GnomeDruid

The biggest thing standing between me and healing is experience. I has none. And the only way to get experience is to, well … get some.

Helloooooo Nurse Catch 22.

So, last night, I took a deep breath, steeled my nerves, and put myself in LFG for normal UK as “noob healer looking for experience.” I believe in truth in advertising. That way, if it’s not working out for the group, they can let me know.

Surprisingly, I actually got a tell.

Again, I reiterated to the group that I was fairly new at the healing game. They were fine, and off we went.

For the record, we were doing Old Kingdom. DK Tank, a Shaman, Shadow Priest, Warlock and me. I know the warlock was 75, I was 74 at the time. The rest of the group was in that range, but I didn’t note specific levels. No one was over 75.

It was an awesome run. The tank pulled smartly, the DPS knew their job, and I kept everyone alive. And learned that I need to watch my own health bar, as much as everyone elses >_>.

The Warlock died on one of the elemental packs, and by his own admission he was not concentrating on the tank target. (Plus, he was a gnome, so it was okay.) The other deaths were TPK’s because we nabbed too many packs at once. (Gotta love those butt/pet-pulls)

The tank got close a couple times, but Swiftmend and/or Natures Swiftness saved the day.

So, overall, I was very encouraged! I know that I had a decent pug in that they weren’t trying to do too much, and everyone knew their roles (most players were on an alt they were leveling).  I have a sneaky suspicion the Shaman or Priest may have tossed off a heal or two, but over all, most of it was me.

It was much less painful than I expected my first pug healing experience to be. So, thanks awesome group, I appreciate it ^_^

The Good

• Only one death, which was an error on that player’s part.
• I had all my mobs on Insanity dead before some of the other players. ^_^
• I got both quests done, and dinged 75.
• They were willing to do a 2nd run with me healing.

The Bad

• The mouseover “glare” on Grid actually made it a little difficult to see the health deficit at times.  (I have colored bars on a black background.) Will have to fiddle with that.
• In redoing my key bindings, I neglected to think about the fact I was rebinding “R” which is making it hard to reply, for some reason.
• I need to make my Nature’sSwiftness -> Healing Touch macro show NS so I’ll have the cooldown showing on the button.

Keybindings

I recently went from my normal keyboard back to my split keyboard as I’ve been doing more typing for class (yay, coding.) Unfortunately, this means I have to reach for keys on the right half, since my right hand is usually on the mouse. So I wrapped my primary hot bar to two lines and rebound the keys:

1 -2-3-4-5-6
q-w-e-r-t

Healing spells on the top row, innervate, decurse, poison, etc on the bottom row. It worked out really well (with the exception of the aforementioned “can’t reply to tells” thing)

I like the layout, and wouldn’t mind adapting it to my other toons, as soon as I figure out which key to rebind Reply to. (Or I could just splurge with my tax return and buy a Nostromo or something…)

Hope you all have a great week!

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Ladies and gentlemen, in lieu of your regularly scheduled post (with actual, you know, thought and content) here is a gnome on a motorbike:

No, he is not wearing pants. Yes, that is a pirate hat and tenta-staff.

Caliban got his Mecha-Hog (yes, I know it’s not called that for Alliance, lemme alone) this weekend and has been having fun tooling around on it. I think it’s a cool mount, except for the fact it doesn’t auto-dismount you when you cast a spell or something.

Yes, I do realize the site design still isn’t done.

The gnome is a slacker! I admit! *cry* ;-]

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Spring Break is upon me, and I’m actually taking 3 days off this week for a 5 day weekend. Yesterday was reasonably productive balanced between Getting Stuff Done and Scheduled Slacking.

Today has been utter slackage. Woke up slightly headachy, and just never managed to shake it off.

Wanted to dink around on the druid some, but just really didn’t have the gumption to do so.

Will be logging in for Phaelia’s little party here in a bit, probably hang about for an hour or so and then go to bed early.

Hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll have a new site design and rss feed up. No promises, I am a gnome after all.

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Lazy Post Linkage

Good (non QQ) article on Lifebloom over at 4Haelz

Updated Path of the hero:

The Gnome

The Druid

Druid Update

Holey crap, I actually played the druid! I had some time after raid last night, didn’t feel like doing dailies (poor Oracles) and decided to hop onto the druid.

I’ve changed specs on poor Tim a lot lately, running the gamut from Balance to Resto to Feral and back again.

I was trying to think of a screen shot for Phaelia’s contest, and knew I wanted to be tree form in it. So I specced out of feral, and just randomly threw  points in to Resto until I got Tree of Life. I threw the rest into Balance so that I could maybe take out a mob or two running around. Till I got the screenshot I wanted.

Well … even with a random spec, I did all right. By the end, I was tossing hots on myself and aoe’ing those, um, poor unfortunate animals in Borean Tundra.  *ahem*. I’d come out at near full health, since Rejuv alone was over 900 a tick.

So I went and dug up a spec from Phaelia’s post here.  Specifically the Thorn Bush spec. It served me quite well through the last of Borean Tundra.

I plan on going back and doing all of Howling Fjord before moving on to Dragonblight (hey, it’s decent XP and leaves that many more zones left to finish once I hit 80.) This also means that I’ll be several levels ahead of the content at that point, which should help.

Hurricane was a little mana intensive if I was chain casting it, but even so, I was moving through with very little downtime (something I’m VERY used to with the warlock and the DK.)  If I was getting low, I’d just single-target mobs till my mana was back up again. Having all that regen does help.

Also, I don’t think I swapped out my glyphs, so I’m probably still running with feral ones…

Previews

Next week is Spring Break for me, and (for once) I have NO homework. I do have some work stuff to catch up on, but it should be minimal.

This will give me a lot of time to play the druid, so I can hopefully get more of a handle on the resto abilities and maybe get a few more instances healed under my belt.

I will also finish the site design and get myself an RSS feed, in case anyone reads this.

Oh, and goof off. Alot. Hellooooooo free time.

And of course take Thursday night to hang out with Phaelia and the others. I will be cleverly disguised as the gnomelock named GnomeDruid.

Wow, for a “short” links post, this got long…

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So, I’ve been a little out of the loop this weekend, and apparently managed to miss two big announcements:

Down by Two

Blizzard has apparently knocked the requirement for Be Mine! down by two candies: as long as you have any six, you will get the achievement. This should go live in 3.1.

Down by 40

They have also knocked the level requirement for Dual-Speccing down to level 40. This is fantastic news, as then it will actually be useful for leveling. Since it seems I prefer leveling the druid as Feral, but then I can easily swap to Resto to doom er, heal an instance run.

It looks like it will still cost 1000g per character (which will still be pretty steep for a first toon). The “reagent” requirement has been removed, so all you’ll need is a 5-second window in which to cast the change.  I would actually get this on the druid before I got it on the gnome who doesn’t really need to switch specs.

Thanks to WoWInsider for the info and links. I am going to go collapse now.

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If you are going to leave a comment, please leave something more than “very good…”. I treat generic comments like spam, especially if they link to a site that has NOTHING obvious to do with WoW.

And now, to play on the title a bit, and because school & work have kept me from really playing and therefore from having anything to really post about, here’s a screenshot of my UI and a list of what mods I’m currently using:

Raid UI

Our Sarth 3d Kill, conveniently showing off my UI

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