WoW on the back burner

For the last few weeks work and family commitments have kept my Warcraft time to a minimum. I'm narrowing down my in-game priorities accordingly, but there's still more to do than I have time available.

Grulnak could do with several more Emblems - I've replaced the worst of his gear but there's still more to do.

I need to keep improving myself as a healer - there's always stuff to do in terms of addon configuration. For example I should set up Grid to show whether I'm keeping the Ancestral Healing buff up on the tank.

Then there's always the elemental side of his game - getting a proper raiding set sorted out, more addon configuration and of course practice.

And then there's my ever-present alt question, which mainly comes down to "It'd be nice to have a Horde tank" or "Perhaps an Alliance alt".

On the Horde tank list there's Grulgok (level 73 orc warrior), Shank (level 66 undead warrior) and Eadwyn (level 66 undead Death Knight). Orcs are cool, but my main is already an orc, plus it often feels more appropriate to be Forsaken for the distinctly human-centric parts of the game such as the Tournament. My snobbish half feels I should stick to warriors, despite their fiddly (although more engaging) tanking. Death knights though seem to have a much easier time, with straight-forward (or even "boring" as I've heard in some places) tanking. And this is without going into how much easier a time a DK has when soloing, or the coolness factor of some of their abilities compared to the somewhat agricultural warrior. So it's an open question which of them will finally hit the level cap, Eadwyn is favoured at the moment but who knows where I'll end up.

On the Alliance list I again have no clear choice. Having decided I'm happiest being central to a group as a healer or tank I have 3 main options.

With the advent of faction transfers Tukkillen may become a dwarf. I currently favour this route, as he's already level 70 with decent professions and I have a good feel for the class. However I get occasional attacks of cold feet since - although he's retired - he has a distinct place in my and my guild's history. Either way I won't transfer him just yet, not until I can get him Cold Weather Flying plus heirloom shoulders and chest.

Other possibilities include a human paladin (currently level 12 and feeling a bit underpowered). Apparently paladin healing is rather boring, but on the plus side they can tank as well. Similarly there's Duillnar, my level 38 druid - although I don't really feel that either druids or Night Elves are for me.

And of course there's always the human (or perhaps dwarf) death knight option - DKs may be cliched and over played, but then I'm considering being a paladin for whom the same seems to be true :)

OK, the Black Knight can be quite tough

Logged on last night and asked around if anyone needed a healer. A guild group had just lost their (non-guild) paladin healer in ToC, with just the Black Knight to go, so I offered to fill the spot.

In a PUG you'd ask more questions (like, just why did your healer quit on the last boss), but it was a guild group so in I went.

It turns out that an undergeared tank (by which I mean only about 40% epics, the remainder being good blues) is really hard to keep alive on the Black Knight. And forget him tanking the ghouls as well in phase 2, so the healer will end up aggroing them.

Being a guild group we persevered and defeated him in the end, but it took proper effort and tactics, an over-geared AoE healer and probably a bit of luck.

Facerolling our way to...

Upgrades? Boredom?

Since the patch hit it seems that everyone is farming heroics for badges, not surprisingly. However, in a group of Naxx-25 / Ulduar-10 geared players none of the heroics - even the new Trial of Champions instance - present much of a challenge. So although I'll undoubtedly be running heroics for a good few weeks, I'm not actually having much fun in WoW at the moment.

Roll on the end of the holiday season, when guild raids will start again in earnest.

Dragon rider

Last night I finally achieved one of my long term goals of Wrath and bought myself the Wyrmrest red dragon.

Unfortunately, like a lot of these longer term, slowly achievable goals (reaching level 70 and gaining my epic flyer spring to mind as comparisons) it felt somewhat underwhelming. I'm obviously not quite the right mindset for this part of the game, although long term I'm sure I'll be happier riding a dragon than my faithful windrider.

Now, when's the next guild first boss kill going to be?

Raiding update - Mimiron

After my sight-seeing trip a few weeks ago I was able to see Mimiron in action last night. Of the 10 raiders present myself and 2 others were new to the fight, so killing him on the 6th attempt was a pretty good result I felt, and the shouts on Ventrilo seemed to agree.

It was what you'd call a good wipe night - on each attempt we got a bit further through the phases, looked at our problems, and made different mistakes the next time. It was much more "we'll get him, but maybe not tonight" rather than "wtf, this guy's impossible!".

Llyra's boss guide gave me in invaluable head start on the fight. But even more valuable and impressive was our raid leader and main tank acting as a sort of live Boss Mods: "'Random DPS' - move - Rocket!". Without him I'm sure it'd have taken us rather longer.

I'm also increasingly thinking that Blizzard has got their raid design really right at the moment. We're a strange mix of casual and progression-orientated guild, and we're moving in to the last few bosses that are currently available. Meanwhile the properly progression-orientated guilds are aiming for world- and server-firsts of the various hard modes. They may be an artificial hoop, but people are jumping through them.

It sort of feels like there should be another raid out there, like in Burning Crusade where Black Temple and then Sunwell felt like a proper peak to be climbed. However, if there were further raids in Wrath at the moment would anyone do the Ulduar hard modes? And without the hard modes would Ulduar be decried as "too easy"?

Argent Tournament? Chicken riding?!

I went to check out the Argent Tournament, something I've been meaning to do for a while. Picked up a few minor quests, and then went to find out about the tournament itself. It turns out they want me to ride a chicken hawkstrider chicken into combat. So much for that.

I might do the goblin dailies, and it looks pretty cool when I'm riding my Wolf around Dalaran with the tournament lance equipped. But the tournament itself will remain a closed book, at least for this Orc.

Ulduar progress

I've now progressed pretty far in Ulduar with my guild, and we're hopefully not far off a full clear. Given we raid sort of casually, with only 2 days per week in the instance, I think we're doing pretty well.

This last week on night one we downed Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Kologarn, Auriaya, Thorim and the Assembly of Iron, one-shotting them all except for Thorim which took us 6 attempts.

Then last night we killed Freya (3rd attempt) and Hodir (5 attempts or so).

The bosses we're wiping on now, especially Thorim and Hodir, are problematic in that one serious mistake from one raider will cause a wipe. We're not carrying any fools though so before too long I'm sure we'll be one- or two-shotting them. Time will tell...

A bonus moment from last night was that, once the raid had been called for the night, I was able from Freya's room to chain Far Sight to peak at Mimiron. I forget sometimes when looking enviously at other classes all the cool tricks that shamans have.