A Fabulous Streak of Futility

So I completed almost all of LFR last night on my Death Knight.  The Tier Shoulders dropped twice more, and twice more I lost the rolls.  That now brings me to 0-40 rolling on upgrade shoulders in LFR - either Tier or the Backbreaker Spaulders.  This streak is now becoming such an awesome thing that I'm almost going to be sad if and when I ever do when new shoulders.  We'll have to see!

I've also apparently gotten pretty spoiled with decent LFR groups over the last few weeks, because I had one of the most horrible ones that I've seen in a while.  We had two dps in the group that were only auto-attacking the entire time.  Plus the normal stuff on Spine with one or two idiots killing multiple corruptions, and a tank that wouldn't hold the Amalgamation next to the plates.

So, I still have Spine and Madness to finish this week, so that 40 total could conceivably go up a bit before it's all done.

Addons For Leveling

There's just not much to talk about these days while waiting what is probably another 3 or 4 months for the next expansion to drop. Right now, I'm actually a little more focused on leveling a few of my SWTOR toons (gotta love the Legacy system - a game that actively rewards altoholics!).

In the meantime, I'm getting all of my toons prepped for the eventual drop of MoP (hehe..that rhymes). What that means right now is getting their bags cleaned out and making sure they've got the best bags available. Same thing with bank space.

Finally, I'm also going through and checking the addons that I used while leveling. There are not a lot of them, but thought this would be a good time to run through the ones that I use.

Carbonite: This isn't as useful now as it used to be with all of the additions to the Blizzard quest objective system. However, I still prefer it over the default, so it's generally the tool that I use to help with spotting and completing quests.

ArkInventory: This is the bag addon that I use. I find the customization options that it provides along with the ability for search for items across all of your toons and their various banks to be invaluable while leveling. It lets me easily keep track of what materials I have where that I may need to leveling crafting skills later on.

CrapAway: There are a lot of addons that do this, but this is the one that I tend to use. Does the simple task of selling all of your gray items every time you visit a vendor. Still not sure why Blizzard hasn't built this into the basic UI yet.

DotTracker: This is a new one for me, but one that I've grown to love. It's a simple addon that lets you keep track of your dots on a mob and notifies you right in the middle of your screen when they need to be refreshed. More useful in dungeons than while questing, but for those tougher mobs, it always helps to have a reminder.

Bartender: My action bar mod of choice. I've tried some of the others like Dominos, but I always seem to come back to Bartender at the end of the day. I love the customization and the ease of setting things up, particularly key bindings, bar size and location.

Gatherer: If you're going to be leveling any kind of gathering profession while questing, this is a great addon. It tracks and stores the locations of any mining or herbalism that either you or your guildies come across and will display them on your map. Also includes the ability to download existing node maps from places like Wowhead.

MakeRoom: If you do end up running out of space in your bags, this nice little addon will automatically suggest the lowest value gray items to be destroyed and take care of getting rid of them for you.

MikScrollingBattleText: I still just don't like the default Blizzard combat text. Mainly because I like to see which of my abilities are hitting for how much.

Pawn: This is a nice little addon that has a default set of stat weightings for each class (which can be modified / customized) and will use those stat weightings to let you judge whether a particular piece of gear (quest reward or drop) is an upgrade for you.

Tidy Plates: I use the Threat version of Tidy plates. It lets you easily keep track of which mobs are coming after you while questing and fighting.

Titan Panel: I use this primarily to track my xp per hour while questing, which I use to compare my approaches - questing, versus dungeons versus PvP. It also shows me the gold that I have on hand across my various toons if I need to move some cash around.

And that's basically it. Those are the addons that I find to be particularly helpful while questing and leveling.

The Unachievable Shoulders

So the only piece of T13 gear that I'm missing on my Death Knight at this point is the shoulders. And I seem to have quite the unlucky streak going with respect to roles on upgrade shoulders of any kind.

At last count, I'm now 0-34 on rolls for either Tier, or other usable raid finder shoulders. So I'm still rocking the good old 353's out of ZG/ZA.

At this point, it's such an amazing streak, that it would almost be a shame to win them. As much as I'd love to switch from the Tier helm to the valor helm, my quest for upgraded shoulders is taking on a futility that is almost Chicago Cub-like at this point.

So I'm going to keep trying until I end up replacing them with a quest green early in MoP. May as well keep the streak alive.

On more positive news, I finally got a second piece of Tier on my warlock, who now has his 2 piece set bonus and as a result will be spending a lot more cuddle time with his Doomguard.

I've also been running stuff now and then on the rogue, because the mechanics of that class seem to work well with my bad internet connection as well. He's only got one piece of Tier at this point though, so he has a way to go from a gearing standpoint.