Raider of the LFR

I made my first run in the LFR last night through Mogu’shan Vaults. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it at this point.

First off, I think there seems like a big push by Blizzard to push people into the LFR. I have been running dungeons in the LFD since that came out back in Wrath. I’ve been quite happy with it. Before that, I tried to run a few dungeons back in the day, but would spend most of my hour or hour-and-a-half of game time just trying to get into a group, and over to the dungeon, only to have someone have to leave, and bam, the night goes down the drain. With the LFD, I queued up and went about my other business, and would get into a group with not much fuss. These days, DPS queues on my server are about 12 to 15 minutes, and I’ll do dailies or run a scenario while I wait. I enjoy most of the Dungeons they released in MOP now that I’ve been through them a few times (except for maybe Gate of the Setting Sun and Siege of Niuzao Temple; I wouldn’t call either of those a favorite, but I guess they can’t all be)

But it seems like Blizzard is not content with me running dungeons to progress my character gear. No new dungeons in 5.1 or coming in 5.2. And the comments Ghostcrawler has put out lately pretty clearly indicate that Blizzard wants people to progress through the LFR after the initial dungeons. So no new dungeons for someone like me, who likes running dungeons. I guess I can keep running the same dungeons over and over ( and over and over) again plus dailies to unlock rep gear to spend on my valor, or take the push from Ghostcrawler and give the LFR a try.

So that brings me back to the top of the post. I did take that push and the Mogu’shan Vault a run last night. I’ll be the first to admit, I had no idea what the hell was going on. It seemed like twenty five people were running around trying to tank and spank the bosses to me. I read through the Raid outlines for the bosses on Icy Veins, so I felt like I did a little research, but admittedly, not a whole lot and it don’t think it really helped me a whole lot. I’m sure that I’ll get more comfortable with what’s going on, just as I did with dungeons when I started running those so long ago. Just as the LFR seems now, those seemed frantic relative to my mostly solo questing at the time, and now I don’t even think twice about mixing them up. So maybe LFR will also seem that way. I hope, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem like you can really have twenty five random people assemble and do anything that seems remotely organized with no planning at all. It seems like it’s mostly just going to be chaos. And I’m not sure chaos seems all that fun to me. Maybe I’m wrong, and this will be my favorite part of the game and I’ll enjoy gearing up for it and through it. But I’m not sure at this point. It’s definitely not something that I instantly fell in love with. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Bloodied Up

After leveling up my Fury Warrior when MOP first came out, I turned my attention back to my Blood Elf DK. I've leveled him up and geared him up to iLevel 466 in the LFD with a few pieces of Rep gear thrown in.

Mostly I've leveled as Frost DPS. I played as Frost ever since the three trees were revamped at the beginning of Cata, and like to think I have a decent handle on it. However, as I've run a few Scenarios, I noticed that if there were some clothies or rogues in the mix, I was taking the brunt of the hit points, so I decided to give the Blood spec a try for this situation.

Now, I'm not truly tanking, and while I've mixed in some Tank gear, I've also just kept my higher iLevel DPS gear where it made sense. But I've found in these types of situations, taking this approach and running in a blood spec works quite well. I can take most of the pounding dished out and have enough self healing to take care of myself while the clothies pitch in more DPS. It works pretty well.

I've run enough LFD now, that I may try one of those as Blood and see how I do. The world needs another tank, right?

Daily Blues

Kind of hitting the wall on the dailies. I finished the Dominance Offensive this weekend. I really enjoyed that and thought it was some of the beat dailies work Blizzard has done.

Unfortunately, I'm still working on the 5.0 daily reps and I'm finding them to be a grind. I hit revered with Golden Lotus, which was nice and picked up the Chest piece there. That also unlocked the Shado-Pan and August Celesteials for me. Both have enchant recipes I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sick of the dailies grind now.

Blizzard, for all their talk of options has pretty much made the dailies mandatory if you want to max out your professions. I'm really not sure the thought process there, but it's got me kind of stuck otherwise, I'm just running LFD, with scenarios during the queue. I find that to be a heck of a lot more fun.

Back to the blog

I never really got off the ground with this WoW blog, but I thought I'd give another go now that we're hip deep into MOP. I have leveled both a Fury Warrior and my Frost Death Knight to 90. I have started working on my Ret Paladin too, but mostly I'm running Dailies, scenarios, and five mans on my DK.

I see a lot of chatter on the blog-o-sphere about dailies. I think the way they were implemented in 5.1 works. If you want to work for a few extra extra pieces of round out gear, you can run a few dailies.

But I have to say, they number of dailies, implemented in 5.0 was way too many. Running both those and the 5.0's on my DK is brutal and a grind. Blizzard says they aren't mandatory, but unless your running five mans as a full time job, they pretty much are to get your iLevel up. I don't know what you'd do with the valor you earn in scenarios and five mans either if you don't run dailies to access the rep gear.

I think like a lot of things Blizzard does, they take a good idea and do so much of it, they ruin. The Firelands dailies in Cata it the Argent Crusade dailies in Wrath were nice patch fillers, but building the whole entry level 90 game around them hasn't worked at all in my opinion. I was much happier with the model in Wrath and Cata and hope we swing back to something more like that in the near future.

Creature Comforts

I was looking for an activity, so I decided to start leveling some of the professions that I'd never done on my alts. I'm using my Fury Warrior as a bank alt, so I decided to level Blacksmithing and Engineering on them. I had read that both of these are expensive to level and don't generate a lot of cash, but with $300k in the bank, I figured I'm in position to finally level them now.

I've been at it a week and finally have both up to 425 and then I came across by new bank alt best friend, the MOLL-E. The portable mailbox for engineers is absolutely awesome. I've got an Argent Gruntling on my main, but the two minutes to use the mailbox is pretty limiting for AH duties and I don't like parking my DK anyway. The MOLL-E has a ten minute up time, which is perfect for cancelling and reposting all my glyphs. No more running back and forth to the mailbox. Woo Hoo! The two hour cooldown is a bit of a drag, but I usually don't repost that often anyway unless I'm just killing time on the weekend. Overall, it's a huge quality of like improvement for an aspiring goblin!