Onyxia is back!  With 3.2.2 upon us, it is of utmost importance that we pay homage to the most uber of all Warcraft related videos.  A classic in its own right, let us take a moment:

It is still absolutely hilarious after all this time and I honestly cannot get enough of it.  And yes it’s true, 3.2.2 hits today. If you haven’t read up yet, take a second to view the patch notes or visit WoW.com’s summary.  The quick and dirty of the most important changes next to Ony returning of course:

• Arcane Blast: The buff from using this ability now stacks up to 4 times instead of 3, and each application increases mana cost by 175% instead of 200%.  In addition, the duration of the buff has been reduced to 6 seconds.
• Arcane Missiles:  Casting this spell while both Missile Barrage and Clearcasting are active will cause only Missile Barrage to be consumed.
• Talent Changes:
  • Arcane
    • Missile Barrage:  The effect from triggering this talent now removes the mana cost of Arcane Missiles.  In addition, the chance for Arcane Blast to trigger this talent is now 8/16/24/32/40%.  All other listed spells continue to have a 4/8/12/16/20% chance to trigger it.  This talent no longer has a chance to be triggered when spells miss.
  • Fire
    • Combustion:  This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of Fire spells by 50% while it is active.  In addition, Living Bomb periodic ticks will no longer interact with the count or the charges on the talent.

Euripedes recently posted a breakdown of changes to the arcane tree so head over and check it out.   It’ll be interesting to see how the change to Combustion plays out.  I’m a crit whore, I’ll admit it.  I love the rush of seeing those huge crit numbers flash across the screen. 

Aside from 3.2.2, Brewfest is here!  Last year at this time I had just turned 70 and was working hard on getting into raiding.  I really didn’t do much when it came to World Events.  This year I missed the Midsummer Fire Festival and have a couple quests here and there to finish up with earlier World Events.  I’ll definitely be working on getting the metas for the remaining seasonal events this year, so next summer I’ll be able to reminisce on what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Realms are coming back online as I write this.   Take a minute and watch the Onyxia Wipe Animation again just because it really doesn’t get much better than that. Did I mention it’s a 50 DKP minus if you don’t? 

SOTP DOTS.

 So I am actually really enjoying playing my horde toons and especially enjoy my Paladin.  So she’s level 68 (last night it took me 2 hours to do 2.5 bars to level. I was caught up watching The Rachel Zoe Project.  Yes. I said it.  The Rachel Zoe Project.)  Anyways, I’m dual spec’d Holy/Prot (I’m not too proud, thanks to my brother who happened to have some extra gold sitting on one of his horde toons lol).  I’ve healed my fair share of 5 mans, but have yet to tank one.  Healing is fun, I enjoy it but holy crap is it stressful.  I mean, the littlest bit of lag makes my heart rate spike.  I yell verbal assualts at my screen so much more now too.  But does this mean I’ve given up on Eury – of course not!  I actually created Eury’s doppleganger and am having fun leveling a mage all over again.   Seeing everything from the Horde prospective is interesting, though I admit I have been flying through some of the quest lines just barely reading the quest text.  I’d like to think my mage doesn’t have a potty mouth but something tells me that if she were to actually write me a letter it’d be much more . . . interesting (?) than the one above. 

Anyways, back in May I outlined some summer goals.  Labor Day weekend, the generally accepted end of summer, has come and gone so I took a few minutes to reflect on what I accomplished this summer.  I finally trained grand master in my secondary professions.  My fishing is still not maxed, but it’s getting there.  Considering that I was away from game 2+ months I am fairly happy with my progress.  Changing progressions was only slightly traumatic.  I had been enchanting/tailoring since I started playing, it was a little intimidating to just up and drop them.  I’ve successfully maxed my jewelcrafting and am almost there with blacksmithing as well (443/450).  It’s been a fun change and I definitely do not regret it.  I haven’t gone through as much of the old content as I’d have liked to, but Cataclysm offers great motivation for that.

I’m in the midst of working on a series of guild events that start in vanilla content and works through to current WotLK content.  This will definitely be a challenge to implement, but how great would it be to go through as a guild and see all of the content we may have missed?  I’ve put up a post on our guild website to get input from guildies on things that they’d like to do/see so that we can incorporate as much as possible.  Maybe it’s a crazy undertaking, but I’m hoping it will be worth it.  I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else is doing something similiar.

So that’s a quick update.  I’m flying to Baltimore tomorrow, the good news about the trip is that it will be 3 days of not having to listen to our new neighbor’s yappy dog.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m totally a dog person.  I love dogs – but OHH EMM GEE.  What I wouldn’t give for a good polymorph spell.  Turtles don’t make a lot of noise . . .