Post-Sping Break Blues

Well, it's back to school again

/sigh

I had a pretty bad case of the Mondays this morning when I realized that my Computer Science midterm was today... and I had no clue! Luckily I knew most of what it covered, but I'll just say I'm very happy to be doing well in the lab portion of the class.

I haven't been doing much on my druid in WoW lately, aside from going feral/resto on a daily basis >_> I go feral in the mornings, kill the Raven Lord and pray his mount drops. And, when it inevitably doesn't, I go do some dailies and go back resto (sometimes). My guild is in a frenzy, trying to get everyone their 'Glory of the Raider: Heroic' drakes, so I've been kinda warming the bench most of the time. It's fine with me though, it gives me time to level my alts, which brings me to ANOTHER topic...

ALT A.D.D
Is it just me, or do other people have several alts nearing max level and they just kind of shuffle back and forth with no idea which one to level first? I have a troll priest at level 75 and a blood elf paladin sitting at level 71. I've also got a draenei priest on a different server around 62.5 that I would love to level (she's so cute!). Sadly, leveling my draenei is out of the question as I don't have any friends who play Alliance, and I hate playing alone!

My first thought is to level the priest first since she's closer to 80 than my paladin is. Not to mention she's almost halfway to 76 and I just started Dragonblight! I've still got all of that zone left to do, then Grizzly Hills, then Zul'Drak... It's rather crazy.

But then, on the other hand, I have my paladin. I'm big on leveling certain characters simply for how they look... hence why I ended up Recruit-A-Friending a blood elf priest to 58, despite already having a level 70-something troll priest. I ended up deleting the blood elf, but part of me still wants to restore her (or try to) and level her up.

So I'm sort of at a cross roads. I tend to log on one, play for a bit, then log off and get on another alt. It's very frustrating! For now, though, I guess I'll go get a snack and try to figure out what I want to do!

Of Add-ons and Achievements

Now that spring break is here, I can spend even more time doing achievements! I, for one, am really glad they implemented the achievement system. While I do hate the "e-peen enhancing" aspect it came with, it actually gives me more reasons to spend time on my main character.

However, being somewhat of a completionist, it can be more of a detriment to my sanity than anything else. An example would be the 'Ambassador' achievement. I already had both Orgrimmar and Darkspear Trolls at exalted (I love the mounts), and my reputation for Thunderbluff was around 1-2k from exalted. Undercity and Silvermoon City were both sitting around 8/21k to exalted.

Being somewhat OCD, I decided to spend the weekend completing all of the lowbie quests for Blood Elves and Undead:

For now my little green chicken will have to do. For the past seven days I've consistently been soloing Anzu in Heroic Sethekk Halls for the Reigns of the Raven Lord (thanks to Myze of 'Leader of the Pack' for the awesome guide on how to solo this boss!). No luck thus far, but a guildy of mine got TWO to drop within 49 consecutive runs, so I'm a bit hopeful. The worst that could happen is that it'll take me a full 100 runs to get it to drop...

Three months isn't SO bad... right?

Along with my Ambassador title, I've been working on the 'Loremaster' (or as I call it 'Lolmaster') title. I've finished 'Loremaster of Outland', and I've done every zone in Northrend except for Icecrown (currently 9/140 quests). As far as Azeroth goes:

Eastern Kingdoms: 310/550
Kalimdor: 430/685

I've still got a ways to go... but what's pretty nice is that I've also got my 'Seeker' achievement up to 2,332/3,000 quests completed! So I figure after I do the Loremaster achievement I'll be nearly done with 'The Seeker'. I know, I'm crazy. But I actually have a lot of fun just running around doing all these quests. It's also much easier when you have buddies in vent to chat with or some good music to listen to. I recommend listening to a radio station called 'After Hours'; for those of you who like techno/progressive trance and similar musical genres, it's awesome!

Aside from random achievement whoring, I've finally (I think...) added the finishing touches to my UI:

I keybind pretty heavily, but I do have bars that appear when moused over. I use a lot of mouseover macros as well to make healing with grid even easier. My grid is configured out the @$$ to track HoTs, debuffs, and other things. Overall I'm quite satisfied with how it looks. I particularly love the add-on that I just got the other day, Forte X...something. It's on WoWinterface if you want to look it up. It's technically a Warlock mod but it comes in a zip file with addons for every class.

I used to have HoT/Cooldown Timers that would track my cooldowns, but I would never really be able to easily see which cooldowns were ending when. But thanks to Forte, they're displayed clearly in a very nice, compact area. The skill icon makes its way down the bar and pulses into a large icon before fading out once it has become available for use once more.

If you're like me and keybind heavily this is really helpful. With no bars shown you can't exactly see all of your skill buttons and so having a sleek cooldown monitor is very, VERY helpful!

PTR Testing: Lifebloom Changes

After reading Averna's number crunching on the 3.1 Lifebloom change (read: nerf), I thought I'd get on and try my own number crunching and see how much it would be affecting me.

Spec: 13/0/57

Stats: (Tree form, duh!)

*** Note: I have Glyph of Lifebloom and am self-buffed***

Number Crunching:

No HoT Rolling:

• 1 Stack (733 mana) - 397 tick, 3219 bloom, 489 mana returned
• 2 Stack (1466 mana) - 794 tick, 6436 bloom, 979 mana returned
• 3 Stack (2199 mana) - 1191 tick, 9653 bloom, 1469 mana returned

I'm still not quite sure how to feel about this... What I do know is that I (along with many other trees, I'm sure) am going to have to really figure out how I'm going to go about healing tanks. Are we just going to be raid heals now with the occasional HoT or two on the tank(s)? I played around for a bit keeping HoTs on Aimee, pretending she was a tank while I rolled HoTs on myself and pretended to heal the raid.

I went OOM in about 66 seconds.

Given that this was without any sort of replenishment buff, this is still very sad. One minute? How are druids going to survive on Patchwerk (yes, yes, we're moving on to Ulduar, but consider it for now)? On a very healing intensive fight that lasts around 3-4 minutes, going out of mana in approximately ONE minute is unacceptable. Even with Innervate, which now replenishes all of 50% of our mana pool (when NOT casting), we'll last through about two minutes of a fight and then be out of commission.

This is all rather disconcerting, and now I'm going to need to really consider how to go about healing. Once I hit spring break next week I'm definitely going to spend some more time on the PTR and do some more testing.

3.1 PTR Shenanigans

So, thanks to 5 inches of snow over the Mid-Atlantic I got a snow day (woo!) and got a break from boring ol' CS classes today. After getting 4 extra hours of sleep, I decided to venture onto the PTR to see how things had changed for myself and my stickly brothers and sisters.


Mana Regen

I was pretty sad when I went onto the PTR and saw how my mana regeneration had changed. Though not drastic, it does make me want to rethink how I'll go about healing a bit.


I don't have the best gear by any means (I don't really stack for spirit anymore, but I may change that). While my mana regen while not casting has gone down rather drasticlly, my mana regen while casting went up 30 points, which isn't so bad.

Before I can really praise or cast stones on this change I'll need to try running some instances or do a raid or two to see how this really effects my healing.

** More to come **

Go go gadget blog!

So, after finally getting around to really reading through some blogs I thought:

"Hey, why not try writing one of these yourself?"

And so I did. I'm not very knowledgeable, nor am I very good at 'theorycrafting' and the like, but I think this would be a fun place to discuss the various aspects of the coolest class in the World of Warcraft! I don't want to just discuss game mechanics, either. I want to rouse discussions about things like gear (T8 Sailor Moon helmet...), shapeshifting forms (and how ugly they are...), and other things that go beyond the generic spectrum of numbers and stats and all that mumbo jumbo (not to say that I won't do ANY of that).

That said, I hope that some of you may stop by here every now and then. As a college student I spend nearly all my time on the computer procrastinating any work I have until the VERY LAST SECOND. So if you have any ideas or comments on what to make my first topic about, let me know!