From Facerolling to /facepalm'n

It’s no mystery that raids and dungeons have become less and less of a challenge as our gear got better.  A group can easily ignore the mechanics of a fight as long as their group meets the following criteria

• They have uber dps and uber heals
• They have an uber tank and uber heals
• They have an uber group with uber dps,tank and heals

Healing Impressions

I know a lot of resto druids were (and still are) a little peeved about the changes to the Tree of Life form.  I for one can admit that I was amongst the group of fairly disgruntled tree healz pissed off at blizz for taking away our beloved form when it was first announced.  I’m actually still not very partial to the idea that I’m a druid but the manner in which I go about healing kinda goes against one of the facets of being a druid.  I mean don't get me wrong, druid healers still have hots but priests have hots as well.  One of the things that made druids cool to play was the fact that we shape-shifted into a form to take on a particular role.  

Second Glance...wtf!

When 4.0 first went live and I was able to test out my dps unbuffed on a target dummy, I was pleased to find that overall it wasn't as abysmal as many others claimed it would be.  Albeit this was on a target dummy and there were a number of other factors that were not taken into consideration, I assumed that I could factor my results on the dummy into other situations (like any  player normally would) and be able to conclude upon my plausible dps performance in 5 man and raid settings.  This however was not the case.  I mean before 4.0 target dummies were basically for practicing rotations which lead to trying to optimize one’s dps.  So how could I be faulted to assume that as a result of playing with other players who brought more buffs (and debuffs in some cases) my dps would definitely increase considerably like it did before 4.0.  


Boy was I wrong.

4.0 First Impressions!

I don't know about anyone else but it took me forever to get the last part of the patch finished (or enough data streamed to be able to play). Of course I knew this would happen so I was content with mindlessly trying to occupy my attention with other things while anxiously awaiting the patch’s completion.  I was able to hop on all of my toons eventually and take the new specs for a semi test drive but unfortunately due to how late the patch actually finished for me I was not able to spend a lot of time with them... and I probably won’t be able to do anything until later today.  

I logged in on my main first to check out first hand some of the changes to resto and feral.

Because of my time constraints I did not look into re-gemming or re-forging ( lol, I Iogged off not being completely sure if that was even available.  I just assumed it was since it was among the things to find in Shattrath when I spoke with a guard).  I did manage to get the appropriate prime glyphs for all of my toons.  I honestly didn't spend to much time in my restoration spec. I did notice I had a crap ton more hp and mana but my heals weren't hitting as hard as they used to even out of caster form let alone while in tree.  Also my mana barely moved but then again I was just messing around with the spells so I really wasn't using anything that you might say would be optimal to use in an appropriate situation.  Even still, I noticed with the cast time of the direct healing spells by the time I cast the next spell my mana was regenerating crazy fast.  I also popped the ‘tree form’ cool down to check it out.  I guess it was cool and all but I would rather just have tree form back as a permanent shapeshift.  A lot of people have qq’d about the tree form  skin as wit was before 4.0 and blizz has actually addressed that “problem” in a recent build

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Head first into 4.0.......point 1

So 4.0.1 is almost upon us... unless of course the patch is delayed for some reason.  Everyone will have quite a bit of adjusting to do once we are finally able to log in.  The first thing I’m pretty sure I will do in game is redo my talent specs and then re optimize my gear.  I will also most likely end up disabling all of my addons just in so my interface doesn't explode. I’ve wanted to do a post on my proposed druid specs and maybe death knight spec just to share how I will approach 4.0.1.  I think I will talk a little bit about  feral for the time being as I have been raiding as feral dps a lot more often then healing as of late (sadly that may reverse in the future..only time will tell).  Because of that I guess I feel I have a little more insight on whats going to be changing with  the spec than resto at the moment.    I will post my experience with balance and resto after the patch goes live.    

Feral Talent spec:


At level 80 we will have only 36 points, and 31 of those have to be spent in the Feral tree before we can put any points in the Restoration tree. This makes the Tier 2 talents in the Resto tree unreachable until Cataclysm is released.

Level 80 Kitty raid spec here

BA Shared Topic: Whats In A Name?

With all the anticipation and preparation for patch 4.0.1, I've been negligent of my blog for a couple of days mainly because I've been trying to farm useful in game pics to use in upcoming posts.  Well I guess I haven't really been negligent because I had intentions of improving my content for readers.  Anyways, I still want to talk about some patch related stuff but I guess now I need to debate if it would be worthwhile since the patch is so close.  I'll worry about that later though.  In the meantime I'd like to participate in this week's Blog Azeroth Shared Topic from Llani of Pocket Heals!


First I'd like to say that this is a very good topic so props to Llani :).  For me, when it comes to creating names for my toons I always try to be random with hopes of coming up with something unique and witty.   I mean who doesn't want a cool name that people comment on all the time in trade.  Then after some time passes and I realize that my creativity isn't quite up to the task I end up either meshing together phrases or words people normally use that I find funny or just using random phrases that no one would think to use for a name.  Basically there is no logic involved which I like because I like to think of my naming system as my very own random name generator without the role-play element and weird syllables and silent letters.  I'll go into further detail about the thought process (or proposed thought process of all the names that seem like they were literally made on a whim) of my toons beginning with my alts.

Down Time

By this point a lot of people have already seen most of the endgame content of the expansion and are biding time until cataclysm comes out. I find myself in a similar situation as I have cleared ICC 10 and most of ICC 25 man on my main.

I'm more of a casual player than hardcore so I have gotten to see most of the content by filling spots in people's regular 10 or 25 man groups mainly because I can do that at my leisure (also because of my mad skills that people tend to recognize... jk ).  

I often find myself doing this because the guild runs that are scheduled tend to deviate from the times I'm actually available. This doesn't really bother me much because I enjoy the people in my guild and I like to be available for help so I stick around regardless.
 
As of late my primary focus has been to get my 2nd druid and my dk to 80 which I accomplished few days ago. My main goal now is to get their professions leveled and gear them up a bit.

Good Reason there needs to be a WoW version of AA

With the start of classes and all, I've been really busy getting situated so I decided that I would take a short break from WoW.  After looking over my schedule for the next few weeks I told myself that I wouldn't play.  I wouldn't until I reached a point where I could play comfortably  and not feel stressed because I knew there were more pertinent things that I  should be attending to i.e. grad school apps and things like that.  I told myself this to help me be proactive because I figured the less distractions I had the more proactive I would be.  But in all honesty though, there is always something to do and I am so easily distracted so I in fact would never not be busy enough to feel comfortable to play for whatever allotted time.

Well I was proactive for a couple of weeks then I gave in and renewed my subscription to hop back in to game play.  Oh yea did I mention that I made my resolution at about the end of August/ beginning of September and I renewed my subscription officially towards the end of September.  So I didn't do too badly.  But what can I say, I can’t stay away.  Lol, and during the time that I suspended my account purposely (because I figured that would help me stay less distracted) I couldn't help but stay up to date on all the cataclysm changes (this definitely was counterproductive to me avoiding being distracted).  I'm sure most who are interested already check stuff like that out but I think I'll post some stuff here as well as I see fit.  On that note stay tuned! :)