BORED BORED BORED, even stabbing someone in the back is boring today!

Well Alliance isn't doing it for me.....I'll leave Flashman over there and unguilded so I can have some private time wowing if I need to. I did the Barrens quests and got the welfare epic gear so Flash is fitted out out nicely. Did the same thing on my Tankadin too, I'm not really a tank, I don't enjoy the pressure so Aztrid will most likely go back to ret, I did like ret but melee is a bit meh. As previously posted I'm totally off Shaman, poor old Mammbo has hardly had a lookin except for when I need his tradeskills. I'm off locks too, can't be bothered. I'm sometimes levelling my little rogue, but then he's melee and although stabbing someone in the back is a bit of fun at first, it does get deathly boring....no pun intended. So where does this leave me? Well, I was trawling through my toons and there she was, shining out like a shaft of gold, my mage. I hadn't taken her out for a spin since the Chinese sellout expansion beat me around the head with the boredom stick and rarely played her even in Cata. I specced her fire, checked out icy viens for stats and priority lists and started laying waste to all that came before me. Mate! I love the playstyle, I remember all the kiting fun I used to have to do back in vanilla with this little mage and recalled that this toon was my first 60 back in the day.

Hopefully Sokz the mage can stop me from cancelling my sub....

Faction Change

Back in the day, way back in Vanilla WoW, I was Alliance. I was Alliance for a long time and levelled my first 60 (Sokz the mage, back then she was called Ameggy). One day I'm reading trade and it was juvenile rubbish and I remembered that it had been juvenile rubbish as long as I could remember, even Barrens chat was better! So I quit Alliance and rolled a BE Lock the day that Burning Crusade was released. Good fun and I never looked back on Alliance......until this week. Flashman my hunter has had a faction, race & sex change to a female Night Elf. Awesome!

Two reasons for the change:

1 - Horde /trade is pretty peurile.
2 - My Guild.

Number two is a biggy as number two's usually are :P

Sometimes I was just want to logon and play without having to say hello and be committed to help out or beat my head against some boss because someone in the raid just. doesn't. get. it. week after week for chrissake! Some people are just dumb or don't have the commitment to learn the strategy or don't realise that they're wasting nine other peoples valuable play time.

So I've gone off raiding with my guild for a bit, plus there was the ninja episode that I just can't let go. It goes like this, we have this fail druid tank, really loves himself, thinks he's the best player ever. So this epic caster ring ring comes up with perfect itemisation for my Elemental Shaman and this dumb prick of a tank rolls need on it and wins. WTF is that shit! So I ask why he's rolling need and he says it's for his OS and basically tough shit. It's a massive upgrade for me but as long as his piss weak OS is geared nicely then I guess that's fine.

Which leads me to the underlying reason. My raid team is fail. They just are. Noone takes it seriously, the dumb shit tank is sometime drunk, others are watching TV, it's all just an excuse to sound off in vent and have a chat. I've given up, I love my guild and I love my GM who is also the RL, but I just can't waste any more time and I think I'll go postal if I hear one more lame excuse why some dumb prick is standing in the fire.

So now I can login and be left alone. Flashman is not in a guild and will stay that way, noone on Alliance knows me and I can also play arbitrage on the neutral auction house. Life is good.

Even though Elemental has no love in Panda

or for that matter, neither does enhance. What is it with Shaman these days? Back in Cata my Enhance shaman was usually in the top 2 for dps. In Panda it's diabolical, actually diabolical doesn't cover it, embarrassment is more fitting. So I switched to Elemental full time and although the encounters are now easier and the dps is better, it's not where I think it should be. Ok, for AoE, yeah sure BALLISTIC! but who care about trash? Not me that's for sure, it's all about the deeps on the boss yes?

After reading all there is, totemspot, ej etc it looks like the blizz devs have lost there love if it ever existed in the first place. So yes, for the first time ever I'm blaming the devs.

To the Future!
I'm currently kitting out my Tankadin, got her to 90 and bought some gear off the ah to get her to 460 ilevel. Now I can enter LFR, I'm going for an avoidance build, seems more natural to me.

But before I shelve my shaman (no love from me either) I wanted to share my elemental shaman macro suite for those masochistic bastards out there who just can't let go, personally I'll keep an eye out for blueposts but meh.

The Macros!
 these macros trick wow into casting a lavaburst when it's off cd, just copy/paste/enjoy
lightning bolt spam with lava burst
/cast berserking
/castsequence reset=0.3 1,lightning bolt
/castsequence reset=0.3 lava burst
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

chain lightning spam with lava burst
/cast berserking
/castsequence reset=0.3 1,Chain Lightning
/castsequence reset=0.3 lava burst
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()


this macro casts healing surge on my mouse over target if they can be helped or myself if no mouse over
#showtooltip healing surge
/stopcasting
/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead] Healing Surge; Healing Surge

same with chain heal

and the bog standard frog macro
#showtooltip Hex
/clearfocus [modifier:alt]
/focus [@focus,noexists]
/cast [@focus,exists][@target,exists] Hex
/y Casting Hex on %F

Have fun! I'll be back hopefully a lot sooner with some Tankadin news.

Awesomeness is its own reward.

Is it just me? Everyone seems so over the moon about Mists of Pandaria, sorry 'm just not getting it at all. I used to race to the PC to fire wow up, now it's a job. I'm probably just getting old, but I was perfectly happy with Cataclysm content, raiding several nights a week, having fun. Blizz! why not just create some new Raids hey! Why does everything always have to be such a big deal.

The thing that irks me, the thing that really bugs me is this: I have children and quite frankly I've watched Kung Fu panda way too many times now, I don't need to see little pandas running around and being constantly reminded of it in MY TIME.

But I'm not quitting wow, I came close a couple of times over the last few weeks, but no, I'm still here. I've been here since Jan 2005 and a little thing like the Kung Fu panda expansion will not drive me away. After all, I survived WoTLK........don't get me started.


Ok, progression wise I have a 90, Mammbo (the old Shoez) who had a sex/race change and then back to male and is now a troll (he's very confused), I do like his hairstyle, white mohawk, very becoming.
Here he is in all his glory!

I switched to enhance back in Cata and really enjoyed it, Mammbo is my main and something occurred to me earlier this year: "Why do I have to be enhance or elemental, why can't I just be DPS and switch to whatever spec makes sense for xxxx encounter?" So this is what I do, and this is how I play my toon in raids/5 mans/LFR - whatever and it does cause issues. Loot. More on that later.

Or not

What can I say? Erm....I didn't go back to boxing. Well I did, a bit. I took the team to Blacrock Caverns a few times on normal, managed to do the first couple of bosses and got the shammies some gear upgrades and while I was doing this I was thinking in the back of my mind "why am I doing this? I'm in a perfectly good guild to go and instance with and roflstomp through this content" and so I stopped.

Why box when there's a LFG tool or you have a good guild? Yes they're are bad pugs, but my experience on all three 85s so far has been mostly positive. I guess it's all down to the reason for boxing in the first place. Looking at my very first posts you can see that it was frustration at trying to find an arc run, or indeed any group for anything. It was never about the challenge of boxing. I can't see a reason for boxing now, I really can't.

Indeed there has been much roflstomping through content since I stopped. Phear is reasonably geared, so I levelled Aztrid the tankadin and then Shoez the shammy. Currently I'm levelling Boondoggle my balance druid who is at 60. It's so easy levelling now, the levels fly by.

Funny thing is, even though I'm a happy single boxer, I just can't let go of my six accounts >.< really must sort that out hey?

And now back to Boxing

I've gotten Phear to 85, for reasons that I have yet to research, her DPS has dropped even though she's in better gear. Not sure why but probably due to some scaling I guess, still really good and better than in wotlk but now pumping out more reasonable levels of carnage :P Looks like a visit to EJ is in order.
Phear is my testbed, my pointman if you like. I've sent her ahead and she's completed all of the quests in Twighlight Hinterlands, Uldum and Mount Hyjal. Looking for quests that are boxable and have good rewards. Well I can't see that there's too much on the quest rewards side that I can't get comparable gear from the AH or from running an instance. With all the ridiculous collection quests it looks questing will only be done to friendly level with each faction and the rest of the time spent in instances exclusively with a tabard equipped. I'll need to sort out a rep grind order asap.

Pheardotdead

I. Am. A. GOD! Something just clicks, it's all come together, Pheardotdead my lock, has topped DPS in all pug instances I've been in since Cataclysm hit. No BS at all. I really REALLY need to watch aggro and regularly make use of soulshatter. What is it? Have I finally woken up? Well I don't know but essentially I spam one key and manually apply things like CoE, Corruption and Soulfire procs and somehow come out on top in pretty average gear, even mages are red faced.

Here is my macro set for Phear:
The first macro clicks the following two which makes this a one button macro

The Clicker Controller

/stopmacro [channeling]
/cast [@target] firebolt
/click MultiBarLeftButton1
/click MultiBarLeftButton2

Quick Soul Fire

/castsequence reset=2 Soulburn, Soul Fire
/cast [@pettarget] Firebolt

Main Spam Macro

/castsequence reset=combat/target Bane of Doom, Immolate, Conflagrate, Incinerate, Incinerate, Incinerate, Incinerate
/cast Chaos Bolt
/use 13
/use 14
/startattack
/cast [@pettarget,harm] firebolt

And the manual proc macro

/stopcasting
/cast Soul Fire

So what I'm finding is that I'm always casting something, there is no dead space at all. This is the first macro set since the start of BC that I can say without a doubt that I'm totally happy with.

scarypants

What to do hey? While waiting for Cat to hit, when I should be doing dailies and becoming rich, I'm leveling my Death Knight named Scarypants. She's currently at 71. I created this toon way back in April 2009 as something to play on the work laptop while I was working overseas for a few weeks and left her at 62 in Zangamarsh. So it's taken me a couple of weeks of very casual play to get her to 71, just questing and teaming up with the shammies for an occasional instance. It's tempting to level through BGs to 80 now as I did with my lock, the downside of that is rep loss so I've decided to level properly and last night got the Toured the Fjord achievement. It's amazing, at level 71 this death knight hits like a truck and has incredible survivability, I'm able to take on level 71 elites with little issue, very nice indeed. Being able to fly for only 500g has had a huge impact on leveling speed.
I'm running the Blood DK diseaseless, in some cobalt tanking gear and quest rewards and am finding that mobs are dying very quickly (much faster than my tankadin). Even after 11 solid levels I'm still getting used to the playstyle and rotation. With some help I've come up with this set of macros:

"tank0"
/cast dark command
/click MultiBarRightButton1
/click MultiBarRightButton2

"tank1"
/castsequence reset=combat blood boil, heart strike, death strike, heart strike
/cast Rune Strike

"tank2"
/cast Rune Strike

They're a work in progress and have just noticed that I have Rune Strike twice lol, I was experimenting a bit last night and having the Rune Strike in the tank1 macro seemed to work better. Any comments are welcome, the macro is ok but still not quite there due I think to my lack of DK knowledge.

Yawn - hurry up Cataclysm!!!!

It's a bit cbf at the moment. I log in, do the headless horseman, logout. Everytime I select a random dungeon it isn't random, seem to always get ToC - ughhhh. I really hate that place, gimmciky vehicle encounters just leave me cold. So I just leave the instance and logout. Last night was different however, I decided to visit some old content :) and went to Shadow Labs, what fun lol, killed murmur in less than a few seconds on heroic. What a difference 10 levels and good gear makes in these 70 instances, it's like being on a sight seeing tour. I remember years ago wiping again and again here and getting really frustrated. After that I went to Sethhek Halls and lo and behold there was Anzu - oohhhh! Looks like he's farmable without a druid now for the mount. After some quick research it appears that the drop rate has been increased significantly, which would explain why I've seen so many of the Raven Lord mounts strutting around Dal lately. Only bit of news macro wise is that I'm using the AoE macro on the pally all the time now, it holds aggro better.

macros updated for 4.0

I've updated the macros I use in the macro section with the addition of the shammy dps macros. Posted here as well :)

for single target

/cast elemental mastery
/cast blood fury
/castsequence [@targettarget, harm] [] reset=combat Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Earth Shock, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
/cast Lava Burst

 for AOE, subbed some chain lightning in to match the Pally AOE macr

/cast elemental mastery
/cast blood fury
/castsequence [@targettarget, harm] [] reset=combat Flame Shock, Chain Lightning,Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Earth Shock, Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
/cast Lava Burst