Well, 3.08 patch is upon us.  Besides some of the tweaks in the patch that's going to make my warlock life more enjoyable (can someone say a summoning stone for those lazy guildies?),  and make my tailoring a bit cheaper, there was waiting for the WIntergrasp Gear. Sad part is that Wintergrasp itself got a bug in the patch :(

You see, I've spotted this gear on www.lootrank.com a long time ago.  There was a helm and boots that were really nice.  It's just they were not available in the game yet.  The data was from the Test realms.  Meanwhile I've been saving my marks from Wintergrasp and crossing my fingers.

The two pieces that caught my eye, the boots and the head pieces come in two varieties - one has hit  and the other has haste.  Here are the Cloth pieces:

Titan-forged Slippers of Dominance

Titan-forged Slippers of Salvation

Titan-forged Hood of Salvation

Titan-forged Hood of Dominance

The head piece costs 40 winterspring marks, which is pricey.  On the other hand boots are only 15 marks.  And I badly needed to upgrade my Leiah's Footpads.

I took the boots with the hit Titan-forged Slippers of Dominance, put a nice hit gem into them and I'm now happy about my boot gear.  My next prize is the head piece.

I really like these pieces and the fact that you get them with just the Marks from Wintergrasp.  I always try to participate in the battle because i find it fun.  This reward, which I picked up for my raiding gear, will stay for a while with me as my PVP pices even when I get better boots in raids.  So it's something that will go a long way.

Here is a link to the all of the Titan-Forged gear on wowhead:

http://www.wowhead.com/?search=titan+forged#items:0+12+1

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've always read in many books that setting goals will drive you to achieve better and faster.  Here is an interesting true story on having a burning goal. -

This happened in wintergrasp.  My first time there.  I'm runnig around exploring when I notice saronite nodes here and there.  Mind you this is the first time i mined saronite.  Even then my mining was in the upper 430's from mining the cobalt.  So i am just running around and my mining is at 442.  Suddenly I run into a Titanium node.   My thoughts - OH MY GOD! I run up to mine it only to find out that I'm too low, need 450 mining.  I panic, then I decide to quickly run around and mine the saronite nodes, I only need 8.

So I'm running around, and getting the saronite.  There is tons of it in that zone.  And guess what, I fin anouther node of Titanium.  OH MY GOD.  So I pray pray noone ( especially some alliance toon) will find it before I get to 450.

Well to make the longs torry short, I did not get the titanium nodes :(.  I got to 450 and right at that moment anouther horde player got to them.  I walked away from there with 450 mning though, and 3 stacks of saronite.

I am starting to get bored with WoW. I feel that it's like a relationship that is beginning to go stale. Last night our 25 man raid for either Gruul or Mag did not happened again due to the lack of people/interest. When someone offered to go do Kara instead, I declined. There is only so many times you can do Kara before it becomes a bore. This is especially since I'm fully in my T4 set with Moramor, and there are only two things that I actually could use as and upgrade from that dungeon, the bracers from Maden and the dagger from Prince.

So, here comes the challenge. What do you do with your time if you stop playing WoW. I was mulling over to pre-ordering Warhammer Online and trying the open Beta. Besides that, there are not many other things that can be as wholesome and entertaining as WoW for the low price. At least none that come to my mind right now. What to do?

What do you do with all the free time in your life if you eliminate WoW completely. WoW took up a lot of that free time in the past. If I would eliminate WoW form my life, I would either have to find anouther hobby that would require as much time and commitment, or I would have to come up with multple smaller hobbies or activities.

One of the challenges I had with multiple hobbies/activities, is that I take on too many and get burned out. With wow, you can scale back or intensify your time or effort commitment. With smaller hobbies/activities you would have to drop one or two. The drama that sometimes entales leaving something is never pleasant. I guess this is a new era, and an interesting turning point.

While clearing out the mail boxes on my bank alts, I was thinking to my self - Wow! What a mess. It seems that it never goes away. The more I try to organize it the more it seems to become more disorganized. Then I through back to my room, my office space, my clothes in the closet. Here is the thing, they are all in the same "state".

So here is anouther one. I work for JetBlue Airways in NY. JetBlue is soon opening up a new terminal at JFK airport - terminal 5 aka T5. So the other day when my coworker started to talk about the T5 what do you think I started to think about. If you don't know, then yo don't play enough! ;).

My life as a lock is full of ups and downs.  I though that  I finally found a cool guild I can raid with, only for the guild mates to be nonexistent online as soon as summer began.  :(

Out of boredom and desperation and also because I've been enjoying my fire specked mage I resepecked my warlock destro (20/0/41).  I have to say that the play style becomes very similar to a mage.  But it did not feel like a lock anymore.

From my personal opinion Warlocks have their biggest and unique strengths in the demonology and affliction trees.  Destruction is fun, but it's very short lived.  You cannot do tings with destro you can do with demonology or affliction, such as non stop grinding or taking down an elite mob by your self.  Plus if you want to blast things, you can always go mage, but only lock can have a unique DoTs and or pet/blast.  I'm back to affliction and I love it!

I've been thinking about this topic a lot. When does life begin in WoW? Does it begin when you create your new character or does it begin when that character reaches level 70, or at least 60? Why am I thinking all of this now? Well because I finally got my main Warlock to 70 a few months ago, and now it has been almost like a midlife crisis for me in WoW.

I remember when I just started to play World of Warcraft a few years ago I leveled my character slowly, taking time to run and do all the quests. Sometimes I would run to other zones just to explore them. Needless to say, it took me forever to level. I also made tons of mistakes along the way, and would learn from those mistakes. This was before I discovered how to look up quests on Thottbot or effectively make gold in the game. But I was pretty exited to sit down and explore the WoW universe.

So I switched to Alliance to get a fresh start with my WoW. I've been playing horde all this time, and I think I need a change. I've been leveling my Draeni Shaman, Ruadia. She's a lot of fun and already at level 33. But I'm intrigued by the Priest class. So today I made my Human Priest, Svyatoslav.

I've been playing WoW for a few years now.  After playing the game for so long you start asking your self why do I play?  Well maybe not as much of that, but how do I keep fun and excitement in my game after doing so much of the game already.  So I think that is why I am drawn to playing some of the classes that I used to totally avoid before.  Healing, playing in groups a lot, not dealing a lot of damage?  All of these were a big no-no for me in the past.  Being a warlock allowed me to solo most of the quests, and just be in the groups when I really needed to be there, and still be just an DPS, no decisions or responsibilities on my shoulders.

Playing a healing class, or a hybrid class is more of a challenge for me, since it will be a totally different play style.  So that is the fun and excitement to learn how to play something completely different.  I guess also to learn how to be more social in the game and group more often.  And grouping is an art in itself!