Friday, February 6, 2009

The Ding of Dings

So the Lunar Festival comes around and provides some nice relaxing WoW that's easy to enjoy for hardcore and casual alike, perfect for a raider and his gf to kill an afternoon or two.

Until you reach the Gumdrop elder and discover that the coin guy is only there in Heroic mode.

Kinda sux if one of you is only level 78.



But that's pretty easy to fix by spending some time in Zul'Drak and Icecrown, aided by some epic cold weather flying, and a week later she dings 80 without really needing to push beyond a normal casual routine of playing the occasional evening here and there, or maybe filling the cold empty void that comes with a significant other who regularly raids in a cone of silence (ah, new cordless headphones, how I love thee).

Big fat gratz on dinging 80!

What's a Shadow Priest to do?



So, we've got our sights set on Heroic Gundrak.

Before going anywhere, lets make sure to reduce as many noob indicators as possible.

Enchants, gems, all the nice things a player can do to improve what she's wearing without leaving the comfort of Ironforge.

But, neither of us really has any clue what a SPriest needs at level 80.

Consult the Armory, check out one of the guild's shadows, and monkey-see monkey-do.

30 minutes and 600g later (its good to be rich), and all her greenies are nice and shiny.

Time for some action!

Welcome to Heroics



You can imagine the situation is pretty nerve wracking.

Here's a player who has a very casual view of the game, getting in on her first real Northrend dungeon run, at level 80, in heroic mode, in a party with 4 pretty hardcore players.

That's a lot of pressure! When ever you have two different cultures collide, there's potential for drama and conflict.

Luckily, the players that joined us are the types who are experts in their roles, geared out the wazoo, plus, they're very welcoming of social members.

The run was a beauty.

The uber gf remembered to buff people, kept her mana battery spell up (vt? ve? i can never remember which), and most importantly....she didn't die in any fire in the one or two fights that come with that hazard.

And, after surviving all the combat situations, and generally staying with the pack and assisting the tank for DPS targets and remembering to mana up after fights, she went ahead and, completely out of combat, fell into some water and got eaten alive by some fish, which was just amusing.

Outstanding work for a first timer, if I do say so myself.


If you want to replace it, polish it



I'm a long-standing advocate of appeasing the loot karma gods by enchanting the hell out of any piece of gear you want to replace.

Well, fresh at 80, you pretty much want to replace every single piece of quest greenie gear, so that's what she did....enchant & gem everything.

And lets just say that it worked.

Every. Single. Boss. dropped something cloth with wonderful spell power, crit, and intellect (all things which EJ says SP like to wear, if I'm not mistaken).

Four sweet Heroic Blue items. Luckily the team we're running with is (A) geared up in ilevel 213/226 epics, and (B) very cool and happy to help a new priest upgrade her stuff.

By the third and fourth drops, it was just getting silly on vent.

So another 400g was happily withdrawn from the Gear Polishing Fund and she's off to a sweet start to her set of gear.

But that's not all, folks!



She's still got a few coins left to get her Elder title, so we're off to Black Rock Spire.

And one of the achievement-hounds in the guild notices and wants to try to trio the Jenkins one.

Have you ever tried this with only 3 players?

All I can say is .... WOW!

That's a lot of whelps.

Warlock runs around grabbing all the whelps while Hunter stands on explosive trap and Priest bubbles everybody. Seed, Volley, that thing that Shadow Priests do for AoE.

3 or 4 seconds of terror as 50 or 60 whelps spank us.

Ding Jenkins!

Sweet way to end a sweet night.

5 comments:

Mrigashirsha said...

That sounds great! I love it when intelligence, good will, and clues come together with some nice luck. :)

Anonymous said...

You should definitely make sure your girlfriend heads over to www.shadowpriest.com for a visit! I find that the posters there are just as in-depth and serious as at EJ and their information is presented in a much more navigable format. Most particularly make sure she checks out the "WOTLK Raid Gear" thread at the top of the screen - this will guide her through maximizing her DPS better than anything else I've ever found.

--Lyssanne

Anonymous said...

Hey AMiva, hopefull you see this. 1:30am posting.

http://wowwebstats.com/d6fyn6eltqgik

As well I picked up the strong hand ring from a 25 man naxx run (wws above), dragon slayers sabaton from H Nexus, and did the OS 10 and got a bag of spoils.

So I did the heroic first, thinking my gear probably wasn't up to snuff, it was a joke, straight up ran through as fast as we could without even blinking. Not OP but just didn't feel challenging. Maybe we had a really good healer.

Decided that hey Heroic is easy, lets try a 10 man, so did OS, top of the meters the entire time, couldn't believe it. Felt pretty good so I moved on the next level.

Ran some 25 man naxx, second boss we got to dropped the best ring for me in the game and I came up with it out of 10 other people rolling on it.

I think tonight was my make up time by the loot gods for the last 1.5 years of not being able to do any raids. Feelng good, have to try to sleep, getting up really early in the morning tomorrow. So excited, can't sleep.

Thanks for all the advice by the way, I showed up gemmed, enchanted, food and flask in hand and did my MQSRDPS. Have lots of practice yet before I'm any good, sloppy rotation and no call from the shammy for when they were using heroism so that didn't help.

Sorry this is your blog, I'll be quiet now.

Anonymous said...

Just realized I said Amiva, not amava, sorry its late. Can't edit my comments.

Amava said...

Outstanding! Sounds like the right way to begin raiding, and certainly sounds like the Loot Gods were in your favor, which never hurts the fun factor.

Don't worry about the name Amiva/Amava, potAto/potOto.

Grats on a cool night, and if you want to write up a guest post capturing your experience, feel free to drop me an email.