Thursday 29 May 2014

Running Free

Out of Money, Out of Luck

We are now into week 2 since the "Oh crap we need to do something patch", and for the next few weeks this is going to dominate the game that I play. I am not sure how much of an impact because last week was curtailed with a short stay on the outskirts of London. 2 nights in Slough is not what most people would choose for a short trip, but the hotel was within a stones throw of Windsor Castle and Legoland Windsor. Much fun was had, and these days I am able to switch off from WoW without any problems.

What a surprise it is raining in England!
Just in case you have not found a reason to go to Legoland, it is ideal for children aged 7-14 and of course big kids of any age.

Before going to Windsor, I managed to valor cap all my alts on Sunday night. I was required to dig deep into my mound of Timeless coins, but at this rate of expenditure I am going to be dreadfully short of Timeless coins after a few weeks, so much so that I might need re-adjust my strategy.

Very few of my characters had been sitting on spare Valor points prior to the patch dropping and so I am going to be much nearer to 8 weeks to upgrade all my gear than the 5 weeks I hoped it would take with 3000 valor already in the bank. According to Navimie, I am weak willed for not having a stash of valor ready to spend at a moments notice. I guess we are all going to be running on empty for at least a few weeks, not that anybody is holding their breath for this new expansion.

One thing I noticed during the upgrade process was the number of items in my characters possessions that are not from 5.4.

"All upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels."
Most of my casters were able to get a decent weapon early on in the expansion due to the Inscribed Serpent Staff being available at all good Scribes near you.


This was a considerable saving on the marginal upgrade of the Cloudscorcher Greatstaff, which required another 20 K Timeless coins. Now the Timeless coins are in greater demand any weapon upgrades are going to be pushed to the end of the queue or more likely a few runs through LFR in the hope of something better and the farming of 1000 Valor for the required upgrades.



For the player with only one or a small team of alts, the Deeds of Valor is a great lifestyle choice, but for the more discerning altoholic, we have a new meta game in town, and it looks like filling the summer months quite easily.

Having anything to do is an improvement on what the Grumpy Elf has been discussing, after the alleged mismanagement by Blizzard. The weeks keep going by and the expansion seems like it is farther away than ever. If we are lucky we might get a Beta release to co-inside with Blizzcon, although I am not saying which Blizzcon that might be.

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Just Can't Get Enough


PTR to live in an instant, I thought it was going to be quick but this was less than a week since the story broke. Just in case you missed the news, I will be mostly talking about:

"All upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels." and "Adding a new token called Deeds of Valor which will cost 3000 Timeless Coins, and can be used to grant your character 100 Valor Points."

1 week is not a lot of time to hoard away 3000 valor points especially when the cap is 1000 for any given week. I was meaning to write a post on the best way to valor cap but was beaten to it by Alternative Chat, mostly because that kind of post takes an age to research, and I really couldn't be arsed. A big round of applause for the Godmother for creating possibly the shortest lived, current content article.

WoW Insider in the form of Matthew Rossi wrote about patch 5.4.8 and this is what I intend to elaborate on. Rossi wrote:

"Consider - easier valor, and valor made more useful, but still capped both weekly (1000 points a week) and overall (3000 total) - this means that you'll get valor faster, and spend it faster. Fully upgrading an item will take your entire week's worth of valor points (250 per upgrade, 4 upgrades) but this assumes you're not going into the patch with a full set of 2/2 upgraded items. It creates pressure to be capping valor every week, makes valor relevant again for a time."

If you already at 3000 valor points and all your gear is 2/2 upgraded, when the patch dropped then are still not going to upgrade all your gear to 4/4 this week. 4000 valor will purchase 8 gear upgrades @ 500 valor per item for conversion from 2/2 to 4/4. By my reckoning there are 15/16 gear slots depending on 2 handers/2 x 1 handers and off hand items. Half the gear is upgraded in week 1 but the rest of the gear will still take an extra 4 weeks and as Rossi pointed out a new piece of gear will wipe out an entire weeks valor cap.

This will create a meta game for the next few weeks as we all find the best ways to upgrade and valor cap. For some people like myself who chose the Timeless Isle as a method for gearing alts instead of running endless LFR and Flex, we are laughing about the amount of Timeless coins that we have stashed, and wish that we had not been so inventive with our methods of trying to get rid of a currency that we thought was past its sell by date.

I am rich

Not all my coins are spread equally and I will need to be inventive to maximise valor and coin usage. My plan will incorporate a wise implementation of Valor of the Ancients. After logging on with a character with a spare 30,000 timeless coins, I can immediately invoke the 50% buff. All other characters will then have 6 days to valor cap and any character not achieving this goal can be topped up the day before reset day using timeless coins. Half a million timeless coins will not last long with this kind of spending but it should help clear the hurdle of the first 8 weeks.

It is quite sad, but I thrive on this kind of shuffling resources around to maximise results. The only problem is that 5-8 weeks will test the patience of a saint. It is for this reason that people are asking for the valor cap to be removed. Blizzard will argue that in terms of Raiding the gear upgrades will allow for a 4-8% increase in relative power to trickle over a 8 week period instead of a sudden avalanche of power.

Wednesday will be Celestials and Ordos day, and Tuesday will be Deeds of Valor day. The rest of the week is mine to do as I please.

Monday 19 May 2014

The Scientist


I had every intention of forcing my son to run Siege of Orgrimmar for me at the weekend, but unfortunately they outlawed child labour in the UK in 1870. My son was far too interested in going on 3 days trip to Anglesey in North Wales to do any Huntering, and apparently WoW is not a patch on Minecraft.

Left with no alternative I paid a little visit to the Stormwind Dummies with Hunter number 2, Buffalobob. Buffalobob is currently sporting  iLevel 542 which is idea for the experiment, but with the inferior weapon of Featherdraw Longbow iLevel 497. The aim was to record the value of autoshotting in this case with a Beast Master Hunter.

I ran the first set of figures with a pet in tow, and then repeated the process with no pet. It was at this time I realised that something was wrong. How could a dummy possibly be dodging my missiles? A quick visit to the reforgery, showed that the additional of an Ordos chestpiece and PvP bracers had disturbed my carefully crafted Hit and Expertise. It is this kind of exercise that shows why the Hit/Expertise capping had to go for the next expansion.

Avoiding the dodge misses increased my DPS by around 10%, which is why the Theorycrafters always insisted on capping Hit, and latterly Expertise, above any other stat.

The figures without any buffs were quite frankly very poor.

With Pet

With my Wolf out, I managed 35K DPS on 25 shot count, and without a pet only 9.8K DPS.

Without Pet

This just shows how useless a BM Hunter is without his pet.

The aim of this exercise was to see if I could obtain 40K in a raid by autoshotting alone, and with raid buffs this answer looks like yes it is very possible.

The hunter in question Lotusmie from Fridays rants, was indeed freeloading in a Flex raid which was predominantly filled with guild members. It makes the people in the raid look soft for not saying anything, and letting the raid disintegrate because in amongst alts and fresh level 90's we are also forced to carry people who are not doing enough work to secure their place in the team.

Just looking at the character sheet, it is evident that Lotusmie can be partially bothered to gem most of their equipment, but not enough to put 5 enchants on.

If you can't be bothered to try when those around need you, then simply stop doing group content.

Friday 16 May 2014

Dazed and Confused


I have spent considerably more time in LFR than is good for the soul in recent weeks. Rather than use my Hunter or healing with my Shaman, I have spent some time with a few of my lower lever characters. In particular I have enjoyed playing with my Warlock and wanted to see how the transfer from 2 button killing machine on the Timeless Isle to the world of full raid buffs in a 25 man situation.

The answer is not exactly what I was expecting, and the huge crits seen in solo play for Chaos Bolts do not transfer to a huge amount of DPS in a raid. On the other hand if organised and able to remember the mob clusters, then the damage from AoE can be astronomical. The problem is I cannot control my own environment on a class that I am still not familiar with. Sometimes my DPS is huge and sometimes it is very poor, and whilst it is not a problem in LFR, I got a little nudge in a Flex raid.

"There is not enough DPS!" said one person after failing to take down a boss. It was time to evaluate my own performance, was I letting the side down? The answer was that I could and should have been higher, but it was not because I was slacking, however if I thought my figures was bad, then at least the Hunter below me would be the main target for peoples ranting.

The Hunter in question Lotusmie, (I was not going to name, but with a iLevel of 541 WTF!) was doing 40K DPS. Just in case you think that is a typo I will write it out  FORTY THOUSAND, DAMAGE PER SECOND.

On the plus side there is no Legendary Cloak, but I spy a decent weapon that my Hunter spent months trying to obtain - the iLevel 536 (with upgrades) Kor'kron Hand Cannon. The weapon is rated at 13,620 to 25,297 so an average of 19,458. How is it possible to do only double that amount over the period of 4 boss fights and the corresponding trash kills.

I have no idea what gear the Grumpy Elf is wearing these days but last month he claimed to hit 106K on the Celestials without buffs. Hunters have the benefit of Autoshot and a pet. It is a feature of the game that allows us to kill mobs and mine/herb/skin at the same time. The downside is that with such a high percentage coming from doing nothing, that the signature shots can seem a little on the small size.

Surely even an inexperienced Hunter in 541 iLevel gear can achieve higher than 40K DPS. In fact I might ask my son to do LFR this weekend with a similar geared Hunter. My son does not play WoW and has never raided or played a Hunter. I am interested to see what the results will be.

Wednesday 14 May 2014

One


"Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same
Will it make it easier on you now
You got someone to blame"
 
U2 - One


Kudo goes to Alt:ernative Chat who is now my unofficial source for news. The champion who can wade through the crap and beat WoW Insider who are still snoring in bed. The article I refer to is 5.4.8 News and prior to that was Spirits in the Material World. Both of these stories have huge impact on the declining player base  and in particular those with multiple characters. I was so taken aback that I have had to check the official sources for both pieces of information.

Everybody is familiar with the current scenario, that Blizzard is going to starve the player base of any new content for 12 - 14 Months, and that the content is already feeling old and tired with 6 months still to go. Taking the items from both stories, how much extra game time will these gimmicks afford the average player.

"All upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels."

These will give the player something to spend those worthless valor tokens on and in the process make us all feel marginally stronger. The hope is to stimulate the requirement to acquire valor and give raiding teams an automatic boost in their quests to complete either normal or Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar.

"Adding a new token called Deeds of Valor which will cost 3000 Timeless Coins, and can be used to grant your character 100 Valor Points."

This operates in the opposite direction and negates the need to collect Valor points, when we can simply convert 3000 Timeless Coins for 100 Valor. Currently scattered across my characters I have thousands of Timeless Coins. The Grumpy Elf wrote back in October "What to do With All Those Timeless Coins?", I have also been thinking up imaginative was to convert them into another more useful currency.

Combined together these two bits of information are about prolonging our time in Raids, and will have the affect of Buffing the players without having to artificially buff the raid or nerf the content as previously done for Lich King and Dragon Soul.

One other aspect not discussed by Crithto was how this will affect Valor of the Ancients. If there is no impact simply convert 30,000 Timeless Coins to get valor capped and then use the 50% buff for the rest of the week and just before reset day top off your valor totals with Timeless Coins. I can tell you now that Tuesday and Wednesdays are going to be busy in my house.

"Gaze of the Black Prince - Increases reputation gained with the Black Prince by 100%. Increases the chances his most hated foes will relinquish their Secrets of the Empire, Sigil of Wisdom, Sigil of Power, or Titan Runestones."

This is all about making the welfare Legendary, truly available to all. With all the changes together there is simply no reason not to get Legendary Cloak on all characters. The bottlenecks are going to be the PvP quest and a 3 week wait to obtain the 3000 valor. Capping is not going to be a problem, but the weekly 1000 valor cap is still in place. I am guessing the whole process for the Legendary questline will take about 4-5 weeks with the new express system in place.

"Heart of the Valorous - you earn 100% additional valor."

It is slightly intriguing that this spell no longer exists on WoWHead but can be found on WoWDB, read what you want into that, but I am guessing that Timeless Coins is the new preferred method for obtaining Valor.

Summary

Blizzard want you to go and Raid until the new expansion is released. They know we are bored and they are trying to remove all the obstacles in our way. If nothing else simply upgrade your gear and feel 8 iLevels stronger than you did before.

"Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again"

If I didn't know better I would say that U2 wrote this song about WoW and the Player base.

Monday 12 May 2014

Relight My Fire


The Legendary Cloak has set off a chain reaction in the way I play. The Cloak gives me the right to kill Ordos every week on all my characters. New gear requires upgrading so the lucky recipients all need to farm 500 Valor per new item. This is leading to new methods of Valor farming, which includes dailies, including the Isle of Thunder, Timeless Isle weekly quests, and earlier LFR raids.

The Isle of Thunder is interesting, especially when you are only inhabitant on the island. The main advantage of the zone is the chance to gain reputation with 2 factions that you have not had very much contact with since patch 5.4 dropped, Kirin Tor Offensive, Black Prince. If you run a few Throne of Thunder raids then you complete the circle and increase your reputation with the Shado Pan Assault. By doing these 3 reputations then elements of the Legendary Cloak will start to assemble on your Alts.

My chosen character is my Gnome Warlock, much maligned in the past and left to rot first as a character for my daughter, and then later as a Bank Alt selling Glyphs. The improvement in the class is absolutely amazing seeing as Warlocks almost disappeared during Cataclysm. This places my Warlock in terms of favouritism in fourth place behind Hunter, Shaman, and Mage.

Due to the low status of Warlocks after Cataclysm, I levelled my Warlock near to the end of my list priorities, but my feelings have grown steadily since November 2013. I was originally only interested in obtaining max level characters so failed to concentrate on the reputation grinds, which had been hard work on one character, never mind the whole team.

Waiting for the older LFR's leaves a fair gap to fill, and so the twin pursuit of reputation and valor is my goal. Not all of the raids are fully opened and many of them need completing in order to make the next Raid available. The Terrace of Endless Springs is still regularly visited as part of the Legendary questline. One thing that I noticed was the high drop rate of Sigils. 3 from one Raid was a very tasty start, and all the encouragement I needed to continue the process. Drop rates are much higher than during my original foray through these Raids, but not all proved as productive as The Terrace of Endless Springs.

HoF 3/6 and ToT 4/12

During one of my trips to the Isle of Thunder, I encountered a Rare in the shape of Haywire Sunreaver Construct. After looting the body I checked to the stack of goodies and discovered the Sealed Tome of the Lost Legion.


Having a hunch but not knowing for sure, I immediately decided to combine the Tome and start the questline. Playing WoW during the day can get me into hot water with my wife and to a lesser extent with my children, and this proved to be an horrendous occasion. Most of the quest can be done in small chunks but towards the end there is a solo scenario through the Black Temple. This is a raid that I have done only twice before and would be the first to admit that I have the ability to get lost in this sprawling 25 man Raid.

I struggled with the maze having done at least 20 separate attempts. I have killed the Disembodied twice. I have bugged out on the looting the relics once and my wife rebooted the router on another occasion.

The final boss however proved to be beyond my capabilities. It relies on using the entire Warlock toolkit, and for somebody who is merely a tourist to the class, I severely lack the muscle memory to control a demon and keep myself alive whilst trying to lay down some damage to the boss.

Although I am totally unable to achieve the task in hand, it is important to stress how special class specific questlines make the player feel. I never got to experience the Fangs of the Father, but I suspect they felt a similar warm and fuzzy glow. It is a long long time since Hunters have felt that special.

Friday 9 May 2014

I Don't Wanna Dance


In the last few days I have gorged on Ordos 22 times. Eleven of those were on the European reset on Wednesday. Ordos is a World Boss fight, but I have felt no compunction to check out the details of the fight, to "learn the dance".

My first visit was on a PvP realm which is were the majority of the open raid invites come from. The situation was that around 40 Alliance and an equal amount if not more Horde, were congregated at the top of the stairs. I fight broke out and Ordos got tagged and 15 minutes of death and resurrection ensued. I only knew that the fight was over when I was awarded Moonhee's Mean Vest. In terms of learning the fight (dance) this was not a good introduction.

I only ever need to learn the fight from a DPS or Healers point of view and only have a vague understanding of why the Tank needs to move or why 2 Tanks are needed, but the rest of the fight I will learn in time. Once upon a time the number one rule was "Don't stand in anything on the ground". This became blurred when Druids and Shamans started to get helpful (Healing) spells that would appear on the ground. The number one rule was changed to "Don't stand in Shit", which meant that we all had to become "plane spotters" able to distinguish at a glance whether to "Stay or Go".

Deadly Boss Mods is our guide to all encounters and visual (and I presume audio) clues, take away the need to make decisions. It is difficult to imagine what raiding without these clues would be like.

Ordos appears to the uninitiated seems to hit like a train, anything that is not wearing Plate Mail or a very hairy bear hide. Ranged classes however can stand a relatively safe distance away and enjoy the fireworks form behind the safety barrier. The only problem (providing there is a skilled Tank on hand) is the Burning Soul spell - Inflicts 50000 Fire damage every 1 sec. for 10 sec. On expiration, the player explodes, inflicting 300000 Fire damage to players within 8 yards and knocking them up.
Knocking Them Up - Potent Seed Indeed

For Ranged DPS this is the only thing you need to worry about, and to be honest it is not the damage that it does to yourself it is the rocket under the feet of all those around you. There is nowhere to hide with that arrow above your head, there is only the shame of not being able to move a few feet/metres to the side. It is not that the explosion kills the raid team anymore it is just the sheer ineptitude or the couldn't care less attitude of the people around you.

The nearest example to this is from the Cataclysm expansion. The Dragon Soul raid was the first to use LFR and one of the most frustrating encounters as a healer was Ultraxion. The Hour of Twilight Spell - The Hour of Twilight falls upon Ultraxion's foes. Enemies caught within the Twilight Realm take 300,000 (Raid Finder: 195,000) unresistable Shadow damage. Players within the normal realm forcibly enter the Twilight Realm. If Hour of Twilight does not hit a player, the Aspects take the full brunt of the attack. This disrupts the shield protecting the Aspects and heralds the end of all life on Azeroth.



The raid would get a green button in the middle of screen and a countdown when to press. In LFR it was a near fatal experience and in all other Raids it would mean instant loss of life. How difficult was it pay attention to a ticking clock and press at a suitable time! Healer in LFR would spend time and Mana building up the team so the same thing could happen at the next spell countdown. It makes my blood boil thinking about now, even when I have not been in that situation for well over 18 months.

This is the attitude that is prevalent in LFR, that it is the job of the Tank to keep them out of harms way and the job of the healers to heal through their mistakes. They would be embarrassed to do this on a guild raid, but in LFR, they are totally anonymous.

On the flip side of this experience, I found myself Healing - Vale of Eternal Sorrows and the Fallen Protectors (He, She and It). On this fight I have mastered when to move and when to stack, and when DPSing, to change target at the right time. What I don't yet know is the individual spells that get chucked out, at regular intervals. Inferno Strike - Embodied Sorrow casts a massive Fire damage spell at the highest threat target. Inferno Blast divides (3000000 * 4) Fire damage among all targets within 8 yards.


I am just guessing here that I have never been the highest threat target. My instant reaction is of course run away and make everybody else safe. In reality it would have been better if I had not received any notification and just stood in the middle of my healing rain.

It might sound like I am raving about the same thing here, but I simply followed my instinct, honed from 8 years of playing the same game, the fact that I should stack is slightly alien. I will of course learn from this mistake. The result was that I used my Shaman instant resurrection and was immediately back in the game, but it did not stop the Tank blowing his lid after the Fallen Protectors had gone down, that we were all Noobs and wished us good luck finding a Tank that could steer such idiots through the raid.

Interestingly enough there were no further deaths for the rest of the raid and the replacement Tank was considerably better than the one that threw his toys out of the pram (stroller).

Thursday 8 May 2014

Under Pressure


The announcement yesterday that World of Warcraft had dropped to 7.6 Million subscriptions, was a shock to most people. Everybody was expecting a far greater decline. All the bloggers I have read recently, are feeling it, (with the exception of Alternative Chat) and the forums and comment sections are getting very angry. The Grumpy Elf even asked whether Blizzard have "Bitten off more than they can chew". Grumpy argued that the delay in development is done to the art team, being a bottleneck for all the new content. The revamped models are obviously taking a lot longer than intended and the need to get them done and dusted is causing delays in the new expansion. Designing buildings for the Garrison must be a piece of cake in comparison.

The general consensus is that Q1 was not going to be the major problem with this expansion and that Q2 would be the danger zone for unsubs. Alternative Chat has highlighted some interesting PTR features which look like Blizzard is trying to create an interest in repeatable content. WoWhead have datamined "Gaze of the Black Prince" and "Heart of the Valorous". These two features will cut a huge swathe through the Legendary Cloak questline. The Gaze of the Black Prince will probably require at least one character to have completed the questline, but it is easy to see how appealing this feature might be to people looking for a reason to keep playing during a barren period. It has certainly piqued my interest, and I am looking into a whole string of possible uses.

Having only recently obtained the cloak and witnessed the huge impact on my performance in a group situation, I am willing to suggest that I can now attain double the damage since I obtained my wings. Even with the number squeeze, (no impact allegedly) this is going to help dramatically on the journey from 90-100, not that levelling is supposed to be difficult in the modern MMO (especially WoW).

Alternative Chat is right to highlight the PvP problem part of the questline, but I feel that with the improved PvP gear from the Weekly Celestials  (iLevel 550 in case you have not done it for awhile), that hopefully it will be slightly less painful. I like to occasionally PvP but these 2 Battlegrounds are not on my list of favourites.

If this idea does get through Blizzard's Quality Control department, I expect an implementation sooner rather than later. Q2 might be a little less kind than Q1.

Friday 2 May 2014

Long Time Coming


Yesterday was a Season finale cliff hanger. The one big hurdle to jump before being supremely rewarded for your efforts throughout the entire expansion. I must confess to being slightly nervous, about having to come back today and announce my inadequacies to the world. Bob the Noob, unable to defeat Wrathion whilst blindfolded. Any credibility would be shattered and I would be unable to lay the blame at the feet of 24 random people.

Celestial Blessings is a reasonably pitched solo quest. It is not a walkover by any stretch, but it does require a modicum of forethought. I had some fresh ideas but was unwilling to leave the Jade Temple on the off chance that I might need to cancel the quest and then need to seek the 4 blessings again.

My bags are currently empty due to an exercise in Solo Retro Raiding, and my choice of pets is currently down to 3. My trusty Bobcat, a Wolf which is a remnant from WotLK when Wolves ruled the world, and my PvP friend the Shale Spider for when the mood takes me. I would have preferred something with more AoE and naturally more Tank like, eg. Gorilla or Bear.

I made use of Flasks and food, made a Drum of Rage for the start of the fight. The fight itself took two attempts and provided I  could stay out of the way of the Mirror phase then I could re-cooperate. I was unable to make use of the back attacks that gain 25% more damage, but the aim is to stay alive on fights like this.

The end of the fight is very bizarre indeed. Wrathion simply walks off and there is no indication to suggest that you have been successful, leading to a frantic few seconds of checking the quest log and finding out where Wrathion has disappeared to and not bugged out after all that effort.

Thursday turns out to be not very good for chain killing Celestials but I did eventually find 2 other DPS a Tank and a Healer who happened to be on the same mission.

Cloak obtained upgraded to Legendary, gemmed, and enchanted, I decided to look for and LFR to complete the chain "Judgment of the Black Prince". Unfortunately it was late in the evening and the LFR group I was in, disintegrated before any mobs were engaged.

As a bonus to myself I decided to find a group for Ordos, and luckily tagged along with a number of Guildies. We ended up on a PvP realm in the middle of an Alliance massacre but for some reason I managed to get a Ordos kill and luckily escaped with a new Chest piece. Some WoW sessions can leave you with a real buzz.

In the space of a week I have moved from having completed the Expansions content to having too much content to complete with all of my characters now having met the attunement to kill Ordos 11 times each week.

I am not quite sure why, but I feel the urge to drag another character through the "Breath of the Black Prince" Questline. This time at least I should know what to do.

Thursday 1 May 2014

The Chain

 
 
Icy Veins calls it the "Breath of the Black Prince" Questline, everybody else knows it as the Legendary Cloak Quest. I am approaching the end of my journey some 6 or 7 months after everybody else, but it is better late than never.
 
Last night I was able to capture the last 2 Titan Runestones from the 2 locations that give guaranteed drops from Lei Shen and Sha of Pride (wish I had known earlier). I ignored the advice from BBB who was under the impression that you could not loot Lei Shen for a Runestone and then to go back for his heart, in the same week. Fortunately I got lucky and was mightily relieved to see the mouse pointer turn to the loot option.
 
An evening filled with 11 Celestial kills and 3 LFR's left me with the task of gaining 4 Blessings from the Celestials at a time when I really wanted to go to bed. One quick attempt to kill Wrathion did not go the right way, and I packed myself and the greasy smear off to bed.
 
Today, I have the job of researching how to defeat Wrathion, but also thinking that I am not the only Hunter frequenting this site, I thought it might be prudent to ask. Please bear in mind that my computer is on the aging side and the effects on the floor seemed to be ill defined. The main aim seems to be to take out the adds and avoid the bad. There is little or no time to heal so avoidance of damage seems to be the way to go.
 
Research seems to point to a cheat that was hotfixed, and the fact that I should have an extra 25 iLevel on when the Quest was first released. The You Tube I looked at practically ignored the blobs. I guess an AoE Tanking Pet will keep the addons occupied.
 
Wish me luck and any advice will be gratefully received.