You what Malygos?

After many failed attempts at Malygos last week I wasn’t expecting great things when I joined a PUG Tuesday evening for 10 man Eye of Eternity. To say I was pleasantly surprised when we one shotted him would be an understatement. So I can finally say that I have downed all raid cont in Wrath of the Lich King. Unfortunately as I have yet to complete heroic Oculus (I really should get around to that) I do not quite have the meta achievement.

If anyone is interested as to how it was so much easier with the PUG it comes down to two things. Firstly a Death Knight that was pulling the sparks perfectly onto each other and a Mage that topped out at 8.5k DPS which is INSANE!

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Naxxramas Cleared!

After only four weeks to Wrath entering Naxxramas, Children of Stormwind raiders have completed the instance with the death of Kel’Thuzad last Sunday. With the Vault of Archavon and Obsidian Sanctum already under our belts that leaves Malygos as our only undefeated raid boss. Should we be able to consistently recreate this effort with the addition of downing Malagyos regularly we should be in a strong position to begin the next tier of raiding as soon as the patch is released.


On a related note The Children of Stormwind stand at 66th in the WowJutsu rankings. I strongly believe we can improve on this, perhaps making it into the top 50 soon!

Additionally Ironarm now has four pieces of the tier seven “Dreadnaught Plate”. Considering that even after a year of Burning Crusades Ironarm only ever managed to get two pieces of tier four this expansion is going considerably better.

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Ironarm the Explorer

At level 79 I sat down at my PC one evening with only 30-40 minutes to play. My internet was playing up so I knew questing would be frustrating. So I jumped onto my Nether Ray and finally got around to completing the World Explorer Achievement.


I was pleasantly surprised at how little time it took my to clear up a couple of missing areas and explorer the majority of Icecrown and Stormpeaks. The achievements rewards a title and an epic tabard. Additionally I received about 5% of a levels worth of experience.

Stormpeaks looks stunning, I am very excited to go and try some quests there. However I am not sure what the purpose of Crystalsong Forest is, there are two camps but no quests.

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A time goes by

It seems that everyone, Blizzard blues included, are wishing away the time between now ans Wrath launch. Players are spamming trade chat, guilds chatting away about non nonsensical rubbish and Wow Insider is speed posting pictures and random mutterings. To help keep you entertained, please see the below picture of Ironarm posing in his Paladin Undead Killing plate armor of doom and such.

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The Straglethorn Vale Fishing Competition

I might have a comtender for my best in game moment, today I won the Stranglethorn Vale. In fact I won it on my first try. With only a moment to choose a reward (you don't win untill you complete the quest)I picked the Arcanite Fishing Pole, reading all the text for the Hook of the Master Angler probabily would have lost me the competition and in retrospect the rod is a better choice anyway.


I must thank Elfarol for his assistance, explaining to me that I need to set my hearthstone to the Booty Bay, showing me a good spot to fish, scouting my next pool and generally hanging around to give me Crusader Aura and make me a less appealing PvP target. Really it was him and a lot of luck on pools respawing in good places that won it.

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Protection Warrior Talents in Wrath

when the happened before Burning Crusade I was caught by surprise (I was a noob back then) and wasted this great opportunity. I do not plan to let this happen again so I have been working on some nice talent specs for Ironarm (and to a lesser extent Squiggle). Now that I am reasonably confident no massive changes are on the way to the protection warrior talents I going to outline my choices so far.

I have looked at two specs, one to go with at level 70 and one to aim for at level 80. These specs are based on many assumptions, mostly I am assuming that with an increase in the damage output of protection warriors that generating rage will be less of an issue. In addition I do intend to take the Glyph of Heroic Strike which will also help with rage generation.

These talent specs are also based on the assumption that I will be running a lot of high level dungeons and raids. I have had to balance the need for AOE tanking and utility that is great in dungeons with the survivability and single target threat generation of raiding. I also do not intend to PvP with these builds even though it would be fun to try.

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Neglected no more

Poor Ironarm has been feeling neglected, all my efforts to get some nice (read decent) gear for Squiggle has resulted in Ironarm only emerging when desperately needed and even then pretty much only for raids. Well now that Squiggle has his epic flyer, setting him up for Wrath of the Litch King, I have switched my focus back to tanking.


I started off with a run though Heroic Magister’s Terrace; I really want that nice trinket. Not my best performance, but we did make it the whole way through. As per usual I was having trouble tanking the group pulls where I was holding three plus mobs. I noticed over the course of the run that if the crowd control was pulled off right at the very start of an encounter I was fine because I could take a few steps back use thunderclap and cleave without fear of breaking anyone’s spells. I didn’t always pull it off resulting in a few “you broke my polymorph” comments. The trinket didn't drop.


The following day off I went to Heroic Shattered Halls. I was concerned with how this would go because I had struggled with the multi mob fights the day before and I knew Shattered Halls would be harder. Sure we had a few wipes here but there were defiantly more successes than failures. Through some of the areas I was holding five or six mobs without too much difficulty. The highlight had to be the last boss, through both attempts we lost two of our DPSers very early on thanks to some unlucky cleaves (I think I should review placement for next time). This left Elfarol healing, Alassiel trying to Kill Bladefist and myself tanking both Bladefist and the adds as they streamed in the door. Sadly we failed the first time because I wasn’t able to pick up the ranged adds who would mana drain Elfarol and Alassiel but the second time we pulled it off. It was very satisfying to watch all those adds run back out the door after Bladefirst went down and think to myself “wow I was holding ALL of them”.

After our Karazhan group fell apart on Sunday evening, a tired and still sick Ironarm agreed to tank Heroic Blood Furnace. Certainly not a performance as stellar as Shattered Halls the previous evening, but another success. Credit has to go to Clinn whom on the second boss did some excellent blinding, kiting and stunning to help control the waves of angry orcs who precede Broggok (the eye of doom).

In summary I acquired 13 Badges of Justice, several shards and a pile of junk shoulder high. I am completely unsure what to do with the badges, there is defiantly more tanking gear I could get with them but it seems a waste with Wrath of the Litch King so close. Perhaps it would be better to turn them in for gems which I can sell on the auction house? Then again some new gear might help with Zul’Aman.

Images from Wowhead

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Lending a hand

A couple of friends who live with Elfarol started playing a while back, Alassiel, Elfarol and I all agreed we would create characters and level with them. Well while Alassiel and my characters are still in their 20s Jyade, Bohni and Gordon (Elfarol's Mage) are not in their low 50s. Feeling guilty Alassiel an I thought we would take them all through an instance eventually deciding on Stratholme.


Before the Burning Crusade expansion Stratholme was one of the top five man instances. What with Ironarm not reaching 60 until well into Burning Crusade I have never played many of the "old school" instances Stratholme included.


For Jyade, Bohni and Gordon it was a great way to get experience with the hardest thing being not to run too close to anything which might want to kill you. All up we spent four hours there killing all of the bosses and getting a level or two of experience for all three.

Baron Rivendare

Balnazzar

Much loot was to be had which everyone walking away with something shiny. Alassiel got the Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and I picked up the Cannonball Runner along with a big pile of Holy Water to help in the Nightbane encounter.


All up it was a very fun trip!

Note you can click images to see a larger version

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Zul'Aman 3/6

The Children of Stormwind pulled it together and downed three of the Zul'Aman bosses last night. Nalorakk the bear avatar went down on the third attempt, Akil'zon the eagle avatar on the forth attempt and Halazzi the lynx on the second. None of the encounters seemed particularly hard and wipes were mostly as a result of learning the encounters.



Participants were Ironarm and Skyer Tanking, Kaith, Brotherrog and Phro healing and Alassiel, Stragoth, Paf, Sellia and Swaggy as the damage dealers. The three items to drop were Pauldrons of Primal Fury from Nalorakk, Amani Punisher from Akil'zon and The Savage's Choker from Halazzi.


Personally I was very impressed, last time we tried Zul'Aman we couldn't even clear to the first boss. I had expected we would get to him this time but not three of them.

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Triptych (3v3)

Elfarol and I started Triptych with a rogue friend of ours ages ago. Ironarm was in the team as a protection warrior to get enough arena points to buy The Merciless Gladiator's Shieldwall (in my opinion one of the best easily available tanking shields around) and some extra gear for solo work. Over the last month or so Elfarol and Squiggle resurrected the team with the help of Mudoken and have been playing our ten games per week.

It started off pretty bad, i think the first week we lost almost every match but since then we have been steadily improving. The majority of the teams we fight are of a similar level to us so the games have been really fun. At the moment Squiggle is pretty much the weakest link of the team. If I can stay alive we can usually beat our opponents as I am almost always the first target. As Squiggle gear improves so will our rating. We currently sit in the mid fourteen hundreds but give it a few weeks and a couple more pieces of Gladiator's Satin Raiment and I am confident we can crack 1500.

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Why did I choose that class

When I first chose a warrior I didn't know what tanking was, I had no idea about PvP or for that matter very much at all about warriors. But I choose a warrior for a couple of reasons, firstly I didn't want to be the same class as my friends who has just stared (Rogue, Warlock and Paladin) not that I had a clue about group composition I just wanted to be different. Also in previous RPG games I had played Ranger type characters but they always seemed so fragile. I had watched my friend with the warlock play and it seemed like a cop out standing back there like a wimp while a demon did all the hard bits. So I figured why not play the character that wears the thickest armor and beats the crap out of things. Now if you are ever going to be a warrior you have to be a Dwarf, I mean dwarfs are tough, they are like chunks of rock with arms and pointy weapons. The funny thing is I tend to play in PvP like that, run at stuff flailing and hope i hit things.

Squiggle was my second character, I rolled him to I could level with Alassiel. My intention was to create a character for PvP as I didn't want to respec Ironarm all the time in order to PvP. At this point most people wonder why I choose a Priest for PvP as opposed to a Paladin, Druid, Warlock or rogue. I mean generally if you want to heal a Paladin or druid would be considered better and a warlock or rogue is generally easier if you just want to do damage. Well to be honest it was a bit or the "I don't want to be like everyone else" syndrome (ironic considering 10 million play this game and at least a good few hundred thousand would play shadow priests). In addition I wanted to roll a Draenei and that limited my choices some what. Thus Squiggle was born, now all I have to do is learn how to melt faces like a pro.

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The First Post

Welcome to the very first entry of my World of Warcraft Blog. This blog will cover my guild’s (Children of Stormwind) news, my characters Ironarm and Squiggle and the game in general.

I should start it all off with a bit of detail about my wow history, I started wow almost two years ago now with my very first character, a warrior named Ironarm. At the time several of my friends were just starting to play as well one of whom still regularly play and they others sporadically. It took me a long time to level Ironarm to 70, when burning crusade came out he was still in his 50s. He is a protection warrior and generally runs as the main tank for Children of Stormwind (CoS). I started my second character Squiggle a while back so I could level along side my girlfriend when she started playing but got distracted half way through and ended up leveling him with her second character much later. Squiggle is a shadow priest and is intended to be my PvP character.

CoS is the third guild I have been in. The first I barely remember my first guild as I was only a member for a few levels in my 20s. Terror Oz was the second guild I joined, and whom I stuck with all the way thought to 70. Sadly due to the selfish actions of several players Terror Oz fell apart and the options that remained were to rebuild the guild or to merge with another guild. That was when I joined CoS and also when I started raiding Karazhan. CoS is a great guild, relaxed, with a focus on enjoying the game first and progression following that.

My intention is to update this blog on a semi regular basis and at least once a week. So stay tuned for the next instalment.

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