GnomeDruid

I’ve been tagged!

Littlebark over at The Tree Unleashed tagged me on 12/18 with a 2009 Review Meme. I unfortunately did not see it until today.

So here goes.

(See what happens when finals are over? You get posts every day!)

What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

Heal! No really. I’d done DPS, I’d done tanking, but I’d never healed seriously before. So 2009 was the year of learning how to heal. I’m still not sure I’ve got it down, but I’ve actually had in-game folks asking me for advice.

Are you scared? I know I am…

What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Hard one. The WoW dev team did an AWESOME job with Northrend. I remember being blown away by so much. The visuals, the music. I think the thing that absolutely blew me away the first time I saw it was the planetarium room in Halls of Lightning. It’s just beautiful. The constellation statues, the planets, it’s gorgeous. I just wanted to wander around and LOOK at it all.

What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Affliction DPS be a viable spec! No wait, Santa brought that one early … hmm. More time to raid? Unfortunately that’s not realistic with school. You know, 2009 was really cool.

I’m gonna say: Violet Proto Drake. I’m only one achievement away (unfortunately it requires PVP…)

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Getting Sarth+3d down. That was awesome.

And everything under “what did you get really excited about.”

What was your biggest failure?

I think I documented that one pretty well.

That was more of a personal failure than a game failure.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?

1) The night I topped the healing meters in TotC25. I know healing meters are only what you make of them, but when I still wonder if I’m doing this healing thing “rite” some times, it was a nice little reinforcement that yeah, I am.

2) When doing Utgarde Pinnacle and we butt-pulled all 3 packs in the room before Ymiron .. and no one died. THAT felt good.

3) Getting the last of the Outland Crocodiles.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Whine? I don’t know. I can’t really think of anything. I always cringe when I look at /played, but if I wasn’t doing this, I’d just be watching television. Or writing the next Great American Novel. Piddly little stuff like that so… yeah.

What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

I don’t really listen to pod casts : \

I appreciated the Ulduar boss posts that Averna had up, I like Keeva’s blog for her good math’s and insight, and Littlebark for a good mix of wow how to and wow life.

Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

Slow down and breathe. There is SO much to do, especially when you’re juggling two characters. And school. And work.

This is a game. We play it for fun. (Well, I do, at least.) Let it be fun once in a while.

Raiding and getting bosses down and getting loot is fun, in one way, but it’s also stressful.

Go run instances in your pirate hat.

Jump around naked at the start of the raid.

Soulstone yourself and jump off the top of Naxx.

WoW is srs bzns. Srsly. That doesn’t mean they can make you wear pants. ^_^

In other news:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Man, I have been running out of mana lately. I’m not sure if it’s a talent change, some of the gear changes I’ve had since I came back to raiding, or just the new fights but in ICC over the weekend I was seriously running out of mana.

So, setting RAWR aside, lets take a look at my gear changes to try and see whats up.

(I need to do this anyway to try and figure out what’s up, and thought it might be interesting to do it publicly, and some folks may find it helpful.)

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Hey, fellow warlocks!

Did you know that when using Glyph of Life Tap, lower ranks of Life Tap produce the same amount of spell power buff that higher ranks do?

Let’s look at that description for Glyph of Life Tap:Use: When you use Life Tap or Dark Pact, you gain 20% of your Spirit as spell power for 40 sec.

Guess what! There’s no mention of spell rank!

That means, that if you’re tapping before a pull, just to get the benefit of the buff, you can use Rank 1 Life Tap, and get the same effect!

Here’s an awesome-sauce little macro that you can use to Life Tap regularly for return of mana, or press Alt + the button to Life Tap (Rank 1) just for the spell power buff!

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1,nomodifier] Life Tap
/cast [modifier:alt] Life Tap(Rank 1)

And that’s the rest of the story!

Um, no, wait … The Wheel of Morality?

No, that’s not right…

Uh .. Go Joe!

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Welcome to the new LFG tool, Population you, and everyone else on your battleground.

To be honest, I’ve actually had pretty decent luck with the LFG tool, and haven’t been stuck with any total asshats. I have heard horror stories, but thankfully have been spared any truly awful groups myself.

So, here’s some of my highlights from the past week. These are not in order of occurrence. These are all with me healing on Timov.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Three Little Gnomes from School.

I’m not a huge Halls of Lightning fan. It’s very pretty, I love the observatory room, but the instance itself is just ‘meh’ in terms of execution. Which is why it was really fun running with Liltina, Milquee and Gnomeister of Thaurissan and random pally who’s name I’m sorry I’ve forgotten.  We bent that place over and made it our bitch. Seriously, the only way that run could have been better is if Pallies and Druids could be gnomes. It was really fun running with you guys.

Then there was the other HoL run with the pally tank who seemed to have a very narrow field of attention. I died a couple times that run because something came over to NOM on my delicious barky self and she didn’t seem to notice. I haven’t been keeping track, but I think I threw out more rezzes that run than any others.

I Lewt Teh Hat!

On the Weirdness end of the scale, was the Nexus run.  The tank’s girlfriend’s warlock was there, apparently just for the winter hat. When I joined, I got asked if I was there for the hat. I have the feeling if I’d said yes, I would have been kicked. Immediately after Telestra, she left group and zoned out.

Then about 2 minutes later, she was back in group again. It seemed like it was a silly random thing, that’d she’d been dumped back in with us on accident. Regardless, we proceeded to 4-man the instance because, LOL-Nexus and the other three were doing a shit-ton of DPS.

It was just odd. If her gear was as bad as her DPS indicated, you’d think she would have appreciated a tow through the rest of the instance, especially since she knew the tank. *shrug* whatever, people. Stop smoking that stuff, it’s bad for your brains.

It’s under 9000!!!

Probably the — I don’t even know. It wasn’t frustrating, because we got through it without any wipes, it wasn’t weird. It was just … yeah.

I got into a Violet Hold. The mage started to drop a table, someone moved and it cancelled. He never tried to drop another one. The Warlock SS’d me at the start, but then neglected to re-SS me, even with prompting, before Cyanigosa.

No one in that run broke 1500 dps. Most of the time they were under 1k. That amount of DPS was fine because: we got through the instance. No wipes, I don’t recall any deaths, it was just a little slower than normal.

AND THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

That’s not for me, that’s for the other chuckle heads out there who expect everyone to already be in T9 gear or they’re going to take their ball and go home. Which leads me to:

LOL GearScore

I don’t use GearScore, it’s not even installed on my computer. It is an excuse to not have to think. It is perfectly capable for someone to be in 232+ level gear, and suck ass. There are some in my guild.

I joined a regularly-scheduled Old Kingdom, already in progress. One of the puggies happened to be a guild mate who whispered me “the tank is in some blues and greens. First healer left after a wipe on first boss. 2nd healer said ‘lol gearscore’ and zoned back out’.” I apparently had my work cut out for me.

They were still on the first boss, so I zipped over and buffed everyone up. It was a gnome DK (HORRORS!) and I honestly didn’t take a look at his gear, because I am in no way qualified to judge tanking gear.

He pulled Elder Nakox, and I healed him through it. And continued to do so. His health got low a couple times, but he never died.  We did every boss in there, one-shot everything, and the tank never died.

So, Mr LOL-GearScore, maybe the right person left the instance. Think about that.

The Pinnacle of Madness

Utgarde Pinnacle. How I love and hate thee. There are actually some interesting encounters in there, that aren’t horribly annoying (AN: Anub, I’m looking at you. Stop hiding and DIE.)

We had a pretty decent group, though we had some trouble on the drake guy getting enough harpoons to pull him down.

Everyone knows the room right before Ymiron: those 4-5 packs that like to fear and summon adds, right? The horror stories of pulling two will haunt our children for generations.

We managed to butt-pull all of them.

Everyone lived.

Believe me, I was as shocked as you are.

One of the big reasons I’ve been concentrating on these 5-man runs is because I have really one healing experience: Raid. I don’t do the 5-man, main tank stuff much. I don’t use my “oh shit!” buttons much, and I really should rely on them more.

Swiftmend is like 15 seconds now. Nature’s Swiftness is 3 minutes, which means I could get it off twice in an average boss fight. I tend to want to save them for the REALLY BIG emergency, when I can (and should) be using them for some of the littler emergencies.

I’m not listing these here either to point fingers at the “LOL <1k dps” or even to pat myself on the back (though the UP thing was REALLY COOL) but as a reminder that unless I suddenly become a GearScore elitist prick, I’m going to encounter situations like this. People are gonna do silly things. Tanks aren’t going to be in the best gear. And it is DOABLE, if you are merely willing to try.*

*The Grand Overlord of theGnomeDruid would like you to point out that there will be situations from which you need to extract yourself for the preservation of your own sanity. Do not hesitate to do so. The druid in Us recommends doing so politely. The gnome sagely advises that you shall know when the proper application of high explosives is necessitated.

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Finals, you can be over now. >_<

Haven’t had a lot of time to … well, do much of anything in WoW. I have run some random heroics on Timov, and generally had a good time.

Have had a couple awesome groups, have had a couple mediocre groups, but none where we didn’t finish the instance.

I think the funnest was the three gnomes from Thaurissan that I did Halls of Lightning with. You guys rocked!

I have done the three new instances on the gnome, and they were okay. Will hopefully write up a full review this weekend.

Right now … I am in serious need of caffeine.

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well, hallo thar 3.3

I’m actually excited about this patch. I will be slightly more excited come Friday next week when school is over and I get to go raid again! Thanksgiving weekend was the last time I actually got to raid due to some massive school projects (and man how time is flying.)

Affliction Viable Again?

They’ve tweaked several talents in the affliction tree, given the fel pup a buff, and a new Glyph for Corruption. (Wow.com’s article here.) Supposedly, Affliction will be on par with the Destro builds now for fights. I can’t wait to get in and see how I do with the new build.

The new Requilary of Souls fight looks like you have to stop DPS, I have not taken the time to find out how that applies to DoTs. May have to have a destro spec for that.

I have, despite knowing that Affliction was not the top DPS spec, stubbornly stayed as affliction for the past year. I tried Destro, I really did, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it. I know they have made some changes since last I tried it, and I haven’t gone back.

I just like my affliction rotation, I feel like I have it down. And I’m looking forward to trying it out in Raid.

What new Gear?

I’m also REALLY looking forward to getting some new gear for Cali. I’ve picked up a few pieces here and there from TotC, I don’t have a single Tier 9 piece. That 4 piece bonus was/is GREAT for afflic locks. Due to school, I just wasn’t raiding enough to get the Trophy’s. I have like 140 triumph badges on Cal now. I’ll have to check out what other upgrades there are besides the Tier stuff.

I actually kind of like the look of the Warlock Tier 10. My first thought was: “It’s Black Mage from FFI!” Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on some soon. (Image from MMO-Champion).

I haven’t even looked at the new gear for druids. From what little interest I’ve paid to the patch, I’ve been mainly focused on the warlock gear and the fact they were threatening to bork ItemRack and similar mods.

Thankfully they have not (as of yet) done so.

Moar Pets?

Man, they are just handing out pets left and right these days. I got my Core Hound pup in the mail (so cute!). And they’re also changing how the raptor pets spawn. Those are adorable as well. I’ve unfortunately kind of lost my desire to “have ‘em all” though I still think they’re cute.

Either the drop is too much of a grind, or I feel like I’m going to be beat by the folks who have no lives and just grind/camp for them all day. I could grind dailies and buy them, but that feels like contributing to the delinquency of the farmers. Meh, I’ll probably pick a few and get those specific ones.

Well, the phone won’t stop ringing, so I guess it’s back to work for me.

3.3 is here. Have fun stormin’ the castle!

ETA: Holey Badgers!

Just did some quick math. Assuming you did both 10 & 25 man versions of raids, and every heroic dungeon every day of the week, you could come out with approximately 493 Triumph Badges after 1 week.

And I bet there are people who are gonna do that, too. (I wouldn’t go quite so crazy, but I would do my best to get some decent gear on both the gnome and the druid.)

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