What a crazy, crazy weekend.
Sometimes, you have a stretch of days that are “lazy Sunday” days.
You know what I mean. You might have a few minor things you are doing, but for the most part you don’t have any big goals, or goals you feel up to doing. So you kinda drift around, idly doing a few quests, or farming some Herbs or Ore, or just sit around in PvP participating in guild chat.
Then… then you get a small frantic burst of activity that makes you feel like you won a spot on one of those old “you can keep whatever you can cram in a shopping cart in 30 seconds go go go” kind of game shows from my childhood.
I loved those shows. Go for the big ticket shelf, Velma! Don’t waste time in the sock aisle!
This weekend was just such a crazed, frantic mess of stuffs.
I’m not going to waste your time with in depth analysis of this or that. I had fun, and I certainly hope you did too.
I will hit what I feel were some of the Highlights.
I earned the Elder title.
Mostly due to having received credit for doing all of the Elder stuff LAST year. I only had to do Northrend, and get 50 Coins of Ancestry. This meant that after getting all the Northrend Coins, I only had to fly from easy access point to point in Azeroth to get the other 25+ Coins I was missing.
I main tanked Omen.
This was a big deal for me, because I’ve never actually seen Omen up and fought before. He was always dead when I passed through Moonglade before. But we had been doing some instances and raids, and afterwards I went to Moonglade, saw Omen sitting there, and mentioned I was gonna take him on. I had a few other guildies, Nighthawque and Ruune and Falromord, come on over to Moonglade, and I charged Omen and started beating on him hard. Over time others passing by jumped in to help beat him up, but I main tanked him 100% of the time, and by the end of the fight I had well over a million threat built up on him. It was cool.
I leveled a character to 58.
Hehe… no, not my Death Knight. I do have a Death Knight at 58, but it’s my SHAMAN I played and dinged 58. I got the ding last night, and now it’s on to Outlands, baby! I am still Enhance, I want so bad to switch to Elemental, but I literally know NOTHING about it, about the gear for it, and I have no gear or idea how you even play Elemental. It sucks. I am playing around with just dropping 100g on Spellpower gear and winging it at 60. I WANT to learn how to heal, and to heal I need the right gear. But I don’t want to gimp myself walking into outland. So I dunno.
I ran a lot of Instances.
Of course, this is nothing new. Ran a lot of Gundrak, Violet Hold, Nexus, Azjol-Nerub, Drak’theron Keep, etc etc. On Heroic. And I got my Essence of Gossamer, so the very last pre-Naxx upgrade I am seriously looking for is the Keystone Great-Ring from Drak’Theron Keep. That’s kinda crazy.
On the subject of Instances… had some weird damn bugs. We did a Heroic Violet Hold, got the blueberry as first boss, I was on my Hunter I think, and we wiped the first time on Blueberry. When we all wiped and came back in, let it reset, talked to the woman and went after it again… starting at Portal #3, we got double portals. We got Portal 1, then portal 2, then Portal 3 and 4 BOTH popped simultaneously, and THEN we got the Dog boss and a single pull steaming add portal both pop simulataneously.
We damn near got it, awesome tanking, but with the streaming adds, the dog boss, the Lava, it just overwhelmed us.
On third restart, it properly reset and we did Blueberry and won and finished it out, still shaking our heads.
Another instance later the same evening, we went into Nexus, and 5 seconds after downing the Void boss, the instance locked. HARD.
Everyone just froze in place. We were able to log out with Ctrl-F4, and log in on our other characters, and still have our guild roster show us in the instance. I took a screenshot of being logged in on two characters at the same time, but as it shows everyone’s toon names, I’ll refrain from posting that one. It took about 15 minutes, and tickets to GMs, with our mains locked into lala land before it finally reset on it’s own… and all the trash was reset. All of it except the ice tunnel, lol. So, a bit longer of an instance night than expected for a Nexus run.
My special project proceeds unabated.
My special project has been quite a bit of fun… now I’m into my Shaman, but I have made good progress and have had some fun. And I know, I’m only mentioning it to annoy the folks that have the curiosity of a cat.
Somewhere in there, we went into Naxxramas.
And we wiped. Repeatedly. We had two tanks, three healers and 5 DPS, and we decided to go in and take a solid shot at the first boss of the Spider Wing. We took a lot of tries at it, and I can honestly say that every single run was much better than the one before. The positioning, the running, the healing, it all improved every shot.
The final problem we ran up against, was when the healers kept the tank alive awesome, heck kept the entire party alive the entire run… all the way to the hard 10 minute Enrage timer. And he still had a LOT of health left at 10 minutes when he Enraged.
We’re all like “We’re gonna do it, we’re going great, oh shit he Enraged, I just got destroyed, oh holy hell, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! OH, THE HUMANITY!”
It was an awesome learning experience… and I feel confident after seeing the team pulling together, that after a couple more weeks of everyone running some Heroics, getting better geared, maybe some DPS rotation work and fine tuning at a target dummy, and we’ll be right in the groove.
Of course, I believe in ending every evening on a high note. So after we left Naxx with our tails between our legs… we all trooped over to Vault of Archavon and beat him like a red-headed Rassendyll in Ruritania. Right off the cuff, 5 minute brief and BOOM! down he went. We had to destroy a Warlock chest armor, but Falromord got the nice, pretty Tier 7.10 Chest for Fury Warriors. Score!
Crazy man, crazy.
Oh yeah, and I soloed Blackrock Depths 100% in it’s entirety for my Shaman at some point, I think Saturday night, and ended up with over 15 full stacks of Runecloth and a bunch of greens. I went into the throne room as a Bear, pulled the Emperor, and let the entire room aggro on me… at no point in all of Blackrock Depths did I ever fall below 30,000 health. My self heals from Improved Leader of the Pack kept me up.
Have I ever mentioned that I love being a tank that can dish out the DPS? Have I?
I’ve soloed it before, sure, but the fact that my health just never dipped was hilarious.
I’m starting to think about soloing Attumen just to see how it goes.
For your shammy, just take whatever caster gear you see. If it has spellpower, yay! If it’s leather, even more yay! Cloth is good too since you shouldn’t be getting beat on as an ele shammy. Forgo things with spirit on it though and focus more on int, crit, and haste (and of course spellpower).
I’m leveling my shammy as enh too but I’m gonna take her to resto when I get her past 50 or so… (she’s only 32).
And yay for Omen!
And you might have a lot of difficulty with Attumen since he was intended for two tanks and 10 people. Maybe grab a healer perhaps and you should be golden.
Great blog, I read it almost every day.
Just wanted to comment on possibly healing on ur shammy. I ended up switching to resto when I hit outlands just because thats what everyone needed in instances out there. Most of the time it was me and a bunch of DK’s running instances out there. At first I would switch back to enhance for lvl’ing but found myself quickly switching back to resto when a instance run was ready. This ended up costing me a lot of money so at some point around lvl 61-62 I just stayed as resto. I lvl’ed thru the rest of outland and northrend as resto and didnt have any problems. Once you get riptide with it’s 6 sec CD its a breeze
Please post if you do take on Attumen, I’d really like to try it myself, but I’ve been chicken hehe. I have a couple of more upgrades to get from heroics though. I need my pants from Gundrak and my helm from Occulus. I’d probably feel much more comfortable with those two pieces in hand soloing a lot of old world things.
Gratz on the awesome weekend BBB! My hubby and I started collecting our coins for the title and achievement, but we spent most of the weekend either celebrating his birthday or raiding and didn’t finish them out. I’m super excited they give rep with all of the major horde cities though, because I’m really close to being exalted with three of the five. It was great fun when we went though. Good times killing ally as they stumbled into our cities to get to the elders. :-)
Oh man nice weekend! Glad you got into naxx to, that place is a blast.
I love being a high damage tank too! Nowadays I nearly always top the total damage for a 5 man run with equally geared guildies, and I’m always around 8/25 in our raids. Plus having a higher health pool gives a conspicuous survivability difference on the hard fights (Sarth+drakes, Malygos) Druids rock the tanking house :)
My original main was an Elemental Shaman, occasionally resto for raiding. I’ve leveled him to 80 after getting my feral druid to 80. You want lots of spell power. You can get a ton of great gear in outland for this, old world ele gear sucked. As the first poster mentioned, you want lots of Crit and spellpower. Hit is good, haste is a nice bonus, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to grab it for leveling. The happy spot I found was to maintain a 25-30% Crit rate. This keeps your Clearcasting and Elemental Oath up almost all the time. Don’t be afraid of Leather or Cloth, but there is lots of decent mail drops in outland too
Heya, Bear. Congrats on getting the Shaman to Outlands level. Here are some suggestions for Elemental, since I play one as one of my two main alts (main is a Hunter, other main alt is a Feral).
Caster mail now abounds. You’ll be able to get it from quests, BoE and BoP drops. This is the earliest I’d recommend going Ele, and, indeed a decent time to start getting a feel for it. The bonus to being Elemental is that there’s little gear to swap to main heal random instances. I’d suggest keeping a few pieces of MP5 gear to help out, primarily rings, trinkets, maybe a weapon or shield. The rest of your gear as Elemental already helps out with the big heals.
If you don’t already use , I’d highly recommend keeping it handy.
Your bread and butter spells are Water Shield (use it, love it), Lightning Bolt, and your various shocks. A typical solo mob pull will be at or near max range, one or two LB, and maybe a Chain Lightning with a follow-up Earth Shock to finish the mob off. At decent levels of spellpower and crit, you’ll typically kill mobs before they can touch you. If a mob does get to you, it’s easier than ever now to kill them with the reductions to cast pushback. (The talent Unrelenting Storm is a must, in my opinion.) Solo, for the most part, you probably won’t use totems much, unless you’re in an area where you can almost stand in one place and pull to yourself.
When healing a group, Lesser Healing Wave and Chain Heal are what you’re likely to use most often. Healing Wave is good, but slow. If you’ve had a chance to heal before, you’ll probably get a feel for it quickly.
Good luck with the totem plopper. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do mine.
Bah. I hosed the formatting of the above. That rather extended link goes to Kaliban’s Loot List. It’s a great source of blue drops from both questing and instances. Handy little reference for planning gear runs.
Attumen is totally doable as a feral druid. It will take you a loooong time, especially with the curse (50% chance to miss), but totally doable. I usually try and convince a healer and a DPS to come with me and we can actually do just about all of Kara that way. I try and make sure to get in there every week for the mount and enchant drops.
“And I know, I’m only mentioning it to annoy the folks that have the curiosity of a cat.”
Damn you :P
Me and another well geared feral druid are going to start “Mount Farming” every week. Attumen is on that list and is easily taken down by two feral druids. We had a rogue with us last week when we started this, but I’m confident it could be easily two manned. I must say though the multi mob pulls before you get to him will probably have you popping some cool downs to survive it if you do it solo.
It’s pretty entertaining to run around the entire game to go farm mounts. Currently on the list are Attumen, Anzu, and the ZG bosses. I’d be pretty happy if just one of the three dropped for us.
I’ve also read that all of Kara can be two manned, and that it is highly profitable. I want to try this eventually.
Hey there!
I hope you’re ok with me asking this in the comments section. I’ve sent you a number of emails on various topics and I wonder if I’m getting through your filters even though directions were followed.
In any case, I thought of this when you said you were leveling your Shaman. My immediate intention was to level my druid to heal. I’d started out with a warrior, tanking, and I always just wanted a healer. Go figure, the girlfriend picks up a healing class so I’m tanking now. I want to work on an alt, but not necessarily one that could heal. Honestly, I’ve kept a second set of gear that I could do regular 80 instances with healing and I like the mechanics of dr00d healing.
What would you recommend as an alt? I’m thinking Mage, maybe rogue or Shaman. I cringe at the thought of playing another caster after my lock, which I hated. Shaman seems SO boring right now. Rogue seems fun.
Copey, don’t forget Stratholme/ Baron mounts too. That’s probably the easiest to solo.
My god, I HATED Blackrock Depths. Its one of the longest rpre-endgame instances I’ve ever been in. Took me 3-4hr the 1st time i did it.
You could probably level the shaman as resto mostly instance grinding … can’t find a healer for love or money in Outlands now. Just herds of Death Kniggets.
Also you are supposed to be writing PBEM, chop chop :P
Pig: rogues are terribly scarce now for some reason, I bet you’d be in demand as a rogue. As much as any dps class ever is anyway.
Hey B – love your blog (even if my work computer gets angry at it).
Something that you might want to try with your uber bear tanking for Noob Beetle (Anub) particularly if your struggling with the enrage – just stay in and eat the swarm damage. Have your off tank and melee pick up and kill the add that spawns (they all run out just before the swarm and tank the add next to the healer). 3 healers should be able to keep you all up without any worries. This means the ranged can stay on the boss so you get much higher dps.
We did this for our first ever Naxx kill in heroic gear / badge gear – just make sure everyone is out of swarm range (about 30 yards).
Hi! Just wanted to say I love your blog. =) And I have been leveling my shammy as elemental and am loving it! It’s like having a non-squishy mage who can heal… kinda kick ass. Not to say I don’t love my mage, and she lives through everything since she’s frost, but I really am enjoying elemental on my shammy. Also, I tend to pug a lot on my shammy… I offer myself up as DPS who is willing to heal if need be and tend to get a lot of invites. With spellpower gear it’s pretty easy to heal even a bad pug group if you don’t mind healing on occassion. Anyway, just my two cents, keep up the good work! <3
Hey. bbb keep running naxx you can beat the spider boss np if you can burn down the vault boss before the enrage timer. You guys have plenty of dps you just need to fine tune your attack strat. gl guys .