Another break in the action

So i took last week off from playing and then came back with all my rest and tried to burn through it on friday, saturday, and sunday. I managed to get mostly through it, but i never got rid of it completely. I dinged 74, got a new worm pet from dragonblight, and have been hanging out in dalaran. LWing is lvl 404 or something. Kind of slow going since dragonblight doesnt havea ton of skinnable mobs. Anyways, i will again be taking this week off since i will be going home for the holiday and i have to finish the rough draft of my committee meeting proposal so my boss can look at it next week. Once thats done ill probably make my rested push to 77 or so i would imagine. Guess im going to have to start looking more at the quest reward gear now since im getting to that level where i may be swapping some stuff out. I also know i need to do a complete revamp of my abilites bars since they have basically been unchanged since well, forever. BTW, worm sundering armor plus aspect of the dragonhawk is a pretty sweet combo. Gorilla + volley = best leather farming combo there is. Oh also, the embossing LWing abilities are sweet. 114 AP on bracers, are you kidding me!! Thats amazing and i got it. Also made myself some nerubian leg armor since i never got the rep up for the nethercleft pattern. LWing is pretty sweet so far, just tons of patterns every 5 lvls it is pretty cool. Not that they will ever be used, but im starting to get into the blue patterns now and i also havea sweet druid cape pattern i think. I will do any LWing for free while im leveling so find me and its yours if i can do it. Anyways thats about it and the scattered observations so far. Its good. Dragonblight is a pretty cool place. Be back on when i can.

Taking a hiatus

OK so just a quick update here. I, like everyone else got into Wrath the first day it came out and did some leveling and just enjoying things. Let me admit, it is weird not knowing where the heck you are going in a place. I fell to my death a couple times just because i didnt realize how far down things were. Anyways, i did probably 1/2 of what howling fjord had to offer and 1/3 of what borean tundra has to offer so far. Im lvl 72 at the moment, but that is where i am going to stay for a while. I have to write a grant proposal for my thesis committee meeting over the next couple weeks so until that is largely done and my boss thinks im at least at a low level of compentence i probably wont be back. School has to come first on this one, so i know i will fall behind but i will come back well rested andf shoot up to 74 or 75 at least pretty fast. Pets are leveling as well. Got my gorilla and cat up to 71 and climbing i think, and i picked up a rhino for fun.

p.s.- i made a blood specced death knight on Kael'thas as well and his name is Heme. Yeah, its nerdy but its a solid name for a blood spec. Anyways thats it for now until i return to game in a week and a half or so.

Kael'thas Sunstrider is DEAD in The Eye

So this weekend I got a pst from a former guildy of Exiled Elite named Skystrider and he was in charge of putting a group together with Legendary as the base to attempt to finish Kael'thas in TK and Vashj in SSC. So being more then willing to help see content I had never saw, myself and some others from Blood for Blood decided to come along. With the group being a pretty big pug it was surprising how things ended up. Anyways, first up was Kael'thas in TK. This was a completely new fight to me and it was pretty awesome. We wiped several times mostly because of people not focus firing on the correct targets, Capernian conflagrating the wrong person and messing things up, or i think there was also a fire pit from Kael or something that killed all 4 tanks at once. I think it took about 4 wipes, but on round number 5 all things came together. What was so great is that once we got on Kael with our nice new stolen weapons, Kael is not that difficult. Another perfect timing thing is that tanks were slowly falling one by one and Kael was ticking down. Just as the 4th tank went down 5 seconds later kael was down. We said screw that phoenix and kill kael and down he went and all the people rejoiced. He are a few pics of the conquest and showing the inside of TK for those who havent seen it.
After TK we decided to go try and take on Vashj in SSC. Wow was this fight a lot harder then i thought it would be. Needless to say we continually wiped and never really got anywhere. This fight is just complex. You got elementals coming, striders being kited around, nagas running around, then u have to worry about killing tainted elementals. If you killed them maybe you got a tainted core which they you have to throw around to finally get it to someone close enough to smash onto one of those thingies. Bottom line, this fight was far beyond us and our group composition and was just mass chaos. It was great to see Vashj i wont lie, but dang this was the opposite of TK where the fight proceeds processively with Kael having talking interludes etc. Oh and did i mention that i got my first token period. Let alone gettting the sweet T5 chest token Rift Stalker Hauberk. This thing is money especially when i put exceptional stats and my ZA stam gem, plus 2 +5crit +10 AP pyrestones on it. This turned out to be a great time. Thank you skystrider, Exiled Elite forever.
After that we had a guild meeting which i think many things that needed to be said were said, but this isnt the place to discuss those things, so i will call it quits with that.

huntering observations

So there has been some changes i have noticed with huntering since the patch came out, and others seem to be bringing them up as well, so i figured i might as well give me two sense directly.

Ok so exotic pets are cool and all, but are they really that awesome as they are. I would say that the answer is only a conditional yes. If you are going to be fighting a lot of casters, corehound will own them. Just ask vadecent the boomkin. LOL. As far as DPS goes, devilsaurs are fine but a cat is probably just as good (i personally am holding off on a devilsaur). Everyone knows how awesome a gorilla is but thats not exotic. If the damage of the ferocity exotic pets was increased sure they may become more valuable, but then BM would again be the sole raiding spec and i dont think Blizz wants that to happen right now. I like having a MM and Surv hunter ina raid now because of trueshot aura and the expose weakness. Bottom line, have exotic pets is cool more for their abilities in certain conditions then they are for overall lvling etc.

Another thing which was brought up in Grai's blog was that pets seem to be running wild now in raids. This is mostly due to the altered "defensive" stance that pets have and not bad hunters. Previously a hunter would have to tell his pet to attack a target, but now the pet is more intelligent and will attack what you attack automatically so you do not have to continually be tabbing and resending the pet to attack. It will do it automatically. This is good except it seems that the pets get a little over zealous sometimes and start running after mobs they have no business attacking. During the nerf you can normally overcome those wrongful pulls, but with Wrath that will mean a wipe so i fully expect the huntard name calling to be back in full force. The three very good hunters in our last Kara run were all having issues with pets attacking targets before they were really supposed to be. I personally think that the improved defensive stance is much better when multiple mobs are there. It was just a pain to always have to tab, then send pet since it was running back to you after last kill, just to start shooting again. I had gotten to the point where once a mob was about down to 10% i would switch my pet and start shooting at the next target to avoid losing dps time for it to return and be resent. Now those issues are solved. So in conclusions, pets are smarter in attacking what you are attacking, BUT they sometimes need to be reigned in because they are more powerful now and can aggro a lot more then they used to. Example. You would think that a gorillas thunderstomp would be ideal when pulling large non elite trash mobs in the banquet hall before moroes to do max AoE damage. The PROBLEM is that pets automatically go behind the target, and unless the trash was pulled far enough down the stairs, that thunderstomp will generate a ton of threat and pull another group and then go running off into them. So in a perfect AoE fight i couldnt use my pets strongest AoE because it pulls too much. Ghostcrawler was even asking for peoples opinions on the new pet defensive stance which you can find the link to by going to maniasarcania.com.

On a side note, my gorilla (Sepharose) hit 70 last night after doing a bunch of dailies. So now i have 4 lvl 70 pets. DPS machine- Qiagen (cat). Tank- Sepharose (gorilladin). Tank on the bench cuz he is worthless- Blink (warp hunter) and Casters Doom- Char (corehound). My plan for now is to probably replace the warpstalker with a worm as a single mob tank since it sunders armor and will do much more then just warp at mobs. Also a devilsaur could be in the future as well but i may be content with my cat and pick up a Rhino since everyone knows, baby rhino= win and stampede would be fun in PVP. I may take a few days off from WoW just before the X-pac because i have some work to do thats needs to get done, but other then that i will be tearing up northrend.