Firing neurons

We are pretty broke this year (like everyone else) so most of our money went to our sons Christmas and we werent to get each other anything... But i made my husband a winters veil gift bag


( What did Great Father Winter bring...  )

xposted a few places

Wow.

So. My dads girlfriend brought my presents over today, and I totally thought I got a dvd player, so I didn't bother opening the box, until my dad asked me if the game was what I wanted..

and so I opened the box.. and it's totally the World of Warcraft battle chest.. which includes vanilla, BC, and a strategy guide.. and I'm literally bawling my eyes out right now because I love him so much, and I already have the games installed. I don't know what to do, but I love him so much for this gift.

Merry Christmas.

OH edit.
I made it sound like I just installed the games.. I meant to say I already HAD them installed.. including WOTLK.

And he bought me this, and I feel bad cause I already have em.

Wish we could see what dungeon we're gonna get in, if only so people could skip Oculus/CoS/HoS/whichever-instance-you-hate instead of making everyone zone in and waste time when they drop group. Especially if it's the freaking tank. As DPS, the wait times are long enough already.

Thankfully my druid tank doesn't have to wait at all. But it's still aggravating.

Howdy, all.
So I just hit 80 with my warrior recently. I've been leveling with a relatively PvE-oriented rage spec, doing the TWF/Titan's Grip DPS thing

http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=1&tal=2500300123300000000000000000000325500000520311250120501351000000000000000000000000000

By and large, I'm charging into melee and laying about with Bloodthirst and Whirlwind, only queueing Heroic Strike if I'm nearly full on rage. Any pointers on what I can do more better?

Now, on to the meat of my actual question: PvP.
I'm not fond of battlegrounds, and haven't been to the arenas, but I really get a kick out of world pvp that my guild seems to attract.
Most of what I've read seems to indicate that Arms is the way to go for PvP, but I will admit to being a complete and total noob in this regard. I bought a dual-spec and tried to put something together. Here's what I came up with:
http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=1&tal=3522332123030100200212213230251305050002000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Now, I'm totally open to suggestion here. What kind of tips can you guys give me? Or what sort of guides should I read to suck less at PvP?

Noobish question, I know...but I'm curious about the Priest talent Meditation.

Basically, if I hover over the Spirit number in my Priest's Character page, and it says I have 616 mana regenerating outside of combat, that means I essentially have 308 MP5 during combat, or is there some other mechanic I'm missing? Does the talent or the resultant mana generated in combat affect the MP5 listing elsewhere on the character pane, or is that based SOLELY on the MP5 stat on gear?

Thanks.

I hate the new Icecrown Citadel Instances. 

Not because they're new.
Not because they're hard.

But because I can NEVER FIND MY WAY BACK TO THE INSTANCE ENTRANCE AFTER A WIPE.  As if the dang citadel isn't massive enough, but it's peppered with closed doors and terraces that lead nowhere.  Getting ported in for a random, wiping and then flying back to this massive citadel in a wispy, gray world is driving me batty.  I found my way to the instance entrance once - and that was after my group kicked me for getting lost.

Can anyone give me any tips?

To escape level 80 bullshit, I went and played on my baby hunter on an old server on the other faction for a while. Was questing around HFP and doing the PVP Towers quest for the extra experience and out of nowhere, this Level 80 Horde Warrior, and a level 63 guildmate hunter fly down. I'm thinking, "Well...I'm dead."

But they didn't attack me. I mounted up. They mounted up and followed me. We communicated through emotes for a bit, the Hunter sets off a Freezing trap under me but let it wear off without doing anything to me. They both /laughed. I /laughed. They still followed me.

Finally, the hunter attacks me. I Scare Beast his pet, pop Beastial Wrath and Beast Within and tear the 63 down in about four seconds flat.

The 80 Warrior stands there for a few seconds, and I'm thinking, "Well...that was fun. Where's the nearest graveyard again?"

But nope. The warrior just starts /laughing, /cheering at me, and /mocking his friend. The hunter makes the corpserun, both wave /goodbye and leave.

I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good US RP server.  The other two with whom I regularly play and I would like to give role-playing a try.  We're casuals and not interested in PVP right now (one thing at a time!).

I plan on asking my Runetotem guildies as well 

EDIT:
If possible, I'd also like to hear what people find enjoyable about the RP server they prefer.

Is it because people do well in staying within character?

Is it because of a helpful community?

Other reasons?

Thanks in advance.

Okay WoW experts, I am apologizing in advance for my lack of knowledge.  I play World of Warcraft VERY casually so I don't know too much of the terminology.  My hubby plays a lot and I wanted to get him a WoW themed Christmas present.

( What I bought for him and what I need help with... )

Edit:  Thank you all so much!!!  This is exactly what I was looking for!  I'll post some pictures of the finished product in my journal tomorrow in case anyone is interested.  You guys are the BEST!

 So after reading my guild's rules for who was going to be eligible for Shadowmourne and realizing that my chance of getting the first one was absolute zero, I decided to put one of my Saronites towards something I thought could be amazingly profitable - Iceblade Arrows. Yes, I said profitable and an Engineering pattern in the same sentence. I may be slightly insane.

... Or not, as it turns out! I'm currently the only provider of these babies on my faction, so I've made ridiculous profit on these in the past few hours. I would encourage all you Engineers to get your respective ammo pattern (Arrows for Gnomish, Bullets for Goblin) and maybe try to get some gold flowing before these are all over the place. You will need to be honored with the Ashen Verdict first, though.

Anybody else ever get a pattern that turned out to be a gold mine for them?

Spot those memes!
( Unconventional Xellapost ahoy! )

I have a lvl 80 Dranei hunter in epics all above item lvl 219.( http://www.wow-heroes.com/index.php?zone=us&server=Exodar&name=vahog )
My gear isn't that bad, but for some reason my dps sucks.  Even when I concentrate on the proper shot rotation, I tend to peak at about 2.4k dps.  Any suggestions?

Zone in. The tank drops group. The healer requeues us. Time goes by. Finally I can't take the silence any more.

"I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with S."

Fortunately there were two gnomes in the party.

Gnome One: "Spindleshanks?" (The NPC)

"Nope"

Gnome Two: "Shadow."

"Rule is solid objects only."

Gnome One: "Spiderweb."

"You win! Now you pick a letter."

Gnome One: "I spy something beginning with R."

"Retadin?"

But the tank showed up and took off running before we could finish another round.

Hi everyone. I am very glad that I found this community. People seem very helpful here, sometimes I feel that I cannot say the same on the official forums and in game.

I've taken a rather long hiatus from the game, but coming back as something sort of fun to do in the meantime. I used to be a rather hardcore player, but I just do not have that kind of time to commit to the game anymore. Don't get me wrong, I would love to raid, but not to the tune of 20 hours a week. I would love to find a place where I could raid three solid days or less.

My dilemma seems to be in picking a faction/server. I did not really have the best experiences on my last server, mostly because the server was rather limited in quality, reliable guilds so I am looking for something new.  I'm also going to be playing completely alone it seems, since apparently all of my friends quit while I was gone.

I have tried these various "re-roll" guilds but they seem all doomed for failure. I am just so afraid of ending up on a lackluster server. I joined a reroll that was taking place on Area 52, which I am sure is a great server, but having a 140 Horde vs 25 Alliance WG is just not really my cup of tea. Is it just me or do these guilds normally fail? I don't particularly want to pay $25 to transfer my character elsewhere, especially considering they are creating characters on a server where the factions are so imbalanced. I'm aware it is a PVE server and it shouldn't matter as much, but I love emoting with the opposite factions in Dalaran =P 

I know this is such a long post, but I apologize. I would just love to hear of some server/faction suggestions if you guys have had any positive experiences anywhere. Factions, PVP/PVE, small things like that are just not important to me. If you have had a good experience with people, your guild, what have you, I would love to learn about it. I know this is somewhat vague, but playing by myself, I feel like the best way to know about a server is from the people that actually play on it.

Overall, I would just love to find a server where it will not be hard for me to PUG and such in order to gear my character (I am NOT looking for free handouts by any sense of the word, I love to work on my character and make it the best it can be, I just want it to be a possibility to gear myself without committing myself to a guild that I will just leave later to pursue a guild clearing more current content) and possibly get into a raiding guild in the future.

Thanks everyone for your time.

Bit of advice to people who like to give advice in WoW. I'm sure all of us hopeless noobs appreciate the experience and knowledge you bring to the game. Truly, your advice is appreciated, considered, and applied as necessary. It really, reall is. And I'm sure we all appreciate it when you take the time out of DPSing to inform us of exactly what we're doing wrong, and how we can fix it.

...but when you take all of what I am sure is well-reasoned and constructive criticism, and boil it down to one line that you shout at us repeatedly while we're in the middle of a boss fight, it's kind of... distracting.

... especially when your distilled knowledge and experience comes out as "PRESS THE HEAL BUTTON MORE."

... no, really? Really? Well hell, I thought all I had to do was stand here and cast all of these nifty spells I had. You mean there's a heal BUTTON? Where the hell do I get me one of those?

If you want to give advice to someone in game, then think about what you're going to say first, and if what you're going to say will basically be "DO SOMETHING OBVIOUS MORE OFTEN AND ALSO USE YOUR CLASS ABILITIES" then just... supress the urge, mkay?

Thanks, I'm glad we had this little chat.

Servers are up.  Seems to be no Tuesday downtime today.

Dear fellow DK tanks,

I have run with several of you over the past few days since my priest alt started hitting Hellfire Ramparts and I want to applaud your sincerity, good attitude, and team-player mentality. As members of this much-maligned class we need to stick together and in that spirit I'd like to offer just a few helpful tints.

( And here they be... )

Many of you are familiar with the Blue ulduar run that downed Yogg10 in normal mode with everybody in all blue gear. Well, the same guy is now doing a bigger project of a similar idea.

A new guild, with people rolling classes they have not raided seriously with before, to level to 80, build a BiS blue set and tackle many WotLK raids as possible on a 3hr per week raiding schedule.

Since Gevlon is doing this on an EU server, a few people were interested but didn't really want to get a second account to do it on an EU realm, so the idea of a US server coalesced.

I decided that my own auction house shark had more gold than he knew what to do with. Since I won't try to sell it against ToS, and since my own raiding has been stymied by my unwillingness to raid more than 1-2 times per week, this sounded like a perfect opportunity. So I got the US project on my server, by offering to do a bankroll about 1/3 as generous as Gevlon's. Nobody on the US side is as famous as Gevlon, but we're following his basic rules, and so far we have about 1/2 as many takers as he does (42 to 85), enough that we should actually have a respectable raid group by the time we are done.

I'm posting this here because it's the kind of project some of you might well be interested in. The social milieu is perhaps a bit "all business" for my taste in general (guild chat bans off-game-topic chat for instance), but that's certainly preferable to drama.

If you want in, read the rules (Gevlon's post, and my post in the forum for US specific rules), register at undergeared.omgforum.net roll a character on the appropriate realm and ask for an invite. Raiding probably won't start until sometime in january or february (maybe march -- whenever we have 10 or 25 raid ready chars with a reasonable raid composition) as many are rolling from lvl 1. Eventual raid time is set for EU project (sat 8pm-11pm GMT), US project times are not yet firmly decided.

For reference "Gnomeofzurich" would be me.

Huzzah!




I also got 20 exalted reputations on the way there. In trying to get exalted with the Sunreavers I've become exalted with the Hand of Vengeance, the Taunka, the Warsong Offensive and, uh, some other reputation that I forget. :D

Where do the exalted reputation achievements cap? 50 exalted reps?

This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Lady Deathwhisper:
We loot all your stuff
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Even the ones who were dead.
And there’s no sense crying over every wipe pass.
You just keep on trying till you run out of glass.
And the druids find hax
And you loot a neat axe
For the people who are still alive.


We took down Lady D for the first time, and proceeded to take down the Ship battle on our second try. That was a blast!