/Yawn – A World of Warcraft Blog

Sorry it has been so long since our last post!  Both Mariana and I have started graduate school (both Ph.D programs) and have been extremely busy in the RL.  That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped playing WoW, however.  Here are the boss kills of all 5 bosses in The Trial of the Crusader raid (Eau’s POV), which can be found on the Argent Tournament grounds in Icecrown Glacier.  Enjoy!

Grats me!

Sick of giving Blizzard my money and wanting to show, once again, my deep love of all things troll, I created Caille (the troll hunter) on Burning Blade instead of transfering Arco (the blood elf hunter) from Eonar.  I know this is going to be a long-ish grind (or maybe it won’t…  it IS a hunter afterall), but I miss those big ugly blue feet damnit!

Posts obsessing over pets probably to follow shortly.

In other news, I continue to be impressed by my mage Eau and how few upgrades add so much DPS.  Looking back on the blog a few weeks ago, I was happy to be pulling 3k on bosses in Naxxramas.  Now that I have a mainhand, offhand, belt, and -something else I can’t remember- from 10-man Ulduar, I did almost 5k on Patchwerk the last time I ran 25-man Naxx!  (She also became Eau the Seeker recently…  still can’t decide if Loremaster Eau is a better title though…)  Plus I am super excited about the news that living bomb will be able to be applied to multiple targets with the next patch, so it’ll be a big boost to AoE DPS and function probably a little more like seed of corruption.  Speaking of the patch, when the hell is it going to come out?  I have heard rumors of early August, and I’m not sure that the druid I made can stand being level 1 much longer!

Anyway, I haven’t been playing much lately because I am currently in Hawaii for a family vacation! 

Things have been pretty hectic recently: I relocated to Arizona from New York, built all the furnature in my new apartment thanks to Ikea, etc.  Now the shaman bug has hit me in a big way, but as I stared at the back of my level 80 tauren, I couldn’t help but feel bad.  I just absolutely hate Tauren.  I hate having to look at a hairy mound of a head, and not having closed shoes, and walking like i’m on the moon, and having huge ugly shields, and sitting off center on dragon mounts…its just all so terrible.

So now I have rerolled a shaman, to be leveled to 80 and spec’ed to Restoration.  Just like my tauren shaman, but a lot less ugly.

There’s the ol’ Vargroth!

I am so happy that I made the change to orc…and I am also happy I have 2 weeks of Midsummer Fire Festival summer pole xp bonus coming up…currently I am level 22, but with some help from Eau running me through SM Cath a few times every day, I think i’ll be 80 pretty quick!

~Nick Fox

I am now the proud owner of a new iMac (2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM).  It makes everything run beautifully!  I have all of the settings on ultra (except for shadows) and it only lags a little bit in Dalaran…  Suddenly, I feel the urge to screenshot every part of WoW.  Tonight was the first time that I ran 25-man Naxxramas on this computer and it was a completely different experience (I didn’t even need to pull away from the group for Patchwerk!).  I also was able to get my 7.5 shoulders finally using the emblems, since I can never roll anything more than a 25 on them.  Now I am wearing the full set!  Woo!  I was also pulling around 3.5k dps today in Naxx (including all my AoE damage), and hitting 3.0k somewhat reliably on bosses.

In other news, I transfered my paladin from Eonar to Burning Blade, since I wanted to do something other than dps for a little bit.  Because the name Acalarra was already taken, I named her Jour (to keep with the Frenchie names, heh).

Sorry about the long time between posts, but Nick and I are now college graduates!  Grats us!

Anyway, WoW has become my main passtime for the summer time, since I spend most of my days home watching my little brother who is on summer vacation as well.  This has, of course, led to me falling back in love with fishing – it happens every school break, probably because breaks would be the only period when I would have the time needed to fish in game.

And the WoW gods definitely want me to fish.  On the first day, I got my fishing from 120 to 330 and did the fishing daily quest twice (once during the day and once at 3am when the dailies reset).  The first time I did it, I got the strand crawler pet:

Okay, so I thought I was already pretty lucky, since the drop rate of this pet is apparently a little more than 1%.  When I do the daily again, I get the Jeweled Fishing Pole!  This fishing pole adds 30 fishing skill, which basically makes it so I don’t have to grind Kalu’ak rep.  Yay!

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better…  I go try out my fishing pole in Skettis and fish up Mr. Pinchy on the first node!  AND I get the pet on the first use of the item!  (This is important because I’ve actually fished him up 2 times before and not gotten the pet.)

I’m starting to think that I really should have gone to northrend that night and tried to fish to get the mount, but I was too sleepy, haha.  Either way, that’s a lot of great stuff in one 24-hour period – a clear sign from Blizzard that I should continue fishing, haha!

Hey All,

So my priest has hit level 80, and instead of hitting up heroics and raids, I went straight to icecrown to do my duty in the Argent Tournament.  I think it is really fun…you can joust, and help build the argent colosseum, get an orc child as your person flag carrying slave..and sweet swag!

That is me, with my banner and my flag carrying slave child.  Isn’t that fun?!

weapons, mounts, tabards, pets, titles and more are available at the argent tournament..so head on up to the northeastern corner of Icecrown and become a champion for your home city!

~Nick Fox

I only shelled out the money for dual spec on my mage so far and I decided to keep my main spec as Frostfire (as I’ve been for the past few months) and take an Arcane raiding spec as my second.  I think I just don’t have the arcana mojo though (or maybe it could just be that I’m geared incorrectly), because doesn’t just eat my mana like a mofo – which I expected – but it also is shelling out consistently less damage and dps on target dummies.  It seems like it might be a good non-aoe trash spec because of the large amount of instants and just the general lack of a 3 second cast (damn you frostfire bolt!  damn you to hell!).  To be fair, I didn’t buy glyphs for this spec yet, so maybe that’s where the 600 dps difference lies, but I doubt it…  I also won’t find out for awhile because glyphs have become so overpriced since the patch. 

If you’d like to check out the spec, check out my armory.  And don’t mind the gear…  I have been spending a lot of time with the dummies shuffling around stuff for arcane, so I might be wearing some weird combos.

On a minor note: last night we tried the new boss in vault (no longer lolvault) and actually failed.  But I was able to complete my T7/7.5 set with drops from Archavon and Sartherion.  We had some issues with the firewall glitching, but we were able to do that eventually.

The guild Legacy has downed Yogg Saron for a world 3rd kill.  What’s difference about this is that they’ve made the world 1st video of it.  Click this for the link over to warcraftmovies.com

The 10 man version of yogg saron is also dead.  Looks like it only took a few days to complete all of the “easy mode” bosses, and there are some guilds already working on the hard modes.  Hodir and Freya have been downed on their hard modes, no doubt someone is trying to kill Algalon before the first raid reset.  Good luck to them!

And to everyone else, good luck to you in Ulduar.  Sadly, I haven’t been able to log on since the patch came out, but I think this weekend will see my priest getting a few more levels.

If you’re in the northeast US, enjoy the weather today!

~Nick Fox

I won’t be able to write the detailed post I’d like to due to real life time crunches affecting me today, but the wordpress community should know that Patch 3.1, Secrets of Ulduar is hitting live realms today.  There will be an extended Tuesday downtime to put the patch all together and serve it up.  hopefully it does not turn into an all day lag and disconnect fest, but deep down we know it probably will.

With this patch comes Ulduar, the new 10 and 25 man raid instance, the Argent Tournament held in Icecrown Glacier, Duel Specs, revamped LFG interface, and really a lot more.  I am kind of hoping the Argent Tournament hangs around for awhile, as I really want to get the mount, tabard, shirt, and pet of my favorite horde city, Silvermoon.  That adds up to 205 champion seals, and my priest is only level 75.  I won’t be able to play until Saturday, so I still need 5 levels and enough time to get 205 seals…It is going to be close >.>

So anyway, I’ll let the offical Secrets of Ulduar trailer do the rest of the talking for me.  Watch it a few times and it will be like you read one of my overly long posts!

~Nick Fox

PS – Why does Varian, Thrall, and Garrosh look so terrible in the face?