The Mocking Smirk of the Loot Gods

"What's your luckydo?" - Every Grummle ever

There are some days when I just have to shake my head and smile at the weird way that things work out.

The thing about random loot drops is, obviously, that they are random and impossible to predict. You might go for weeks without getting drop, or get three great pieces in a row. Call it RNG Hell, the Loot Gods, Bad Luck or whatever, but blame random chance for that one item of gear that you've been unable to upgrade.

That's where I was last night. My gear was looking pretty good; 522 or better on every single item except for Boots (502 Raid Finder, so at least current tier) and my Shoulders.

The shoulders were embarrassing: [White Tiger Mantle], my LFR shoulders from last Tier that stubbornly refused to upgrade themselves. Weekly LFR runs of Iron Qon and Primordius and almost daily Heroic Scenario runs in the hopes that I would beat the miniscule odds and get a 516 drop with stats that weren't entirely useless.

Nothing. The Loot Gods were displeased, apparently.

I had given up hope completely of ever getting a drop. I was convinced that the drops didn't exist (much like the Shield from Tortos and the Twins, but that's another ranty, Gear QQ post). So I resigned myself to grinding towards Exalted with the Shado-Pan Assault and just buying a set.

And last night, right after Ji-Kun fell over dead into her own green slime, this popped up:

Finally! I was so excited. I wanted to teleport out immediately and buy them, but my raid leader told me to have some damned patience and wait until the end of the raid.

The Loot Gods are bastards, though. After more than two months of waiting and hoping and begging, once I was Exalted and could just buy the damned things and get the suffering over with, what did Primordius drop? Yup: [Spaulders of Primordial Growth].

My raid team all laughed and told me that at least I hadn't spent the money on the reputation gear and would I please finally shut the hell up about shoulders, already?

Now, you're probably saying, "So what?" This sort of thing happens to us all at one point or another. Random is random, after all.

But the Loot Gods have a real flair for the ironic. Guess what Iron Qon dropped? Yup! [Shoulders of the Crackling Conquerer].

I didn't even bother to roll on them. Yes, they're my best in slot and I would absolutely love to have them...

But three sets of shoulders in one night is just too much for any Paladin.

A Good Day

Over the past month or more I admit that I have been neglecting poor, ol' Battle Medic, and not without more than a little guilt. I have not, however, been neglecting the game entirely. I have been sneaking and conspiring, negotiating and stealing rare moments to indulge in Azeroth playtime whenever there was an opportunity.

And the majority of that time has been spent blowing stuff up. Mage-style. Warlocks beware.

My little gnomish pyromaniac has slowly and painstakingly progressed into the mid-60s and is slogging through the mire that is the Outlands.

Anyway, today was a good day. I have been intermittently fishing the high, lonely lakes of Terrokar Forest for the Mysterious Mr. Pinchy for a long time now. Every single skill point in Fishing that my Shaman has achieved has come in the futile hunt for this nearly-mythological crustacean. But no luck. Never even a sniff.

Until today.

Today was a good day.

An End to Madness

Deathwing is dead.

Actually, he's been dead for a couple of weeks now. I'm just damned tardy in my progression updates these days.

My guild, Mountain Top, cleared normal Dragon Soul for the first time just before the 5% Power of the Aspects nerf hit at the end of January. Sadly, I wasn't there due to a family crisis, but I'm proud that our guild managed to down Dragon Soul before it's difficulty was reduced. And we managed it despite losing key members of the team and not having a regular raid night.

Did I mention we're recruiting?

I got my own first Deathwing kill on the first week after the nerfs, and am going in again tonight for my third. We've also begun working on Heroic Morchok, whom we got down to 10% on our first night before time constraints forced us to kill him on normal difficulty so we had enough time left to clear the instance that night.

At the beginning of this expansion I set a raiding goal for myself; I wanted to clear each raiding tier while it was current, something that I didn't manage to do in Wrath of the Lich King. With Deathwing's demise at the hands of my Shaman I have now managed to accomplish that on the last two of the three raiding tiers this expansion.

I view Raiding Progression as a very personal thing. As much as I share the accomplishments with my guild and couldn't do it without them, I look at the raid bosses I've downed as my measuring stick as to how well I've experienced the content and how I am personally progressing. I was enormously disappointed that I didn't clear all of Tier 11 while it was current, only going 9/12; I didn't get Nefarian or either of the Throne of the Four Winds encounters down before 4.2 brought the nerfbat to them. Despite that disappointment, I'm very happy to have accomplished what I have done.

ON DIFFICULTY

I promised myself that I would not make this post a discussion on the difficulty level but I need to at least mention that compared to Lich King, Nefarian or Ragnaros, Madness of Deathwing was a hell of a lot easier. It didn't take my guild very many attempts to finally kill him. I think I saw about five pulls on normal difficulty before I got my first kill. Even Ragnaros after the savage nerfs that he received seemed more difficult than Madness.

The question that I pose to you, dear reader, is: Was the Madness of Deathwing encounter inherently easier than previous end boss encounters, or did it simply seem easier because the vast majority of us had already seen and defeated a simplified version of it on the Raid Finder?

Elusive Purple Wrist Candy

It's no secret to anyone of the Holy Paladin persuasion that bracers were a huge problem in Tier 11. Only 4 sets of PVE Intellect Plate bracers were available when Cataclysm first launched: two heroic level 346 bracers, a set that dropped from Cho'gall and finally a heroic-only set that dropped from Sinestra. None of these were terribly common drops, and throughout the entirety of Tier 11 not a single one dropped for me.

Not one.

Early on I had picked up the blue PVP bracers as a stop-gap. Even with the utterly useless Resilience, the Intellect upgrade was more than enough reason to choose them over the iLvl 333 Bracers of Umbral Mending that I was sporting since regular Grim Batol. They were not ideal, but I figured that they would do until something else dropped.

I wore them for six months.

And it's not like I didn't have opportunities to get them, either. I ran Grim Batol until my eyes were bleeding since the Dungeon Finder had a particularly evil habit of choosing no other dungeon for me. The bracers never dropped. Cho'gall didn't drop his either, but since I only ever got him down two or three times it's not nearly as surprising.

Fast-forward to Patch 4.1 and the Zandalari Troll instances and we see two new dungeons, dropping iLvl 353 gear that was designed to fill in the gaps between normal Heroic gear and normal-mode Raid gear. I was very excited when I learned that the Bracers of Hidden Purpose would be available in Zul'Aman; even more so when I learned that it would be off Akil'zon, the first boss in the instance. No more struggling with end bosses to get the nifty Plate Intellect bracers!

I figured I'd have them in a week.

Sadly, the same, familiar story was repeated with these bracers, only with an twist. The Dungeon Finder, with it's cruel, anti-Holy-Paladin bias, would choose nothing but Zul'Gurub for me when I would queue up for a Random Zandalari dungeon. And the odd time that it did choose Zul'Aman I would invariably zone into a group who had already downed Akil'zon and thus not even have a chance to get them. In the whole time that Zul'Aman has been back as a 5-man dungeon I think I have seen and killed the Eagle Boss 3 or 4 times total.

It's enough to drive a Dwarf to drink. Not that we need much of an excuse, mind you.

Jump ahead again to 4.2 and a new guild: Taking my own advice, I was running a lot of guild groups into the Troll-roics and I finally managed to snag the ever so elusive purple wrist candy. I should have been excited as I enchanted them for our first raids into the Firelands, but I wasn't. I was fairly ambivalent, actually, because I knew that not 5 days later I would acquire enough Valor Points to simply go and buy the Bracers of Imperious Truths.

So after eight months of struggling to get decent bracers, within the span of a week I now have two. Admittedly, the new Valor Point bracers are vastly and unquestionably superior, but since they are Bind on Equip the temptation to sell them for a ridiculous amount of gold is extremely hard to resist. There are none of these on the Auction House on my realm, nor have any been listed to my knowledge. Can I live with these troll-rific bracers for another week or so to get a huge, potential payday right now?

I think I can, as long as the money is truly, epicly ridiculous.

So I put them up on the Auction House. I couldn't believe I was doing it even as I was clicking the Post Auction button. The thought of 50,000 gold makes a boy do silly things.

As a responsible raider, however, I set the Auction to time-out just before our raid starts tonight. If they don't sell - and at 50k gold I figure it's a low probability that they will - I'll enchant and reforge them and rock them in Shannox's face tonight.

And if they do sell, then I'll try use the money to craft some of the great gear that's available. I'm sure it won't last long, but the start of a Patch like this is a golden opportunity to cash in. It's not like these bracers will be hard to obtain, after all.

UPDATE: For better or for worse, the Bracers of Imperious Truths didn't sell for my rather ambitious asking price before our raid last night, so I equipped them for our fight against Shannox. The irony is, of course, that Shannox - should we ever kill the fucker - drops bracers too.
 
 

A Little Quiet Around Here

"I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out." - Roy Blount, Jr.

I have not abandoned my blog, but it's beginning to feel a little neglected these days. In the past couple of weeks I have been having a very hard time getting quality writing done. I have been struggling mightily with every post that I try to write, and so my blog has been very quiet as of late. The noise of the crickets around here is deafening.

With precious little time at home that isn't filled with satisfying the demands of either the Dwarfling or my Wife and free time at work diminishing as we enter our busy season, I am finding it increasingly hard to find the time or inspiration to sit down and write blog posts. And when I do try to bang out some words, I find myself harshly critiquing things before even getting anything written and so never manage to get very far. I'm probably over-thinking things and making it harder than it needs to be, but words just aren't coming to me easily right now.

It really bugs me that this Blog is as quiet as it is right now. I take a lot of pride in Battle Medic, and to see it wither - even temporarily - is painful to me. I think about it all the time. Not posting feels like a failure, which makes actually sitting down and working on new posts even harder because of the pressure that I'm putting on myself to get new and excellent content up. Filler posts like these are okay, I suppose, but I can't imagine listening to me whine about not posting is terribly compelling to anyone.


WHAT'S COMING

The worst part is that I have a lot of great posts that I want to get posted. Each one has a start, or a concept in my Drafts folder, but I am finding finishing them very difficult. As a result I have slipped quite dreadfully from my goal of three posts per week, and am barely managing one a week at the moment. I thought that in lieu of actually giving all you Battle Medic fans actual content, I would fill you folks in on what I'm currently working on.

• A Dungeoneering Shaman's Journey to 60
• The Druid Dilemma talking about why I don't have a druid even though I've always wanted one
• An article on my Power Auras for Holy Paladins & Resto Shamans
• Holy Paladin Basics guides
• an update on Raiding
• an article on the Recycling of content (ie, the Troll Dungeons)
• an article on the current state of WoW
• Serenity Saz's 15 Days of Screenshots Challenge with a unique Battle Medic flair. I'm actually quite excited about this and looking forward to doing it.

BATTLE MEDIC'S GREATEST HITS

I picked up lot of new readers and new subscribers in April while I was doing the 20 Days of WoW Challenge. With that in mind and seeing as how this is a filler post anyway, I thought that I would share with everyone a list of the posts from the earlier months of the blog that I am most proud of. This feels quite self-indulgent, but I hope that someone who hasn't gone through and read Battle Medic from the beginning finds something interesting.

The First Annual Peevie Awards

What Makes a Main?

Blogservations: Random Thoughts on Writing and Warcraft

On Archaeology and the Trials of Surveying

On Heroics: When is the Nerf Bat Necessary?

Pushing a Boulder Uphill

Favourite Weapon

Professing on Professions

REAL CONTENT COMING SOON

I promise.

  

  

On Timing: The 4.1 Keybind Action Change

Have you ever had something that you do all the time suddenly feel completely uncomfortable and unfamiliar? Like when you write a word that you've written a thousand times before but then look at it and find no connection between the specific arrangement of letters and the meaning, as if you've never seen the word before? It's an odd feeling.

Something like that happened to me after the 4.1 patch.

One of the less heralded features that Blizzard included in 4.1 was a change to the way key presses work. In the past, when you pushed a key down the ability that is bound to that key would not activate until you released the key. Or put more simply, the ability activated when the key was going up as opposed to down.

Blizzard added an option to change this behaviour in the form of a check-box in the Interface>Combat part of the main menu. Having this box checked would change the action of the key press to activate when the key is pressed, rather than released. Blizzard also set this option to ON by default.

For many, this was a welcome and long overdue change. Add-ons have existed for a long time to provide this kind of functionality, and many people have been using them for years. In theory it should save a split-second every time you activate an ability. It's kind of a mystery as to why they did it the other way in the first place, really.

MOMMY, MY BUTTONS DON'T FEEL RIGHT

I swear that I tried to give this change an honest try. I can completely see the advantages of the new key action, and before the patch I was very excited about this change. I figured that it would make healing much more natural and responsive and in the long run would make me a better healer.

However, something happened that I did not expect. Every time I tried to heal things just didn't work right. My timing had been completely thrown off by the change. I would press the button too early and get a That Ability Isn't Ready Yet error and my spell wouldn't cast, forcing me to press the button again and waste precious time. Or I would press the button and it would cast on the wrong target because I had selected the target I wanted a fraction of a second after hitting the button. My timing was off so much that everything felt completely foreign and I was having a really hard time healing.

That split second made a huge difference.

I ended up having to spend more time looking at my Stuf cast bar (which shows latency) so that I could time the button presses just right, which meant spending less time looking at the giant globs of green goo that the boss was using to try to kill me. My fingers just didn't want to cooperate, and were fighting years of muscle memory in trying to learn the new timing.

I tried for a week or so to get used to to it, but I ended up having to turn it off. Once I did everything felt alright again and the natural flow of my healing rhythm returned.

I guess the moral of this little story is that any little change can be a big change. Given more time I probably could have got used to it, or I could have switched to Clique or Mouseover Macros to solve to problem. But the simplest solution was to just turn it off.

Did anyone else have any problems adjusting to the change, or am I just weird?
 
 

Day Eighteen: Favourite Outfit?

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days. We're on the home stretch now!


DAY EIGHTEEN: FAVOURITE OUTFIT?

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” - Oscar Wilde

I can honestly say that I don't have the first clue how to respond to this question, so this post will be nice and short.

Being a Wrath Baby, I don't have any tier sets from Vanilla that I keep to memorialize the sixty-seven Molten Core runs that I did. Tier 9 was the first set of tier gear that I ever even had the opportunity to collect, and it was sharded or sold as soon as it was replaced with something better.

Robes by Armani. Shoulders by Gucci. Off-Hand by Louis Vuitton
Not Pictured: Christian Loubouton Combat Boots

As such, I don't really have a Favourite Outfit for any of my characters. If I was held at gun-point and forced to choose one under threat of death or worse (like hearing a Rebecca Black song), I would probably choose the one that Fannon finished off Wrath of the Lich King in and is still wearing today.

There is no real reason for this: It doesn't match, it's not best-in-slot or particularly noteworthy in any way other than the fact that I've had it and been looking at it for so long. Although, that being said, I do think the Tier 10 Shoulder designs are far nicer than the T11 ones: Who wants to carry around bowls of water on their shoulders, anyway?

This outfit is in the photo in my Blog Header, my Twitter profile picture, and in my "signature" on my guild forums; so I've become very familiar with it. And because I've used it so much it has become almost a logo of sorts.

In the end, it will be sold off as I begin levelling Fannon through the Cataclysm content and finding replacement gear. In fact, there are already a couple of new lvl 80 items sitting in the mail waiting to be equipped, so very soon Fannon will have a different look. I don't really get all that sentimental over my gear or what my characters are wearing.

Yesterday, DAY SEVENTEEN: FAVOURITE PLACES IN THE WORLD (OF WARCRAFT)
Tomorrow, DAY NINETEEN: THE STUFF IN THE VIRTUAL ATTIC

Finally!

I logged in late Monday night to grab a couple of screenshots for a post I am working on, and as I am flying through the Western Plaguelands I see this:

He's comin' right for us!

All I can say is: FINALLY! I have been waiting for that stupid dragon to kill me for months now! I think he's been avoiding me, frankly. Our relationship has been a little bit strained ever since that party a couple of years ago where we both got completely drunk and he kept bragging on about how he was going to destroy the world - and when I told him he was full of shit he stormed around the room, flailing his arms and breaking furniture and saying how he was the freakin' Aspect of Death and how he'd show us all. Nobody really took him all that seriously due to his spotty, teen-age moustache and the purple Kylie Minogue T-Shirt he was wearing, but eventually he passed out and his girlfriend Sheila dragged him by the ankle to her mom's Buick.

OK, that actually didn't happen.

But, yay! Achievement!
 
 

News From the Lower Levels

Over the past several weeks while I have been working on the 20 Days of WoW Challenge, I have kinda been neglecting writing about anything else. While I managed to sneak in my take on Call to Arms, it's been hard to find the time to write about other topics, even though my mind and my notebook are bursting with ideas.

While playing, I have been spending much more time these days on my alts and yet oddly, I still only have one 85. My lowbie Shaman and the other Fannon have been keeping my attention these days at the expense of my higher level alts. Fannon the Second is about to hit level 40, and Thallie the Shaman just dinged 30 last night.

LEVELLING

I must say that the levelling experience after Cataclysm is superb. The pace seems fine tuned; it's quick and fun, but doesn't overreach the level of the zone unless you use heirlooms or run dungeons. The quests themselves are executed better as well, with a vast majority of the tedious and time consuming running back and forth between quest-givers and quest areas removed. Duskwood in particular has benefited from getting rid of the need to run back to Darkshire from the Raven Hill graveyard every 10 minutes.

The two alts that I am levelling up simultaneously are both using a different approach: Fannon, my Protection Paladin on Azuremyst, is questing and trying to amass as much gold as possible, while Thallie, my Shaman on my main server is in full heirlooms and levelling up through the random dungeon finder.

FANNON THE PALADIN AND THE QUEST TO GET STINKIN' RICH

Firstly, I am finding it damned confusing to have two characters the same name. Normally, all of my characters have unique names and, while I don't do any roleplaying, in my head at least they are all unique individuals. When I created a new character on Azuremyst, I named him Fannon because the guild I was joining is full of people from the Blogosphere and Twitter who know me by that name.  However, I'm finding it annoying when referring to the two Fannons in writing, and calling the Paladin "Fannon 2.0" kinda ruins the immersion for me.

Anyway, attempting to put aside my own mental problems, I am astonished at how quickly Fannon of Azuremyst is progressing through the levelling content. Obviously, starting on a new server means that this Fannon doesn't have access to any Bind to Account Heirlooms or any help other than the perks that being a member of a Level 11 guild will bring.  However, even lacking heirlooms I am plowing through the levels.

Same-level quest mobs get mowed over like tall grass in front of a riding mower piloted by a cocaine fiend. Quests are turned in by the bunch. Quest hubs are squeezed and used up like limes during a tequila drinking contest. The quests and the levels just fly by.

In what seems like very little time (in fact it's a little over a day of actual playtime), my little Effin' Paladin is about to ding 40. All of these levels were done with questing; he hasn't stepped foot into a dungeon yet. It's a little hard to believe he's that high, because the levelling process has seemed completely effortless.

The other bit of interest with Azuremyst Fannon is my goal of becoming wealthy by level 85. This isn't going as fast as the levelling, unfortunately. As of this writing, he is sitting at 440g with another 100g or so on the Auction House. I'll talk more about this in another post (hopefully this week) and give some more details on how I've gotten to where I am.

THALLIE: THE DUNGEONEERING SHAMAN

Note: I was too lazy to take another screenshot of her.

Thallie, as you may recall, is my little levelling Resto Shaman on Sargeras. At some point she has managed to acquire a full set of heirlooms - although her shoulders are cloth and her mace is the wrong itemization for healing. She has been spending her time sitting in the Dwarf District of Stormwind next the the Shaman trainer and faithfully running dungeons to gain experience. I haven't spent as much time playing her as I have with Fannon of Azuremyst, but she's been packing on the levels too.

Over the past week or so, any chance I get I log onto Thallie and hop into the Dungeon Finder. I must say that I am pleasantly surprised with how well these low level instances have gone. Admittedly, some of the lowest level dungeons go by extremely quick and they sometimes remind me of the final days of Wrath when Tier 10-wielding 10-man PUGs would storm into Naxxramas for the weekly raid quest and steamroll over the bosses in 30 seconds.

She has seen more low level dungeons than any of my other characters ever have, and I've done a few that I had never seen before. Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Stockades, Gnomeregan and most recently Scarlet Monastery Graveyard have all been conquered by this intrepid little braid-wearin' healer. Oddly enough I have never got Deadmines or Shadowfang Keep. Go figure.

With full purchasable heirlooms - Cloak, Shoulders, Chest, Hat and Weapon - in addition to the experience bonus that comes with being in a level 24 guild, each dungeon is easily a full level or more. And with the way Blizzard has restructured the dungeons, most of them are very quick runs. And her gear is fantastic. She has gained seven or eight levels in the past few days with 5 or 6 dungeons and very little effort.

The biggest problem I've seen is just trying to keep the same group throughout the dungeon. People drop out after defeating a boss, finish a quest they need or dinging the level they wanted then leave, and new people quickly take their place. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have had very few long waits for a group, and most of the tanks I have had have known their stuff well enough so as to not cause any problems. Running all these dungeons has been quite enjoyable.

QUESTING OR DUNGEONEERING: WHICH IS FASTER?

It's not exactly a fair comparison given the heirlooms, but even so there is no question in my mind that levelling through questing is much faster than levelling through the dungeon finder - assuming you are playing a non-healing spec. Mobs melt like butter in front of my Protection Paladin, but are not surprisingly quite a bit tougher to my Restoration Shaman.

The questing zones are just so incredibly well designed that there is virtually no downtime while questing. The quests are varied and fun, and proceed in a logical, story-driven manner which is completely engrossing. I have not felt as if I were grinding once since I started taking Fannon 2.0 through his journey.

The biggest advantage to running dungeons during the levelling process is the same as it always was: gear. For a minimal investment of time and effort there is a whole lot of great, blue quality gear available. Thallie's gear is a lot better than Fannon's paladin gear was at the same level. On the other hand, having great gear is far less important during questing than it was (or it may be that Protection Paladins are just ridiculously overpowered), and the mobs die just fine in quest greens.

Favourite Weapon

This post is part of a Blog Azeroth Shared Topic "What is your Favorite Weapon" as suggested by Dangfool.


Throughout the course of levelling and raiding in World of Warcraft, it's safe to say that each character goes through enough weapons and gear to arm two small armies.  From ridiculously oversized maces, sexy swords, daggers, or gigantic, hideously dangerous looking axes, there are a plethora of awesome weapons.

And there is nothing more satisfying than bashing your enemies face with your favourite one.

I gave this topic a lot of thought.  I get emotionally attached to my characters, and especially to their appearance.  In thinking about it I realized that I did have a favourite weapon, and even though it is one that you can't put Crusader on it's great fun to bash people in the face with it.

Shields.

I was really disappointed when Blizzard took Shield of the Righteous away from Holy Paladins and made it only for those silly Protection Pallys.  During Wrath of the Lich King I tried to heal every heroic boss in melee range so that I could whack him in the bum with my giant, spiky piece of arm candy once in a while.  It was very satisfying.

I learned that I had a fondness for shields when I got to Northrend with my Warrior and decided to try out tanking.  I loved the way that Protection played, even during questing. The noise that Shield Slam made was the sound of distilled awesome.  I bashed and devastated my way all the way to level 80.

I turned out to be a lousy tank, but my warrior is still Protection, simply because I enjoy the playstyle and the fact that I get to wear a shield.  There is nothing cooler looking than a two-and-a-half foot Gnome carrying a six foot tall chunk of wood.

Equipping this shield gives +100 Awesome

My all-time favourite shield is the Grand Marshal's Aegis.  It is, by far, the best looking shield in the game.  The model is used by a lot of NPCs, but is only available for a player through PVP rewards at level 60 and again at level 70 as the Grand Marshal's Barricade.

I have this shield on my Paladin main, Thosif.  I levelled Thosif as a Retribution Paladin, but I armed him with the Battleworn Thrash Blade and a shield. In terms of levelling efficiency, spec synergy or common sense it didn't really work, and frankly I'm not sure why I didn't just pick up a Protection spec and go to town on 10 mobs at once.

But damn, Thosif looked cool.

In order to get this shield I spent the vast majority of levels 50-60 in Arathi Basin, farming Honor points.  I hate PVP with a passion, but I really wanted this shield so I sucked it up and spent a lot of time watching the Resurrection timer in The Stable graveyard.  I finally got it, and I kept it equipped for most of Outlands until I finally switched to Holy.  It is still in my bank, and it's one of the few items that I keep purely for sentimental reasons.

Luckily, Holy also gets to have a shield.  Probably my most thrilling drop of WotLK was when the Lost Pavise of the Blue Flight dropped off of Sindragosa, and one of the weirdest moment of Cataclysm so far was when I replaced it with a rather boring looking off-hand healing sceptre.

I'm now using the Elementium Stormshield, which has awesome stats but doesn't look anywhere near as cool as the Grand Marshal's Aegis or the Lost Pavise.

But I just wish I could bash someone in the face with it.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

When Cataclysm launched I set a goal for myself to complete the raid content while it was current.  I came very late to the raiding scene in Wrath of the Lich King, and missed a lot of really great content.  I did not have the chance to clear Naxxramas or Ulduar while they were relevant, and still haven't made it back there to run them for nostalgia reasons.  I didn't want that to happen to me in Cataclysm.

We're getting there.  The last couple of weeks have seen very good progress.

Shadowgarde is now 8/12 in current tier content, having downed Ascendant Council for the first time last week. We had a couple of good looks at Cho'gall last week as well, even though they ended with some embarrassingly quick wipes.  Only Nefarian & Cho'gall remain in their respective instances; then it's on to Throne of the Four Winds, which we haven't looked at yet.

It's nice to be able to see that the realization of my goal is in sight.  There is still a long way to go, and three of the four encounters that we have remaining are the most challenging of the expansion, so, like the Dwarfling, they're not likely to go down quietly.  But the end is within reach, and that feels pretty good.

For my part, despite the changes to my life, I have managed to attend my raids and keep my focus well enough, although I have hardly been at the top of my game.  Lack of really restful sleep and a hell of a lot of distractions (most due to the relatives that have been visiting us non-stop; welcome to Hotel Fannon) have made things harder on me.  I'm still managing to get the job done, but I don't feel like I've been playing with the same level of skill that I was before.

For example, last night on Magmaw and Omnotron (which are admittedly farm bosses for us now) my use of cooldowns was very spotty.  Ooops.  Nothing earth-shattering or anything and no healing-related wipes, but hardly efficient and I expect better of myself.  I did much better once I realized that I was playing lazy and the pulls of Maloriak and Halfus were much better.

Tonight we'll be tackling Atramedes, Chimaeron and Ascendant Council, and hopefully we'll have enough time to get some more attempts on Cho'gall.  Time is going to be very tight, however.

As I mentioned previously, our Raid Group has a hard time cap; we're done at 10pm server time, pretty much no matter what.  We have managed to squeeze a lot into those 5 hours per week, but we're beginning to run out of time to work on the progression bosses because we're spending all of our time downing the 8 bosses just to get there.

It's a hard choice:  Extend the lockout to work on progression or continue to reset so that we can get the gear.  As of right now, the gear wins out, since a majority of our raiders still need a significant amount of upgrades.  I have yet to see a single piece of Plate Healing gear drop yet, for example, and I know that there are others who have been RNG's bitch as well.  The Resto Shaman that we don't have has been making out like a bandit, however.  Maybe that's another reason that I decided to level one.

Luckily, there is lots of time.  With Blizzard's decision to delay the next tier of raids until patch 4.2, we have at least a couple of months before we move on to another raid.

But the goal for this tier is progressing nicely:  75% of the way home, and still going strong.

Gettin' Jiggy with the Shammies

Oh god, that title isn't dating me at all.  I was considering some variation of ShamWoW, but slapped myself and moved on in the nick of time.

Over the past two weeks since the arrival of the Dwarfling, I have been getting the Alt-itch.  You know the one; it's the itch you get when your main is geared up enough that nothing but raiding drops will help and you're looking for something else to do.  This feeling actually comes at a good time, since as I expected my play time has become much more restricted than before and I don't have as much time as I'd like to devote to heroics or extra raids.  I hear that they're working on an ointment to cure this, but it's not ready yet and all you can do as of now is to scratch it.

So this past Sunday, I asked the Twitterati which alt I should focus on:  The Dwarf Shaman or a Druid.  The replies were mixed.  It didn't get all that ugly, but do you ever get the feeling that if you put one hundred Druid players in the same room with one hundred Shaman players that eventually a no-holds-barred knife fight would break out?  We healers are a passionate bunch, aren't we?

In the end, to nobody's surprise, the Dwarf Shammie won the day.  You have read the title of this blog, right?

Thallie, looking badass in her mismatched heirloom gear.

This is Thallie, my newest and cutest dwarven battle medic.  She was created as soon as 4.03 dropped and the world changed, but has been languishing a little bit as I have been leveling and gearing my Paladin.  I took up the call of the elements and spent a little time leveling her on Sunday.

Oh, and just because I'm a little nuts, I've decided to level her as restoration.

The original plan was to level her through dungeons as a healer.  As an unrepentant Wrath Baby, I did not get the chance to see a lot of these dungeons at the level they were meant to be seen; either I soloed them at max level or was run through them by guildies while leveling.  The desire to see these dungeons and run through them as they were meant to be seen is very strong and would be a fun way to level.

The major drawback of leveling through dungeons and the thing that is really bugging me is that I am going to miss all of the lovely new quests that Blizzard has created for us.  I really enjoyed the changes to Dun Morogh  and Loch Modan and I am really torn about missing a large chunk of the rest of the zones.  The experience gains in dungeons are amazing and even with a mix of questing and dungeon running I'll end up out-leveling the zones extremely quickly.  I've run her through three dungeons now, pretty much doing levels 14 through 21 without questing at all and in doing so I completely outleveled Loch Modan and had to dump most of the quests and move to Duskwood (also as recommended by my Twitter peeps).

Riding into Darkshire took me back, however, since I was immediately ganked by a party of level 85 asshats burning down the town.  I've never understood what makes that fun, honestly.

Anyway, the low level dungeons are a lot of fun, even though there is not a great deal of healing required in them.  During the Wailing Caverns run that I did on Sunday I spent more time dealing damage than I did healing, letting Earth Shield do most of the healing work.  I had never been in that instance before, so it felt really good to see some "new" dungeon content.

By the way I am really a terrible DPSer.  Just plain awful.  "Please, Mr. Tank, take some damage so that I don't look like I'm being completely carried through this dungeon!"

I think in the end I'm going to end up doing a vast majority of dungeon leveling where I can squeeze in the time to do it.  The questing will naturally come when I either don't have time to do an instance, or while I'm waiting for the dungeon finder to get a group together for me.  But I just have to accept that with this plan I am not going to get the full story that is being told in each of the zones.  The lore nerd in me cries as the prospect, but that's the price for quick leveling, I suppose.

How do you level your Alts?  Do you prefer LFD leveling or questing?  Or are Alts something that you don't have time for?

I would like to give a special shout-out to Mylindara of  the Crimson Blades guild on Sargeras for helping me out with the screenshot featured in this post.  I was stuck at work with no access to the wow armory and he was good enough to grab it for me.  Check out his blog Cleansing Waters at http://mylindara.crimsonblades.info/.  

This Week in Raiding: Green Bay Wipes Us

This Week in Raiding is a (hopefully) weekly feature discussing the raiding encounters that my guild tackled this week, the lessons learned from them, as well as any news or thoughts on raiding in general. This week I complain about things. Enjoy!


This week in raiding... was cancelled. Apparently last Sunday there was an important broadcast of some sort coming from the telly that had a lot of our raiders transfixed. I'm not exactly sure of the nature of this broadcast, but from what I have gathered so far, I think it was a new episode of World's Funniest TV Commercials, since that seems to be all anybody was talking about afterwards. However, there was a lot of buzz on Twitter about a rather grandiose soup bowl of some sort, so that might bear some investigation as well.

Seriously, though, our Sunday night raid did not go off as planned due to some, err, unannounced absences due to the Superbowl. Oh well, I did my heroic and a couple of dailies and spent some time with my wife. It worked out well, really.

Monday night our regular raiders returned, acting all innocent and, "Waddaya mean yesterday was raid night?" It proved to be an interesting night.

Our biggest nemesis (aside from the elevator, which has wiped us more times than Arthas) was lag. The connection was terrible on Monday night, which likely had something to do with the 4.0.6 patch being downloaded. I noticed multiple occasions where my screen would freeze for a couple of seconds and then race to catch up with me. It's very interesting trying to heal when you're watching a photograph instead of a movie.

In the end we did manage to get our three Blackwing Descent bosses down in the one night. Magmaw actually took us a great deal more time that I would have expected. The lag was causing massive problems mounting him and getting the chains attached properly, resulting in numerous wipes on a boss that I thought we had cased. In one rather unique wipe, I accidentally clicked on Magmaw during the chaining phase and ended up on his back. I was surprised, to say the least, and tried my best to get him chained down, but the tank ended up becoming worm munchies and we called the attempt.

Tuesday morning I had quite a few people hit my blog after searching for "Problems Mounting Magmaw" on Google, so I don't think we were the only ones having this issue. I suspect that this is a temporary issue, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

On we went to Omnotron, who was one-shot. I know, I was surprised too.

Maloriak gave us a bit of trouble, but we ended up getting him down on our last attempt of the night. What is the magic of saying, "This is the last attempt of the night"? Is it just me, or does it seem like as soon as that phrase is uttered your odds of downing the boss get better? It's like searching for hours for your car keys and giving up, grabbing a beer from the fridge, going back to the couch and sitting on them.

Afterwards, I pugged a last minute Baradin Hold run with Oath, our main tank. Pit Lord Lootbag dropped my Holy tier gloves, which represented the first raid loot for my holy spec that I've seen in the month that I've been raiding. It was very exciting. Or rather, it would have been if I didn't already have the World Keepers Gauntlets from Earthen Ring already. You know, Argaloth, I could have used those pants that you have on you somewhere. Those would have been very helpful, thankyouverymuch. I'll save the tier gloves, of course, until I have another piece of tier gear. If Omnotron Maloriak drops the Flash Freeze Gauntlets next week I think I'll cry.

How was your raiding weekend? Did the Superbowl or the lag cause you any issues?

It’s Nice to Be Needed... But Not Too Needed

When you are in a Raiding Guild, it is nice to be needed. 

I really enjoy my guild.  Even though I am a relative newcomer (I've been there for just shy of a year now), I feel like I have been accepted into their bizarre little family and have become one of them.  I have seen the highs and lows of progression with them; stood defiantly in front of the Lich King as he decimated our raid, exulted with them in triumph when we overcame that fight, and was there to see my guildmate Bomba break down in great, heaving sobs every time someone mentioned the phrase "Ulduar Hard Modes".  

When I joined Shadowgarde I was a complete noob when it came to raiding.  I had actually never even set foot in a raid before, but I knew that I wanted to.  I did everything I could to get my gear up to par (including PUGing Trial of the Crusader, which was equivalent to getting a 10-man and a 25-man root canal every week) and eventually I was invited to heal our guild ICC run.  There were a lot of growing pains as I learned the ropes, and my guildmates were great in helping me through it.  I think that in the end I evolved into a very good raider and that I've earned my raid spot.

It is a little disconcerting, on the other hand, to feel completely indispensable.  

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that any time there is a raid called I get an instant invite.  I love being a go-to healer and someone my guild can count on to always be there.  But if I can't make it for whatever reason (say, like having a pregnant wife have a mental meltdown on a raid night), I don't want to feel like I'm the sole reason that the raid gets canceled.  Frankly, I can't take the guilt.

It's not just me, either.  At this point we are so hard up for healers that we don't have enough experienced, raid-ready healers to allow much flexibility at all.  If one of our regular healers miss a raid, it's a good bet that it will end up being canceled, or at least significantly delayed while we scour tradechat for a PUGer whose knuckles don't drag on the ground.  We have picked up a new recruit who has been raiding with us for a few weeks now who looks like he's going to work out really well, but we need more.

We are a very large guild full of all sorts of people from raiders to PVPers to casuals and socials.  It's not unusual to have 25 people online at raid time and still not have enough people who are interested in or geared for raiding.  Being such an incredibly diverse guild is a double-edged sword; on one hand the interaction and feeling of family is wonderfully comforting and compelling, while at the same time it's very discouraging to feel like you're PUGing within your own guild.

So... Any healers on Sargeras looking for a new guild?

  

Blogservations: Random Thoughts on Writing and Warcraft

This post is a desperate attempt to find a reason to use the term “Hodge-Podge” in a way that doesn't require double-quotes.  Success is by no means assured.

I have been blogging now for about six weeks and have recently been dealing with a minor bout of writer's block.  It's my first, so I'm not entirely sure what to do with it; is there a protocol or tradition for dealing with your first bout?  Are you supposed to frame it and put it on your wall like the first dollar that a fledgling business earns, to forever be a reminder that, yes, things have sucked worse than they do now?  Or is the inability to get past the blank word document a dirty little secret that you need to take to your grave, since talking about it is considered a grievous faux pas like mentioning a no-hitter during a baseball game?

As a complete non-sequitur, I really like abusing semi-colons.  I feel like every sentence deserves one.   Besides, I think that commas are overworked and that it's a good idea to give them a break unless they start a revolution and overthrow the world's governments.  I, for one, welcome our new comma overlords.

It's not that I don't have any ideas on what to write, I have lots of ideas for posts.  In my drafts folder on blogger, on my work and home computer's word processors are snippets, thoughts and orphaned titles of posts that are germinating in my brain but can't seem to get out of the grey matter.  There is no greater feeling of creative helplessness than staring at a blank page or canvas without the faintest idea of what to fill it with.

Even the Blog Azeroth Shared Topics, normally a goldmine for any Warcraft blogger that is feeling lost for a topic, have eluded me.  Last weeks topic “An Open Letter To…” stumped me for a solid week, and after each attempt was mercilessly aborted for being completely awful, I just threw up my hands and walked away from it.  I thought that a topic with completely endless possibilities would be fantastic, but the lack of direction ended up taking my mind in so many directions that physicists are going to have to create a few new dimensions just to accommodate them all.

At least with the current one “Are Five Levels Enough” I can simply say, “Yes” and move on.  Hey, does this post now count as my response?  I can already feel the link love.

After six weeks of writing for my blog, I've managed to observe a few things.  First of all, this project really is the first real writing I've done since university.  I worry that my style has become, well, rather staid and boring at times, having something to do with the fact that the major source of actual, real writing that I've done for the past ten years have been professional letters for work.  Inserting some personality and humour into a serious post can be mind-numbingly frustrating, and at the same time I wonder if small, throwaway posts like this one aren't worth the bother since why waste everyone's time?  There is always the nagging self-doubt hanging in the back of my mind that when I am writing something personal nobody is really all that interested in reading it, and that I'm not enough of an expert to write the IMPORTANT POSTS.

Still, I've really enjoyed writing again.  It's always something that I've enjoyed but never did, so this has been a wonderful outlet for me.  To both of the people who have read this far, I truly appreciate it.

Another thing I've observed is that Twitter is enormously distracting when you want to get any real work done.  Want to sit down and write a post?  Oops, Twitter has a new message.  Need to do the job you get paid for?  Wait, what is twitter saying about Wil Wheaton?  I always feel like I'm missing something vital and game-changing when there is a new, unread Tweet.  I get this weird burning in the back of my brain when I can't click on it to find out what it's all about.

In the past, whenever I've been feeling creatively stagnant, there have always been a few places I could go for inspiration.  For my photography, I could go to an art gallery or peruse any of the dozens of books that I have on the subject.  If I just wanted a buzz and a boost to my overall creativity, I would read U2: At The End of The World, which for some reason works on my brain like putting a packet of Mentos into Diet Coke:  everything gets all fizzy and starts spewing out uncontrollably and eventually you'll end up sticky.

For writing, however, there really is only one book worth picking up; only one book that energizes me enough to face the demon of the blank Word document.  (There you are Semi-colon, my pretty.  I've missed you).  Douglas Adams's The Salmon of Doubt, which in a sense is not a proper book:  merely a collection of writings from one of the most brilliant minds to ever postulate that sticking a fish in your ear was a good idea.  The articles in the book itself are wonderful to read, but most importantly, The Salmon of Doubt shows me how to be a writer.  There is no trick, you just have to write.  You need to write all the time, about whatever comes to your mind.  Vomit it on the page (or in this case laptop... who writes longhand blog posts?) and see if there are any undigested chunks of good writing in there.

I picked it up last night and started reading it, and well, 900ish words later here we are.  In case you haven't guessed yet, this post has nothing to do with WoW and the title was just to draw you in (I'm sneaky, aren't I).  But as a new blogger, and a person who only recently started to think of themselves as a writer, I felt I needed to get this out.  I think there are at least one or two readable bits here, although I'd be careful... it might just be some corn that I ate last night.

An Intimate Conversation with my Level 1 Self

There was an interesting Breakfast Topic posted over at wowinsider a while ago.  The questions was, "What Would You Tell Your Level 1 Self?"  I posted this in my guild forums, but I thought I would share it with the blogosphere as well.

Personally, I would take my new and shiny level 1 and take him into Anvilmar, sit him in front of the fire and have a long talk with him.  The Thunderbrew Ale would flow freely and the conversation would touch on many things, lasting far into the night.  We'd cover such topics as…

- “Youngling, log out and delete your hunter.  Just… just do it.  Having a dwarf with a gun is not nearly as cool as you think it’s going to be. You are really going to enjoy healing.  Seriously, DPS is for suckers.  Go get yourself a Priest or a Pally and thank me later”

- “Same thing goes for a Gnome Warrior.  The thought of a Gnome in 2 tons of armor is funny, but it’s gonna get old.  Oh, and Tailoring seriously is a stupid idea for a warrior. Really.  You can buy all the bags you want on the auction house.”

- “Don’t be scared of dungeons and groups.  Yes you’re new and have no idea what you’re doing, but everyone else was there at one point.  You’re going to make mistakes and you’ll embarrass yourself occasionally, but you’ll learn faster and there are lots of people who will be willing to help you out.  This ain’t a single player game, buddy”

- “Kill any horde rogue on sight. Kill the Alliance ones too if you can figure out how.  You will learn that there is an extra-burny place in hell for rogues.”

- “WOW is fun when you play it drunk.  Do this often.”

- “Oh, that thing you told your wife about not letting yourself get addicted to this game… yaaaaah… you’re wrong.  You might as well apologize to her now and get it over with.  And she will never play it with you, so don’t bother trying.”

I’m sure it would end up with both of us drunk, singing Dwarven drinking songs in front of the fire.  I would not want to be either of me the next morning.

What would you tell your Level 1 self if you could go back?

Feeling Behind the Curve

From a game company’s perspective, December is a great time to release a new game, but for those players who have families and jobs, it’s a terrible time.  Between family obligations, travel, work, a pregnant wife and a nasty bout with the stomach flu, I have had virtually no time to dedicate to getting geared enough to begin raiding.

I have typically been able to squeeze in only one heroic attempt on the nights when I have a chance to play, and I’ve had to cut several attempts short due to real life concerns.  It’s been over a week since I was able to queue for heroics, but I only got my first upgrades from them last night. 

This has me feeling a little bit behind the curve in terms of progress.  Some of the more hardcore people in my guild are beginning to organize the first raids, and we’re short on healers.  I would dearly love to be with my guild when they first step foot into the new raid instances, but frankly I don’t think that’s going to happen, which is very disappointing.

So my goal is to maximize my gearing in the minimal amount of time that I have.  To do this I am going to focus on specific dungeons:  Halls of Origination, Blackrock Caverns and Stonecore.  These are the dungeons with both the most drops for Holy Paladins and the most potential Justice Points with 490, 350 and 280, respectively.  Technically Shadowfang Keep has 350, and a couple of great drops as well, but you’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.  Besides, I still have nightmares from the last time I was in that place.

The biggest downside to this strategy is that I will be foregoing the 70 Valor Points for doing the daily heroic.  However, once I get closer to 340 ilvl (currently I’m at 331) I’ll go back to doing the randoms. 

I hope this post is just a little bit of gear QQ, as it’s probably not as bad as I’m making it out to be.  I am on the cusp of becoming Revered with the Earthen Ring, giving me access to [Peacemaker's Breastplate], and as well I should be able to buy [Legguards of the Gentle] using Justice Points after the next heroic run.  So hopefully I’ll be back on track before too long.

How has your gearing been going?  Are you feeling behind the game in terms of gearing?  Is your guild getting antsy about when raiding is going to start?  Have you come up with a strategy to maximize your own gear progression, or are you just taking it day by day?