My Little Velf

My Void Elf priest hit 110 last night, making her  the 13th toon to 110 so far. EEK!! That’s a lot of levelling this expac.

Levelling was incredibly quick as from level 1 to 73 I was levelling with 4 other people and we had the darkmoon faire buff all the way. Because we had a tank, healer and 2 dps in the group, we just dungeon spammed non-stop.

From 73 to 81, I popped into Kara and holy nova’d my way through a few resets of trash mobs, then it was back to dungeon spamming until 90.  90 to 100 was opening up the garrison in Warlords and picking up treasure and bonus objectives in Gorgond and Spires.

100 to 110 took the longest but only because I was only levelling solely through invasions. Each invasion gave just over a level each time. I could have made 100 to 110 a lot faster if I was questing between invasions but I was happy to let her sit in Dalaran waiting for the invasions to pop up and only doing the priest weapons and  order hall quests.

One thing I was really unimpressed with levelling, was just how hard Cata dungeons are. I levelled exclusively as healer, healing the same tank in every dungeon with pretty much no issues no matter how big the pull until we reached the level where we could queue for Cata dgns. Holy hell they were disgusting to heal. I don’t think I am a terrible healer, I’m pretty familiar with priest and I was in full heirlooms but I could not keep the tank or the group alive even through smallish pulls. Luckily one of the others was on a monk and they swapped to healing  and we two healed our way through Grim Batol and Throne of the Tides for the dgn quests and then we stopped queuing cata dgns and went straight to MOP ones which were a faceroll compared to Cata.

I’d hate to think what it would be like for a new player, with no heirlooms, to go into those dgns. It was truly horrible and made me want to walk away from healer and levelling. There may have been a few tears behind the keyboard as I questioned just how truly shit I was at healing. Thank goodness MOP dgns restored my faith in myself and my priest and dgns became fun again.

My Velf is so damn pretty that I really think I’d like to swap to a class that can play one as a main.  They might be a reskinned Belf, but they’re different enough and the hairstyles, OMG the hairstyles, are so gorgeous that I would love to play one more.

I wish that Belfs would get the really pretty hairstyles. Void Elves really are the prettier sisters of the two. I secretly wish that Velfs were on Horde because with the faction divide that is coming, I think I want to be on the side of the Horde again and I’m tossing up maybe having priest as my main class for BFA.

Faction and Class to main are decisions to be made in the coming weeks.

 

 

Random Tuesday Mutterings

Random Tuesday Mutterings is the perfect place to put the random assortment of what-nots I’ve got up to in Azeroth each week.

I’m rather excited that 7.2 is out tomorrow. I’m planning on going to bed early tonight so I can jump up early and do the scenario and initial quests before work. I feel a bit unprepared in knowing exactly what I should be doing in 7.2 but I’ve completed the pathfinder ach, have all the reps at exalted and have been stockpiling order hall resources on Z for quite a few weeks now to be able to use for the new order hall advancements that are coming. So we’ll see what happens.

This week I  finally finished my Shaman order hall campaign. I’m still disappointed there’s no more achievements after finishing 5.

I was stuck for ages looking for the last Blood of Sargeras to hand in for the last order hall quest.. only to find that while the quest text says you need 10, the hand in amount to the quest guy was only 5. I feel that updating the quest text would have been a nice addition to a hotfix sometime in the last 5 months!

She also got flicked to Resto to head off and do some dgns as I had a few quests in there and I got seriously sick of waiting for dps queues. I think I’ll stick with her as resto now and start dropping the rest of the AP she gathers into the healing weapon. I really love the restoration weapon, the shield with the waterball is just gorgeous.

Hell affix week turned out to not be quite so hellish as you only needed to do a mythic plus 10 not a 15, to obtain 905 gear from the weekly order hall chest, due to the transition between 7.1 and 7.2 tomorrow. So both my Druid and my priest went off to complete their 10. My priest in particular was incredibly lucky this week, getting a ton of achievements and getting a pair of 910 gloves out of the weekly bonus cache and then picking up 2 legendaries only a few days apart.

Huge thanks to E, Dys, Gimme and Juls who came along with me to my 10 depleted Vault just so I could get the achievement before the level of the mythic increase tomorrow. Utterly cheating I know.

I nearly cried when the first legendary she got was the Velens trinket, because I’ve wanted that on Z for ages. The second was a belt which apparently is quite useless but as I can’t equip 2 legendaries anyway it doesn’t really matter and when I can, I’ll be replacing an 850 belt with a 940 so not a complete loss.

Z hit Prestige level 1 and got a little pet out of it which was awesome. Now I’m on a prestige hunting phase and spending a bit of time ducking in and out of battlegrounds.

But omg queuing bgs on my own makes me sooo  cranky. I was healing a demon hunter who had the flag, in the flag room of Warsong Gulch in one of my bgs and he had 4 chances to cap the flag and he didn’t cap even once and we lost the match. I was pretty much shouting at my screen the entire time. I’m sure he must have been an alliance queuing with the buff to make him look like a horde.

And I found out that my new guild records their kills on our fights too. Naz linked our Spellblade kill to me with comments about how excited I sounded at the end ;p

See you all in 7.2 tomorrow!

The priest’s adventures in Proving Grounds

Tonight being a Tuesday with no raids and no shutdown planned,  I took the priest up to proving grounds to test out her mettle and see if she could make silver.

I got past silver pretty easily in her main spec, Disc, without having to do any serious reforging or talent changing though I was certainly feeling the lack of mana regen. My priest basically reforges out of spirit atm for her lfr and flex adventures but if I was to try for gold in the proving grounds I think I’d need to up her spirit a lot.

Then onto trying it the dps challenge. Atm my priest runs around the world completely in disc spec. Even when she goes to the timeless isle  disc is strong enough to kill/quest in,  so I thought I’d see how far I could go in disc for the dps challenge. I just made the  final wave of bronze by less than a second. So there was no way I was going to do silver as disc.

Over to shadow spec I went and I think I blew up on the 2nd wave. I kept trying and finally scraped in on the 5th wave before I decided to do this properly I’d have to go and get some dedicated shadow gear to reforge and regem just for proving grounds. The gear I was using was mostly shared between my disc and shadow set so the majority was gemmed/refroged for healing.

Off to the bank where I had a ton of unturned in raid finder tier and some tot gear I had kept for transmog. I regemmed them for haste and crit and went up to try again. It took me so many tries to get past the enrage timer of the lower levels. It also involved a lot of swearing and wondering if I should actually be playing a dps class at all. Eventually though I started to realise a few things that I didn’t ever pay much attention to before. I needed to be using both my dots on the higher health adds, especially the one that takes ages to cast (vampirc touch) because it returns mana as well as doing a sizeable chunk of damage.

I also never realised how much I misclick on targets (I’m always using vuh’do on my toons to heal with rahter than selecting targets) so I stood there for quite a while on a number of attempts clicking abilities without a target, the tight enrage timer pretty quickly got rid of that bad habit. Changing talents helped too, I didn’t even realise that with power word: solace I get a dps boost when using mind flay on a target with devouring plague. For the stand still fights that silver has, that talent was so good and I got so excited at seeing that I could refresh mind flay right before dev plague ran out and I’d get an extra buffed mind flay. Pretty exciting stuff for me :).

I finally started to move on past wipes at wave 4 and got up to wave 8 a few times before I finally killed it. That was pretty cool in my books. I’m still nowhere near getting gold, I can’t even get past wave 2, but I’ve got a tiny bit more of an idea of my shadow priest now. But even with silver in my achievements I don’t think I’d be ready to dps as my main spec in a heroic dgn without a ton more practice. Maybe its time I did a bit more playing in dps spec rather than staying in disc all the time.

World of Warcraft is messing with my perceptions

I came across a blog that had the title Priest in it and I automatically though Oh they must play a priest, better go check them out. Apparently they are a priest in real life; a possibility that never crossed my mind. I hear priest, I think  of wow.  Gosh I hope I’m not the only one.

I’m seriously in love with disc priesting atm. My blood elf priest is dutifully running Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar to get her secrets for wrathion. 8 to go and then she can move onto the next phase.

Not satisfied with only playing one priest I decided it was time to play my Night Elf priest again. I dropped her holy spec and picked up disc and hit up the auction house for all the crit gems she can squeeze onto her gear. She needs to get herself into the battlegrounds then she’ll be on the same stage as Talarial.  It will be interesting to see which priest gets her cloak first. I’d assume it will be Tala but I guess the RNG gods are going to have a hand in it.

I then thought immediately about wanting to level another priest just for the fun of seeing all the zones on a baby priest again but I stopped and counted the amount of priests I have tucked away. I have 5; 2 90s, a 43, a 30 and a 6. I really don’t need another priest.

By night one way, by day another

It was alt run for my priest  last night which I’m in two minds about. There is one particular annoying person in the run which makes it not as super fun with comments like “all content should be able to be two healed in here”and snipy comments on vent at wipes. For goodness sakes most of us are on alts with a lot lower ilvls than our mains and some of us don’t have the amazing cloaky goodness and in my case I don’t even have the meta; and they do add a lot of bonus healing. So that is a little frustrating having to listen to it. Raiding an extra two nights a week means I spend a lot of time staring at SoO bosses instead of off faffing around the world. But on the other hand I do like raiding and faffing gets old at times and being the only cloth spirit user saw her get a lot of gear last night so I don’t really want to turn around and say thanks for the gear guys but I’m out of here. I’ll stay with it for a bit longer and it would be exciting to see Garrosh go down for my priest. We’re currently progressing on Thok so I can’t see it being too far away hopefully. The downside is that I don’t get to run with Frostwolves in their flex run which I was really enjoying. At least they aren’t inflicted with me accidently pulling bosses or falling off things.

The only really annoying thing about it is that I find Malkarok really suits a holy priest but I like playing disc and the bubbles are great on most of the other fights so I respec holy simply for that one fight so far. But killing as disc when grinding mobs for rep or coins or in ICC looking for those amazing purple shoulders is so so slow. So I’ve had to come to a compromise; on Monday – Friday I’m a shadow/disc priest and on Saturday/Sunday I’m a holy/disc priest. I get so annoyed at that pompous priest trainer in Dalaran though who constantly reminds me that the price will get more expensive each time I change my mind. She must think I’m the most indecisive priest she has ever came across. Right about now I’m wishing that rumor of tri-spec was a reality.

Regularly using 3 specs means I have a great reason to come up with a 3rd outfit for my shadow spec so I’ll definitely have to keep myself heading off to ICC each week in the hope the purple shoulders drop so I can make the purple outfit I like so much but in the meantime I need something different. Luckily I picked up a few more pieces of the items that I was sharing between specs so making 3 distinct sets is a bit easier. I  thought I’d play around with making 3 sets based on the one dress model just in 3 different colour ways.

Holy

 

Hero’s Circlet of Faith, Mantle of the Avatar, Gossamer Robe, Exiled Dabbler’s Gloves, Dawnspire Cord, Soft-soled Linen Boots, Spirit Chaser Staff.

Disc

Replica Magisters Crown, Flarecore Mantle, Robe of Power, Gloves of the High Magus, Veteran’s Silk Belt, Fire Striders, Staff of the Blessed Seer.

Shadow

Crown of Luminescence, Silver Thread Armice, Robes of Argul, Hands of Eternal Light, Exiled Dabler’s Cinch, Dark Runner Boots, Malygos’ Favor.

Now all I have to do is get enough gear to make 3 sets.

Playing on the Priest

My guild has started an alt run for  going into Seige of Orgrimmar on the weekends and this week I went along on my priest. We worked our way through the first 8 bosses without too much trouble but on Malkorok we got a bit stuck. It was a combination of factors that was holding us up but I noticed on that fight my healing  seemed a lot lower than it had been. I had read somewhere that disc was quite viable on that fight but seeing we were having trouble and since 2 out of the 3 healers  were disc I decided to go and change my shadow spec to holy during a break.  My healing as holy on that fight looked way better but it didn’t make too much of a difference to the outcome of the fight  as during the break we lost the 3rd healer and couldn’t replace them. We had a few attempts at 2 healing but there wasn’t really enough healing going out though we did get him to 16% on our best attempt.

One thing I really noticed going from disc to holy is that holy is so much more mana intensive and while I regemmed/reforged into mastery as opposed to the crit I was using for disc my spirit was too low and I kept going out of mana really fast. It’s a bit tricky because I want to keep the 2 healing specs for now but I don’t really have enough gear to have 2 distinct sets.  I do have some  duplicate raid finder items and when I swapped my priest out for my druid during last night’s  normal run on paragon’s  I was lucky enough to pick up 2 leg tier tokens so I have some pieces that are dedicated for each set.

I wanted to make a transmog that was different for each spec’s gear so it’s easy to see which set of gear I’m in but each set had to be something that coordinated with the shared pieces. I’m pretty happy with what I came up with. I’m not 100% sold on how the gloves or boots  match  but they can stay for now and hopefully she’ll pick up a few more pieces this week.

                        Holy                                                      Disc

• Hero’s Circlet of Faith                Hero’s Circlet of Faith     
• Hero’s Mantle of Faith               Hero’s Mantle of Faith
• Elegant Robes                              Robes of Prophecy
• Brightcloth Gloves                      Brightcloth Gloves
• Sash of Mortal Desire                 Derevka’s Gleaming Girdle
• Skydancer Boots                          Skydancer Boots
• Hellscream’s War Staff               Hellscream’s  War Staff

I really like playing this toon and have been spending a lot of time on her lately. Luckily disc is still fairly effective as a dps spec though killing mobs on the Timeless Isle takes ages compared to shadow. I can also see quite a few trips into some of the older raids for  transmog runs in her future as my Night Elf priest has a pretty extensive transmog wardrobe and there’s quite a few pieces I’d like this priest to have.

Alt-itis

No matter how hard I try to tell myself that I don’t really need another 90 geared up to raid on, every time my guild advertises for people for alt runs in either SoO normal or flex I get the urge to have an  alt that has an ilvl high enough to go and raid with. I can’t help it, running around the world completing loremaster or dropping into old dungeons or ineffectual attempts at finishing levelling blacksmithing  (I need how many cobalt bars!) just doesn’t hold my attention long enough to take away the wish for being able to have another 90 ready for raiding.

But what I don’t have that I really need for sticking with the gearing up is patience and that’s hampering my attempts. My priest has the worst luck when it comes to lfr. I know there are good lfrs out there but it seems when I zone in I come in to a group that is bickering or half the raid has already left and we wait for ages until the remaining half leave including me.  So needless to say the gearing up is going really slowly. She did run flex with Navi’s  Frostwolves  guild run last night which was great , but I have to say I make so many mistakes on her, I’m so used to a bigger health pool with my druid and having a ton of movement increases like displacer beast and dash that I misjudge what my priest can  do and  I tend to stand for a second too long in things thinking I can get away with it. And I really can’t, embarrassing to say but my priest died a few times to really dumb stuff last night.

But making up for all that is  simply how much fun she is to play. A  priest was my second toon I ever made so playing a priest is feels familiar and after getting a bit annoyed with trying to manage her mana as holy  with low spirit gear I changed her to disc and suddenly she’s really fun. No more ooming and as well as my standard heals I get to stand back and smite the heck out of the boss and people still get healed. I love it. It helps too that she is a gorgeous blood elf. I still haven’t reconciled myself to being a troll on my druid, I like pretty toons and currently troll ladies aren’t that pretty. I took the priest through Naxx the other day in the hope that the Halo helm piece would drop from Kel’Thuzad and it did. This is definitely my favourite priest tier armor item in the whole game. Combine it with Archangel wings and she looks so pretty.

Well I guess she’ll get there in the end and we still have a bit of time before Warlords is live so I’m sure to have her geared up enough to hold her own in a normal raid, one day.

Alt Week – Priest

Priests are another of my favourite classes to play and I have two at 90 and a few low levels dotted around the place. My 90s are Falu and Talarial.

Falu was my second toon I ever made.  She started life as a Draenei though I was never fully happy with her as a Draenei and she quickly got changed to a Night Elf when I started raiding on her because the Nelf Racial; Shadowmeld + Mass Resurrection saved a ton of long run backs after a wipe.

When  I started her I knew that I wanted her as a healer so I made her holy and because I had a number of people tell me that it wasn’t viable to level in holy spec and I should level in shadow and change to holy later, it made me dig my feet in and decide to level her the entire way as holy.  I’m stubborn like that. But levelling her as holy was amazingly fun and even if she didn’t kill very fast she was very survivable and  the only thing that would kill me was if my mana was to run out before the mobs died. Now I know how amazingly good disc is for dpsing, any subsequent priests get made  as disc spec. She stayed as my alternate main for a long while and I raided casually in Cata on her. She ended up being the 2nd toon to 90 and I raided on her as well as the druid. But once I went horde on my main she got put on the shelf and left alone for a bit. She’s my alliance enchanter and tailor so it’s unlikely she will be made horde.

My 2nd 90 priest is Talarial.

When I was doing recruit-a-friend I had levels to spend from levelling up my 2nd druid and warrior together so I made another priest as they are one of my favourite toons and levelled it to 40 and then instantly granted the levels to her so I had an 80 priest straight away. When I moved my main horde I  decided I wanted an enchanter/tailor on horde side and I didn’t want to move Falu horde as I wanted to leave a couple of my 90s as Alliance so I transferred the priest over and finished levelling her as a blood elf.

 This time I decided to level her as shadow which I find pretty enjoyable now. Her main role is simply to be a profession toon though every now and again I think about how much fun a holy priest. For alt week I’ve been spending a lot of time on Talarial and got her ilvl up high enough that she can go into SoO lfr. I realised that I really do like holy priest healing, it’s the closest healing style to druid in my mind so I might re-learn holy  and start to build her up a little as my healing alt.

My 3rd priest that I jump on regularly is my tiny explorer Trisella.She currently spends her days on the sunny beaches of Stranglethorn Vale where she has the role of levelling pets from level 1 to level 7 via pet battles with Bill. I have plans of her exploring her way around the world at low levels but atm she’s happy babysitting the babies.

I made her because I wanted to have a toon in the Convert to Raid guild. Convert to Raid is a podcast I listen to fairly regularly and it’s pretty great there are a whole ton of linked guilds made just from fans of the show but apart from that brief interest I haven’t actually put any significant time into levelling her and I log onto her only to do her daily pet battle.

Priest would have to be my favourite class next to Druid.