3.3 Update

So been too busy running around like a chicken with my head cut off to do much in the way of posting. Time for a bit of a stream of consciousness.

My guess about how long it would take me to get my shield that I posted about in my previous post turned out to be sadly too accurate. Running regular HoR at least once a day (often more than that) every day since 3.3 went live and I only just got the Splintered Door of the Citadel. I went from just barely having gotten the gloves and shoulders of T9 to 5/5 T9, the iLVL 245 shoulders, having both 245 librams, and being only about 20 emblems short of having the iLVL 245 helm before I finally saw the shield drop. Prior to getting it, it was one of my three remaining iLVL 200 pieces I still had. Despite the dour mood running HoR constantly left me in, at least it gave Emblems of Triumph, which allowed me get something from all those "wasted" runs.

After getting my shield, I was too pumped to sleep (despite the late hour) so I ran a number of random heroics to get the last badges I needed to replace my helm. This had a number of benefits including getting me back over the Expertise soft-cap.

Additionally I scraped and saved my Emblems of Frost enough to get the Corroded Skeleton Key yesterday afternoon. Between doing two of the weekly random raids and a PUG ICC-10 (with a good amount of help from fellow Maintankadin poster Thornir and my lovely girlfriend), we cleared the entire instance and managed to get the achievement "I've gone and made a mess.", I got all the emblems I needed a good week or so earlier than I might have otherwise.

In other news, my DK has been brought out of retirement. Not to make him my main again by any means, but mixing gearing him up with making money. "Making money?" you might ask. Well, as everyone who's paying attention to the various game news reporting sites knows the new Legendary, Shadowmourne, will require twenty-five Primordial Saronite, plus the new crafting recipes for ICC also cost one (or more?) of the same. Primordial Saronite is the new "orb" for this patch, and costs 23 Emblems of Frost along with having a chance to drop inside ICC (I believe...). On top of that, Primordial Saronite is not BoP and is able to be put up on the AH. So after realizing this (I knew it, but kinda had a brain fart about it), I started running my DK through one random heroic a night along with trying for the weekly random raid. And last night I got the emblems I needed for my first Primordial Saronite. Sold it for 2.4k, which is probably cheaper than some servers, but whatever. I'm gearing up my alt, and getting paid (albeit in an indirect manner) a lot of money to do so. I approve of this.

I realize in retrospect that my assessment that queue times for random heroics is not quite as fast as I guessed. For we tanks it's blindingly fast even at off-times. Queue times of over a minute are rare and I've only been waiting for two minutes once. For healers it is close to this, from what I understand, with the average being a minute. Meanwhile, the glut of DPS leaves them with a long queue time, the shortest listed average I've seen while playing on my DK, who I've changed as a primary role to being a DW Frost DPS, is 8 minutes and some as high as 15 to 20 minutes. Sheesh!

As for why I changed Kazalix to primarily being a DPS, while I love tanking, as I've mentioned elsewhere, tanking on a DK is a bit more than I can do effectively, so instead I hit things and have fun doing so. Though I am kinda considering going back to using a 2H. As a DPS, using fast weapons is less of a big deal to me, plus I'm now a Draenei and the male Draenei 2H animation is less ridiculous than the male Human 2H animation (as shallow as that is, it was a deciding factor for me...). Maybe when I get my second Battered Hilt (first one will go to my girlfriend for her Enhancement Shaman), I'll see about either a Blood or Unholy DPS spec with the STR 2H Quel'Delar.