Delayed post.

So Cataclysm is slowly getting closer and closer and the 13th of October patch 4.0.1 will hit the EU servers and we will have to adjust and ”relearn” to play our classes.  Am I looking forward to it ? Yes, most certainly after maximum 2 days of raiding each week with ICC, RS, TOTGC and UL I am quite sure that it will be great fun to raid these over farmed instances with an almost new class.
As I have stated in my first post my main is a mage and I have been playing him as my main character since the day I started to play the game quite a while back. So obviously my main focus will be the upcoming mage changes, but I might add that I haven’t won a Beta key and I haven’t bothered to download the Live game in order to play. This decision was solely made due to I find that from October to December is where I have the time to learn to play my class and how boring would it be if you already mastered it and then just had two months with standard farming and crying in private whispers because all the others were incompetent retards who didn’t manage to hit their buttons in the correct or just slightly correct way.

Anyway, I must admit that I first was a little against the remake and removal of almost half our talents and a complete remake of our class, but after a bit of thinking I do actually think that it is a quite brilliant idea.
So yes – The Mage, one of the current top DPS classes and the remake is looking quite tasty even though we aren’t given Flame Orb yet (dr00l for any Diablo 2 player).

I am fairly sure that this is more or less the build which I will be trying out first. It is a fire build (yay don’t we all love fire and huge ignites? Reminds me, here is a link to a Youtube Vid of the mage Greatshock from “For the Horde” who gathered a 100% crit set and was fooling around on the Saurfang encounter: http://manaflask.com/forum_topic.php?forum_id=19&topic_id=31091) and this is the build which I reckon will be the standard fire build until Cataclysm: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnZtqt.a5o.mage. It is the build which I reckon would yield the highest single target DPS, but for a fight like Lich King on heroic I would change my build in order to get free Flamestrikes when the Valkyr Phase starts: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnDX8_.a5o.mage. Though I might consider switching one talent from Netherwing Presence into Impact, but I do not have a feeling of “how often” Impact will proc, however, I will have an idea the 13^th of October.
However, even though I assume fire will be the “top raiding build” I must admit I do feel tempted to try frost since it does look like it got a major overhaul. However, I am afraid that frost will never become a spec which will be able to compete with fire and arcane.
Arcane, I do feel an urge to hit my head against my keyboard when I play it and I must admit that I am quite sure of that I ended up getting a physical disorder after playing arcane in what seems to be endless Lich King HC tries due to our only retard paladin decided to stop playing, just after he received Shadowmourne (Always fun when the first person who gets Shadowmourne decides to quit / give his account to his brother and the 2^nd person which received it got it and more or less stopped playing the day after while being one item away from BiS.

I am sorry for not getting this post up around the release date of patch 4.0.1, but I had quite a lot of irl things which had to be attended, however, I will post it anyway and make a brief update on my experience with the patch so far.

25^th of Oct. it has been about two weeks after the release of one of the most game changing patches so far and there is a lot to talk about.
Firstly as a mage I was quite thrilled when we started our raid on Wednesday the 13^th  and fooled around in Ulduar. There had been a quite noticeable damage boost for mages which I reckon would be approximate 1500-2000 dps close to BiS and it was quite fun for most of the casters (hello fatkins, lolocks and “I kill myself priests”), but for melee, except death knights, it was another story. Fury warriors had dropped something close to 50% in dmg and most of the other classes being within the range of 20 – 30% (rough estimates based on the meters in my guild) and there was quite a lot of frustration, which is very understandable – Going from #1-3 on dmg to just barely above the tank, man it must feel frustrating.
Though most of this was only to last a day since quite a lot of hotfixes were made during the night and some casters were nerfed while some melees were given a buff, which was needed, but rogues was and is still a broken class imo.

Our next raid was in ICC and we didn’t really feel much difference except people failing on stupid stuff while giving the excuse “My ui doesn’t work, I didn’t get a warning” as well as excuses related to class mechanic changes and yes, there were some changes, but some of it was just plain stupidity.
There was more or less not any real problems until we encountered Sindragosa and our melee dropped like flies, and thus blaming healers for being unable to keep them up – II do myself not play a melee or healer, but it is quite obvious that with Judgment of Light gone there is a lot of “passive” healing gone, this is also combined with the fact that the HP pool might be bigger, but the healing mechanics has changed as well. However, our melee wasn’t really understanding it and along with paladins going from being a “MUST HAVE” healer they ended up being the poorest healing class (until it was hotfixed a few days later, thank God) so I was asked to relog my resto shaman and spam some Chain Heal along with Healing Surge (mana expensive, but a damn good heal).
This is where our problem began, at the Lich King our pala tank was killed in what we later could see in logs, in 1,20 sec. due to the class mechanic and we had to switch him out since he more or less was unhealable.

However, we was unable to take down LK that week due to massive stun/slow failure and tanks taking immense amount of damage. This was fixed within the next reset where we one shottede LK.

Again I apologize for the late update and no pictures, but I thought it would be better to get a post up so I wouldn’t get even further behind and I will try to make my posts more date relevant.

My experience with vanilla WoW.

Uhrmf, I really don’t know how to start this blog so if the start makes you think – what the fuck, I do apologize. My idea with this blog was to cover the release of the long waited and quite interesting expansion to the MMO scene, and I do not talk about Diablo 3 (even though it will be quite interesting as well), but about World of Warcraft – Cataclysm and the still unknown release date.
However, since there isn’t an official release date yet I could sit around and wait awhile, so instead I decided to “warm up” and see how ghastly my Engrish had become and share my World of Warcraft experiences with you.

 

I guess the most logical place to start is with the beginning of my first and quite frankly pathetic first steps in game, but then again we all had to start somewhere and I started at the bottom. I bought my copy of World of Warcraft the 02/01/06 and what a journey it has been.  A friend of mine who had been playing the game a little longer than me suggested me to start on the Trollbane EU realm (For those of you who doesn’t know there is an EU and US version of the servers) and I started out with the most amazing character the realm had ever seen – A gnome mage with red hair, a big moustache and completely clueless of how anything worked, but he was on a quest to throw fireballs and frostbolts at any foe who dared to cross my path of retribution and goodness for I was to become a champion of the alliance, a hero of the light, or that was my intentions until I actually became aware of the gameplay.

 

I fooled around being slower to level than a turtle, but I finally got to level 60 in greens and blues and I was starting to understand just a little of the game, and yes this was the time of the incredible hard frostbolt spam.  One thing I do remember was my first Magister’s piece it felt amazing - those stats, the blue color and possible set bonuses in the future, but nothing happened for a while and I started to farm Timbermaw Hold reputation for the amazing +15 Agility on 1handed  enchant and there I met a druid with who I teamed up for farming the rep. This was my way into raiding due to he joined a guild a week or so later and they were trying to gather people for the flabbergasting, amazing and truly epic raid instance Molten Core. It was my first experience with more than 10 people I was thrilled and excited and even though we wiped a few times on the trash who either was immensely hard or we sucked donkey balls (we sucked), however it was great fun and we actually managed to take down Lucifron, Magmadar and Ghennas I didn’t receive any loot, but just the sheer thrill to take down a new and big bad mother fucker, oh yeah this is why I still raid.

This made me think – Hey, I can be a raider and I started to search for a raiding guild instead of the casual dungeon guild I was in. I honestly can’t recall if I made an application to my first guild Hazzard or if I just talked a little with an officer of the guild, but long story short I got in the guild and in Hazzard I experienced the rest of Molten Core (ghastly video quality movie of Ragnaros) and taking down Ragnaros was one of the best online experiences I have experienced.
Molten Core was done and we ventured into the next raid instance Blackwing Lair

After our Ragnaros kill we gradually started to change our destination a little and that was of course guided tours into the dragon infested halls of Blackwing Lair. All that I can remember of the first boss is the feeling “F##KING” adds, however, we managed to take it down and looked at a dragon, which in first glimpse looked to be a walkover, but oh boy were we up for a surprise. For those of you who did play with the encounter during Vanilla I reckon you know what I am talking about. Vaelastrasz the Corrupt was a bitch and along with the fact that I think is not to be underestimated: We sucked donkey balls

 I guess I need to make a little comment on the 40man raid environment – Unless and I repeat unless (or that is my experience) you played in what would today be called a hardcore top 50 guild you had tops and I repeat that TOPS 15-20 people who knew what they were doing and had actually studied the encounter – 10 people who almost knew what they were doing and then the remaining 10-15 people who either was afk. Auto attacking /melee huntards or wanding who which the raid could easily have done without in my humble and useless opinion.

Back to BWL and I must admit I can’t recall much of the instance tho after some thinking a part seems to crawl forward from the abyss which I refer to as my brain. If I remember correctly it was pull - run 20 yards, aoe - rinse and repeat for what I recall as 20-30minutes just to wipe on the boss and do it all over again. Now for those who always seems to say “Oh, everything was way better back in the days when things were hard and it is walkover and piece of cake these days – I say fuck ya, the reason for it being so abnormally hard was the majority of us sucked and the encounters had a serious amount of trash before each boss which today would be considered as several mini bosses – and because it is true we sucked or at least the majority of us did.

Ahh, it always feels good to ramble and taking the first steps towards being an angry and grumpy old man. I must admit I can hardly remember the next few bosses up until Nefarian (or Neffie) except there was something with decursing like a lunatic.

Though eventually we stood in Nefarian's room, and oh boy was he a challenge, and truly an epic encounter according to my blurry memories. I will sum up what I can remember and fill in addition info which I will copy pate from various websites because I am a lazy bum. However, here goes: Adds spawning from two sides of which there were two gates each place and they were to be tanked and aoeed down then an air phase in which we usually lost quite a few people in the beginning due to people “forgetting” to take their cloak on (insert link) and in the phase he did something, but I can’t recall what, but I do remember giraffes and other zoo animals being all over the place.

Since I played a mage I guess it is in its place to mention that during BWL the mages in my guild, and I would guess the majority changed spec to fire and began to cast fireballs (oh, the rolling ignite days) instead of the incomprehensive and mind-blowing frostbolt spam.

After we in some lucky + rng along with severe luck we managed to take him down and we now set our eyes on the next challenge, which was the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj or usually referred to as AQ40. The trash was harder than some of the bosses in the previous instances and the temple being incredible large, no that just not justify it  - It was bloody enormous. While we were progress in AQ40 another instance was released, and yes this is where you properly is sure – Hey, he isn’t even raiding hardcore what a waste of time to read and you Sir/Madame are properly correct, however I continue.

The instance that we in the current expansion “Wrath of the Lich King” only speak of as a joke, yes the instance Naxxramas today it is a walkover it was that when the expansion was released and people wearing Sunwell gear along with blues managed to clear it, however it must be said that those people is what you would call pretty damn good players for the most part.

Back to Vanilla and my first experience with Naxx: We started in the Military wing and after some sheer dumb luck we managed to take down Instructor Raz, and that was all I encountered except for some completely failures at Patchwerk.

I guess one of the reasons why we didn’t progress much more in Naxx was that it was not too long before the next expansion was released and there was not much point in farming gear which properly would be replaced shortly after by greens and blues because they were much better itemized.