Heart of Fear: Garalon (10)

Garalon is a single-phase fight where you must kite the boss for the duration of the encounter however 2 tanks are still needed.

Garalon fixates on a random raid member and move towards them. Who he fixates on is determined by a debuff which can be passed between players. Therefore, you can control who the boss is following although one player cannot have the debuff all the time because it deals increasing damage to them.

Garalon's legs can be attacked and killed and doing so slows Garalon each leg slows him down more and makes kiting him easier and ensures that the kiter does not get hit by very damaging abilities that Garalon uses. 

Garalon will periodically revive his legs, so killing them is something that must be done throughout the entire fight. Killing the leg also hurts Garalon by the same amount of health the leg had.

The tanks' only role in the encounter is to soak the damage from a frontal cone attack that the boss does and that needs to hit at least two players.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 2

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

I've mentioned in my earlier post, that my initial drive was a mount but my true gold making was not happening at that stage and it wasn't really a goal. I've never actively set myself a goal while gold making but I have always used it as an enabler to aid my raiding in term s of buying the best enchants, gems and BoE gear. It has also provided me with the ability to buy gear for my alts to aid them in alt and pick up group raiding.

Once I had surpassed the level needed to meet this simple goal I've been able to add things like mounts, pets and not have to worry about being able to afford these minor luxuries.

While grinding out the rep for my Insane title I used my gold for buying rep the lock boxes to hand in to Ravenholdt, sure I'm lazy and could have used my rogue but it was a much better use of my time to used hired help than do it myself.

The last thing I've used the gold for is sponsoring guild competitions providing things ranging from pets to Mekgineer's Choopers as prizes.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 1

My first reason to make gold was this (no not a rig with better graphics...)

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

I started trying to make gold and being interested in it way back in Vanilla when at level 30 somethng it hit me that running around Azeroth on foot was really tedious and that all the max level characters had nice shiny mounts instead. At level 40 I was due to get a mount but the skill was going to cost something like 10g (don't take that as gospel) and the mounts were going to cost 100g (for a slow 60% mount) or 1000g (for the epic 100% version). You guys now have it soooo easy.

At the time I didn't even have the 10g to buy the skill let alone the 100g for the mount! I farmed some rare drops (Cold Basilisk Eye and the Big Iron Fishing Pole spring to mind) after reading something on http://wow.allakhazam.com/ which I sold for something like 40g each and spent a lot of time herbing. I still failed to get my mount at 40 and if memory servees me correctly I was something like 43 when I finally got mounted and spent the whole evening riding around Azeroth. But once I achieved that goal I stopped and focused on getting to 60 and then raiding.

Then came the Burning Crusade and a guy called Rixxor, a former guildie who just as we dinged 70 got himself his epic flyer at a cost of 5000g when me and everyone else was struggling to get the 1000g to get airborn. I focused more on some Auction House strategies mainly flipping items for profit and even buying everything of a certain type up and relisting.

I earned enough gold so I could raid easily but still had to be careful with gold but by the end of TBC I was on an epic flyer and had a couple of my 9 level 70 alts that also had epic flight. Wrath came and I was able to buy myself a Travelers Tundra Mammoth as a reward for dinging 80 and as my alts got to 80 they too got rewarded with epic flight. Then midway through raiding in Icecrown Citadel I hit ISP issues and ended up only getting 111kbps meaning I couldn't do 25 man raids so on raid nights I consoled myself by focusing solely on gold making and turned my tiny gold stash (it floated around to 15 to 30 thousand mark into over 100,000 gold and when 4.0.1 hit us Glyphmas came and I made a tidy 11500g overnight and another 40000g over the following week all from an investment of 5000g and I made loads of mistakes and should have made more.

Why I'm Glad Item Upgrades Are Being Removed In 5.2

Back in 5.1 we were given a new feature, upgrading gear from justice and valor points. Everybody loved it as it allowed key pieces of gear to be upgraded that were either already best in slot (BiS) or impossible to replace given your individual gear progression. 

That will all change in 5.2 though as Blizzard have decided that thee upgrades are only to be available in patches where there is no additinal raid content, if they even reintroduce it, this has sparked a lot of discussion particularly the other night in Exhumed's guild chat, so I decided to have a deeper think and post my thoughts here.

Three Today!

3 years ago today this blog was born. I had honestly expected to run out of ideas for content at best 2 and a half years ago and expected nobody to read it.

But I'm still here and I'm getting 100+ readers per day, sure its not gonna frighten MMO-Champion or WoWInsider, but a massive audience was never my aim and while I'd love to reach more eyes I'm happy that anyone reads my ramblings.

Looking through the stats on the site  is, for me at least, quite interesting:

• 58379 unique page visits;
• Top referrer is Google.com;
• Top search word is "bubbles";
• Most of you are from the United States;
• While most of you use Firefox (17125) many use Chrome (16988) and Internet Explorer (16147);

My top 3 posts? Well I was shocked to find none of them are priest related, the top page, with 5242 visits is a post entitled Cataclysm Beta: Portals Linking Darnassus to Exodar, in second place with 2707 visits was Archaelology 101 and in third place is Transmogrification 101 with 2253 visits. My most popular month was October 2012 with 4827 visitors, which was presumably due to the launch Mists of Pandaria.

The best and most unexpected result of the blog has been the new contacts I have met because of the blog and that has inspired me to continue writing and become more active in the WoW community, which I am proud to say is, without exception, full of great people. Bloggers with huge readership and podcasters who I have placed on pedestals are really just great down to earth folks like the rest of us.

I hope to be around for at least another 3 years, although I must admit the thought of still being in WoW after 10 years is a little scary. My goals for the future are to become a bigger contributor to the community by commenting more on other people's blogs and becoming a more active podcast listener, by sending in questions and opinions rather than doing nothing like I have done for the past 6 years!

So thank you all for helping me keep going throughout the past 3 years and if you have any feedback pleasepost comments on the relevant posts.

Where I'm At, What I'm Grinding....

Just a quick note to let you all know I haven't fallen of the edge of the world. Between work, home, the holidays and WoW commitments the past month have been carnage (especially work as I've had little free time on the night shifts when I do a lot of my blogging) and I have not had time to blog properly since mid-December and I've now consumed all of my backup posts!

Hopefully things will return to normal now so I'll be able to pay the blog a lot more attention over the next few weeks, especially as Evangelysm has its 3rd birthday this month.

So for now have fun and keep farming those dailies!