Proof Alchemy doesn't hate me

While the discovery mechanism is a nice touch it can be very frustrating to have some great recipes available in game which can only be found through a remote random chance whilst making other things.

So having got to 375 alchemy and made a while bunch of elixirs and potions on the way it was a bit frustrating to not have made any discoveries. Well know that flying around and picking herbs is that huge amount quicker I've decided to recoup some of the flying skill costs by making and selling potions (something made a bit smoother by being a potion master). Well there I was busy making haste potions when this happened.

Not a flask I'm going to use often (well not without a respec and regear) but I know there'll be some mages and boomkins out there that will be after them.

Is it a bird...?

Due to a lack of sign-ups our Friday raid was canceled and in it's place our veritable raid leader suggested that we head into Sethekk Halls and defeat Anzu so that Medrare could get his Swift Flight Form. Our party for this mission would be two feral druids, a resto druid, hunter and mage.

Our start time was slightly delayed by the discovery that our Mage didn't have the Auchenai key due to a lack of Lower City reputation. The Arrakoa of Terorkkar didn't know what had hit them as 3 of the party went to grind feathers whilst the mage and healer looked for quests which could be completed for extra reputation. A couple of hundred feathers later we were ready to go.

A couple of attempts on the first boss and we were on our way up to the main event. Our main tank had slight reservations about some of the pulls (based on when we ran this instance for his quest) but we bravely fought our way through and then it was up to face the Raven God. It was a flawless fight and soon the Emerald Dream was saved from the menace and on a slightly selfish level I completed the quest. Sadly the mount didn't drop, and we were unable to kill the final boss but I was able to ditch Flight Form and speed my way back from Cenarion Refuge to Shattrath for a fly past show.



The instance run again required a bit of everything from me, mostly cat dps, with the occasional OT role for cc, using Hibernate for cc and healing the MT should it desperately be required. This relates very closely to the whole quest chain which leads up to the instance run, which has been the most fun quest chain I've done in game. Requires a bit of everything you have as a druid and making sure you do a bit of everything a druid can do.

We can only hope that there are more quest chains like this that can be experienced in future gameplay as the expansions come out.

Rogues and Battlegrounds

I've done a few battlegrounds during my WoW playtime, mainly to grind for the S1 and then S2 swords but occasionally to get some gold from the daily quest or just let off some steam by beating up some alliance.

Having heard enough calls to nerf rogues from priests, mages, warlocks and just about anyone else who's had their behind handed to them on the end of a dagger/sword/mace I thought I'd share some tactics I use and that way other people can know what might happen and start thinking...

Arathi Basic Defense
I love playing defense in AB and in fact can get quite possessive of my flag and go a bit gung-ho to get it back should the enemy manage to steal it away from me. Anyways being in stealth is an obvious state of affairs, but a key aspect of the AB map is the amount of bushes and shrubberies near the flag. These can help camouflage you even more and are away so any AoE that a class does next to the flag doesn't de-stealth you before you can hit the stunlock.

It is very amusing to watch someone and start capping the flag only to find themselves at half health and with a stack of poisons applied. So remember if the flag looks undefended there's a rogue, no really, there is. Don't come crying to me that you got killed because you should know they're there.

Make use of fear
Yes it's annoying when you do the headless chicken dance due to some warlock or priest hitting a magic defense button but watch your combat flag, chances are that once the fear has worn off you'll be out of combat and able to re-stealth without having to Vanish and of course stealth equals stunlock which is always nice.

Kick the Elemental
99.999% of the mages you come up against in a BG will be frost specced and so have a pet water elemental which they can summon to cause mayhem. However they only have one school of magic available and kicking them leaves them stood there with nothing to do except watch their master get obliterated.

So there's a few tips and what you should be looking out for. If anyone has any for playing a feral druid (other than trying to be a rogue in cat form) I'd be very grateful for them.

Going back for fun prizes

One of the disadvantages of having started to play after The Burning Crusade expansion came out is that I never did any of the higher level dungeons or the raids. Our guild has done a couple of retro runs to Molten Core and Black Wing Lair but that still leaves several dungeons, quests and loot I've never seen.

Well what's the point of having two level 70s with stealth if you can't go sneaking around things to get just what you need. Firstly I headed into Stratholme, a place I'd been only once to help a fellow guildie get their paladin epic mount, but with 3 other level 70s in the group it didn't really take long and a lot of things died before you got a chance to see what they were. Regardless I snuck my way in, killed a couple of groups and started sneaking around looking for Hearthsinger Forresten. He died the first time no problems (alongside the mobs I aggro'd) but only dropped some mail loot. No problems, run out, reset and repeat. Second time I had a better understanding of what I was doing and he could be taken out without aggroing anything else. A quick stunlock and Piccolo of the Flaming Fire was mine, which is going to be fun whilst we're hanging around in raids.

Next up were the pets awarded from the quests from Kibler which required going around Lower Blackrock Spire collecting spider eggs and a worg pup. The only problem was the sprawling nature of the instance and trying to find my way out once I'd completed the quests. A quick run back through the Burning Steppes to hand in and a Smolderweb Carrier and a Worg Carrier found their way into my bags.

Finally the giant cannon outside of the Aldor bank indicated that the Darkmoon Faire was back in town. So what should have been a quick run to Blackrock Depths to pick up some Dark Iron Ale in order to return Jubjub to his owner and get my own Jubling. If I thought LBRS was sprawling it was nothing compared to this. Fortunately lockpicking meant I could bypass a lot of things once I found my way round and as you can buy the ale in bulk it meant Medrare could also get a pet.

In other news the Spirit of Competition smiled on the little druid as a fantastic 5cap win in Arathi Basin rewarded him with a Gold Medallion.

Karazhan Off Tanking

Now Medrare has the Master's Key, he's fully able to sign up to guild runs on his own merit and start tanking things with his face. The run was pretty smooth with only one wipe due to a ninja pull of an elite pack and we survived it the second time it happened (well I didn't but it's not a wipe if half the raid survive). It was good to learn boss fights from a new perspective even if you can't really see a thing of what's going on with the rest of the raid.

Attumen the Horseman
A place for the off tank to shine as you start the encounter by tanking Midnight until the mount up. Our boomkin pulled aggro and died before I could grab him back but other than that it was smooth whilst he was dps'd down. Once phase 3 started and I wasn't needed to tank anymore it was time to go cat and pretend to be a rogue. However one of our priests didn't survive the transition to phase 3 and so required a battle rez and innervate before I could get back to it and down he went.

Moroes
No need to run after adds here, just a case of keeping up with the main tank on threat and staying alive when the MT gets gouged. Again we lost a healer due to a bad combination of the MT being gouged and me being blinded. No problems a quick battle rez and innervate again and we'll be back in the fight. Unfortunately I didn't spot that I wasn't targeting the healer before hitting the button and innervated myself. As it was we managed and got everything killed without losing any of the raid.

Little Red Riding Hood
A rarity for our guild as we always seem to get Wizard of Oz, but an Opera where I wasn't really required to tank so time to go cat again. The plan went a bit south when a priest died whilst Red Riding Hood I needed to shift back out and help keep the tank alive with rolling lifeblooms, and the occasional big heal when I managed to resist the fears.

Maiden of Virtue
Again only one tank required so this fight was almost identical to when I've done it on Crash except running out to heal is a lot easier when you not relying on potion and bandage cool downs, and again it's possible to help keep the main tank alive when the main healers are all stunned due to Repentance.

Sadly no tanking/cat dps loot dropped but there are the lovely badges to compulsively collect and it was a lot of fun fighting the encounters with a different set of skills and responsibilities. Hopefully there will be enough raids over the summer that I can get along to to try out all the fights again and hopefully get my gear a good leg up ready for the expansion.

Little Bear in Big Raid

Last night was the last of our scheduled Kara runs for the raiding week, with the run from Aran up to Prince staring us in the face. Given that Med still isn't keyed I was all signed up with Crash ready to interrupt Aran's spells and run away whilst enfeebled from the Prince's Shadow Nova.

However when invite time came around we found ourselves a tank short so Med was called in to try and not die to the nasty elite mobs that patrolled around the former home of Medivh.

Things went fairly smoothly, our healers did a great job keeping my health a positive value and deaths were just a part of learning to deal with the new tank and how well I can cope with the damage from the bad guys.

Anyway we were soon outside the Shade's room and it was decided tanking on the summoned elementals would be better than dps and interrupt given we didn't have any warlocks to fear or banish. One quick(ish) fight later and Aran was dead and there was badges and loot to be distributed.

After a quick bio break we headed up to the Chess event which was very smooth and the dust covered chest gave up a very nice necklace for me before disaster struck. Suddenly a few internet connections (including my own) broke down and we had to call the raid early before the Prince could feel our wrath.

All in all a good night given the 'chucked in the deep end' feeling at the beginning and trying to learn the encounters from a new perspective. Hopefully once I can get the key and on the quest chains inside the rest of the encounters will have that shiny new feeling to them again.

Gathering the karazhan key fragments

Now while patch 2.4 removed the need to hold The Master's Key in order to enter Karazhan our guild still has a rule that any character that wants to go raiding should have gone through the atunement quests, partially to open up the other quests for the nice reputation reward rings, and to ensure that people have had at least some experience of playing that character in a group, which is important given that it's now very easy to level to 70 without stepping foot into an instance.

So now that Medrare is 70 and getting some tanking experience under his belt, the key fragments needed to be collected from the various arcane containers. The first step was to head into the Shadow Labyrinth and required the full clear.

Our group did fairly well considering, the first boss didn't cause any major headaches, the time for fun guy killed a few people but we got him down before he got all of us or incited enough chaos for us to kill each other. Grandmaster Vorpil gave us a couple of scares, once for not getting out of Hellfire, and the other when a rogue skeleton popped up and took out our healer. The third time was the charm and we moved on and stood face to face with the essence of sound Murmur.

I've got bad memories of this fight on Crash who managed to die on every attempt due to getting hit by Sonic Boom. However this time no such problems, Quartz made it a doddle to know when to run out and Feral Charge means that you're always on the very edge of the hit box when it's time to head back in there. Down he went and after defeating the guardian the first fragment was retrieved.

Lessons learnt: Having important information up front and centre in my UI makes things so much easier in terms of keeping aware. Once I've sorted out the full tanking setup I'll post some screenshots along with Crash's dps version.

The 2nd and 3rd fragments require trips into Steamvaults and Arcatraz and whilst not a full clear enough to warrant a full group and some team effort.

Doing things a bit backwards we went into Arcatraz first, and seeing how we went past the first boss we took a chance and had a go. Our boomkin died quite soon in and our healer succumbed quite close to the end. Unfortunately I died just as the boss did so whilst not a complete wipe, the two mages left standing meant that it was a runflight back from the graveyard. After that we cleared the rest of the necessary trash and the third fragment was secured.

Lessons learnt: Trying to spot void circles on the floor, whilst tanking a boss with your butt against the wall is impossible, and moving out of line of sight of the healers can cause greater problems than just your health going down.

Finally we went into Steamvaults, a place I will learn to love if the Earthwarden is to be mine. The was a slight hiccup when I managed to pull two groups but other than that things went well and we managed to down the first boss again even if it did require the mages to go nuclear on the elementals.

Lessons learnt: Just because every other pull has been flawless doesn't mean you can be any less careful about the next one.

Just Black Morass remains to get the key blessed by Medivh and I can go test my tanking skills in Karazhan against some of those nasty raid bosses.