I haven't raided in a while, almost a month now. I've been busy with things in my life, and those things don't fit into the neat raiding schedule of my guild. And to a degree it's been OK. I've been just leveling my alliance toon on anouther server.

My guild is hitting the new raid instance TotC 10 man. I ran it once with my guild mates on my healer. What I found is that in this instance there is very little room for mistakes. Everything has to be precise. You've go to move out of the fire right away. You've got to jump on the tank spamming really big heals when the first beast boss is below 20%.

I found the cobolts to be very annoying and yet an interesting twist. Those little buggers not only through around the fire bombs, but they also jump on you and can spell lock you for a while - BAD for a healer. It's an interesting dynamic that DPS has to go now and knock them off you. Now if they through a fire bomb on you while other dps is knocking them down, you've tons of AOE damage for the raid.

I don't know, I think I would rather run Ulduar on 10 man or even 25 man then to do this TotC raid on 10 man. I think I miss trash :(, and Nax ( and Kara, but don't tell anyone about this one).

I've been doing some of the Level 78-80 quests, including finishing up my Sons of Hodir chain quets. I also ran some Heroics with my guildies, which was fun and quick. What I'm fininding and quite to my surprise is that you can get pretty well geared by doing those two things to get you ready for raiding.

Since I've had a lot of rest experience, and combine that with a lot of dailies I did while leveling, I got to 80 without doing a lot of the higher end quests. So most of my gearing came from crafting and raiding. My guild was already in full swing with the raids, so it made sense to do that. On the other hand if you got your character who is not part of a raiding guild or if it's an a lot who's not allowed in many guild runs, do the quests. There is some great gear, and you work on your rep (and cash) at the same time.

Also run the heroics. A lot of my initial gear came from there, and a lot of that gear can even compare to some of the gear you get in Nax and OS, especially if it is 10 man versions. In addition you get badges to buy better gear. Example, the other day I got two pieces of gear that were small upgrades for me, while running heroics. Now while small upgrades (a wand and a ring), they were upgrades nonetheless, and I've got most of my gear coming from 25 man raids.

Well continuing my previous post Getting My Lock ready to Raid at 80 an lets cover some of the other pieces of gear and weaponry.

Just a quick note.  You may have items from BC that you got from heroics/dungeons/pvp.  Those items may be superior to these if they have lots of sockets and you can gem them right.  So always compare and shot around.  And don't vendor gear until you are certain that it is inferior to something else.

Well I've hit level 80 over Christmas.  It was a great achievement.  Now I can begin raiding and doing heroics.  Some of my favorite things to do in WoW, especially with my guild.

First and the most important thing though is gear.  The guild may be ready to do Nax, but I may not be. My philosophy on gear is:

• Get things that are not too valuable, since they will be replaced. Don't overspend on gear that may be replaced on the first drop in that heroic/first raid run.


• Get gemmed and enchanted, but once again don't go overboard, you will replace things.  Go for the cheaper versions for starting gear.


• Get as close to your Hit Cap as possible - with three points into talents into destro and affliction hit talents you need 365 Hit to be hitcapped.  Who cares how much spell power you have if your Dots are not landing where they supposed to and your shadowbolts are flying off to the side.


• Balance your gear.  I don't believe glass cannon locks.  You're mana should be OK to cast a few things, your stamina should give you enough points to life tap occasionally and also to survive a tough fight or pull where healer may be overtaxed.  A lock is not a mage, and thus should not be bust damage then dead (no offense to our mage counterparts I hope).

I can't wait for Thursday to be here.  Wrath is coming out and I'm very exited to begin leveling my main in the new zone.  I've had the beta key for quite a while, but I've avoided playing the starter zones with the copy of my main - Moramor.  Instead I've experimented with the Blizzard premade level 80 copies.  So I've purposely missed all the content in the begging of Northrend to enjoy it better when expansion comes out.
For now, I've been doing a bit of raiding with the guild.  We've downed first three bosses in Mt. Hijal, that was fun.  I've also been leveling my druid a bit.  I just enjoy playing with him.  He's also has inscription that I'm leveling along with him.  I've been also trying to get rid of all of my stuff I've been hoarding in my banks.  So far so good.  The only thing I can't to be able to get rid of is the spell cloth.  Nobody wants it.  Primal mooncloth went well, and I'm making the 28 slot soulshard bags from the shadowweave cloth and they are selling as well.

Inscription prices are dropping like the Stock Market.  Now that there are tons of people who do inscription, there are too many glyphs in the market.  The herb prices are still high though since demand for them is now easing up at this point.  If you want to have a good bundle of cash for the Wrath, drop one of your professions and pick up herbalism and just leveling it to max.  All the herbs you gather in the process will make you rich.

As far as my copy of Wrath, i've ordered a collector's edition from Amazon.com.  It should be delivered on the release day.  I hope it is, since I took the next day off, and would have to drive to work to pick it up if it comes late.  Cross my fingers :D.

The wrath of the Leach King is only a week away (I'm very exited).  Meanwhile, since all the raid bosses got really nerfed in the patch 3.02 my guild has been running ZA in the way we've ran Kara before - like all the time :D.  I've so far completed ZA 3 times.  Here are some tips I can give to others in regards to things I've learned.  Most of these things are beyond the basic strategy, and will be more specific to warlocks and perhaps other spell ranged DPS:

I've been leveling my Paladin a bit, and I'm quite enjoying him. He's already at level 28, and I can't wait to get my mount at 30. However, in this post I'd like to mention why I love pallys when I group with them.

Salvation - Can you say shoot without worrying about threat? As a decently T4 geared warlock I get spoiled with this pally buff. If I'm in a 5 man, or god forbid Kara without a pally, not having this buff really rally gimps my DPS because just by casting all my DoTs my threat jumps a lot. You should see me begging for this buff all the time.

Well, I don't have much to post on that comes to mind and does not involve too much time :). Presently I've got into a nice guild that raids a lot (by my standards). I've been doing Mag and Grull, and we even did some trash and got to first boss on Mt. Hijal. So it was fun and I got a nice clock from trash mob drop.

I've been also leveling my druid, who is my bank/enchanter. I want to get him to level 35 because i want to disenchant all those greens over 64 that i accumulated. They are becoming annoying in my mailbox "bank". I'm too lazy to find anouther Dissenchanter to DE them. Too many at this point.

I toyed with the idea of leveling my druid to 70. I respecked feral and was breezing through the mobs. My goal is that I want a end game healer. However, I don't know if I want to play my priest to 70 (currently in his high 30's). I find Druid Tree healing is really cool, but I don't find leveling druid pleasurable.

I've created a Pally and I think I will play with that character and level to 70. I find Pallys to be very self sufficient, and at the end of the game they can Heal or Tank. I think they will also benefit a lot from all the additional Plate gear with caster attributes that they will share with Death Knights. I find leveling them interesting - a new challenge.

My Mage who I finally learned how to play is gathering dust at level 41. I think I got to a point where it was too easy to play him now that he's a fire specked. I guess I want something different Endgame, and Mage is too similar to a warlock as far as gear/damage etc. Paladin offers different dynamics to learn. Plus I can Heal (I guess I'm a closeted healer).

Well a few days into WoW on linux (Ubuntu-8 ) only, and I broke down and installed Windows XP on my machine. Here are two biggest reasons:

1. In linux, my mouse pointer is software rendered, since we are emulating a windows program in linux. This is fine and dandy when I was playing by my self, but when I grouped up with 25 other people to do Mag and Grul, I saw the challenge with the software rendering of my mouse. When we hit a lot of visual lag due to everyone casting spells, the mouse pointer would move in slow motion or I would sometimes completely lose it on the screen. I had to quickly relearn how to use hot keys. This I think was a decisive point to play WoW under windows, where even though frame rate might be low, mouse pointer would move smoothly anyways since it is hardware controlled.

2. The second piece in linux that did not work was Vent. When i was in WoW i could hear vent, but could not hit a key to speak. This i suspect could have been fixed if I did some more research.

To sum up my experience with WoW in linux, is that it has been very impressive. Besides the raid experience, soloing or grouping with a small group worked very well under linux. This may be due to the recent release of the Wine 1.0 version. About 6 months ago, wow was almost unplayable in Linux with decent graphical settings and resolution set to my native 20 inch flat panel. It is very good now, where when I solo I get almost the same performance I would get in Windows XP.

I think it is important to note that it would be great if Blizzard can release a native linux WoW client. Until then, WindowsXP for me as far as WoW. Although I will continue to mess around with Ubuntu linux and maybe find more tweaks for WoW in linux.