Various and Sundry

Bah-humbug.

Deathwing, after six-odd weeks of kills, has dropped two rogue axes, not once, not twice, but multiple times.  In addition to the agility polearm and the bow for a raid with no main-spec ferals or any hunters, Deathwing can go DIAF. I'm tired of disenchanting the same goddamned things while pining for a Souldrinker and the rest of the raid is still using crappy 397 gear week after week.

In fact, the loot-tables have been just miserable. I don't think we've seen more than one or two healer trinkets drop and other than Resolve of the Undying (which drops every week like clockwork) we have seen no Tanking trinkets. I could also complain about the fact that this week we saw 4/5 tier token drop for the Hunter/Warrior/Shaman set which we have none of, but that would be just the icing on the cake.

Bah. Normal mode Dragon Soul has gotten super-boring at this point, as we're mostly finished with all of the achievements as well, except for the Gunship and Madness ones. At least we started working on Heroic bosses finally, which has been incredibly gratifying. We're also nearly finished with the Firelands meta achievement, which I'm eager to put behind us, and we're maybe three weeks from finishing the legendary. And then I never have to do Firelands again!


You know what would actually be kind of fun? Going back to T11 and doing the hard Heroics there. These Heroics are still a hold-over of the super-hard T11 tuning and they didn't really nerf this content so I'm kind of hungry to go see it. Heroic Yor'sahj kicked our ass for a while this week though, so working on the current tier isn't a bad thing either, for me.

Other than that, and some mid-level Arena, and occasionally playing my Death Knight, I really haven't had a whole lot to do in game. I wound up almost emptying my bank last night to buy a relatively cheap Deathcharger (60k) and immediately liquidated some assets on the AH overnight to get back up to 35k, so maybe I'll play the AH for a few weeks.

Mostly, I'm working on some off-line writing and programming projects, and I'm excited for MoP to start so we can leave Cataclysm behind for good. I did pay for the year-long subscription, but I likely won't be logging into Beta as I hate spoiling myself, or having to do all that work twice on the same character. I might log in to test the class changes and talent tree stuff and so forth, but I won't do any leveling or dig into the new zones at all.

As far as when to expect the game, my crystal-ball gazing has revealed the following to me:

Alpha: This month
Beta: Mid-April
Release: Mid-August

Unless I'm very wrong and my Insider Source(tm) has been misinformed.

And finally, have you guys seen the new Paladin tree? It's pretty interesting and I want to chew it over and write a full post about it. And for those of you freaking out about Ardent Defender missing from the talents, it has been made a base-line ability under protection. Relax.