Friday's Food for Thought - Flip the Script

Morning blog lovers,

Ahhh yes, Friday is upon us again. That means that the light at the end of the tunnel (aka "the weekend") is almost here. Just a few more hours for myself. /cheer

In regards to WoW, its time to hit 80 on my mage, get my "Elder" title from the Lunar event, and raid Naxxramas.

In regards to RL (real life), it is time to start the preparations and the beginning of the hype for the UFC fight on Saturday. Also, you can't forget about the Super Bowl on Sunday either! Now that I am thinking about it, my weekend is pretty jammed packed with hard hitting action.

...is it me or did that last sentence sound too cliche? Definitely sounded like something you would hear on a "MONSTER JAM" radio commerical or something lol...

Random thoughts from a random blogger...

• I am going for all of the world event achievements on my Restro Shaman, including the Lunar event.


• The title you are given for completing this event is "Elder"


• I have a huge problem getting the "Elder" title on my least oldest toon.


• My Mage has been around since Vanilla WoW and I would consider him "my oldest" active toon.


• My Shaman is "my youngest" toon and has only been around enough to raid Kara a handful of times before the expansion came out. Roughly 8 or 9 months.


• I don't RP (role play) with any of my toons, but I can't help but to feel like I am doing my mage wrong. I feel guilty and dirty....lol

Topic of the Day

From the Urban Dictionary
Flip the Script - To do the unexpected. To deviate from the norm

ie. (Clean version) I flipped the script on that female when I told her I was leaving her stank butt

First of all, this post is a reply from an article from our favorite goblin, Gevlon. You can read his article here and I really suggest you read it....like now. Go ahead, I will be here waiting =P
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Ok, now that you are back I will give a quick overview of the article. The article states that Blizzard should completely flip the script in regards to how the current end game works.

Instead of gearing up in 5 man heroics when you turn 80, you would gear up 10 and 25 man raids.

So you ask then what would be the end game, the hard stuff right? Well they would be 5 man instances, heroic versions of course. Yes, Blizzard would have to adjust gear so the better gear would be in heroic 5 mans and of course they would have to make the current heroic 5 man much harder.

The reason why I like it so much is that it would be ALOT easier to find 5 good and skilled players then it would be to find 10 or 25 or the same token. As Gevlon stated, Blizzard would already have 50+ instances to work with. Imagine Heroic Walling Caverns or Dead Mines, how fun would that be right?

In these new heroic versions, the trash and the bosses would have to be changed to make it more challenging like I stated before above.

What about the social aspect?

I know what you are thinking, but what if I like the social atmosphere that raiding brings? Fair enough, I know alot of raiders out there raid solely for this purpose.

Bring back the 40 mans and make then a HUGE gear check. Heroic Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, hell...you could even make Karazhan into a 40 man with some adjustments. The main point would be to keep the players that enjoy those big social groups and the hardcore people paying their monthly payment and happy.

Overall

So lets review

• You are keeping the casual players happy with heroic 5 mans and you are also keeping them very busy with all of the new instances revamped.
  
  
• You are keeping the players that enjoy the social aspect of the game, the larger groups, with 10 and 25 man instances. This would also be the way to gear up for the harder heroic instances.
  
  
• You are keeping the hardcore players and those big guilds together by bringing back 40 man raids.
  

Did I miss anything? I would love to hear your thoughts

Achievements, Rotation, UFC 94

Shared Topic: Your Thoughts on Achievements
courtsey of Blog Azeroth
When achievements were first announced, My first thought was "What a waste of time".

I put this out there not because I still feel that way, but because it helps to know where I am coming from. I am not one of the people going out and collecting 50 mounts (looking at you Orissa). I'm not going to complete all of the Holiday events ( or any of them, although "the Hallowed" is a pretty cool title)

I like the titles that show you have done something.

The Dungeon master achievements are a great example of this and are some of the only ones i have actively pursed. First came the regular edition, complete all instances on normal difficulty. Check. Next was Dungeon Hero. Check. Now pretty easily I can see that i have at least done all the 5 mans in this expansion. Working on the Naxx achievements as we speak.

I dislike the achievements that want you to go do something pointless.

Basiclly I use achievements as more of a measuring stick with how far i have gotten in the game rather then use them as a neat side game to complete.

Tanking and DPS Rotation

The other day I am invited into a heroic Azjol run. It started off on a bit of a bad foot due to the fact that his way of inviting me was to ask "hp/def?". I am back and forth on how annoying this is.
When I first hit 80 and was just at the def cap, sitting in LFG for 2 regular instances and a single heroic the question didnt bother me at all.
Now when I am sitting in LFG for 25 man naxx and 25 man OS with MT/OT in my comment, also qued for a single heroic, The question annoys the shit out of me. Would I really be looking to tank two 25 man raids If I didnt have acceptable HP and defense for a heroic? I digress...

I responded to his "Hp/def?" question with a "what is your AP and crit?" After a bit of back and forth I decide to join his group as it was the last Heroic I needed for Duengon Hero. As it turns out the group had an excellent healer and was looking to have a quick run. Hence the interogation as to my tanking ability. Since this group is so l33t I throw out a "If I out dps you as the tank you are getting the boot" (after they pass lead for marking purposes). What can I say, I can be an ass sometimes.

The run is going rather smoothly, and even though I am doing more dps than the other DK "DPS" I don't make an issue of it. I do point it out at the end of the run in a friendly manner. (we had bonded by the end of the quick wipeless pug).

We get into a friendly conversation where I lay out the three major problems DK's will face trying to dps (or generate threat in my case)

1. Rotation
2. Spec
3. Gear

This Deathtard had a cookie cutter DPS spec. Gear was alright, but it comes in time and can always improve. Niether of these things were what was holding his dps back.

When asked about his rotation; " I just kind of hit whatever is available or comes off cooldown"

Thats not good. (what a long segue into my personal rotation=)

The rotation I have come to know and love is the single disease frost rotation found somewhere in the bowels of EJ Forums
In order for this rotation to work you need to start with one of your blood runes already turned into a death rune, this is easily acomplished useing bloodtap and just to make sure to try and finish pulls with a death rune.
Icey Touch -> Obliterate -> Obliterate -> Bloodstrike
That is the basic rotation I try to use all the time. Of course rotations are bound to get messed up but this one is really easy to get back to and puts out great dps as frost spec. Howling blast and pestilence are substitued for aoe pulls.
I noticed a 200 dps increase when i stopped mashing buttons and started trying to stick to my rotation. Make sure your rotation is Tight, like a tiger.

UFC 94

I cannot wait for this Saturdays UFC. Two of my favorite fighters are squaring off, BJ Penn and GSP. These two guys are basiclly living legends in the sport. Last time they fought GSP edged out a split decision in a 3 round brawl. Looking at their faces after the fight though, you would never have guessed that GSP was the winner, his face was battered and BJ Penn didn't even appear to be breathing hard.

I gotta go with my gut here and pick Penn. For some reason I got a man crush on this guy and I think he is pretty pissed off he lost the decision last time. Penn by gogoplata in the 4th!

Real Life Ramblings

So I got engaged to my longtime girlfriend and turned 25 in the same week. Talk about making a guy feel old. Almost 30! HaHa. Feeling old Is interesting because it's really just a matter of perspective. I work with people who would laugh at me saying I feel old. I play wow with some people who probably think I am Ancient. I got a tell from a "wow friend" the other day saying he had just turned 17 and was excited. I had been raiding with this guy since MC days! Having a Fiance or paying bills I am sure are the furthest things from his mind.

Life's a garden, dig it?

Tuesday Maintenance Boredom - Delimmas, Advice, and Randomness!

Morning blog lovers!

Ahh yes, its Tuesday and you guess it, maintenance day. Nothing to look forward to when I get off of work in 4 hours. I guess I could go to the grocery store or something, but its a winter wonderland where I live. So I will probably go home and screw around for an hour, then go to bed.

God, isn't that exciting stuff! I have been told many times that my life is so interesting and fun....makes you wonder what the hell ever happen to those times lol.

Ahhh...yes, the good old times.

/end daydream

Dilemma for the week

• I dinged level 79 on my mage right before the servers went down last night.
  
  
• Lunar Festival is in full swing and I have not collected one coin on my shaman.
  

Doesn't seem like a dilemma to you? Its a pretty big one for me actually. I am super excited to grind my mage one more level to get 80 so I can start pimping him out. However, I am all about world events since I found out if you complete them all you get a proto-drake! Also, I have completed the past two (Hallow's End and Winter's Veil) so I might as well right?

So now you see why I am struggling with this...

My heart tells me to level my mage, but my brain is telling it to STFU and do the Lunar event because its timed. I guess I just have to bite the bullet and take a break from leveling my mage and start collecting coins with my shaman. I am a little upset about it, but it will be worth it...

...I think.

What do you guys think I should do?

In Other News...

• I have decided that my Shaman's T7 shoulders are dropping this weekend in Naxxramas.
  


• Yup, its going down and I will be DAMNED if I get out rolled by a hunter or a warrior. I haven't gotten anything out of Naxx in 3 weeks and our hunters have gotten a few upgrades....So I am going to have to but the voodoo curse on them
  

WTFspaghetti's Resident Troll Voodoo Witch Doctor creates [Elixir of Horrible /Roll]x2

• O yes, these will come in handy..../evil laugh
  

WTFspaghetti's ID10T of the week (work friendly)

• What does an 11 month old child, the police, and 500 illegal plants have in common lol?
  

Tip of the week

• Alot of people are doing the current world event, Lunar Festival. Some of the quests want you to go into your opposing factions major cities and find an NPC.


• This means that you have about a 98% chance that you are going to die. Yes, from other players, but also from npc guards.


• Make your repair bill cheaper by getting pretty much naked and pick yourself up some invisible pots. You will thank me later and yes, I accept payment in gold. =P
  

Quote of the day

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

-Oliver Wendell Houston Homles Jr

Song of the day

Ignition Remix
R. Kelly
Chocolate Factory
2003

That's right, I went there...R. Kelly baby! You know he was found Not Guilty right? Guess the jury decided that wasn't him on the video...

Anyway.....

Thanks for reading guys and gals. I hope your loot is phat and your repair bills are low, I'm WTFout of here.

Monday Morning Warcraft

Monday Morning Warcraft is a weekly post that illustrates random thoughts and events that occurred over the weekend in the life of a wowhead. Feel free to e-mail me with questions, suggestions, hate mail, ect... mlange0385 at yahoo dot com

Morning blog lovers!

Another weekend has gone by and now its already Monday. It seriously feels like the weekend went by so fast that it doesn't even seem that it was here in the first place.

I had a great weekend though, so I can not complain. Now that I think about it, I was pretty social this weekend. On Friday, I saw "My Bloody Valentine 3D" and I must say, I was impressed. If the movie wasn't in 3D, then it would have been a horrible movie. The 3D made all of the difference and guys.....I was freaked out lol.

The movie was very gory and kept you on the edge of your seat the whole time. I am not going to lie, I wasn't scared per se....but I was frighten and on edge the whole damn movie lol. I think I actually screamed, jumped out of my seat, and got into the fetal position 4 or 5 times....good times lol.

On Saturday I had some people over at my house and watched the "Affliction Pay Per View". Overall I can not say that it wasn't a good event, but I missed Joe Rogan and the octagon style ring. I think the fight of the night was Josh Barnett vs. Gilbert Yvel. I really want to see someone stand up with Gilbert Yvel...that dude brings the PAIN.

What about you guys? Anything fun happen IRL(in real life) this weekend?

Onward with the WoWtalk!! WTFspaghetti style!

Mage'n it up!

The majority of this weekend I spent leveling my Mage. I dinged 78 and I decided to try out this new and improved arcane spec. I can't link you my spec because I am at work and therefore is blocked, but it feel free to check it out on my armory page.

My Mage leveled from 1-70 as arcane and fire. However, for the past 1(2?) years he has been a frost Mage for pvp and farming purposes. So when I made the switch back to arcane, I was in utter shock! I forgot what critting for 6k felt like!

Overall, I really like my spec and I am going to give some link love to everyones favorite troll, Euripedes over at CriticalQQ. His article on Arcane is what motivated me to give it a try. Mages are finally at our rightful spot at the top of the dps meters thanks to a damage rotation simply called "arcane shatter".

It consists of casting arcane blast 3 times to get max dmg buff, then casting arcane missiles until the very last tick. Before the last missile, cast your arcane barrage. This damage rotation is keeping destroying all other specs currently and takes alot more management by the Mage. All of you Frostfire Bolt specs looking for something else besides spamming 2 buttons might want to give it a shot. Check out Euripedes article for more information.

Since when did Tailoring actually become good?

Seriously, I am really surprised by this. The only reason why I started tailoring in the first place back in TBC is because of the overpowered Spellfire and Frozen Shadoweave pieces. I only kept on to it because I thought "why not?".

In WotLK, they have just a TON of great items for all specs and for pve and pvp purposes. This is my only character that actually can make their own gear, so maybe that is the reason why I am so surprised. (i.e. Shaman = Leatherworker, Paladin = Blacksmith)

I mentioned in my last article about how much tailoring sucks. Well, it still sucks and has been a pretty big money sink so far. Now, I have only dropped about 400-500g on leveling it and I agree that its not a large amount by any means. However, I could have probably made 400-500g selling other mats that I already had. (i.e. Infinite Dust, Eternals, ect)

Overall, I know it will be worth it. So I guess that is all that counts right?

In Other News...

Naxxramas

Started off horrible this weekend due to the servers being down Friday morning. We actually had to cancelled it, it was the definition of suck. Went in there on Saturday with our sub par dps squad and one shotted the spider wing. After that we cleared OS and called it a day.

Then Sunday comes and after a late start, we one shotted plague wing and Patchwerk. Had a few problems with Grobbulus but we took him down on our 3rd try. So progression was made and I was happy, sort of.

Nah, I take that back, I was happy.

Guild Types

I just have to remind myself that I am in a Casual guild that raids, not a Casual Raiding guild. Big difference in the two and I will explain.

• In a Casual Raiding guild, people are forced to come prepared. Meaning that they should be working on their toon to make it the best before you come to the raid. This includes farming for mats or gold to buy epic gear, bring buff food and pots to the raid, reading up on boss strategies, and most importantly - learning from your mistakes. If you do not do these things in this type of guild, more then likely you will not be raiding with them.


• In a Casual guild that raids, people are not forced to any of those requirements. This is more of a social guild that likes to play with each other and are not worried about progression. Instead of making one toon the best they can be pre-raid, they are leveling alts or a profession. They expect to get in the raid even though they are doing sub-par dps (1k dps or lower) because they are friends with everyone.

Both situations are fine in my opinion. We all play this game to have fun and that is the most important thing. If you have fun leveling alts and professions and really don't care about raiding and progression, then a casual guild that raids is perfect for you.

On the flip, if you want to progress, then you are only going to get frustrated in a casual guild that raids. You might want to think about that before making choosing a guild. The main point is to have fun but noone likes someone joins a guild, takes some epics and then leaves.

~Monday Morning Madness~

1. You might want to check out what you can buy with Wintergrasp marks. There are actually some really good stuff I had no idea about.
   
2. I am still making a killing off of Cooking. It seriously took me about 3-4 hours total farming all of the mats for 1-375. 375-400 is super easy to level but I spent some money on AH for mats. I been making some serious bank with it....try it out!
3. Only one more day left on the weekly poll and so far it looks like Mages are leading with close to 30% of the post. I am pretty sure that means that alot of Mages read this blog lol
4. I absolutely love playing during the down time (Mornings) on my server. There are a huge amounts of ignorant people on US-Bonechewer- Horde side. It just blows my mind.
5. Speaking of boneheads...whatever happen to people saying "reported" in general chat? All of those people seem to have gone away and the trade/general chat seems to be 10 times worst. Not that I want them back or anything...I always thought it was pretty silly to report someone, but still! Where did they all go??
   

In conclusion...

It was a great weekend, I had lots of fun and relaxed to the fullest. How did your week go?

Friday's Food for Thought - Do you have WoW'dar?

Morning blog lovers!

The weekend is again upon us my friends! Time for some well deserved relaxation. Nothing like just kicking back and enjoying the company your friends or family.(Some alcohol never hurt either =P) I have absolutely nothing planned and I must say, DAMN that feels good...

Can I get an Hallelujah!?!

Wtfspaghetti's 15 man gospel choir - Haaalleluuuujah!

That is what I'm talking about.

It might be just me, but I enjoy those rare weekends were I have absolutely nothing on the agenda. Anything is possible! I could decide to host a "Rock Band" party, rock out and get drunk until the wee hours in the morning. Or I could get a wild hair up my as....eh....nose(?) and decide to go to VEGAS and party like a REAL rockstar....

Yes, yes, these kind of weekends make you feel like the world is your playground. Lets be serious though, I'll probably do what I do every weekend. Hang out with my girl, my friends, and support my addiction to WoW.

Before we get into the main topic of this post, I would like to talk about some random stuff that has been going on in my wow career...

• First off, I dinged 77 today on my mage and I must say that I am super excited about it.
  It is nice playing a dps class when you are used to being the healer, it is much less stressful.
  
  
• The ugly hand of playing a dps over a healer is that you no longer have that edge to pick and choose your pick up groups. When I am on my healer, if I want to run a 5 man, I can get invited to one within five minutes usually. Totally different with a DPS class, completely different...
  
  
• Leveling tailoring sucks. I have been putting questing on the back burner and solely AoE grinding using Frost is the New Black's guide. I figured that way I would get more frostweave and its not like the xp that I am getting is bad either...
  
  
• Speaking of tailoring, if you are a shadoweave tailor, you can make two ebonweave cloths with one cool down. Same goes for those spellfire tailors and spellweave. Remember you can change which "specialization" you are by talking to the tailoring guys in Shattrath City. Of course its going to cost you though, 150g from the reports I'm reading.
  
  
• Going to start up the good ol Naxx runs this weekend again. I am going in with a brand new attitude. Would I like to progress? Of course. However, if we continue to farm the current bosses we have down, I have no problem with that currently.
  
  
• The goal is still to progress somewhat though, even if its just one boss. We shall see /crossesfingers

On to the sole purpose for this post...

WoW'dar, do you have it?

You might be thinking, what the hell are you talking about with this WoW'dar talk here buddy? What does that even mean? Well I am here to tell you that I completely made the word up about 30 minutes ago. I put the word together by taking the word radar and WoW and I am asking you this in regards to other people you come in contact with...

Can you tell if someone plays World of Warcraft?

Good question uh? Ever hear people or movies using the term "Gay'dar"? Meaning that a fellow gay person can tell if someone is just like them, gay. Usually they can tell by holding a normal conversation with them.

Same deal, but in relation to WoW.

I work in the Information Technology field at a company and I would say there are about 500 or so of us that work under one building. Is it quite funny to walk through the break room or the cafeteria and hear words like motes, arcane dust, druids, Ironforge ect, coming out of people in suits and ties.

Personally, I try to keep my addiction on the down low at work because of articles like this one. Due to working nights, I don't have to hide it from that many people 6 out of my 8 hour shift. Its when the first shift people come in is when I have to watch myself.

Yesterday day I was having a conversation with an employee I deal with on a day to day basis over a instant messenger chat based system. The conversation was work related (again, I really don't try to become buddies with anyone at this job) and he said something that I agreed with.

So I replied back to him "/agree"

Immediately he paused and typed "/nod".

Thinking on how I should reply....I decided to type "/golfclap".

He started laughing and we talked briefly about WoW, it was pretty funny in a nerdy kind of way.

Do I have it?...

I think that I have some sort of WoW'dar. However, I can only tell if I catch certain words or phrases. Such as epic, weaksauce, any form of "pwn", elite or 1337, melting faces, ect...

How about you guys? Do you have a WoW'dar? Have a story that relates? Is your WoW'dar so good you can tell if someone plays WoW without even talking to them? Any suggestions on how to hone in on your skills to make your personal WoW'dar better lol?

Don't be shy, please share!

Thats it for me. If you got this far, I want to thank you for reading my post. Its the viewers like you that keep me posting.

Until next time, let your loot be phat and your repair bills low, I'm WTFout of here!

3.0.8 Tanking Spec

3.0.8 Is finally here!

I can say with full confidence that this patch has been nothing but a buff to me. I have more defense, armor, and health than I did before. I am also putting out 1-200 more DPS (and correspondingly Threat) than I was pre-patch due to the changes in Killing Machines functionality. I know they were trying to nerf it for DW and buff it for tanking but they may have gone to far. It seems to proc once per rotation and cause a frost strike or icey touch crit. One crit every 5 attacks is a lot more than my 5 % to crit would indicate =) I had to give up a few things from my previous build, but I think my new spec has similar mitigation/avoidance and greater threat.

I am a bit upset with the treatment that Howling Blast got. I understand that they added the cooldown back shortly before the patch went live, but that is no excuse for the way it was implemented. Howling blast tooltip says nothing about a cooldown. When you use the skill, no cooldown timer is started and the ability is not greyed out. However you get the "that ability is not ready yet" message when trying to cast it a second time in succession. Don't get me wrong, the cooldown is shorter and I use the ability twice as much as i used it before, I just think that it hurts the polish of the game to not show the cooldown. It seems such a small thing that could have been fixed before the patch was pushed. Its kind of like the bug that happens when you use a cooldown ability on a deathknight and instead of counting down the actual time left on the cooldown, it counts down the time until those runes are ready again. So your UI may show that the ability has one second left on cooldown, when in reality the ability still has a minute left and the runes it uses are about to come off cooldown. Once your aware of it, its not a big deal, but it is annoying and hurts the smoothness of the game.

Raid Tanking

I missed out on our guild's naxx run due to being out of town. I was pretty disapointed by that because I had done a lot to improve my gear from the last run and wanted to see if it made anything easier. Once I got back from Kansas I made up for my missed time rather quickly. In quick succession I tanked 25 man Arch for the first time, Tanked 25 man Sarth for the first time, and got the heroic daily done over the course of 2 hours. I have been reading a lot about Sarth +1 and really want to give it a shot next time we do OS. It may be asking to much of my small casual guild but I think we can do It.

I talked a bit to thedoctor about him and I setting up and running some PUG naxx 25. I think once we/I have more experiance in the 10 man version It shouldn't be to hard to get some pugs going. Pug raids are very active on our server and we could get the people easily.


PUGS

I got a lot of feedback on my article about pugging, some agreeing with me, some disagreeing. I still plan on rolling on anything I need against strangers in pugs, but I have decided to make sure my intentions are known before we start.

On another, related note. I have pretty much all the tanking gear I can get with heroic badges. I am holding off on buying the tier Chest piece for a few reasons:
1. 80 Badges is a lot of heroics.
2. They may release new badge gear with the next content patch.
3. I gotta want something out of naxx right?!?!

My DPS/PVP gear is also coming along rather well (thanks to running heroics that drop my needed dps pieces) I now have the 2 piece tier bonus (gloves/chest)! Just need to scrounge up some gems and enchants now and I will be melting face with the best of them. Have any of you run into this problem? Overabundance of hit on gear. I have almost 11% to hit in dps gear and I really want to drop it (as it is above the cap) and get more Strength, Crit, Expertise on my gear. Every time I replace a level 75 item with an 80 item i get more and more hit! With all that Hit i contemplated dual wielding as dps, but it doesn't really appeal to me. I like hitting things with my big hammer!

Until next time.

Tuesday Maintenance Boredom

Morning blog lovers

Yesterday I sat down ready to write an epic blog post for my weekly article, "Monday Morning Warcraft". I got about a couple sentences into it before my job decided that it wanted to bend me over. I didn't get any downtime or a break for the rest of my shift (6 hours later)

Short story, it sucked. I need to win the powerball lottery so I can live large, travel, quit work, and play wow the rest of my days....

/end daydream

Anyway...so I apologize to all of my readers, especially the one that messaged me,

"WTF, I'm at work and bored, where is my Monday blog?"

Which was just awesome if you ask me. It is good to know their are people out there that think like my friend. My blog site has been steadily growing with every passing month. The past couple weeks I have seen a consistent following of about 65 unique views a day and all I can say is wow.

That is way more then I ever expected when I first started blogging and its crazy to say the least. Think that you might want to try your hand of making a blog? What about just writing a post as a guest or feature writer? It could be a one time thing or a weekly article, the possibilities are endless and you never know....you might like it.

Plus, I'll put your toons name as one of the Armory links on the site. I mean cmon, how cool would that be right??? lol

Ok ok, that was a rather large amount of words with absolutely no mention of WoW. Lets get down to business shall we?

WTFspaghetti Style!

Naxxramas

It wasn't much progression, but progression was made in Naxx over the weekend. My guild now has taken out the plague wing. My t7 shoulders did not drop but I am not worried about it, I'll get them soon enough.

We attempted Grobbulus in the Construct quarter a couple times and we got him to about 5% on our best try. We also cleared our way til Instructor Razuvious in the Military quarter but one of our tanks could not grasp the concept and the best that we got him down was 20% or so.

Like I said, there was progress, but it was too far and in between for me. I was highly disappointed in our performance, especially on the Instructor Razuvious. It is such an easy fight and it should be a loot pinata. As the person that put together the raid, I could really only blame 2 people for the majority of the issues that we had, especially on the two new boss encounters.

One was a hunter that was was consistently dying and the other one was a pally tank that struggles with anything besides your basic tank and spank fight. Don't get me wrong, they are great people, they just seem to not learn from their mistakes as fast as the normal wow player would.

What now then?

Well I definitely don't want to /gquit like Drug did over at Shields Up. (Drug has completely different and valid reason why he did) I guess I will just roll with the punches and hope for the best. We are progressing and even though it seems like I am complaining, I do have alot of fun playing with these guys.

I did tell myself that I would be satisfied with being a casual raider, but it just seems like with all of the time and effort I am putting into getting prepared, I should be progressing faster...much faster.

As far as the guild merger goes, I don't think it will happen really. I'll bring it up again to the other guild, but if they don't make more of an effort I will consider that option completely gone. As I stated on a previous post, I am starting to level my alts again. That will be a great option to take advantage of while I wait for my guild to gear up and progress.

Weekly Poll

Results are and all I can say is that the Paladin is the undisputed champion in regards to who people would prefer to tank. They have everything that "tank" would want in their arsenal. Excellent one on one tanking abilities with crazy good aggro control. Their dps seems to be above all of the other "tank" classes and they are perfect for all of those trash mobs you just want to mow down with aoe.

Paladins have it pretty good right now and that is why you probably see so many of them. Every spec - Holy, Ret, or Protection is highly sought after. They have definitely come a long way from the MC and BWL days. Back then they only had one spec that was really viable (Holy) and that consisted of spamming the Flash of Light button.

Random Odds and Ins you might find Interesting....

WTFspaghetti's Weekly Idiot Reward (Work Friendly)

• Perfect example on why NOT to text message a police officer when you are drunk....lol /fail
  

Five thing you might not know about WoW

1. When WoW first came out in 2003, it was possible to be a Dwarf Mage. Blizzard decided to change this because it did not match the lore of the class. In my opinion that means that they thought that my Dwarven brothers were too stupid.............or too much of a drunk. Damn your racism Blizzard! Damn you!!
   
   
2. Shaman will receive a free respec once patch 3.0.8 goes live due to the changes to the elemental tree.
   
   
3. Speaking of the patch, their have been some recent news that was added to the patch notes on January 19th. I won't list them all here so just go check em out here
   
   
4. Throughout WoW's existence, every class has been considered "Overpowered" but the one that cracks me up the most was the Shaman. They were the kings of PvP and were not to be taking lightly. The Shaman WoW forums would be filled constantly with pleads of Nerf and it was awesome. Others popular ones that come to mind are Druids and of course Warlocks.
   
   
5. If you find yourself burnt out on dailies and you don't like to farm herbs/skins/ores. Then try your luck out with the AH. Greedy Goblin has some fantastic tips on how to work your Auction House to bring in the BIG money.
   

I think that is all that I have for you today people. Its getting close to "going home" time here at my job and I am getting sleepy....

yes....

very sleepy...

/sleep

Friday's Food for Thought...

Morning blog lovers!

The weekend is upon us and I know for myself, it is well deserved. Everyone has been getting back into the flow of things even though the holidays feel like ages ago. I live in the central united states and it is freaking COLD outside. Tonight we hit -14F(-25C) with the wind chill factor and that makes it a new 10 YEAR low.

That's right, it hasn't been this cold in 10 years.....F this....I am going to spend this weekend doing indoor activities. I'll finally take my Christmas tree down, maybe clean a little bit around the house.

Lets be serious though, I will probably be glued to my monitor playing WoW the majority of my weekend. That is just how wowheads do things, especially when its the coldest its been in 10 years outside.

I have a couple topics I want to touch on, so lets get with it already shall we?
Music while faces are being melted?

Our friends over at Arthak´s Apothecarium talked earlier this week about listening to music while you play. I replied in a comment over there, but I felt that I wanted to say more and I didn't want to Crit his blog with my wall of text.

I am sure everyone by now has atleast heard of myspace.com. Almost every single artist that has ever released a CD is sure to be somewhere on myspace. Fun thing about it is that you don't even have to have a myspace account to view and listen to all of the music in their database.

What I have been doing lately is running wow and myspace at the same time to listen to some of my favorite music. Arthak was saying that the type of music that he listens to depends greatly on what he is doing. (questing, farming, raids, ect) I didn't realize it, but I do the exact same thing.

Here this whole time I was thinking that I was just playing music that I liked...

Whenever I am healing a 5 man I am almost always listening to some sort of fast rock. I can only assume that the reason why I do this is because that genre of music makes me concentrate more then the other genres that I like - rap, punk, metal, easy listening, ect. Take for example theses two songs, "Wizards in Winter" by the Trans Siberian Orchestra vs "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz

Wizards in Winter is a fast paced rock song with power cords and sharp breaks. I'm Yours is a really easy, slow grooving song. In regards to paying attention and keeping focus, I think I rather listen to no music or just the default WoW sound then listen to I'm Yours. It just doesn't put you in the right state of mind of melting faces.

Here are some artists I like to listen to when I need to focus and melt faces Rage against the Machine, System of a Down, Dragonforce, Metallica, Static X, Flogging Molly, New Found Glory, Goldfinger, Slipknot, and some good old AC/DC.

Here are some artists I like to listen to when I do not need to concentrate, aka grinding Tupac, Dr. Dre, Cashmoney Millionaires (current and former members), Dispatch, Notorious BIG, Ludacris, TechN9ne, Bob Marley....the list could probably go on and on. I feel good leaving the last artist named as the one and only Bob

Random Thoughts that are in my mind currently

1. Have some sort of progression in our guild raid of Naxxramas. We have had only 3 runs in there and all with different people. Every time we have gone in there we have had solid progression. This weekend we will be without one of our better healers and tank due to personal reasons. So I am kinda weary
   


2. I need to start leveling one of my alts up here very soon. I am going to try to level one of them sometime this weekend, I'm think my mage. Nothing like some AoE grinding to past the time =P
   


3. I saw this blog post linked on a few other blogs and man....its the definition of /fail. You must check it out, its work friendly. I wouldn't lie =P
   


4. Most of my Shaman's upgrades are in 25 man raids and it makes me sad. Mostly because I know I would only have a pugger's change to get em. I guess that is what Alts are for right?
   


5. Is anyone else saving their heroic badges? I have 95 heroic badges and I have absolutely no idea what to do with them. I am figuring that sooner or later there is going to new badge vendor with better loot. What are you guys doing?
   

Hope you guys have fun and adventurous weekend. Thanks for reading and remember, let your loot be phat and your repair bills be cheap. I'm WTFout of here....

Pug Tanking, Deathknights, and You

I have been in the process of getting my DK Tank raid ready. It is going rather well and I am full of anticipation for 3.0.8 to come out.

About the only way I have of getting my toon raid ready is through the running of pugs...repeatedly.

I have also been reading a lot of blogs about pugging and decided to chime in with my thoughts.

I pug a lot, and thus I get the full spectrum of groups. Usually you can tell before the first boss is down what kind of group it is going to be. If I can tell from the beginning that a pug is destined to fail I bail quickly and have no second thoughts.

The worst groups are the ones that seem to be going smoothly, maybe even down a boss or two before you realize that the group is full of fail. Today I had a couple of these. How a decently geared group can wipe in UK is beyond me. The last boss managed to kill me twice... both times I went upwards of 12 seconds with no heals at all. The Paladin healer claimed "my heals were on global cooldown" Wtf that is supposed to mean, I have no idea.

After we down the boss, the real drama starts. Plate DPS legs drop. "FUCK YEA MY PANTS DROPPED" shouts the other plate wearer. I tell him I have to roll on the pants. I win the roll and all hell breaks loose.

"YOUR A NINJA"
"IF I KNEW YOU WOULD ROLL ON DPS GEAR I WOULDN'T HAVE INVITED YOU!"

to which I respond "If I knew I wasn't allowed to roll on these pants from the beginning, I wouldn't have joined the group, In fact the only thing that drops in this instance I can use is those pants"

The argument rolls over into trade chat and of course people fall in on
on either side of the argument.

Don't get me wrong, I see his point. I tanked the run, then rolled on DPS gear. If it were a guild run or a raid I surely would have passed. But it wasn't. It was a pug heroic.

People have rolled against me for tank gear on pug heroics, and I said not a word. If I am forming the group, I do not include people who would want the same gear as me. If that's not possible? I accept the fact that I may lose a roll. It happens. Get over it.

This guy of course would not get over it. 2 hours later and I am still getting random whispers of congratulations and of ninja hate.

What do you people think? I think its pretty clear where I stand =)

Meanwhile I will be enjoying Staggering Legplates every time I PvP or DPS.



There are good pugs out there. All my gear aside from my shoulders are from pug heroics.
You know the runs where half way through everyone is asking about running more heroics? It seems rare that I am not out dpsing at least one of the "dpsers". When it happens though it is sweeeeeet.

God Loves Good Healers.

Peace.


@ thedoctor

"You stole my fucking cloudsong!"

Tuesday Maintenance Boredom - Feed back is Welcomed!

Morning blog lovers, whats happening?

Another Tuesday, another confirmed extended maintenance morning. As far as we know, patch 3.0.8 is not going live today, of course that could always change. I am actually kinda glad for once really. I have alot of chores around the house that need to be taken care of....they actually should have been taken care of weeks ago....

• Take down the Christmas Tree or pwn some noobs?
• Clean the house (Like REALLY clean the house, not just straighting) or melt some faces?
• Pick up cat tranquilizers from vet or raid Naxxaramas?

Ok, I know what you are thinking...wtf cat tranquilizers? No, I am not some freak that does experiments on cats or likes to play tricks on them and get them HIGH. I actually have a long hair cat that I get groomed once a year and he F'N hates it. So I have to get him all drugged up and feeling good before hand lol.

Anyway, so ya....back to my point. That is why I am looking forward to this mornings maintenance. Must get some thing accomplished, some real life "Dailies" if you will lol

That is the life of a wowhead thought right?

Weekly Poll

This week the weekly poll asked which tanking class do you like the best? More then 2/3rds of the vote were for Paladins. Now I could have just alot of Pallies that view the site, but that is highly unlikely.

I am really not that surprised, but it brings up a great point. No one wants CC anymore. Everyone just wants to zone in and steam roll the place with all of the uber AoE PWNAGE. I must admit, it is nice. Especially when you have already done the instance a number of times.

In an hour and 30 minutes today, I completed 4 heroics, Timed CoT, AN, Gun'drak, and Drak'Tharon. Warrior tank, 2 unholy death knights and a ret pally = equals ezmode for a restro shaman.

Now that I think about it though, every tanking class besides druids (currently getting fixed in 3.0.8) are pretty well equipped for AoE tanking. I guess people prefer Paladins because they are the most equipped to handle aoe tanking maybe? What do you guys think??

Thoughts on merging guilds

Very interesting subject matter and I would love to hear from you guys. I would especially like to hear from you if you have done or been apart of such an event. Its kind of a weird thing, its a very simple concept but has alot of complicated matters in it.

Just to name a couple of the complications:

1. Who is going to lead? I like the idea of a council, but someone is still going to have the rank of Guild Leader
2. Ground rules - Big question mark. To make the merger work, you have to come up with and agree on the rules. What about alts? What about the people whose main toons are lowbies?
3. Raid times - Major factor of course.
4. Drama - One of the coolest things about my guild is that there is ZERO drama. We are all too laid back to worry about drama. I would hate for a merger to happen and drama breaks out. That would be the definition of suck.

Why do the merger? Whats the point?

The point would be to make a better guild then the one you are currently in.

There are many positives to have more max level toons in your guild in my opinion. This allows for more guild runs, more toons equals more professions to use without worrying about getting scammed or tipping.

Another major reason for having a bigger guild and will definitely one of the major goals of the POSSIBLE merger, is the fact that we can setup 25 man raids. We could also have two solid 10 man raids setup as well.

In conclusion...

I think that it would be a great idea if it is pulled off correctly. The main reason why I am in my current guild is not for gear or a raid spot or anything like that at all. It is solely for the people that I have meet and become friends with.

If another small guild that already has some ties with our guild and is at the same spot progression wise. Why not merge?

I have this linked permantely on my page, but here it is again. Great read about building a successful guild from the number 1 priest blogger in da world, Matticus.

I would love to hear from you guys on this, what do you think about all of this? Don't be shy!

Song of the day
"Hypnotize"
Notorious B.I.G.
Life After Death

Quote of the day
"Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening"
-Barbara Tober

Monday Morning Warcraft - Tales of Randomness...

Monday Morning Warcraft is a weekly post that illustrates random thoughts and events that occurred over the weekend in the life of a wowhead. Feel free to e-mail me with questions, suggestions, hate mail, ect... mlange0385 at yahoo dot com

Morning blog lovers!

Your eyes are not fooling you, it is Monday morning. I hope everyone had a loot filled and safe weekend.

NFL Rambling

If you are a NFL fan, you love this time of year, I know I am. Who in their right mind would have thought that the Arizona Cardinals would go to Carolina and completely destroy them. If Carolina is your team, I feel sorry for you guys and I am a freaking Rams fan!

San Diego lost at the Pitt and Philly won out against the Giants. I guess that teams finally figured out that if you blitz the hell out of Eli Manning, he doesn't have a go to receiver since Plax has been suspended. Losing 4 out of the last 5 games speaks volume. It is safe to say that Plax was the straw that broke the back of the Giants.

NFC championship - Cardinals vs Eagles? - What the hell is wrong with the world!

Ok, ok, I know this is a wowblog. That just blows my mind though lol.

Onward with the WoW talk - WTFspaghetti style

The weekend started out pretty good. We went into Naxxaramas on Friday and cleared the Spider Wing despite only having about 9k dps as a group(Rogues were slacking). No loot for me, but we did get some gear for one of the tanks and our 2k dps warlock and hunter got some nice upgrades.

Seems we are pugging less and less and how sweet it is! I am not against pugging, but because alot of people in my guild are still learing the fights, we wipe. During the spider wing, we wiped a total of 9 times. Alot of this was due to the fact that our MT has never stepped into Naxx and that we had some lackluster dps.

I know in regards to myself, I hate wiping. Pisses me off ALOT, especially when the fight is so easy. However, if it is a guild run, it is ok with me as long as people realize their mistakes and try to fix them. When I am in a pug, I do not accept wiping more then a couple of times total.

So I always warn people before I invited them to the run that we are probably going to die and that we are still learning the fights. So far I have been extremely lucky and have only come across so really nice people. Woot for nice people

Saturday was pretty fun. We ran OS as a guild and had an attempt on killing him with 1 drake up. In all honesty, I thought that we had no chance whatsoever. I was pleasantly surprised that we had a solid attempt. We decided just to kill the drake and take out the boss with no drakes up due to the lack of dps we had.

Not a problem with me, its free loot! Speaking of which, my only upgrade of the whole weekend of raiding dropped off the main boss in OS, Sartharion the Onyx Guardian. No it wasn't my teir 7 gloves or a sexy spell dmg necklace.

It was the UBER OVERPOWERED 22 slot bag, Dragon Hide Bag! I was pretty excited about the whole thing actually. I been playing since vanilla wow and I remember farming Onyixia every single week. Ony always dropped a bag and of course, I never won it. I seriously must have killed that ugly dragon 40 plus times. I guess I could go in there now and smack her around with a couple others.....I'll probably pass....Im not one for old school achievements.

Sunday, progression day for our guild in Naxx. I say that because its our A group. DPS was around 11.5k, (amazing for us) Healers are geared, and our tanks are pretty much geared. So we had everything going for us to prevail!

We one shotted the first boss in the plague quarter and after a few wipes we finally mastered "The Dance" and took out Heigan. This is where progression slowed down greatly...

The hallway leading up to the last boss, Loatheb, is a bitch for multiple reasons. Mostly because if you wipe on the boss and do not have a rezzer, you need to keep on doing it. It was also very easy to die if anyone took dmg besides the tanks. If everyone is on the same page (something we were not) its easy, not even an issue.

Loatheb, the last boss is tricky. You have a 3 second window to heal everyone every 20 seconds and the whole raids gets a buff to increase their crit chance by 50%. Really wasn't too hard we just couldn't execute properly. I don't think the DPS was the issue, but if the MT's gear was a little better and the pally healer would have the buff more then just once....we would have probably made it.

Out of 5 times, the best that we got him ws 4%....so close! So we decided to skip him and go right for our favorite rambunctious, smelly abomination, Patchwerk. We one shotted him even though our ret pally pulled aggro at the very beginning and died lol. We called it after that due to time.


Not terrible, better then last week and really....isn't that all you can ask for?

Monday Morning Madness

• Alot of stuff will be changing once the new patch, 3.0.8, comes out. One of the new changes might be the fact that druids will be allowed to equip polearms. Pretty neat I think - I know the stats on the majority of the polearms are very nice for a feral druid. Why not, its a welcome change in my book
  


• Really enjoying my new leadership role in my guild. For some reason I started to lead the raids and now it has become somewhat of the norm. I hope some of the other vets in the guild don't feel like I am stepping on their toes or anything. I doubt it but you never know.
  


• Staying on the subject of guild leadership. Our guild leader has finally dinged 80 on his paladin. When Wrath was first released, he mostly played on his ally server. However, he always kept in touch with us through vent and logging on every now and then. I wonder what is going to happen to my new leadership role now that he is 80. It could quite possibly stay the same or change dramatically. I hope it stays the same though - like I said, I enjoy it.
  


• Its Official - Our resident DK, Mannyfresh, is now one of our few tanks in the guild. It was definitely fun raiding with him and my other real life friend, a shadow priest. This is the first time we have all been in the same guild since The Burning Crusade came out 2 years ago lol. I am glad that we are, it was the main reason why I rerolled in the first place.
  

Things that probably only I care about

• I was pretty sad last week in regards to blogging. You see, I have installed a tracker to see how many hits / unique views my blog gets. Its been steadily climbing over the past month to about 45-50 unique views a day. I know that is pretty low in terms of wowbloggers but that is HUGE for me and I love it. Then all of a sudden I am getting zero views a day. Very weird I thought...Then, it showed three days in a row with zero views.
  


• I knew something had to be up because after that. Found out that some how my tracker code was no longer there. Weird uh? I glad it was a tracker problem and not the fact that people think my blog sucks lol.
  


• I got my cooking from 325 to 375 on Sunday. I can now do the cooking daily and make a pretty nice profit on the auction house. I am pretty surprised how easy it is to make money selling the buff food and why everyone wouldn't want to get in on the action. Hey, more money for me I guess =P
  


• I'm slowly but surely making my way to revered with the Sons of the Hodir. The dailies aren't horrible, but they aren't really fun either! I really want a mammoth mount though and I don't do wintergrasp as much as I should to get the stones.
  


• I think this picture is full of win. As a cat owner, I must say this picture made me crack up.

That is all for now. Have a good Monday - Don't forget to check out my Blog shout out of the week and the weekly poll. I'm WTFout

PRESSURE! Pressure down on me...pressure down..

Morning blog lovers

I know that I just got that catchy song in your head with my clever title and you are welcome my friends. =P

That is the way I been feeling all this week and it sucks....ALOT. There are alot of changes at my work right now due to the failing economy. One of these changes is the scary word, consolidation.

My shift, midnight til 8am, consists of six people all who have certain tasks that need to be completed daily in order for the shift to run smoothly and to make management happy. One of the most critical things about my shift is the individual that runs what we call "The Command Center".

The Command Center basically acts like the middle man between all of our IT groups and our business. Very critical aspect when your company is a multi-billion corporation.

So now that you know a little about that, I will tell you this. They are moving 3 people off my shift (including the individual that runs Command Center) and putting their responsibilities on.....you guessed it....ME. Alot more work and no more pay equals sadpanda in my book.

So its got me down a little and pretty pissed off really. I really strive to look on the bright side on most things, so atleast I have a job right?

Ok, enough with this venting crap - ONWARD WITH THE WoWAGE Talk! - WTFspaghetti style!

Random thoughts in my blogmosphere

• Miners rejoice! Some of the new changes that were mentioned in 3.0.8 patch notes is that miners no longer have to tap the node more then one time. Now, the first time you tap the node you will get everything that the particular node was going to give you. (ores, crystals, jewels) That should save some time off farming.
  
  
• Trackbacks, or backlinks as Blogger refers to them. I for the life of me can not figure them out. I have everything setup correctly in my settings, but I am still failing to see how they actually work. Can anyone help me with this? I will totally give you some gold if you reroll on my server.
  
  
• The Oracle's "Mysterious Egg" has finally hatched for me! YAY! I just know that it is a Emerald Proto-Drake mount! Nope, I fail again - It was some "Aged Yolk" I refuse to switch factions until I get my big cow hoofs on that baby.
  
  
• Going back in Naxxramas on Friday with the guild. Hopefully our dps will be good enough to to take down Patchwerk. I wish I wasn't but I am doubtful. Our top 3 dps will not be going on Friday and they were the ones that were picking up the slack from the people that were only dps around the 1100 range.
  
  
• I don't have a dps class at 80, so I do not know how hard it is to do atleast 1500 dps constantly . I do however know that I ran a ton of heroics and spent around 2.5k gold getting my toon ready for Naxx. I know a couple of our players were pretty newly dinged 80s, so I can only hope they made a major jump in their gear.
  
  
• I have been hitting a writers block in regards of what to write about. BlogAzeroth has a pretty nice forum for blogstorming, but nothing that I can really relate to and write about.
  
  
• I am pretty hungry to get a timed run of CoT Strat done sometime shortly. I ran it with some "decent dps" and missed it by about 5 minutes. Group composition wise, I think it would be best if you had a DK or a Pally tank, and the rest aoe dmg classes. (Ret Paladins, Death Knights, Hunters, Mages, Shadow priests.) Ofcouse, all of them would have to do atleast 1600-1700+ dps to be successful.

Unrelated WoW stories that crack me up

• "Porn industry seeks 5 billion dollars in Federal Bailout" I am not even going to comment on this one....just an EPIC win lol
  
  
• "Brain implant better than meds for Parkinson's disease" - Dang! We are at this point in human kind? Good lord
  
  
• "The dumbest Criminal EVER, period" - Seriously guys. If you don't read any of these stories, you MUST read this one. It is the definition of FAIL, I still can't stop laughing lol. Classic I tell ya, classic.
  
  
• "6 year old drives to school" - The 6 year old actually ended up driving for 10 miles! Funniest thing about the story is that he told cops he learned how to drive from "Grand Theft Auto"
  

Until next time - Let you loot be phat and your repair bills low - WTFout

Tuesday Maintenance Boredom - DK tanking...the In's and the Out's

It's that time again! While we all anxiously await the servers coming up, I sit here contemplating my Death Knight:

I Finally hit the defense soft cap thanks to the Waistguard of Living Iron. Time to start tanking heroics. I need 3 more defense rating to be un-critable during a raid. That should be easily accomplished once the servers come back up and I get the tanking runeforge. My next major gearing concern will be stacking stamina. A lot of stamina should come from replacing my high defense blues with something a bit more rounded (Read: Epics).

I am more undecided than ever on what to spec for tanking. Unholy is losing some of its luster with the heavily nerfed bone shield. Blood gets a boost but will it be enough? Frost was a solid tanking spec pre-patch and is getting better aoe threat with the removal of howling blast cooldown.

My only concern with frost tanking is the fact that i have already ran across a few mobs in instances that a frost immune. Nothing to get your party killed faster than mobs that are immune to 3/4 of your damage and abilities. I am also not sold on frost tanking cooldowns. UNbreakable armor is UNderwhelming, sure it seems nice on paper until you realize that it only works against physical damage, and even then 25% more armor is not a very high mitigation increase.

Compared to bone shield giving you a flat 20% mitigation against ALL damage. Not to mention the fact that bonesheild can last longer at high avoidance levels.

Blood comes in as the dark horse. Vampiric Blood is very strong and lasts longer than either of the other tanking cooldowns. However, it doesnt actually mitigate or avoid anything. With Vampiric Blood you are heavily reliant on the healers to take advantage of the buff. If your healers are stunned, silenced, or otherwise incapacitated your fancy tanking cooldown just did nothing to prevent what could be a wipe. Even after your healer dies you can pop bonesheild or Unbreakable armor to try and whittle away the last of a mobs hitpoints, With Vamp blood you have nothing.


The current plan is 12/51/8 It came down to 1 simple thing, Economics. I am already glyiphed for frost and the gold reserves are to low to be going out and re-glyiphing.

Blood Talents:
Blade Turning- A must have tanking talent. 10% parry that is up almost all the time.
Bladed Armor- Looks to be pretty good for threat, as a Tank I expect to have a lot of armor =)
Two-Handed Weapon Specialization- Another threat boost 4% may not seem like much but that is to every swing/attack.

Frost Talents:
Toughness- A must have tanking talent.
Imp. Icy Touch, Icy Talons, and Imp. Icey talons- Reduces enemy attack speed (avoidance/mitigation) and increases my attack speed (threat). The point in Imp. Icy Talons is because as a tank I KNOW I will be grouping, and a boost to the dps on my run means a faster run for everyone.
Black Ice- More damage/threat. Yes Please
Annihilation- Obliterate is the Frost/Unholy attack you use on single targets as frost. We can't have that taking our disease off!
Lich Borne- I really didn't want to put a point here, but hey tanking cooldowns are tanking cooldowns and I needed a point to move further up the tree.
Frigid Dreadplate- 3% avoidance active all the time (even while stunned) I'm Sold.
Chill of the Grave- Need that runic power to fire off your Frost strikes
Deathchill- Another one that I didn't really want to spend the point in, But a crit howling blast for 5k+ on all enemies is a great way to start an aoe pull.
Rime- Extra crit and resource free aoe damage. nuff said.
Howling Blast- The Frost AOE. It is getting its cooldown removed in 3.0.8. It already does 20% of my damage in a typical instance run...
Blood of the North- Who cares about blood strike damage? Needed for frost rotations ( 2 frost runes just isn't enough =)
Unbreakable Armor- Tanking cooldown, sub-par in my mind, But hey we are down here anyway.
Frost Strike- Frost RP dump, hits like a truck.
Guile of the Gorefiend- I'll take bigger crits and extra time on cooldown you use almost every pull.
Tundra Stalker- The requisite flat damage increase of the tree.
Hungering Cold- After getting the goodies I wanted from blood and unholy I had a point left over. Seems more useful than one point spent in the other options. Very situational. Arguably very cool as well!

Unholy Talents:
Anticipation- Another must have tanking talent.
Morbidity- The one thing i missed the most when I had 0 points in Unholy. Waiting for DND to cooldown is annoying, and can cause problems when you need to group up waves of enemies.


If you see flaws in my reasoning or something glaringly wrong with this build please let me know.

Song of the Day
Bang Bang
Dispatch
Bang Bang [Bomber]

P.S: I just got an Iphone. The thing is amazing, I have some nice WoW apps on there but if you have any favorite apps drop me a line so I can check them out!

Monday Morning Warcraft - Decisions and Random Knowledge

Morning blog lovers!

Another Monday, another week starts, another Monday Morning Warcraft post.

Hope everyone had a phat loot filled weekend. I know I had some major upgrades to my restro arsenal - cloak, hands, belt, weapon, boots. Pretty much put my stats in line to heal any 10 man and most 25 mans. That being the case it is now time to start spending some time leveling up one of my other toons, mage or paladin.

Both toons would be straight DPS for the most part. I have had some urges to make my Paladin a tank, which I think would be CRAZY fun. Who really knows though, it would be nice just to leave them both alone and focus just on my restro shammy. That way I would spend less time playing WoW and more time being productive in real life.

I am moving out of my apartment soon, so that will take a major amount of time away from WoW. If I start leveling one of them I will get the addiction bug hardcore. On the flip side I could just log in to my Shaman, do some dailies and raid.

GAHH...I cant decide, what do you guys think about it? Do you know what I mean when I said "the addiction bug" in regards to leveling? Any suggestions?

Ok, enough of that nonsense. Lets get this post going already

~Monday Morning Madness~

• Titansteel Guardian is a fantastic healer weapon. With 490 spell damage it is the BEST in slot before 25 man raids and most people consider the weapon to be overpowered. Well Blizzard has agreed with these haters people and they are nerfing the weapon. Its a solid nerf, 90 spell damage. This would bring it from 490 spell damage to 400 or so spell damage. My thoughts? COMPLETE AND UTTER WEAKSAUCE!
  
  
• Druid tanking / feral stats - It has come to my attention that druids are currently a work in progress in regards to tanking. From my understanding they are pretty much defense capped at 80 and need to shoot for avoidance. However, that is pretty much failing for the most part. Atleast that is the word on the street. I did some research and instead of me telling you, I just do some linkage love. Good post on what stats a druid tank should shoot for here and some more random conversations about feral DPS here. All good reads.
  
  
• I want a freaking drake! I have 3 days left until I my Sholazar Basin Oracle's egg hatches. More then likely it will egg yoke or a vanity pet, but there is a chance it could turn into the pretty emerald green proto-drake. How kickass would that be right? In order to get the egg you must be revered with The Oracles
  
  
• Stone Shards. Everyone has them, very few people have done anything with them. In fact, many people have yet to step foot in Winter Grasp, yet find the vendor. Well have no fear, I will lead you on your journey to the WG vendor and all the amazing standard gear and items it has to offer. First thing is to see if your faction has WG. You can tell this by looking at your buffs at the top right hand corner of your screen. If you do have the buff then head over to your local battlemasters in Dalaran and click the portal. Go down the stairs and turn right. You will see a giant Mammoth with a orc on it. Waa La
  
  
• At the Winter Grasp vendor you can buy alot of pvp stuff such as enchants for your head that has resilience and a pvp trinket that bind on account. Nothing really interested me besides the Mammoth you can buy for 200 Stones! I would say its worth it, enless you are a big pvp guy.
  
  
• Relics of Uldar - This item will no longer be bind on pickup! Also, the Iron Boot Flask, which cost 10 Relics will now cost 200 in the upcoming patch. The Iron Boot Flask turns you into a dwarf for 10 mins with a one hour cool down. This item does not have any charges and can be used an unlimited amount of times. Read more about it here

~5 things that I probably only care about~

1. First guild run of Naxx started with a wipe on the very first pull of trash about 45 minutes later then we wanted to start. Two hours later we cleared the spider wing and the first boss in the plague quarter. Not BAD for our guild at all.
   
   
2. I had Master Loot for the first time in a 10 man and I must say....I like it. I wasn't the only raid leader, but I definetly like the role.
   
   
3. Changing the culture of a casual guild to a semi casual guild that is a little more serious about raids is definetly a thought I want to share with a few people in the guild. I am not talking anything crazy, but some things like a guild website, signups for raids, new guild ranks (raider, casual), things like that. I dont think it would be a big deal, but who knows. More info to come on this subject hopefully.
   
   
4. Playoffs? PLAYOFFS? That's right, its NFL Playoff time and what a wild card weekend it was people. All I have to say is that Darren Sproles cracks me up with his littleness and speed, what a GANGSTA!
   
   
5. SuperBowl pick? Chargers vs Panthers. Panthers win by 21 - Thats right, you heard it here first baby!

Until next time, let your loot be phat and repair bills cheap. I'm WTFout

Addon's - A User Interface discussion...

Morning blog lovers,

I hope you guys had a safe New Year's Eve and are fully recovered now that it is Friday.

I am off but I can not log in to WoW because the past 10 minutes I have been waiting in queue. Now I am number 221 and I am projected 23 more minutes of wait time.

Awesome

On a positive note, I now have time to write a fairly quick blog post so I can pretend that I am entertaining the masses that view me site =P

So on WITH IT THEN - WTFspaghetti style

Now, I am no uber elite raider like our friend Drug at Shield's Up. So my UI (User Interface) does not have to meet the needs for any specific purpose. For the longest time I took pride in the fact that I did not use ANY mods or add-ons, but the original UI that Blizzard created for us.

Then after awhile I started to use super simple add-ons like damage meter, CT Raid, KTM Threat meter, ect. However, three and a half years of playing wow and I have never changed or messed with the action bars.

Then comes my Shaman with entirely WAY too many spells to keep track of and organized. So I was forced to finally take the plunge and get some sort of bar mods.

So here is a couple pictures of my UI

Domino's - Pretty neat bar mod that give the end user complete and utter control. Height, width, location, and it works with all of the new vehicles that are in the Xpan. Would recommend to anyone.

SunArt - This mod is strictly to make my UI a little cleaner. It provides a spot to put my action bars and there are plenty of options that come with it. Such as different skins, transparency options, and like I said before....it just makes your UI look a little neater. Atleast in my opinion.

Item Rack - One of my favorite mods of all time. If you carry another set of gear with you and switch it out every now in then. You know it sucks to put every item in one by one. Item rack allows you to hit one button to equip all of your gear. My shaman has 4 different combinations that I use regularly. One mp5 heavy, one crit heavy, one for pvp, and one set that consists of my main healing gear.

Prat - Simple, its a mod makes your chat more user friendly. You can actually use your mouse scroll to go up and down. You can highlight text and it has a time stamp for all messages. After using this mod for the past 4-5 months, it is definitely a must.

Sexymap - Im too sexy for my map, too sexy for my map..... right ....Ok, back to reality.

SexyMap is another one of my mods that I use for strictly to make my UI look, well sexy lol. Lots of cool options come with this mod as well. One of my favorites is the transparent skin that rotates clockwise. Another cool feature is that it gives you the option to hide all of those map icons (you know the little circles that are on the border? minimap, time, bgs, ctraid) until you scroll over it with your mouse. Pretty neat in my opinion.

Overall, my mods take up a total of 3.59 mbs. Super low amount that shouldn't break your system.

What mods do you guys use? Are you a mod freak? What about a stone cold anti-mod cowboy...

...whoa, did I just said "stone cold anti-mod cowboy"? Who says that lol? I think that is queue that I need to end this post and go to bed.

Quote of the day
People might not get all they work for in this world, but they most certainly work for all they get
-Frederick Douglass

Song of the day
Slacker
Tech N9ne
Absolute Power

As bigredkitty would say, fo shizzle