A Whole New Shield

A New Shield

Wow-64 2015-12-09 21-24-57-83

It is officially Christmas time , as last night I ordered Pepperollies for the first time of the season.  One of the local pizza chains has this thing that only exists during the holiday season, that consists of pepperoni, cheese, pizza sauce, rolled up in a crust and cut into little disks…  then brushed with garlic butter and baked.  They are so amazingly good that we have even tried to make our own version when we get the craving… and it isn’t the holiday block.  I ordered dinner originally thinking that it would feed both my wife and I, but I completely forgot she had a Chanukah dinner at a friends house.  So that means we have plenty of leftovers for tonight I guess.  The primary reason why I was ordering something in rather than trying to fix something at the house… is that Wednesday nights I have started participating in an alliance side raid with some twitter folk which starts at 7 pm my time.  I figure there will be a time where I cannot make this raid, but for the time being I am riding along for the fun.  Unlike the Sunday horde side raid, they run on personal loot… so everything is left up to pure dumb luck as to whether or not I walk away with anything other than gold.

The exciting part of the night is that I managed to get a shield to drop off the very first boss.  Swords and shields are hands down the most important gear slot for me personally… and I have stuck away in my bank/void bank every single mainhand/shield combination I have ever tanked with for any significant length of time.  Since I managed to upgrade my weapon to 695 over the week…  I still had a 670 shield, so getting the Smoldercore Bulwark to drop was a really exciting moment for me.  I spent a few strategic tokens here and there, and picked up another few items… like the Stamped Felsteel Chestplate but I really cannot afford to break the four piece set.   So the only other piece of gear that I will actually use was a new cloak…  which is funny considering I have gotten pretty much nothing but cloaks from my garrison loot boxes.  The Drape of Gluttony itself is pretty much ideally itemized with both Bonus Armor and Crit on it.  Part of me wants to continue raiding Alliance side if for no reason other than it is quite literally the swan song of me as a Gladiator dps.  The spec is so amazingly fun…  but is absolutely not going to be around any longer after the expansion.  It was my one time to be a special snowflake… and I kinda want to soak up as much of it as I can while it is still a thing.

On Timewalking

After finishing the raid last night I popped over Horde side to piddle around and try my hand at a random Timewalking dungeon.  This week/weekend is the Cataclysm Timewalking event, and with it comes a bunch of level boosted cataclysm dungeon gear that has been brought up to 675.  At least in theory that is what it is supposed to be… the problem is I’ve had some add on bugging out on me that keeps me from seeing the actual item level of an item.  It appears that TipTac the addon I have used for years to relocate the tooltip pop up window to some standard location in my layout, has some old calculations going on… making it so items show up as their base level not the boosted level.  This has also made it so that my weapons for example, will always show up as the pre upgraded version.  While I will miss having that addon… I won’t miss seeing all the timewalking gear as level 115.  So if you are also having this issue…  kill TipTac.  Unfortunately I’ve reached a point on both of my main characters where the timewalking gear isn’t really an upgrade, so instead I am mostly running it for the Timewarped Badges.  And with those… I am mostly only interested in the pets and mounts… and the random chance of getting the Infinite Timereaver dropped mount.

If nothing else it is still fun to run these older dungeons and see them still function as relevant content.  The only problem with this is that in truth… these dungeons are a lot tougher than the equivalent dungeons would be in Warlords.  There are several rooms in Shattered Halls that will still gleefully murder you if you pull too much.  With the Burning Crusade zones specifically… this was the era of mob crowd control… and they love to fear and incapacitate players left and right.  So last night I ran one of these dungeons completely random, and then another two with my guildies.  I would have loved to have done more…  but it was almost midnight… and I had to function  today.  There is this strange nostalgia about the whole places…  and unlike revamped versions of places…  it feels the same.  I guess it is my hope that they will stop redoing old dungeons… in favor of just adding them to a Timewalking event… either that or making Timewalking a permanent feature for certain dungeons.  In truth I would love for EVERY dungeon out there to be able to scale to the highest level cap.  I love the idea of evergreen content… even though very few games do it well.  It is my hope to get in tonight and run several more of these, potentially on both sides of the fence… since I have plenty of Alliance alts that could benefit from the gear.

 

 

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