Instancing levels 40-60

With 3.3 dropping any time I thought it would be an excellent idea to post a leveling by instance guide. Because you know, everyone will be pugging everything under the sun, and the cross-server LFG should help get you into more instances while you are leveling, or at least you can sit around with 4 other people looking for a tank or a healer in cross-server LFG.

Starting at high 30's you can get into Uldaman. This is a very
long instence, as a lot of them were in old Azeroth, but if for nothing else it is a lot of fun for the "Indiana Jones" boss. I don't want to give any spoilers for anybody that haven't done this, I will just say i got a kick out of it the first time there. There are 8 bosses in Uldaman, that is almost like doing a 5 man raid, except trash respawns much faster.

There is a TON of loot in Uldaman, but nothing worth "farming" for. If you find a group ready to do it awesome, but do not feel like you have to visit it to move on in your leveling.

Some of the loot highlights include:
Olaf's All Purpose Shield - Not the best shield and lets face it at this level you will have a 2h or very close to dual wielding, but the on use makes it very useful.
Spaulders of a Lost Age - MP5 mail? Sure why not!

At level 40 you will hit Zul'Farrak one of my favorite old world instances, and someplace we all went to for the then awesome Carrot on a Stick remember this was back in the day when epic riding was the fastest movement speed in the game. This instance also has what was my first ever "Event Boss" that takes place after freeing captives at the top of the temple. I have so many excellent memories of ZF that to this day if I find someone needs to run ZF I will always go. This is also the first place you learn things like positioning, CC and agro management. Becasue if you do not do those things, you will die.

Loot highlights:
The Hand of Antu'sul - Really with the proc, you should pass to the tank, but it is an excellent Enhancement weapon.
Gahz'rilla Scale Armor - Stam + MP5, this screams Shaman...or hunter cough cough.
Ripsaw - I actually had this weapon for far too long on Skraps.

After ZF You can move on to Maraudon and Sunken Temple. These are both REALLY long instances, but if you have committed to leveling through instancing and are able to use the new LFG tool to find a group, you will really enjoy these places. Back in the vanilla days, the hunter class quest culminated in Sunken Temple and really required you to use all the skills a then max level hunter would need to be a successful end game player.

The loot lists for these dungeons are ridiculously long, so i am going to cheat out and refer you to the Awesome Kalibans Loot list to make a wish list of gear you want.

Here is to 3.3 and hoping the new LFG works as good for low level instances as it does for end game Heroic Dungeons.

Leveling Enhancement 40-60

Continuing my leveling guide after a long hiatus, lets just jump right into it! Again the point of this build is ease of leveling and getting to those sweet sweet spirit wolves as soon as possible. I know there are some Shaman resources out there (with actual numbers to back them up, where as mine is just love of the ability) that say spirit wolves are under powered and kind of a joke but for leveling they are a must have.


As soon as you ding 41 run, do not walk to your Shaman trainer and train Storm Strike aside from the fact that it is a wonderful damage tool in your bag of tricks the increased nature damage makes your next 4 nature damage spells kick it up a notch. With the mana return from the improved version you will almost never sit to drink again.

Your next 3 points will be put into dual weild specialization this will minimize misses, and really helps get over the hit penalty you take with dual wielding.

At level 45 you get another excellent ability Lava Lash this ability really shines when you are doing something like MH Windfury off hand Flametongue. Remember as an Enhancement Shaman you are rewarded for slow weapons. So find the slowest big fat mace, or axe you can find and pummel things to the ground. You could also use fist weapons, but at this level I do not think there is any fist weapons.

At 47 you have a few options on where to put your next 2 points. You can go with Static Shock which may allow you to refresh lightning shield a little less often, but maxed out it only provides a 6% chance of discharging and recovering 2 orbs. i much prefer to go back up in the tree and put these 2 points into Frozen power 10% more damage from damn near every spell you fling? Yes please.

At 49 you get Shamanistic Rage this is a wonderful ability with a short cool down, and you are going to want to pop it on almost every fight. Reduces damage, and regens mana for every melee hit. One of the defining talents of the Enhancement tree. After Shamanistic Rage you will drop 3 points into Mental Quickness this converts attack power into spell power. With the true hybridization of the enhancement tree being both melee and caster dps this talent is a no brainer.

At this point in your leveling you will once again have a point to put where you please. I do not do any PvP so you will notice I do not take the PvP talents like Earthen Power instead I go back and put slack points into Elemental Weapons as this increases the effect of all our weapon imbues.

We are getting very near the bottom of the tree, and put 5 points into Maelstrom Weapon this is the awesome ability that allows you to instant cast Lightning bolts, chain lightning, and and heals, although if you are casting heals something went terribly wrong. When we ding 60, there is much rejoicing (yay) and you get Feral Spirit and every three minutes you get your puppy pals to come play with you.

This wraps up talent selection for the level 40-60 grind. Tomorrow I will be posting instances and gear selections to go with it. Normally I would suggest you just grind out quests as the fastest way to level, but with 3.3 potentially dropping on Tuesday Dec 7th I like to think instancing through levels will be possible with the cross-server LFG.

He beat WoW?!

So there is a story out today about a Taiwanese man who "beat" WoW. Now what does this mean? It means he has gotten all 986 achievement points and has completed an amazing 5906 quests. Here is his Armory Profile. Just looking at his Feats of Strength makes me kind of sad. So many Server firsts, the amount of time he has spent on this game must be ridiculous. Sometimes I think I spend too much time on the game, I raid (usually) 2 nights a week, play in the mornings on weekends, and an hour here and hour there when the wife is watching something on TV I hate.

I would like to take this moment to remind everyone this is just a game, go out and make adventures in real life. Spend time with loved ones, have a beer. Run naked through the center of town, ok so I got arrested for that last one, but you may be lucky.

Wednesday night durnken...drunkings?

So it is Wednesday night. The day before Thanksgiving, and I have a 4 day weekend ahead of me. Not only that, but today was our Unix admins last day of work, he is now retirewd! I am now the Unix admin. Yay! Sorta...I get a promotoion with no pay raise.

But more importantly he come over tonight after work and we got ripped :)

Youy see to lhe left here a picture of my 2007 fathersday gift. My son bought me a kegeratore. How awesome is that?

I am currently pretty ripped on 4 pints of homebrew Honey Stout, whic runs abotu 13% alchahol by volume. The unic admin has lef t the building and I thing it is time to login to wow and see how fail I can be.

Will lwet you knwo how it gowes,

Happy turkey day to all my ones of readesr!

May you have as many drunken nights as I hav eahead!

How fail can a Fail Naxx be?

After recovering a bit from the weekends events I logged on to WoW to see if I could acquire a piece or two of gear for my warrior. I putted around Dalaran for a bit, putting Titansteel and epic gems on the AH to fill my pockets a bit, when I see a request for an OT for Naxx25. I whisper the person and get a raid invite.

Things that should have clued me in to the potential of fail ahead of me.

1.) When looking at Raid comp, I say 8 DK's.

2.) Looking at the 22 members currently in the raid there were only 5 that were classes that even had the potential to be healers. Only 2 of them were speced heals, the druid was the bear MT and the 2 shaman were enhancement.

3.) When I connected to the vent server provided and heard the "raid leader" (I used quotes because giving this guy the title "Leader" is being generous) talk I realized he was a 8 year old kid playing his dad's account.

4.) After 30 minutes, we were able to get 2 more healers, which I think is a little light for an inexperienced PuG we started clearing trash to Anub'Arak, the DK dps'ers were constantly Death Gripping mobs away from myself and the other tank.

You would think that after all this just to START a raid, I would have bailed and moved on with my evening, but no. I am a glutton for punishment. We got to Anub, explained the fight. Something that I feel should not be necessary for the first raid this late in an expansion. I mean come on people, even if you are gearing your first toon, this late in the expansions cycle there are enough resources out there for you to come to a raid reasonably educated to the boss fights.

Attempt 1: The main tank, pulled I heroic threw (is that right?) to one add, switched to Prot and charged the other and picked them up nicely if I must say. I know I know. Should I really be patting myself on the back for doing the first part of the easiest raid in the game correctly? With this group the answer is yes. Adds were burned down, and fun was had by all. The first time Anub'Rekhan cast Locust Swarm the melee dps failed to exit the area, there was much dying and the corpse scarabs had their way with the raid.

We wiped. On Anub'Rekahn. Yet I still stayed with the raid.

Attempt 2: We explain over and over the importance of running away from the locsut swarm and coming into the middle to DPS the add. Fight starts well, adds go down, Anub casts locust swarm, melee dps dies, and corpse scarabs have their way with the raid.

We wiped. On Anub'Rekahn. Yet I still stayed with the raid.

Attempt 3: We explain on vent once again how to do this boss. A number of times. It is not hard. There is discussion from the "raid leader" that we should go to a different quarter and try an easier boss. Really? an easier boss than Anub? There isn't one. Myself and the 2 other experienced raiders explain that if this raid can not down Anub there is no way we can down any other boss in Naxx. There was more suggestions of a diffrent boss, one that did not did not spawn the scarabs, because you know they are SOOO HARD!

The main tank, at this point is getting a little frustrated and says this fight is real easy and if the people that do not know it just listen and follow directions we will down this boss and see about moving on. Now I do not know how to emphisize the importance of this next phrase, uttered by the "raid leader", one of the DK's that could not get out of the swarm and stay alive.

He says and I quote "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO LEARN THESE FIGHTS, I JUST WANT TO RAID" let me repeat that. "I don't have time to learn these fights, I just want to raid.

Thank you ladies and gentleman, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitresses. Good night.

I would 4 friends and ran 5 heroics in an hour and a half. Received no gear upgrades, but got the same amount of badges the Naxx run would have netted me, had a great time and built my AOE tanking skills a bit.

How I spent my weekend

This weekend was a very busy weekend. Mrs. Skraps threw a baby shower for her sister on Saturday, so Friday night was clean clean clean the house. With some WoW thrown in at the end of the night, nothing major just a few heroics. Saturday started with a canned food drive for my son's boy scout troop. A soccer tournament that included me being AR. I must say my old fat body did not take well to running up and down a soccer pitch for 210 minutes. Then the wife had her party, so I had to avoid going home. Finally at 6:00 pm I went home to take a little nap to prep for the evening.

At 9:00 pm I took my son to the church we have our boy scout meetings at, picked up 3 other boys and caravaned with the rest of the troop to Davis, CA to go to Rocknasium for an over night lock-in. At 5:00 am, we rounded up all the kids (it was a co-ed trip as the troop and venture crew went to this event together) we headed home. I walked in the door at 6:30 am, hit the couch and fell asleep. I slept until 9:30 when the father in law woke up and started rattling around the house. I tinkered around the house a bit, when the wife got up, I went to bed to sleep a bit more.

I have come to the conclusion that I am getting a little old to be running around for 3 soccer games, then staying up all night with the boy scouts. But it was a fun weekend over all.


Later today or tomorrow I will talk about the total Fail PuG Naxx 25 I joined thinking I might actually be able to get a little Naxx raid in.

Gearing up, and Raiding again.

After a very long stretch of sporadic raid availability, real life has mellowed out a bit, the boy's soccer season is over and Tuesday is the only night of the week that we have booked, and I am able to raid again. This week marks the 3rd week in a row I have made raids and I am finally accruing some DKP to win some upgrades. This week I won a nice pair of wrists for the paltry sum of 5 DKP. This really nice cloak also dropped this week but after I bid 50, another resto shaman in the raid, checked how much DKP I had and bid 5 over what I had, essentially slapping me in the face with his enormous ePeen. I'm not bitter though. It is good to be raiding again. Also I managed to get Water Walking cast on the Guild Leader a split second before he hit the water, to the joyous laughter of the entire raid.

In other news. I have spend most of my "down" time in WoW over the last 2 weeks gearing up my alt (was my main in classic, and first ever toon to 60). I have worked really hard, with the help of some excellent guild healers trying to get myself to the defense cap. There was quite a few hairy moments running heroics with just over 500 defense, that our awesome healers managed to keep me alive through. I dropped about 500g getting my engineering up to 450, made a Combat Shotgun, and tanking goggles and with the help of a few gems got up to 541 defense. Now I just need to work on stamina and avoidance. I am hoping to get a PuG together this weekend and try a 10 or 25 Naxx. I really would like to try tanking a raid before 3.3 comes out and I am busy gearing up my main.

Besides last time I tanked a raid it was MC and Baron Geddon was giving us problems. Mind you I came into WoW a year after release and the guild I was in, in an amazing paradox wanted raiders geared for highest level raids in order to step into the lowest raid instances. because of this bizzare gear requirement, our guild was mainly a farm guild. People would come in, cut their teeth on raiding and move on to progression guilds. I have a few friends still in that guild, and they still have this problem of keeping raiders.

Final note: Last weekend some friends and I went to a beer tasting event called "Around the World in 80 Beers". Now correct me if I am wrong, but does that not sound like there would be 80 beers at the event? Instead of 80 beers there were 31. Now I admit I struggled with math in high school and college but I am pretty sure that 80 is not equal to 31. To top it off, the advertisement for the event said and I quote "served by beautiful "ambassador" models dressed in specially designed sexy costumes with an around-the-world theme". The advertisement for the event even included this picture as part of its promotion. When we arrived at the event there were 3 men, and one very angry woman pouring beer. No models in sexy outfits. About 30 minutes after the event started three of the 4 tables were staffed by women, but none were in sexy costumes, and only two of them were willing to chat at all with the patrons. We were not falling down drunk, and hitting on these women, just trying to chat with them like we would any waitress at any bar we have ever gone to. So if they host an "Around the World in 80 Beers" event in your area I suggest you skip it. It is not worth the $30 price tag for admission.