The Vial of Sands

Thass right, baby! I'm an Internet Dragon! Woooooo!

A long-time project came to fruition this week with the imbibing of the Vial of the Sands this week.

Mega-kudos and a great outpouring of thanks go to Deathwink of Nagrand for crafting the potion for me. She lifted me out of a fairly lousy week in the process by showing how nice players can be and even admitting to being a reader of this blog!

I think I have referred to this in blogs of pages past that I'm going through a fairly large professional transition this year. My game time has been decimated from what it was before and the largest casualty of this situation has been my ability to raid. To compensate, I' trying to be completist about the game in every other respect (since that's mostly something I can do at my own pace and um... solo *cry*) but getting the ability to shape change into a dragon has been one of the larger projects, collecting each and every primal needed to transmute out the truegold, and then raising the gold reserve to be able to afford the *cough* exorbitant price of materials that can only be bought from an individual vendor in Uldum. This was meant to be a zero-sum project, and it nearly was. Um, except that I misread the number of Sands of Time called for in the recipe and had to lay out about another 20k to get that number right.

Finally, I posted in the official Nagrand forums about a week ago to find a craftsman who had obtained this extremely rare alchemy recipe.   For the record, the Recipe: Vial of the Sands is a rare drop from a Canopic Jar that one might find while doing Tol'vir-related archaeology. You have to have your archaeology near 450 for that to even be a possibility, and as archaeologists all over Azeroth have discovered this past year, Tol'vir artifacts only appear in Uldum, while there are 15 other zones on the same RNG chance to go digging. So, in essence, this recipe is a rare find from a lucky roll that you can only even have a shot at if you are also an alchemist (it won't appear if you're not an alchemist) and if your archaeology skill level is pretty close to max.

If my fellow Nagranders contact Deathwink to do some crafting for you, I'll leave it to the two of you to negotiate crafting fees, and simply say that it was a great pleasure to have met her and I hope the threat she made to "go over to the dark side" sometime soon to play with some Horde friends doesn't happen. If it must, then, please Deathy, don't roll Blood Elf, at least :D

It's the Little Things ...

Hyaaah! Git along lil' doggy!

An update to the Resto changes on the PTR:

The tremor totem range change from 30 yards to 10 has just utterly disappeared. It was never officially altered in any patch updates. I went looking for the original information I read to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and best I could find was that the original post had been edited too.

The mana tide totem has been officially extended to raid wide, which is buff city. Just make sure you coordinate this with any other restos in the guild though.

An Alchemical Imbalance

Bubble bubble, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble

I have always been a big believer in the need to bring your best buffs to a raid.

WoW raiding, in my mind, is a game of inches. If you are on the edge of your raiding abilities, then you are going to defeat bosses with luck, preparation, and the best attention to stat details that you can muster. Thus, getting the rare quality gem instead of the uncommon, using enchants, and drinking your flasks make a huge amount of difference in winning a fight.

It is with this background that I come to the very reluctant conclusion that the current batch of flasks in game are totally not worth it.