Conjured Biscuits

Every time that I started playing with my shaman team, I first logged in with my mage Alaire to make a mage table and stock up on biscuits. Usually I would use only very few of them and have the rest decay when logging out.

Yesterday I decided to change that. I gave the daily quests on the isle a whirl and did the same today, giving me friendly reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive and access to the non-decaying [Naaru Ration]. Yummy!

Shopping list woes

With the purchase of [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] I have now spent 40k honor. At the time that I am typing this I have 12k honor and 650 arena points. Now, I figure the first thing to buy with arena points would be [Brutal Gladiator's Mail Gauntlets], which require no rating. Easy. But what about the honor?

[Guardian's Mail Girdle] 17850 Honor, 40 AB, no rating requirement.
[Guardian's Mail Bracers] 11794 Honor, 20 WSG, 1575 Rating.
[Guardian's Mail Sabatons] 17850 Honor, 40 EotS, 1700 Rating.

I think we have a clear winner here also. These bits are so awesome that I will worry later about the other slots. =]

Seasonal Eye-candy

At first glance at the quests available in town for the seasonal flavor, I was shocked at how fiddly they are. A quest item with a cast time 0.1 seconds shorter than the target stays up with a constantly changing target. Tossing torches that doesn't work well with the wow camera to track it. Add someone else doing the same quests at the same time and it is pure chaos.

BUT! there is a component to this that is similar to looking up the elders all over the world, but gives you not only tokens but also gold. 6g and 5 tokens for visiting bonfire of your own faction, 12g and 10 tokens for visiting one of the opposite faction. Making a trip to around those bonfires nets you around 500g and enough tokens to buy some eye candy.

So I took my shamans around the game world, bagged the gold and got the eye candy going: [Brazier of Dancing Flames].

Honor Shopping

Closing in on 25.200 honor and 20 EotS tokens, I knew I had to do something about temptation. The Season 1 [Gladiator's Gavel] provides 199 spellpower, is worth an enchant which gives another 40 spellpower and allows me to equip a shield. I already have a quest shield bagged on all characters, the [Spellbreaker's Buckler] with 29 spell damage. Compared to the [Battle Mage's Baton] from the Ring of Blood in Nagrand, that is a significant upgrade. The S1 Gavel and Shield combo gives 268 spell damage. the staff gives 85 spell damage - and some crit. 183 more spelldamage is huge - considering that I am currently at 470 odd total and just short of 1k is full S3 kit.

Now, the problem with that is that it is very attractive but in seven days there will be Season 4 starting and bumping the S2 [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] down to honor - supposedly for the same price. The S2 gavel gives 26 more spell damage and just over 1% spell hit. So it is quite sensible to wait for this.

To avoid that I succumbed to this temptation, I went and spent my honor on the [Vindicator's Band of Dominance]. That is 15k honor and 10 AV marks, and more importantly, still part of the honor kit after S4 hits, since people usually use the current season's honor ring along with the previous season's honor ring.

Now I can PvP my heart out to get honor together for the next two bits to buy after Wednesday: [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] and [Merciless Gladiator's Barrier]. That should cost me 25.200 honor for the gavel and 15.000 honor for the shield, plus 20 EoTs tokens for each. I can't wait, but I'll have to! =]

A bridge too far

Oh. My. God. I love quad shaman pvp. Even with my 'of the noob' gear I am able to strike decisively. When I start defending on the bridge, I almost pity the attacking horde.

After my first PvP weekend I have 13.5k honor and am supposed to get 350ish arena points. I also had 51 AV marks. These are typically decaying in the mailbox of a PvP char. That fact, combined with my strong dislike of the Elephant mount motivated me to blow them on the Stormpike goat, which I promptly did. Time for bed now. =]

First steps in PvP

After reaching 70 on Thursday night, I could finally equip the blues that I had waiting in the shaman backpacks. Yet, the preparations were not complete. I was still short of Sha'tar revered reputation and all the fancy and expensive metagems had requirements that I could not fulfill. A couple of quests and Arcatraz finished my Sha'tar rep grind and after collecting a few more spirit shards I bought the Auchenai caster metagems.

Then I headed out and hit Alterac Valley again and also Eye of the Storm. I must say it was a very positive experience and great fun. While my individual characters are very weak, the combination is quite devastating.

I met a hunter at the Relief Hut that happened to be from my server, we got talking and decided on the fly to do some arenas for giggles. The hunter brought his main to battle for this, a rather well PvE geared resto shaman. We started out with a used team just under 1500 and played ten games, loosing 7, but winning 3. There was nobody as badly geared as my characters, by far. In some of our losses we lost 6 points, or 7, making the teams that opposed us quite a bit higher rated then us. This resulted in the rating not moving much.

Besides being very entertaining, the setup shows a lot of promise. Bad gear, me as arena noob, not having all my spells set up for ready use and a bunch of other things are all things that can be improved for sure, given time.

Playing with lighting is immensely entertaining. I am enjoying pvping with the shamans very much! Oh. AV is up. Laters =]

70!

After 10 days /played over an extended period of time, my four shamans hit 70 tonight. That brought a lot of fetching, carrying and running with itself, but seeing the four of them lined up in noob pvp gear uniform with four baby elephants to accompany them just had me grinning without even hitting a key.

After a bit of messing around with gems, a few enchants and respecting to cover up some blunders I made on the way to 70, I stuck my toe into the water of Alterac Valley. I just played twice. The very first bit of text that greeted me when I entered was some random player from another server recognize me as multiboxer and show a positive reaction. That is a good omen as far as I am concerned.

Considering that I have not done any pvp setup for my controls, was using a pve geared tank totally superflous just because I did not want to set things up fully yet and that my resilience is just as low as my spelldamage, I was positively surprised what I could do already.

I look with anticipation to the weekend! Time for bed, work and then pvp! Yay.