Elkagorasa the Casual

Hi Blizzard, I think your group calendar feature could use a little work. See, I use Outlook at work. In this software you can send out "meeting" requests. " Meet me at Blackwing Descent summoning stone at 10PM ". When I respond to a request, I can opt to send a note back. I'd love to be able tell my guild that I'll be home, but I don't plan to log on if my guild doesn't have 9 other players for the raid. Give me 100 characters, have it show on the raid invite screen when you float over my name. Sure, I could just login, or mail my raid leader, or my co-worker who is also in the guild, but that's not the point.  Thanks, Elkagorasa

Back when Cataclysm was first announced, Blizzard talked up the Mastery stat.  The Mastery stat will be the stat everyone will want. The stat to homogenize gear so that casters and melee will want it. It will be the stat to rule them all .  Unfortunately, now that it's implemented, critics agree, Mastery is one of the most useless stats for warlocks, destruction , affliction and even demonology . In all forms, it adds DPS to your game, but not as much as other stats, I guess? According to the data on EJ : 179.28 mastery provides a 1.35% increase to all fire damage we do. As 90%+ of our damage comes from fire spells, mastery is not a bad stat, however, the increase per point is low enough that we will not prioritize mastery over crit or haste until much higher gear levels. Will Blizzard change this? They evidently didn't like that warlocks preferred the infernal vs the doomguard (in certain situations) so buffed Mr. Doom. I can imagine that this will eventually be ...

Sure, goblins and worgen are the two new classes in Cataclysm, but the lore they've given us is worgen vs undead; not goblin.

Last night, on a whim, I ran over to Eastern Plague Lands and tried running through Stratholme. Two purposes, play around with my Felguard and Demo spells, second get my Argent Dawn rep, so following a half-remembered forum post, I went in and started killing. 0 rep earned 2 hours later, bags laden with a dozen or so, soulbound level 50 epics!, I never found the book I was looking for. Half expecting to find a glowy, twinkly book sitting on the ground by the second-to-last boss. All in all, I never got a point of rep. A few things I forgot: There are prequests. The quests are well detailed in this comment . I plan to try again later this week. Doing these quests would have gotten me to Revered. Since, I am already there, so I was hoping to skip them. My Argent Dawn commission . It was in my bank. Oddly, looking at the commission entry on Wowhead, this has been removed from the game.  Supposedly if you had done the prequests, you should be able to pick up a replacement. If yo...

As a casual player, I can often only get on to play a few days a week. Sure, I will typically play for a few hours each night (10pm to ??) but not everyday. This means I may get only 3x70 valor points each week. Considering warlock tier gear is going to cost me 6000 valor points. Without any raiding (or considering we have only downed the BH boss), this is going to take me easily 28 weeks. In 4.1 , that will all change. You will still get valor points for doing 7 random heroics a week, just you will be able to do them all on the same day. Imagine that. Raid buffed, you can pull 5 members in for 'another' random dungeon afterwards. Or if you finish early enough, do a second dungeon immediately afterwards. I can imagine a few social changes that will come from this: People will run more chained heroics. I know at this point, I am fairly well geared (average i351), so I am not looking for gear upgrades dungeons and definitely can't find gear to purchase with Justice poi...

Last night, I ran my Therazane dailies in Deepholm, I decided to clear to two fairly easy achievements, Fungal Frenzy and My Very Own Broodmother . Fungal Frenzy is fairly straight forward. While destroying the mushroom babies for Fungal Fury , you get a buff for each type of mushroom you destroy. The trick is just finding each of the 4 and picking them quickly. Typical Blizzard fashion, you will never (very seldom) find all 4 next to each other. Don't get in water, the buffs wash off. Scope them out before hand. Pick the trapcap last.  If you pick a shuffletruffle first, you get a nice run speed buff. I suggest mounting up between shrooms.  Taken at 72, 32 Shrinkshroom is the hardest to find. It is a white with brown stripe mushroom. They like to spawn next to the large pink pillars. I found a total of 2 during my looking. Shuffletruffle is very common. Light blue mushroom that spawns near the blue rock outcroppings. Speed buff. Poolshroom is a red m...

At my child's Elementary school, they are getting all rev'd up for St. Patricks day. For them, this means 4-leaf clovers, leprechauns and rainbows with pots of gold at the end. My youngest is looking for us to set up a leprechaun trap in the house, so we can capture one and he can share his gold with his class.(IDTS, it's all MINE !!) Guess we'll have to see what we catch.. This ' holiday ', Blizzard is not going to disappoint. In patch 4.03 (aka Cataclysm), they included a new series of quests in Felwood. This series of quests (see comment ), starts with you bagging Impsey (try not to kill him, I suggest a swift wack with your weapon), and then ends with you blinding imps with a crystal refraction. The quest chain took me a total of about 15 minutes, include flight time from Orgrimmar. Best of all, when you're done, you get your very own Rainbow Generator . Sure it doesn't do any damage at 85 (30 damage on a critter with 42 health), but oh, what a di...

Last night after a fail raid. ( Magmaw 10, OOT 0), one of my trusted warlock guildies (playing the role of healer last night) said, "Hey Elk, ever consider running a Demonology build? You get some massive AOE damage." Had I? Actually never. 4 and a half years, and I've never, ever ran a demo build. So, after the excitement of 80k dps AOE's I thought "Now is the time". After clearing those 31 points out of my incomplete Affliction build, I pull up my guildie's Armory page and grab her Demo build. OK, some new spells, new priorities. Hand of Guldan? Fly up to the training dummies, summon my Felguard, "Thoosas" and try out a sample rotation . Shuffle my buttons a bit and try again. OK, rebuild my buttons to match closer to my Destro buttons (fel flame and soulburn on B4 and B5, etc.). Once, I get it where I think it should, queue for a PVP run, cuz battlegrounds are my spell rotation, talent build and gear testing ground. For once, I get...

At the moment, I am working towards my Exalted reputation with the Ramkahen. After finishing the quests in this zone, I was still a long way from Exalted. Picked up the Tabard and started wearing it for all my heroic dailies. Each evening that I log in, I do my 2 Ramkahen dailes before anything else. Still a full 10 days later, and I am still working on the stretch from Revered to Exalted. Ugh. On the other hand, I finished off the Deepholm quests late last week. I've ran the dailes 3 times, and was able to pull down a massive 4500 rep. Just running dailies alone, I believe I should become Exalted about the same time as with Ramkahen. This is why I believe those Ramkahen need more dailies. With only 2 dailies currently active, I can only get ~500 reputation each day that I run. With some of the options available in this zone, the lack of fun dailies, is not because of a lack of great quests. Personally this zone is ripe with great 'vehicle' type quests. Some of my p...

I love cooking. Before I started playing WoW, some 4+ years ago, the concept of a game that allowed you to create things was absolutely foreign and strange. You can make things, then sell them to other players for money?? WoW! Yes, coming from a long FPS background, you only go that nice gravity gun after you killed the mini-boss who had it. Of course, then it dropped from everyone, but, that's a different life. Now, as I've been leveling fishing, (that 'profession' I never thought I'd max out), I've picked up a ton of fish. When completed  I cooked them up and threw them all on the AH (getting 10g for the one of the strength recipes). Looking at the caster recipes , I am wondering what is everyone's favorites. Here's a quick list of the Cataclysm recipes I see will grant an Int, Hit, Haste or "highest stat" well fed buff. Basilisk Liverdog Broiled Dragon Feast (from achievement ) Broiled Mountain Trout Fortune Cookie (needs enchante...

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!  From Blizz Fan Art   I love reading to my kids and now they love reading, like daddy did. Cat in the Hat is outrageous, and Green Eggs is stoo-pendous. Sam-I-Am. That Cat was insane, but sure glad wasn't a gobl-ane.