Gitr Knows WoW

Let’s start a debate. On Blessing of Kings, his latest post as of this writing was about his role as paladin in MC being less than glamourous or even fun.

So my brain splatter for the day is what is more important for choosing a character class: leveling to 60 or end-game roles in 20- to 40-man raids? You don’t want it to be unbearably boring to reach end-game content so you’re sure to make it to the end, yet it’s nearly certain that you’ll be playing a character longer AS a 60 than getting TO 60.

For me, the decision took place in two parts. First, I was determined to have an easy go at soloing, so I entered as a dwarf hunter so I even had the guns specialization and stoneform for battling spiders and such. Eventually soloing became boring because it didn’t really take any user input to win fights. I was literally siccing my pet on a mob, marking it, and starting with Serpent Sting and Arcane Shot and falling asleep. I’d wake up and my pet would be running back toward me. On to the next target. That’s no way to level.

After a few days of consulting with Talion and Intoxication, I settled on a human warrior strictly for end-game role. I was really interested in wearing plate armor, carrying a big stick, and going toe to toe with the biggest, baddest bosses Blizzard could make. About half-way through, we realized that my primary pleasure was taking a beating and my secondary pleasure was dishing out more damage than I took. So I became a Fury-specced warrior. I want to do rogue-like damage and go “mmmfff” if I rip aggro for a few seconds. I’ve already hit a 2,900 crit in MC and LOVED it! Nothing like getting 100 rage on a core hound at 13% and killing him with an Execute. It’s incredible. That’s what I want to do in instances, so I’m in the right place.

There are a few shortcomings at times in the guild, so I’m leveling my warlock and my brand new dwarf priest (Fear Ward) for those times that we are having trouble filling a class in a group. Let’s just see if I can bear the leveling and enjoy the end-game content.

We came a-knocking on AQ20’s door tonight. It was quite the night with high drama and great results.

First things first: make the first pull without wiping. LOL. Not so easy when your first pull brings in 2 of the guardians as adds right off. We reset and made good progress…to the doorway to the left. It was quite nice of Blizzard to put the graveyard right by the entrance, because we all got very familiar with those corpse runs. About 25 in all for me, I think. After our first complete wipe in the doorway, we made it all the way to Kurinnaxx with fine discipline and improvement. We marked a target and Fish tanked the charging wasp off to the side so he wouldn’t charge. DPS took down the marked targets sequentially and dropped Fish’s in seconds. It was about a minute or so per pull. Then it got HARD.

We got a briefing and synopsis from someone who ran it earlier in the day with a PuG. He has a nasty effect from the front, drops sand traps that silence, and gets pretty enraged. The problem with the silencing even flowed into our tanking ranks because you couldn’t taunt and our sunder armors missed.

Our first attempt began early while spreading out when we found out exactly how big his agg radius is. Let’s just say it’s big. Really big. With an unexpected body pull, we got him down to 19% on our first attempt and we were ready to go at it again. A big help in this fight is that you have plenty of time to run back from the GY and rejoin combat. Several times. After 4 attempts, Talion broke out the repair bot and people started calling out their repair bills. I heard “5g for cloth…yay Magister’s.” LOL

After one more wipe, a couple of people had to leave, and we brought in one more rogue to up the dps and I was told to go as dps as possible. I busted out the elixir of mongoose, my agility belt, went berserker stance, and equipped both Dawn’s Edge axes for a grand total of 25.8% chance to crit, get flurrry, and really start going nuts. That is how, on the 6th try, we took him down. DPS the crap out of him and keep the tanks up. A lot of the learning was getting the aggro off the first tank as his healing returns get worse. Aggro is really hard to get, but once you get it, it takes a long time to give it up. I found that out. It took almost a minute for Siv to take it off me after I stopped attacking.

He dropped a lot of money (over 2g each member) and a very nice blue plate belt. I forgot to write down the name, but it was a major upgrade for Gitr. So he decided to roll as low as he could and got a 9. Woot! The experience was great. It was very satisfying to take him down after so many tries.

I’ve really come to appreciate several things about being level 60.

1. You can go darn near everywhere. There aren’t too many places in the world you can’t go, outside of high-level instances or areas of upper 50s elites that you can’t go to farm all alone. If you’re on a normal server, as I am, there is no threat of Horde ganking, yet the thrill of taking them down if they have their PvP flag up.
2. Rest, what’s that? I don’t give a rat’s butt about logging out in an inn or city any more. The only reason I do is so I can check my mail and run to the AH real quick if I don’t want to play.
3. I don’t care about XP. I am completely free to go to Scarlet Monastery to farm silk or Deadmines for linen and not gripe about losing precious play time without any XP. I can pick up a new profession that starts me off in a low level area and give the rest of the goodies to a guildie.
4. I can show off in instances with lowbies. Ever go to Razor Fel Downs as an upper 50s? It’s even better as a 60 because there’s no XP wasted. I have better gear. It’s just plain fun to be a level 60 escort and have lowbies depend on you killing things before they do a body pull from being agg monkeys.
5. Molten Core. Enough said.

I was reading at lunch today and ran across this and wanted to pass it along:

Warlocks In-Depth: End-Game Pets

Only having a level 19 ‘lock, I was pretty interested in this read and the link inside. I’d seen a few Infernals before, but never even heard of a Doomguard, let alone any of their properties. I thought Infernals were like the mechanical yetis :).

Any of you have experiences or knowledge to add to this?

Everyone who doesn’t have a guild forum, and even those who do, should go sign up at The WoW Forum. It’s new, so we’ll have to contribute, but we can make it great. I get enough e-mail and comments to know that you, the regular readers of Gitr, are end-game players and have a lot of knowledge and experience.

It would be fun to get with you on there and have a central interaction place. I signed up last night under… Gitr. 🙂