Elkagorasa the Casual

I love the Blizzard has been changing up PVP this expansion. I find these crazy brawls rather appealing to play and participate in. They make me want to do more PVP (not world) aspects of the game. Ref: Shadow-Pan Showdown Shadow-PanShowdown is a PVE players dream. You queue up as a 5 man dungeon team: tank, healer and 3 DPS. When the BG starts, you are faced against a similar 5-man party and race to the center. You will randomly be assigned to purple or gold team.  In the center of the dance floor are two bosses surrounded by a giant disco ring. The team with the most players at center, will enable their attackable boss. Winner is the team that takes down their boss first.  The bosses have 3 basic abilities.  Smash - knocks back attackable team to the wall of the arena if caught in it. Avoid ground with 'dust flying' AOE damage - circles appear on ground, avoid. One boss it's fire, one boss it's electricity. Healing - interrupt whenever possib

Last night, I ran the first wing of the Tomb of Sargeras raid on my Protection Paladin. We managed to one-shot all of the bosses. Thank you DBM for making me look like I knew what I was doing.. :) The only really questionable fight was Harjatan as fellow tank and I didn't use the damage soak on his 'unchecked rage' mechanic. oops! Today, I found Krazitrain has posted short videos for the first three bosses.. Nice concise 1-2 minute long summaries each fight from a ranged DPS perspective. I've added my perspective as a prot paladin below. Wing 2 - Wailing Halls Wing 3 - Chamber of the Avatar Goroth  ( icy-veins guide ) DBM prompts you to do everything you need here.  Taunt when other tank is inflicted with Burning Armor. Run out of range if it's cast on you. Hide behind spikes when he cast Infernal Burn. Don't stand in bad stuff. Harjatan  ( icy-veins guide ) (My DBM was a little out of date, so this may have been fixed alre

Ah February. Love is in the air. Those heart shaped chocolates. The exchanging of sappy cards and trinkets. The endless grinding the apothecaries for a mount with an insanely low drop rate. Ah holidays.. So, Elkagorasa has been taking a bit of a holiday. He's gone back to Pandaria to do a little recreational activities. He started the adventure hanging out with Nate on his little floating town. Elk was already honored among the Anglers as being a decent fisherman. Getting exalted meant hanging out for 3 different adventures each day. These trips ranged from fishing up garbage (player competition), killing puffer fish, and collecting the clam meat. The 'worst' was fishing up a piranha from the rivers . The oddest was fist fighting a shark . (spam #3 on cooldown). Those goblins loved sending him to 'blow-up' things, but usually he would just DOT everything up and watch it die quickly. At hitting Revered, Elk picked up the Angler commendation , basically turning

The other day, Blizz linked to a spanish youtube video put out by Hols. This video detailed how to get the new booterang  "toy but not a toy" from 6.2.2. Watching the video, I notice that Hols IS WEARING GUL'DAN'S shoulders! Yeah, not the corruptor set like I substituted with, but the same model. So, I start by searching the US armory.. (can't select EU for some reason), so I searched Korean, Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia as well.. No Hols . "Change" button disabled going from US to EU. Quick Internet search, I found " WarcraftRealms.com ". This site lets me put in a few specifics, [level 100], [mage], [blood elf], ["Hols"] and it returned exactly who I wanted. Hols @ Uldum-EU Looking up his shoulders , I found they share the same model with the warlock HFC tier set . The normal version of these shoulders of these don't appear to have the spikes, but the Mythic one does! Sigh, I don't see me runn

Just wanted to share a YouTube channel I just subscribed to, MGN . They have a series of 'how to solo' videos done by " the angry swedish man, Franki " which I found useful, but also funny. "spam it, spam it, spam it and loot!" ... makes me want to send my druid into Ulduar again to see about trying for this mount again.. (I'd give him a PG-13 rating simply for language and a bit of sexual innuendo) :D

Just a quick update... Vacations are complete. At least I think so; my wife may have other ideas. 4 days amidst the crowded Disneyland 60th Anniversary celebration should be enough for any family.. :) It was a lot of fun and we still managed to get on a lot of rides.. It's all just a matter of planning out your tickets so you're always waiting on another "FastPass". Cinderella's Castle taken with my cell phone I've managed to complete part two of the legendary quest chain. All 125 abrogator stones collected. It was 2am in the morning, but I still ran over completed the quest chain. The next portion with having to collect 900 fragments sounds absolutely outrageous. Hopefully the drop rate is better than 1-5 per boss.  Warcraft movie is previewed at ComicCon. Some guy isn't interested because it's heavily CGI. Too bad there are no orcs that they could have used for filming.  Update: Just saw this on Legendary's Facebook.. So

It's finally over! Despite all my ranting and complaining, scheming and whining, I have managed to complete the DPS silver proving grounds. This time I invested $30 and purchased Wondershare's video editor , so the graphics quality is a ton better than the free Windows Movie Maker.  The ah-ha moment for me was remembering that the Felhunter / Observer also had an interrupt. This allowed me to still run as destruction (not having to relearn demo) and have an instant cast, non-targeted interrupt. There's one typo in the video, that I am not sure I'll fix. At 6:03 , I say, "move to 3", when it should say, "move to 6". Round 1: ( 0:12 ) Cast Havoc on slayer, and focus down the guardian. Round 2: ( 0:41 ) Cast rain of fire on vermin, then focus down slayer. Round 3: ( 1:22 ) Move to 3 o'clock, cast havoc on amber weaver in center, focus down far slayer, then move to close slayer. When done (if time) setup portal facing center. Round 4

Trying my hand at video recording, I captured my latest run at doing the proving grounds. I am now regularly reaching fight 8:8. The 'ah-ha' moment was realizing that the Felhound and/or Observer have an interrupt. Here is my 200dpi (yeah, it stinks badly) video of my last run, with notes for those who are still working at it. I'll record it again tonight (actually sort of excited about this) and hopefully work out all the bugs for that last fight.. As Grumpy Elf said, it's all about placement..

Honestly, after the announcement of the Selfie camera in 6.1, I quit watching the patch notes. This means I missed some of the new recipes that came along for Alchemy . Tonight when I logon, I'll be running over to my alchemy hut, to pick-up the Tome of the Stones . This teaches how to create a i640 alchemy trinket. Combine this with a crafted belt, I should be Savagely Epic!  Now I just need to find some shoulders , craft a belt and I'll be Savagely Epic . And if you haven't seen this video linked on The Grumpy Elf, it's definitely worth a watch.. My spanish is terrible, ignore it. It's all about the subtitles.

As I've stated before, I have guildies who are running legacy content for achievements, titles and mounts. Last August, I helped a guildie get her Sarth+3 drake mount. 2 days ago, she called in guild for a healer! *PLEASE* and I tried to bring in my disc priest. Sadly, she's never ran ICC 25-man, so she couldn't get into the raid for 25-heroic. Doing some research, I found that it's absolutely soloable. Sure Disc has really low DPS, but it is  possible to complete. Here's the first few bosses done by a level 90 shadow/disc priest. Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 This got me thinking... why my priest? That drake boss... Ok, so how do I heal the boss to full health in order to move on. Warlocks have 0 healing abilities, maybe I could pack along a big bag of bandages and 'heal' it up that way..  I could call in a healer, like Taur did.. On the other hand, my druid can heal and dps like a champ. Heck, maybe even heal enough in feral spec!? While I am at it

The other night (before Black Temple), I was trying to get into a few dungeons. To avoid the stress of tanking, I jumped into the DPS (i.e. werecat) queue. Sadly after 45 minutes in queue, I check the 'queue status' to see 0/1 Tank 1/1 Healer 3/3 DPS. OMG, go figure.. It's all my fault no dungeon... I hop on YouTube and watch the Grimrail video to get an idea of what to do on boss 2 (1 and 3 are fairly straight forward). I queue up and happily drop into this very dungeon. Managing to get through with me dying (to trash of all things). Yeah over-pulled coming up to the boss 2. Happily no wipes. Sadly no loots worth anything for me (i615 replacement of existing i630 crafted item).. In fact, the Tavern quest netted me only the ' bloody bandanna ' which sparked the run into BT. Salts includes how to get the differences between normal and heroic, plus the achievements in the dungeon. Here are each of his videos for the level 100 dungeons.. Everbloom: Grimrail

Last night I decided that it was time to head back to the Black Temple and finally attempt to pickup Illidan's headpiece . It was extremely easy 30 levels over all the bosses and they only progressed to phase 2 where it was required by the boss. Since I'd never ran Black Temple at level, I found this quick video by Nobble extremely helpful. He points out an easy order for killing the bosses so that you can get into see Illidan. (counter clock wise). It was more helpful for me to simply find the best path between bosses. As I've stated before, it's SO EASY to get lost in these places!?! :) It's funny running through this as a raid, after seeing it as the warlock scenario to get green fire. Many of the same bosses are here, except the warlock scenario starts at the front door and Akama takes us straight for the Essence of Anguish. To get there, I took the portal.. Yep. Back to Panderia, taxi'd to Temple, then portal to Shatratth. I've now set my

One more to 100... The other night, I got my guardian druid, Esha, up to 100. Happily was in the middle of the Nagrand quest chain, dropping traps and gathering leathery animals. As with Elk, I ran the proving grounds and got my 610 staff. I was able to one-shot it, because of a mechanics difference. As a tank, if you don't finish the last mob before the timer, it lets you slide... As long as your healer doesn't die, you're good. I haven't tried running Silver yet as I still don't have the 610 to get into Heroics, so no hurry. Looking at Arielle's video, it looks more than do-able.  I managed to get into a random Everbloom. What a mess. Problem number one, IMO, the DPS didn't know the fights. Sure, it was my first run as tank, but still. On spider boss, DPS was leaving the Pale One alone, he'd inhale the goo, enrage and then start attacking. Spider boss gets a big tasty snack! Mages we pulled while healer was OOM. On Yalnu, we had tons of flo

Sitting here in the office, watching the "Looking for Group" documentary on Youtube. I think it's funny with the background of the Gates of AQ  (24m17s) comments then compare the results of what I think happened with the Draenor release...

Elkagorasa has reached a point in his gearing, that I think Heroics are in order. I've ran a number of normal dungeons and gotten a number of gear items. According to the armory, he's at a 607 gear score equipped with 613 looted (or in bags). The proving grounds, introduced back in MoP, are a series of 8 fights in increasing difficulty that are supposed to test your raid worthiness. The start with basic single target fights (do you know the class rotation) in bronze, with multi-target aoe fights and cc requirements (stop the healer!) in silver. Basically DPS down all illusionary npcs, before the timer runs out. In Warlords they were implemented as a bar to pass before entrance. Heroic Garrison Quest. The Tavern in my garrison is only adding to the frustration with all the heroic quests that keep popping up. "Go get this item from UBRS" but it forgets to tell you that it only shows on Heroic. (Note skull in quest log for heroic dungeons quests). My frustrati

This morning I decided to give the Green Fire quest line another try. I believe I was approximiately i505 last time I attempted, today Elk is sporting a 535 level gear. This time was completely different. Elk was able to burn through the giant baby head in no time at all. Howl of Fear on the Lost Souls. Gateway across center to give a second avoidance of them. One interrupt of the AOE, but mostly just stayed far back. Soul Leech provided all the healing for the fight. One healthstone in my pocket, just in case.. What I hadn't considered was what came next . The scenario continues up until you fight the big boss  Kanrethad Ebonlocke . I had watched a few of the strat videos, and read some strategies, but hadn't actually thought it would continue on.. Top it off, I didn't give myself enough time to research and complete the Ebonlocke fight. A few attempts, where I managed to die on his first chaos bolt, one time I had a soulstone and revived from it, to die from a swarm

I have been enjoying the CarBot WoWCraft cartoons! This 3-part series actually made me laugh out loud.

Ok, I am still stuck on Yikkan Izu . I've taken to waiting the 13 minutes for Crystal of Insanity to reset, so about only 2 attempts each night. Apply all self buffs. - Insanity, Dark Intent , Crit food Grab some arena pots if I don't have some, like  Brawler's Cunning . Summon voidwalker (or void lord). Zone in, summon major demon, typically  Doomguard , but going to try Infernal for the AOE. Cast typically boss rotation, CoE, Immolate, Conflagerate, Incinerate...  Watch for Shriek , try to interrupt with Fear , Shadowfury , Howl of Terror Best I've been able to achieve is about 25% health remaining. What happens is something like: I use up all my interrupts, get hit by the Shriek and stunned for a few seconds. During this time, I am not healing with Soul Leech , so my vw dies. VW dies, everything aggro's me and I die.  I get out of the stun quickly with Unbound Will . Resummon a new vw , only get overwhelmed with adds and die. I AOE too many

As I anxiously dungeon my bear up in the levels, I am once again introduced to the complexity that was only found in Vanilla. The dungeon of the day is Blackrock Spire . This dungeon has 9 bosses in the 'upper' region and 5 more in the lower region. There are 7 different 'floors' to this map, with several shortcuts between each level. If I was a Blizzard level designer, this would be my masterpiece. I think this would be a perfect level for Warlords of Draenor (Orcs, Ogres, and Spiders Oh My!). 83 minutes at level 57! Play time has reached a soaring 2100 minutes! (1 day 11hrs) to reach 57.99. Yeah, I am only 2000 xp from reaching druid flight form. I was so torn to just run one more dungeon, or maybe go fly out to the next zone and grind some beasts, but I decided to simply wait for next time I can run dungeons. Probably later this weekend. Update :: Sunday night, logged in for about an hour. Of course, get BRS again, and ding 58 while clearing the trash in the

Blizzard finally realized that most young, male players hate playing casters because robes, really do, look like long dresses . They now have plans to alleviate the issue. In the next patch, players will no longer have to transmog their chest pieces. Instead, they will be given the option when equipping it to either select a tunic or robe options. The tunic models will be similar to the full robe, but cutting off a the belt. This will lead to less male casters saying....   Further WoW News: WowHead Patch 5.4.8 Blizzard - new game - Blizzard Outcasts Blizzard - Female Draenei Model Amijade - Flying Warlock mount GameInformer