I have however, been playing a crap-ton of Eve. Which while blowing my mind, will avoid going into here, (but stay tuned for an update on where I will go into it).

I do have a friend getting into WoW this weekend to take advantage of the reduced pricing, and for the recruit-a-friend bonus. That should see me play quite a bit over the next few days while I help him re-familiarize himself until we do the Goblin roll come Dec. 7.

I will say Orgrimmar is freakin’ rad looking, and I detest Grom Hellscream just a tad less.

Playing this guy is too much fun! I love Survival, and I love being back in the driver’s seat on this toon, (I mentioned in a previous post he was my vanilla main).

I did get a gear-check smack in the face on Tuesday however, when I joined up with my raid team to do a Sarth 3d mount-run. After a couple of wipes and only putting out about 2400 dps at max, I switched over to my retadin to get it done.

Needless to say, I have some heroics and weekly quests to farm to get him anywhere near decency, but grouping and running those dungeons has been a blast!

For those interested, heres Uesdeeay’s armory profile:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Earthen+Ring&cn=Uesdeeay

Yes he’s wearing a shammy helm, but it will have to work ’til I upgrade it.

For the last couple of levels I’ve been using my Survival spec pretty heavily with a Black Worg (Ferocity) pet. With the talents available to him, he has decent survivability, no need for food, and hits pretty hard. He’s fit in with my playing rather well.

Yesterday, I popped down into Zul’Drak and grabbed a polar bear to try out a tenacity pet while in Beast Mastery. I’m going to have to admit that it’s not locking in for me as much as I hoped. Mr. Bear does not seem to hold the aggro as well as the worg, even considering the lower dps I’m outputting. I would wager I either have him specced wrong, or I’m employing him incorrectly.

I think I’ll keep tooling around with him for quests, but Survival + Worg is the route that’s definately working for me in instances right now. Hopefully me and the bear, (as yet unnamed) can figure it out.

Survival is an absolute blast, and I see myself using it when I hit 80 with him as well. I also suspect I’ll race-change him to Undead for the fun of it when possible.

I’ve noticed a fair number of folks bemoaning the loss of Volley.

I for one absolutely love multi-shot’s new functionality. My hunter is currently sitting at 76 and survival specced, which has me topping the charts in instances.

Trash pull rotations where mobs are 3 or more is pretty much just Multi Shot spam, with Hunter’s Mark and Steady Shot used on one of them for focus and saving any Lock and Load procs until only 2 mobs remain, then applying one shot to each of the targets. I then focus on one of the targets, but while two remain use Multi Shot to keep Serpent Sting up.

When I have the time prior to the pull, I fire all 3 traps I can into the general area the fight will occur. If I only have time for one, I’ve been going with Snake Trap.

Liberal application of Misdirection for the tank is going to ensure the fight goes smoothly.

I will likely have to re-work some things once I hit 80, but have been talking with Beefywife, who is in my 10-man group and she’s been having similar success there.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed Survival and Beast Mastery the most. If still leveling, I don’t know that I’d recommend survival until you hit 76 for Misdirection (or if you have an awesome tenacity pet).

I’ve gone and been raiding as holy on Saethae, and finaly maxed Herbalism and nearly Alchemy on Vyzic.

I have also registered and begun practicing for the 2010 Arena Tournament. I’m using an Unholy DK with liberal bits of frost picked up to maximize Runic Power generation and make my Chains of Ice hurt more, while rooting casters.

I went with a human, (named Vezketh – follow his progress on the Armory) for the tourny because of their racial that mirrors the PvP trinket and due to their bonus to maces.

I’m really happy with the rotations I’ve worked out for him and I’ll post that and my first full day of arenas tomorrow after I hook up with the other members of my team, (resto shammy and shadow priest at current).

It’s also known that I generally detest farming most of all. However, with only 2 points left to grind to 450 on my engineering – it’s come time to go gets me that ore.

Also – the guild I’m in has a Craft Fair event coming up, and I want to contribute. While this means more farming of ore, (and herbs on Vyzic) it’s for a great cause and I’m happy to do it.

This has become infinitely more bearable now that I have epic flying trained on Saethae and can get them nodes before the hoof-paste… I mean gnomes do.

~Vez

I have decided to have my DK Vyzic focus entirely on PvP progression at this point. I will be looking for teams to join while I work on farming the necessary gear to be usefull.

I’ll let you know how it all shakes out here.

Do want Furious Gladiator Frostwyrm!

In a new guild, you may have heard of it… (http://www.aie-guild.org)

Working on some neat things to spice up this sad, neglected blog.

Stay tuned!

~Vez

First, I logged into my Blood Elf Warlock, (Level 22) to melt a little face.

I embarked on towards the Arathi Highlands/Wetlands border in order to finish up my Succubus quest. This got me thinking about class quests that are still around vs. those that have been effectively removed from the game.

When you’ve done a fair number of class quests on many different characters, I can see the desire to want to just visit a trainer, smack some gold on the table, and be done with it. I myself have done the succubus quest about three times, and travel time aside, have no qualms with it.

[may contain spoilers]

In fact I find I actually feel it adds to the flavor of being a warlock. The quest has you head off to the southern tip of Silverpine and the Arathi/Wetlands border to shuffle two saps loose the mortal coil, (pun intended) in order to aquire their bits for your ritual.

If you let it, I think this is one of those quests that even if you don’t get your RP on – still helps create a kinship with your character.

I finished the quest, got my sultry new friend and headed off to Hillsbrad to do some questing. With most everyone in Northrend I was able to get to level 25 with little hassle, and park my toon’s butt in the in to jump on to my Shaman.

Logging on to my level 22 Tauren Shaman, I discovered he was still working his way into his Water Totem quest.

This quest for me really was just long and obnoxious. Go over there and get me some water. Now go over *there and get me some water. Fantastic, take the water to this other person. Hey you have some water, take it way the fuck over there and kill a thing and bring the water and one of said thing’s bits back to me.

Fuck you.

There was story and a point to all this running around, but the ratio was not worth it for me to not desperately wish that this was one of the class quests Blizzard nerfed into a trainer visit like they did with Druid’s Aquatic Form.

Now if they had the first part of the quest chain send you to the farthest point – where you acquired some kind of thing that let you hit the rest of the key points via some kind of spirit-jaunt-portal thing, that would make it so much more bearable. And it still would make you run to that farthest point to reveal map and inter-continent travel for the newbies.

After completing the quest, I had him do some stuff in the Ghostlands to boost my rep with the Blood Elves, (and because I like the feel of that zone a lot) and ended up for the evening at Level 23.

All in all, a pretty productive romp with my lowbies.

~John

The concept for this blog is to share my experiences with the Death Knight and Paladin classes, (for now) within World of Warcraft.

I am not an expert theorycrafter, so I’ll keep the math to a minimum. This will be more of a place to share, (what I hope will be) a thoughtful recounting of the experiences with the classes I love to play.

For perspective, I am at the moment playing a level 80 Unholy Orc Death Knight working through heroics and some raid content. I am also playing with a 73 Blood Elf Retribution Paladin, with which I’m enjoying a more in-depth play through of the quests in Northrend. I think where I got the name for this blog has become apparent.

There may come a point where I’ll bring in my perspective from my old pre-BC main, my level 65 Tauren Hunter, (currently Beast Mastery spec’d).

For now though, make yourself comfortable and I hope you find something to enjoy here while you wait for Wintergrasp to be contested.

~John