Haven’t played that much lately, just some dailies now and then and a few instance runs, but here’s a selection of nice screenshot taken over the past few months.
Unfortunately there will be some changes to the Season 4 Epic rewards as you can read here on wow-insider.
The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:
Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none
This is bad news for everybody who doesn’t play with a cookie cutter setup, or who just isn’t very good as pvp. Teams below 1550 rating (the majority I would think) won’t get any rewards. This will probably change the Arena landscape, as I assume a lot of people will just not bother anymore with Arena. And this will leave the hardcore pvpers battling it out amongst themselves, and they might be struggling to get a decent rating.
Has Blizzard thought this through ? You would think so. I really wonder what the mindset it of the people that come up with this stuff…
Mainly did dailies dailies and more dailies this week. Think I went a bit overboard as I didn’t feel like doing them at all the past few days. So today we just did the Auch. Crypts instance. The bosses gave me two more spirit shards. I had 15 in my bag, so I finally figured out where to exchange them. You can use those spirit shards at Gartok in Terrokar Forest. You only need 8 to obtain Swift Windfire Diamond, a Metagem to be used in your headgear socket. I am currently using it in Earthwarden’s coif and it’s a nice gear upgrade.
And with pain in my heart I had to let Jerry the wolf, my trustworthy companion from around lvl 28 – 60 go. I don’t see myself leveling a pet from 60 – 70, and I needed to open up a slot to learn the highest ranks of Bite and Gore. Got a very nice new dinosaur named Sparkles though. He holds aggro very well, and he was already tamed at lvl 69. I took him with me on all the dailies and he’s just turned 70 during the last instance run. I found him in the top north sphere in Netherstorm. If you have a pet spot open, I’d like to suggest you try one of them out. They look fun (wiggly tail and all) and do nice dmg as well.
And that makes my pet collection complete, got a cat, a ravager and the above mentioned dino now. I sure hope that once WOTLK arrived we get 2 more spots so we can train the new animals in Northrend. Otherwise I am going to have to let go of one of them and that won’t be fun.
One picture says more than 1000 words ;). Here you can see what I have been up to. The instance runs with Morphea were a lot of fun. We completed the Key to Arcatraz questline, finished up some group quests in Netherstorm and overall had a lot of fun.
What you don’t see are Morpheus’ Arena matches, don’t have time to hit that Print Screen button. Actually I have plenty of time while being stunlocked or feared or when dead on the ground, but those shots wouldn’t be very good for my fumble ego :).
There is a very nice article on wow-insider on Hunter DPS.
A lot of people will tell you that a Hunter is an overly easy class: sic your pet, turn on Auto Shot, and you’re done. While having a built-in tank that you can even heal a bit gives you a pretty strong advantage when going it alone, I’d have to say they oversimplify things a bit.
I have to agree with this. Especially instance runs were a challenge at 1st with managing your pet, keep threat low and setting traps. I’ve gotten a bit better at it now, but it takes some practise ;).
After a successful Manatombs run friday night, I only had a few 10k of xp to go, so I decided to head to Netherstorm and do a few quests to get to 70 ! And while killing one of those weird creatures outside area 52, I dinged to 70 ;). Ofcourse I received a lot of GRATZ !!!! from the guild.
Got some pretty nice gear from the instance runs and some blue quest rewards. I got the pvp S1 leggings and will get the gloves as well when I have 20 AV marks. My current spec is 18/43/0, which works very nicely along with Spikee, the revenger. When i get a crit, the Go-for-the-throat talent gives him rage, which he then uses for his Gore ability which can do quite a bit of dmg. Only thing I am not too thrilled about is the improves concussion shot, but it’s ok, it can help out every now and then. Morphea will mainly be doing PVE, we’ve been having a lot of fun doing instance runs lately, so I hope to upgrade my gear a bit by doing the 5 man instances and maybe when we have all geared up a bit, Heroics.
So after almost three years, Morphea my hunter ‘alt’ reached max level ;). I mainly started playing her late last year. It went by pretty fast even the outland parts 60-70. The instance runs helped a lot. Got most of Netherstorm, all of Blade Edge Mountains and Shadowmoon left to do for gold.
We did quite a few instance runs this weekend, the Black Morass and Steamvaults were the toughest ones, but in the end we managed to finish them all :).
Especially the Black Morass is excellent. It’s a constant fight and you have to keep on your toes the whole time. But once you get into a sort of rhythm, it’s not too hard. Morphea was on addon duty with a little help from a mage (beano or pangloss). Excellent tankage was provided by Donahue and healing by Timps ;). Blizz should definately take this direction in WOTLK, I think this instance also won the best instance poll on the wow forum.
Some nice new loot included a new gun and a new head piece ! The gun looks awesome :).
As you can see in the picture below there was quite a bit of interest for the new dailies ;). The new ones are very easy and pay well. Especially now that the novelty has worn off a little, and you don’t have to fight 6 other people for the same mob. The two new ones in Hellfire are also very good. Quick to do and you get a sunwell surprise packet, that can contain a badge of justice, and always a green item that I usually end up selling to a vendor.
There is an excellent overview at cursegaming of all the dailies. Not all are available yet as Aggramar is currently in Phase 2.
We also tried the new instance the Magister’s Terrace and unfortunetely got beat by the second boss. I am sure we’ll get our revenge when we get back in somewhat better PVE gear. It’s a beautiful instance and definately different from other ones. A lot of casters though, that are hard on the tank. Only thing I didn’t like were the tight corridors, where you sometimes end up pulling, as it’s hard to see when you play a Tauren and it make the fighting somewhat confusing.
All in all patch 2.4 is very nice I think. Patching was very smoothly, I turned off most of my addons (except Bongos2) at patch day, and updated everything thursday and friday night and dropped a lot that I didn’t use much anyway. Oh and I can now press my mount when I am in Moonkin and I morph into caster form and hop on. Very convenient ;).
Update : Excellent overview of the new dailies + the Phases 1-3 explained at the Wowhead Forum
Patch 2.4 is here today in Europe, and I am very much looking forward to doing the new dailies, the new 5 man and the other new stuff that 2.4 brings.
Found this writeup very hulpful at joystiq.com:
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/03/25/the-best-of-wow-insider-patch-2-4-special/
Ok it’s been a bit longer than a week, but the title sounded cool ;). Morphea has finally left Terrokar Forrest behind her. We did the group quests with the guild, which was a lot of fun, but the environment was getting on my nerves by now, so I left a few quests undone and finally moved to Nagrand. I’m so glad I got an epic mount, because it’s rather big and there is quite a bit of running around between the various quest hubs and mobs.
The first quest chains I did were ofcourse the hunting quests for the Nesingwary Epidition. Kill 60 goats, owls and clefthoofs. And then the elites. A friendly guild druid helped out with those. The big elephant like creature at the end of the chains ‘Tusker’ was pretty tough, but we made it and I got me a new gun to replace the epic pvp bow. I also collected the beads killing ogres and some quests for the Consortium.
Also ran various instances with the guild the past week, with the help of one or two non-guildies here and there. Slave Penns was easy, we were a bit higher lvl than the instance is rated, and cleaned it out without problems. Sethekk Halls was more troublesome. I think we bit off a bit more than we could chew, and wiped quite a few times, especially at the End Boss, some of us even had to go back to the caravan camp and repair. But it was so cool when we finally did it. The quest reward for the instance is a very nice polearm with lots of agility and stamina on it that actually looks great.
Mana Tombs seemed to be better suited. Only had a little mishap, we even beat the Prince without any troubles. But out of all these, the most fun was Old Hillsbrad in the Caverns of Time. It was pretty tough, but we made it, only wiping twice. The mobs have fear, and some of the groups are pretty close together so you can figure out what happened those two times ;). Also cruised around old Southshore and Hillsbrad for a little while after we were done. It’s very nicely done. So nice to see Hillsbrad in it’s original state ! All in all Morphea is now lvl 68 1/2 or so, and still plenty to do in Nagrand.
Almost exclusively played Morphea, with Morpheus doing the daily pvp almost every day, and one Arena Night. We did well this week going 7-3, now with a priest / mage / boomkin combo, instead of hunter / mage / boomkin. Ruryk has dusted off his retired priest and at least the fights do last a lot longer now ;).
Patch 2.4 is around the corner, I think it’s already been downloaded in the background, looking forward to the new dailies !