Heroics & Armory

As there are no upgrades for my gear in the normal instances and it became boring to run them over and over, I decided to focus more on heroic instances. So far i went to Slave Pens, Underbog, Steamvault, Old Hillsbrad, Mechanaar and Mana Tombs in heroic mode. The goal is to gather enough badges to "buy" the Azure-Shield of Coldarra from the heroic vendor. I'm at 20/33 badges so far... not that many runs left, counting in you gain between 3-5 badges per successful run.

It's very important tho to gather a good group, as else heroic will end up in a wipe-fest. I like heroic, despite the fact that some encounters should have some fine-tuning. While it's fun to have a few encounters like Bog Lords or Tavarok, it's quite insane that a one second lagspike can just wipe your party. For those that have not been there: these mobs hit a full-decked tank for 10k+ so the tank needs to be on full health all the time if you want to survive it. Because it's the same bosses, it can be hard to determine which drops come from heroic mode. Itemization is sometimes a bit questionable in heroic mode - risk versus reward is not always good. The thing that sucks the most is the occasional epic/unique gem, epic in quality it does take up the epic loot slot at the last boss. Means you get a gem, that's your "epic" reward. I use filter rules for itemlevels (internal) to look stuff up. While these lists, which i doubt are complete, are not entirely from heroic mode, most drops are:
heroic blue drops
heroic epic drops

In addition there could be more quests involved in heroic dungeons. So far it's only a few quests, like the trials of the Naaru, which requires you to run a few instances in heroic as part of the attunement for the Eye (lvl 70, 25 people raid instance) or a quest you pick up in heroic Slave Pens for attunement to Serpentshrine Cavern (lvl 70, 25 people raid instance). The Shattered Halls trial is supposed to be 45min baron on drugs. You need to run from the gauntlet part to the end in 55 min on heroic to make it. There should be more new minibosses or quests to spice up heroic a bit more. I lack like 1.5 Shattered Halls runs to grab my last heroic key. If i get the chance nowadays, i run instances on heroic. Should you need a tank for some crazy heroic adventure, give me a holler. ;)

Did you have a closer look at the new Armory feature Blizzard started the beta service for? Basicly it's a large database with *all* character data. Only stuff missing is the things in your bags and bank. Else *everything* is shown.. talents, reputation... everything. Your gear is saved a few times a day when you log off.. So while it provides a snap-shot, it's not sure you were wearing your main gear or just leisure clothes. Opinions about this database are split. While it has some useful features, like a proper guild member look-up, some PvPers are angry as they want their specc to be a "secret", as much as that's possible. In my opinion Blizzard should add a bit of functionality for guilds, like attunement tracking and such, and maybe add opt-out functionality for those that want their specc to be a secret. Then it could become a very useful tool. If you want to look at a profile, mine can be found here: Thulf at the Armory