Archive for March, 2008

My new britches.

Published on March 29, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Spellstrike Pants - Materials needed.Finally had my [Spellstrike Pants] crafted by a fellow guild member, thanks Zombiedude. I waited until the day patch 2.4 came out as [Primal Nether] is no longer bind on pickup, so I was able to give this to Zombiedude along with the other mats for crafting. My Son, Bbcone was kind enough to sell me a primal at a cut down price, which avoided me having to buy one with my Badges of Justice.

I have socketed the pants with 3 x [Veiled Noble Topaz] which cost me just over 100g but it does get me an extra +15 spell damage and +12 hit points.

Below is a static image of my current stats without any buffs etc.

I plan to get some more of these gems when I can afford it and replace several of my other poor quality ones with these. I’ve also a few enchants to work on to increase my hit and spell damage.

World of Warcraft - £7.99 delivered

A few updates….

Published on March 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Last weekend saw the Alterac Valley ‘holiday weekend’ or more accurately ‘double honor points for 4 days weekend‘. What this means is you can grind away in AV battleground, which in itself is one of the higher honor-gaining BG’s and on these 4 days, Thursday until Monday, you get about twice the honour as normal.

I already had about 11,000 honor and was saving up for [Gladiator's Spellblade] to replace my trusty [Continuum Blade] which had served me well for the past 3 months or so, queue time for getting in to the BG was about 30 seconds. So over the weekend I was able to pop on now and again as and when I got chance and partake in some PvP action! By late Monday I had the required 25,000+ points needed to purchase said blade! This gives me a an almost 80 point increase in my spell damage! I had the mats for +40 spell damage enchant for it too, so I’m now 120 spell damage up on what I was previously!

So now the only other item of my gear (well not counting my trinket items) that is non epic are my rather embarrassing pants/trousers/legs. Since level 66 or so I have been sporting the dapper [Stormreaver Shadow-Kilt] but over this last week I have been going all out grinding the mats for some new pants, the [Spellstrike Pants]. The good news is I now have the mats, the bad news I need to find somebody to craft these for me, hopefully it won’t be long.

Guilds first outing to SSC.

Published on March 14, 2008 in Serpentshrine Cavern. 0 Comments

Sunday evening saw the guilds first outing to Serpentshrine Cavern . This is the 25 man raid instance in the Coilfang Resevoir. It is the central one adjacent to Slave Pens, Underbog etc, which you are unable to enter unless you are both level 70 and a member of a raid party.

The first thing you notice as you enter is a huge circular lift, this takes you down at rapid speed (do not jump late or fall) to a massive area deep below the resevoir. Then you proceed up a small lift to the beginning packs of mobs. I’m not going to describe any more as there is so much information out there on the net about this raid.

We attempted Hydross the Unstable first, he is a huge water elemental that alternates between doing frost damage and arcane damage depending if you pull him out of the beams or keep him in them. You are forced to move him in and out every few minutes, as he applies a debuff which stacks too big after a while and will wipe the raid unless you alternate his phases. Each time he switches phases he spawns 4 smaller elementals. These must be killed before you alternate his phase.

I was assigned to banish duty on the back left elemental. Mages should frost nova these elementals when they spawn to give you some time to banish, if they run away from you they will cause havoc with the raid! So get them banished and then concentrate on DPS’ing the remaining elementals.

HydrosThe whole fight needs good co-ordination from your tanks, who must move him back and forwards, healers for lots of healing and the crowd control to keep the adds away from the raid. Then its a huge DPS battle to kill Hydross and nuke the adds as quick as possible. We wiped 3 times and I had a feeling we were not going to make it and would need to return for another attempt another evening. Anyway on the 4th attempt we managed to get him down! It was very close as he had just entered enraged state at 10 minutes and we had lost 9 of the raid, including myself!

Nothing dropped of interest to me, we moved on to The Lurker Below after clearing the packs of mobs leading up to him, then you must jump in to the scalding water below and make a short swim on to the islands surrounding Lurkers pool.
From here you take your positions on the islands and some of your raid party start fishing! Yes, you actually have to fish him out of the central pool. After a random time he jumps out of the water and the battle can begin. We had a couple of tries at him but it was getting late and we decided to leave him to the following evening.

The Lurker BelowSo on Monday evening we got the raid group together, in record time I reckon too! We cleared the packs of mobs leading up to Lurker and positioned ourselves on our assigned islands and waited. I think we wiped on the first attempt but on the second go at him we took him down, we’d had plenty of practise at him, as long as you:-

  1. Avoid the spout he does.
  2. Kill the adds quickly that spawn at his phase changes
  3. Keep the DPS as high as possible, you cannot aggro him from range.

You should take him down. Again nothing of interest dropped for me but some of the guild got some nice epic loot :)

On the whole an enjoyable couple of evenings for the guilds first trip to SSC.

One less blue item.

Published on March 7, 2008 in Gruul's Lair. 0 Comments

Wednesday night and a Gruul guild run was in order. A fairly quick run with a wipe on the High King and his 3 friends. In the end though we took him down and I won a nice cloak/back [Brute Cloak of the Ogre-Magi], this replaces one of my two blue items remaining. I did not want to spend too much DKP on this as I was still wanting the blade from Gruul himself. But it was not to be I’m afraid.

Oh well maybe next time ?

Size really does matter.

Published on March 4, 2008 in General, Hints and Zul'Aman. 1 Comment

At least where your bags are concerned in WoW. Running out of bag space is something that happens to me a lot, either when I am grinding, questing or just getting a few soul shards together prior to a raid. So, when I heard about the chance to pick up an easy 20 slot bag of course I jumped at it.

The bag in question is [Tattered Hexcloth Sack] and you get it from the 10 man instance Zul’Aman, there are lots of details here about getting it but it basically entails you getting an invite to a raid spot that has cleared the early part of Zul’Aman up to the bear boss.

Last night I was listening on Teamspeak as 10 member of my guild were finishing off in ZA so I kindly asked if I could get an invite to the raid as they were leaving. I’d already positioned myself right outside ZA so once I got the invite I was in. I’ve not been in Zul’Aman before but I can tell you it looks very big, similar to Zul’Gurub which won’t come as a surprise. It took me a few minutes and some questions on TS before I was able to locate the map that you have to retrieve for the quest, then I dashed out and turned the quest in at the small gathering outside ZA. The reward is a nice 20 slot bag and some gold. I picked the next quest up, X Marks… Your Doom! and one of the other guild members was kind enough to escort me round in order to finish it, it requires you to visit 3 locations in ZA. Apparently there is no limit to how many people can ‘jump in’, do the quest and also get this huuge bag. Expect this to get nerfed sometime soon.

Dual monitors FTW.

Published on March 3, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Dirky?s DeskJust a quick one, here is a picture of the current setup at Dirky HQ (click photo for better resolution pic). The iMac on the right is a 17″, 1.8Ghz core duo with 2gb ram, hooked up to it is a Dell 17″ monitor on the left. My Cisco 7960 VoIP phone can be seen on the far right.

Playing with dual monitors makes things so much easier, you can have a web page open on one monitor, Thottbot, Wowhead etc whilst still playing WoW on the other.

Of course this setup was not designed with World of Warcraft in mind, its my main office computer too don’t you know!

Click on the photo for a larger view.

High Astromancer Solarian down and more Epic shoulders?.

Published on March 3, 2008 in Tempest Keep. 0 Comments

SolarianWell it finally happened last night, I think this was our 3rd or 4th separate visit to ‘her’ chamber and it was to be our last attempt for the evening, we’d wiped the previous 2 times. But at last she went down! I won’t go in to the tactics again as I have already talked about them here . I had an addon called Solarian Alarm this time which I can highly recommend. It turns your whole screen blue when you get the “Wrath of Astromancer” debuff on you, it’s not possible to miss this I can tell you.

When you are huddled in a tight group, with your camera zoomed back and your speakers turned down, concentrating on getting as much DPS as you can on the boss its sometimes hard to miss the skull on your head or confuse it with another players, with this mod its a no-brainer - blue screen = STOP what you are doing and run to the side away from the group.

Anyway, it’s a relief that we managed to take her down and a great end to the evening.

Oh did I forget to tell you? I won the tier 5 shoulders from Void Reaver!.Void Reaver 020308
I nearly did not bid on them though! I saw the master looter announce the loot from Void Reaver but there was nothing of interest for me so my attention was drawn to other things whilst people went about their business bidding. From what I can gather the looter then announced the T5 shoulder token, it was only Headlessorc on teamspeak that alerted me to the fact that people were bidding on them and he wondered why I was not! So I jumped in quick and won the bid! Thanks ‘Headless’ :)

The High King drops his best for me.

Published on March 1, 2008 in Gruul's Lair. 0 Comments

Last Wednesday saw another guild run in to Gruul’s Lair, I was very pleased to win the DKP bid for my third tier 4 piece from High King Maulgar, the [Voidheart Mantle]. I was hoping Gruul would drop his lovely sword but it was not too be. Still it was a very worthwhile raid for me :)