Righteous on people. If that doesn’t get dispelled it will do a large amount of damage to them (up to about 15k). What we didn’t know is that you can throw the hammer back at him by hitting the 1 key and it’ll do damage to him instead. That would’ve made this fight even easier than it already was.
The next guy to fight was the Black Knight. He comes swooping down on his skeletal dragon and starts talking crap. This fight was the hardest for us. It’s a three-phase fight and he keeps changing forms. At one point he’s himself, then he’s a skeleton, then he’s a wraith. Guess you’re just getting him closer and closer to death? Who knows.
This fight was much more rough, but could be managed by moving out of his death knight ground circle thingy… you know what I’m talking about.
Oh, in phase two he does spawn a bunch of undead adds to help him, they’re nothing major, an AOE can manage them – which I’m glad we did cause I found out later that if you kill him first the adds explode and do AOE damage in a corpse explosion.
So then… it’s done?
Yeah, apparently, that was it.
No message, no achievement pops up, we’re like.. is there more?
That was massively disappointing. Every other instance you expect if you finish it and kill all the bosses that come at you – that you get an achievement pop up the first time you do that. Not for this one.
Apparently, the bosses we fought are random bosses and there are also some different ones. We’ll have to keep going back and hope the other bosses show up in order to complete the achievement.
Strangely I didn’t get the Black Knight showing up as dead on my achievement count – even though everyone else did. Don’t know why.
We got gear drops, all of which are heading to DE. We couldn’t use any of it.
The gear that dropped was:
Leggings of the Haggard Apprentice
Uruka’s Band of Zeal
Scale Boots of the Outlander
Girdle of Arrogant Downfall
Gauntlets of the Stouthearted Crusader
In any case, now we have to make sure and go back to kill the other bosses that live in that place.
Overall, I was very disappointed that we didn’t get a completion achievement.
I really think you should have one achievement for finishing it, and one achievement for killing all the possible random bosses in that dungeon.
Ah well, not much to do about, we just have to go back now.
I’ll post an update when we go back and get them all down