General Things

I don't have anything big to talk about but I do have several smaller things that I can share.

Guild Update:
Things aren't to bad. It has been a bit of a bumpy road, but things seem to be moving in the right direction. My raiding week has been a little frustrating because I haven't been able to raid much due to personal stuff, and the guild has seemed to have had a few issues while I was gone. Tuesday they decided to work on VR, and apparently it was a very frustrating night, only getting him to just under 50%. I think we can chalk most of the issues up to growing pains. We have a lot of new people that are not used to a more serious level of raiding and we have some people that are relatively new to guild leadership positions not doing/knowing what is expected of them. These thing resulted in long waits between pulls and relatively poor performance from DPS. We have also had issues with the number of healers showing up or raids, and have had to bring in an alt or two to get a raid started. On Wednesday, they did Gruul's and apparently it went really well, then the went to Mag and apparently it was a lot like Tuesday so the raid was called early.

Thursday night was great. We went to Mag and three shotted him. The first two attempts went well but little things like someone DCing wiped us. After that we headed to SSC. We didn't really have a good group to try VR, and we didn't want to call it so we decided to give Lurker a try. In our first night of attempting him as a rebuilt guild we three or four shotted him. He also provided some great gear that was desperately needed by dropping the Tanking Mace and The Cord of Screaming Terrors. If you have read my blog for I while you know that I really wanted the The Cord of Screaming Terrors. I still would like it since it is a great belt, but I couldn't bring my self to take it from one of our new members that needed it a lot more. Plus with 2.4 around the corner I will probably be swimming in spell hit soon.

Anyway, Thursday was a great night for us. On Monday we will be trying VR again and I am sure we can get him down. Hopefully we will be able to get a few of the other SSC and TK bosses down soon so that we can try Vashj again.

Patch Update:
Not a whole lot here that I want to talk about, but there are a few interesting topics.

- Players will no longer need the Master’s Key to enter Karazhan. The gates to Karazhan will still require the Master’s Key to be unlocked. - Basically this means that it will be easier to get alts into Kara. Not a bad idea, but not that big of a deal in my opinion. Getting the Master's Key can be a little time consuming but it isn't hard by any means. I will tell you this right now. I will not run with anyone that doesn't have the key unless I know them. Kara isn't all that bad, but people that are very new to it and without a decent level of pre-kara gear are going to have problems with it.

- Many gameplay elements of the encounters in Magtheridon’s Lair have been changed to decrease their overall complexity and difficulty. - This has been in the patch notes for a little while but the specific changes where unknown to me until the new Blizzcast that came out. I am like most of the changes they made but I worry that they may have nerfed it two much. Nerfing the adds is a great idea. I have always thought that the first two minutes of this fight are the hardest and after that it is just a tank and spank. The one change I am a little iffy about though is reducing the amount of mental exhaustion from clicking the cubes. Personally I think that that rotion is really what gives the Mag fight its flavor. If one person can sit at cube and click it then it really is just a tank and spank, bosses like Netherspite and Prince will be harder.
On a more positive note the adjusted loot is great. Getting 25 gold per kill, a 20 slot bag and some epic gems is very nice. It will be interesting to see how we distribute the new gems though.

- An Upgradeable Alchemist Stones (link) - I and several other people have suggested this on the WoW Forums many times and it is great to see that they are doing something about it. The current Alchemist Stone is nice but not really good for anyone since its stats are so spread around. Being able to upgrade it to something that is specific to your roll is awesome and could finally give us a reason for having Alchemy on our mains.
While I like the concept, I am disappointed by the execution so far. The healing trinket is great, and my guess is that it will become the most sought after healing trinket in the game, but the other three trinkets leave a lot to be desired.

The Caster DPS trinket has 54 hit on it. Spell hit is a great stat and this has a ton of it on it, but once you hit the cap its worthless. Most casters I know don't have a big problem getting to the cap with just crafted and lower level raid gear. As it is, it is only useful for raiders, and most raiders will give it up fairly quickly for Spell Damage Trinkets when the can get better gear with hit on it. This trinket will work best for someone that is new to raiding and doesn't have a lot of gear yet, but they wil probably stop using it fairly quickly. If I had my say, I would change it to give you 61 Spell Damage instead of 54 hit. It would compete with other Spell Damage trinkets but not pass it from a DPS standpoint, and still provide a significant amount of mana.

The Tanking trinket has 54 Defense on it. This trinket has the same problem as the Caster DPS trinket. It provides a tone of a stat that is not hard to cap. Most tanks I talk to want one thing: Stam. If they put a ton of stam on this trinket instead of defense, then every tank you know would want it.

The Melee DPS trinket also seems to be underpowered. I will be the first to admit that I know little about melee dps, but most of the things I have read say that 54 crit is no all that valuable. Some have gone as far to say they would prefer the 15 Stam, Strength, and Agility on the original stone then the crit on the new stone.

Toon Update:
Graylo - Again not much to say here. I told you how raiding was going above and there is not much I can do with Graylo that is new until the patch comes out or we start to raid some content that is new to me. I have been doing a lot of daily quests with him. I am trying to get the money for an epic flying Graypal. I am not that far off. a few more days of dailies and I should be good.

Graypal - I haven't played him much but when I did play him it mattered. Graypal went into kara for the first time last night. The run was full of alts so it didn't go great but we did get Attunmen and Moroes down. I mainly wanted to go for badges and rep so that I could get the rings but I ended up walking away with [Handwraps of Flowing Thought]. It also taught me that Graypal needs a lot of work. His DPS wasn't bad but mana was an issue. I really need to update my gear so I get more mana from VT and I need to work on keeping VT up on the boss.
Grayfel - As I had mentioned earlier my playtime was limited this past week, and since I was doing more dailies Grayfel didn't see any action. I will probably try and work on him a little soon just to use the rested XP.