My favourites

Class - The hunter would be by far my favourite class. They are a ranged DPS class that have the ability to tame beasts. They have 3 specialization, Survival, Marksman, and Beastmaster. I just got mine to lv 90 and hope to replace my mage with him. He is the first toon I created when I started playing wow, he is specialised into the the beasmaster class, and has the most hours of game play logged.

Pets - Since the hunter is my most favoured and played class, my favourite hunter pet would be my celestrial bear. He is a rare spawn that takes days to camp to capture.

Land Mount - The mechanized chopper would be by far the best land mount there is. It has the ability to ride a second character with you in its side cart. It is an expensive mount that requires an engineer to create for you.

Flying Mount - The turbocharged flying machine would place as my #1 mount. Its is also and engineer created mount. Its a gyro copter that requires an engineer to ride.

Profession - Engineering is my favourite profession, since its required to use several of my favourite mounts, and has many awesome ability's such as explosives, parachutes, rocket boots and damage enhancing glove enchants.

Old School raid - Uldar tops my raid list for favourites. It was based in the Lichking expansion and in its time it was a long and difficult raid. What makes this one my favourite is the first boss encounter that is fought on mechanized mounts such as seige engines, demolishers and choppers.

Starting area - The goblin starting area in my opinion is the most unique area of them all. Its based in a sort of industrial area, with many quests unique to the goblin story line.

New Raid Team

 I made a switch to a new raid team and guild (The Valar) to get some raid progression. My first week running with them we blazed through the first 4 bosses. We are currently are hung up on the 5th boss.

The first boss encountered are the Stone Gard. They are the first line of defence against those daring to enter the vaults is a stolid row of enchanted, bestial statues. There are 4 different statues, Amethyesis, Cobalt, Jade and Jasper. In a 10man raid there are only 3 of these present that are random depending on the week. I find it to be over all easy fight as long as Cobalt is not present with Amethyesis.

Second boss if Feng the Accursed. He is a 3 phase fight that can be easy if the heals are good and everyone knows to stack for attacks such as epic center and use proper defencive abilities and healing AOE's. This is a good fight to test DPS ablity to properly move when they need to.

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder, the third boss is the leader of the Zandalar trolls. I was surprised to see this boss for the first time, because I just did not understand where he fit into the story line. As a DPS this fight did not really enforce any mechanics for me other than to DPS. There was a group that when into the voodoo, but I have no idea what they had to do. This boss was just a one shot for us.

The Spirit of Kings is the fouth encounter in the vaults. Ancient records tell of these legendary rulers, powerful mogu who carved an empire from the very rock of Pandaria. Their names still cause the land to tremble: Zian of the Endless Shadow, Meng the Demented, Qiang the Merciless, and Subetai the Swift. Once again was an easy fight. We basically followed the tank around and spread out Subatai was out. We also had to avoid an ability called flanking orders, that causes one of the groups of statues on either of the four walls to walk across the room, cleaving anyone in their path.


The fifth boss is Elegon, and the one we are currently work on is a celestial dragon. This is a very fun and different fight than anything I have done in the past. To start out we turn into celestial beings upon walking on his platform. As a DPS I need to leave his platform for a moment to clear a debuff that slowly stacks on me that increase my damage taken. This boss requires everyone to be on their best game and requires no slip ups. He has 3 different phases, our group has the first two down pat but are struggling in the third, possibly due to the transitions phases where we have to down orbs that cause increased damage to the boss, and might not be getting enough of these down. We always seem to enter the last phase with a bit too much health on the boss.

I am confident we will have this boss dead early this week, allowing us to get to the last boss and possibly the next raid, Heart of Fear, to enter an entire new level of gear with gear tokens to get out set bonuses.

25man VS 10man raids

Everyone has their opinion of whether a 25man raid is better than a 10 man. I officially hate 25man raids. I will never be volunteering or allow my self to be drafted into a raid set to 25 player mode unless I personally know at least 24 of the people in that group (not including my self), #1 - know the fights inside and out, #2 - can pull at least half their own weigh, and #3 - Can show the group the respect of having their gear enchanted and gemed so they are not just dead weight being dragged by the players doing the work. The only sad exception this is the 25man Raid Finder version that is a dumbed down version of the real thing were you expect the majority of the group to suck.

The Monk

With my youngest brother now involved in the game, that means we get 300 times the experience towards levels when playing together on a character under level 80. So we both started some monks, and also both chose the pandaren race.

 The adventure begins on the Wondering isle which is the starting area for the pandaren race and a content of Pandaria. It is a large sea turtle named Shen-zin Su  that is roaming the great sea. The zone had about 90 quests that went by rather quick, since the time on the island was enjoyable from the wonderfully detailed landscape. There was also a lot of movement from area to area that helped keep your attention on the game. Nearing the end of our journey on the wondering isle, one of the final quest we need to finish before we choose which faction we will be joining, is to remove an alliance air ship that has crashed into Shen-zin Su. The alliance ship that crashed was threatening the giant turtles life which in turn threatened everyone’s life on it. It also contained some horde prisoners that were the first non pandaren quest givers for the pandaren starting zone, following some quests from the alliance. One of the final quests was to remove the air ship by blowing it up, and then heal Shen-zin Su injury.

 My brother and I choose to follow the alliance faction, as the majority of my character are alliance and all of them on my main server are. We managed to get to level 60 in about 10 hours of game play with help of the experience boost, mostly running dungeons after completing the starting zone. My brother had decided to stick with the dps class of the monk, but I have been jumping all over. I started as tank, with off spec dps, and now have just switched to healer keeping my off spec as dps. I have yet to actually heal anyone, but the healing mechanics seem to have no similarity to any of the other healing class, so its going to be an interesting learning experience.

What a long grind.

Well, after five days and a bit over 30 hours of eye straining game play, I have finally reach level 90. I also managed to do this solo. I guess I was unintentional punishing my self by sticking to my fire mage spec instead of switching to a frost spec that would have been far less painful to level with. But I took this advantage to tweak and prefect my fire rotation and pulled through in the long run ... a very long run. I also find out shortly after reaching level 90, that for every person in a group grants an extra 10% experience increase which would have got me there 40% faster since there is a 5 person cap to a group. But this long haul let me experience the beautiful landscape of Pandaria and collect a few achievements along the way.

  Now with the leveling out of the way, Its time to grind reputation with the many factions in Pandaria. My main focus is the Golden lotus, they have all my patterns for my professions: Tailoring and Enchanting. They are based in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms which is located into the middle of Pandaria and is not unlockable untill lv 90.

COUNT DOWN

WOOT! 7 hours left until the release of the Mist of Pandaria expansion. Its what every WOW player is eagerly awaiting at this moment in time, or at least me. A new world (Pandaria), new race (Pandarian), new class (monk). I have my alarm clock set for 3am to try and get some server first achievements before I have to wake the rest of the family up and get ready to head to school. Its a bummer I have an test worth 25% of my grade tomorrow or it would be a WOW day! I will just have to try and catch up right after school if my wife love me enough to let me lock my self away from the family for the night. Well I'm off to get in a bit of studying and some sleep before the big release in 7 hours.

The Fall of Theramore

 While eagerly waiting for the expansion that is just around the corner, Blizzard has released a scenario for us to play. It takes place in the Alliance fortress of Theramore where the horde leader Garrosh Hellscream ordered it to be attacked. They dropped a massive mana bomb on the barracks destroying most of the fortress, all that remained were a few buildings and the docks. This adventure begins at the docks where we need to destroy 3 of the horde ships docked there, defeat their crew, and captains. After completing that and purging the area of odd groups of horde, we encounter Gash'nul and his two wyvern sidekicks. He died very easily as I soloed him with my Disc Priest while the other two attending my group were off screwing around. After he is taken care of we meet Lady Jaina Proudmoore down in the crater which used to be the area that held the enormous barracks. She is dealing with the mana bomb and sends us to clear some random groups, a horde siege machine and gain some land back from the horde. Returning back to her we are encountered with a horde onslaught and then followed by Warlord Rok'Nah. He was a bit tougher than his fellow orc Gash'nul, and with the help of a plate wearier in the group died effortlessly with the help of my atonement from Disc Priest DPS.
 I am overall disappointed with this scenario as it was too easy. My priest who has good gear, a failure for a Hunter and Death Knight with an ilvl of 354 had no issues of any kind with this. I imagine I would be able to stop this one out solo on my geared Druid tank if needed. The good side of this is it is well laid out and adds a great start to all the new content to come in the up coming expansion.