World of Warcraft: The Short Person Crusade!

Before I get on to a blog about my "new" character, and current exploits, I thought I'd post a screenshot I came across from a while ago. It's of me, among a group, at the last boss of Shattered Halls. It's just a really cool shot, I think. And I remember that's why I took it. It's a great shot of a group, sitting right before a boss, planning strategy. In this case, judging from the chat log, we're deciding that the two hunters should take out the "adds", and that we should take him down quite quickly, because the healer only has limited mana. Good times.



But anyway, on to current affairs!

So, as always happens during the months I'm away from my beloved WoW, I've been trawling all the forums and fansites, and planning what to do when I can play again. I decided to play a healer. And I opted for a dwarven priest. But luckily, I already had a level 13 Dwarven priest. So when I went to Varsity for a few hours to hijack their internet. Here's how my character started:





So, as you can see, I'm a level 13 dwarven priest, called Beerdy. Quite a witty name, I thought. I also have all my weapon skills, including wands maxed out, and defense doing quite well. I'm a fairly well accomplished tailor, with mining skill. Nice. And I have a nice, healthy, 27 gold. I also have cooking and first aid, at low levels, but no fishing. Shouldn't take long to get them up to the level they should be. But not until I'm at home, since at 3 hours or so per week, I can't afford to waste them fishing!

Looking at my character screen, I have some pretty good greens for my level. But... no spell damage, no spell crit, and a pretty poor arsenal of spells. Going from left to right on the bottom row of my spellbar, I have:
Wand, Smite, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Pain, Power Word: Shield.
On the next row up, I have: Melee weapon, Lesser Heal, Renew, Desperate Prayer (dwarf racial), Bandages, Resurrection, Fade. Then Power Word: Fortitude, and Inner Fire.
Talent-wise, I have 4/5 in spirit tap. But I'm only a few kills away from levelling up, and have a ton of rested XP. So the situation is good!



This shot shows a couple of things. Firstly, I dinged 14, after killing a few low level mobs around ironforge. I then went to ironforge and trained my skills. You can see a couple of new ones on the button bar, but I'll tell you what I got.
Smite, rank 3. More damage, more mana, more casting time. Only really useful as a puller, to start fights.
Renew, rank 2. from 45 heal over 15 seconds up to 100 heal over 15 seconds. VERY useful. Not many mobs of this level can outdamage renew by much.
Cure disease. Does what it says on the tin, really. Cures one disease. Good for this level, since a bunch of the creatures in loch modan and westfall are pretty disease-ridden!
Lastly, Psychic Scream. This is a pretty cool panic button, but very situational. What it does is, it sends 2 nearby mobs running in fear for 8 seconds. This gives plenty of time to get off a smite or two, or a mind blast.

The shot also shows a bug I found with the boots I made from tailoring. Notice how it says "Use: Increases damage and healing..." instead of "Equip:". Bugged!

Also, you can see a new feature of the minimap: Quest givers can now be seen on the minimap! In this case, it's just a silly repeatable quest which is impossible to do, since it's from back in the AQ opening event. But it still illustrates the point nicely, I think.


This last screenshot for today shows me playing with Scott's latest character, Scooter, the gnomish warrior. He's just hit level 10, and is picking up his new skills. What does the future hold for this intrepid duo? Only time will tell!