I’ll have a full update tomorrow, but I was so proud of our raid team that I couldn’t really wait!  So here’s a quickie – in photo format!

How to Interrupt Heroic Nefarian

I drafted this little flow chart up for my guild to try and save myself some grey hair as we start digging into Heroic Nefarian.  I have no idea if it will help, but since I had a bit of fun with it I thought I’d share

A while back one of my guildmates was looking for a good guide for Resto Druid PvP, as he had just leveled his to 80 and had really gotten into the PvP aspect of the game with his druid. Naturally he asked me and I offered the following, well educated and eloquent response: “um….”. Not feeling satisfied with this, I scoured the internet long and hard looking for a definitive guide on Resto Druid PvP, I asked around on my blog if anyone had any resources for Resto Druid PvP, and still nobody had anything. Apparently the secrets of Resto Druid PvP were being tightly locked away in the tightest vault know to…well the internets! I bet the goblins of Gringots couldn’t have cracked this sucker!

Today, my friends, that has changed!

I recently received an note from Oombulance letting me know that he has finally unlocked that vault and released the secrets of Resto Druid PvP healing in his very own Resto Druid PvP Guide! I was really excited to see this guide, as I really did feel that something like this was missing in the community, so thank you Oom for all of your hard work! I finally have a reference to provide to people who ask me about PvP resources, which beats my standard response of “um….”

If you have any interest in Resto PvP whatsoever, I strongly recommend going over and seeing what Oom has to say about the state of Resto Druid PvP!

Yes, I’m still here! Yes, I know it’s not Monday, but I’m behind! Between vacation, WoW and the Holidays I’m just running short on time to post as frequently as I am accustomed to doing The days that I work, I get home in time to raid and then have a ton of things to do after the raid (you know, like eat dinner, do my random heroic, get ready for tomorrow night’s raid, etc), and the days I don’t work…well, I’m doing a lot of playing! However, now that the rush is over, and I’m starting to fall back into a somewhat normal schedule, I suspect that my posting schedule will settle back into place as well.

Until then, let me give you a bit of (a brief) recap of what I’ve been up to lately!

On Raiding

Our 25 mans are set to start up in about 10 days, and I’m quite excited for them. In the interim we have been trucking through the new content with a 10 man group, that is constantly shifting with different members of our 25 man progression team. We have currently cleared through 8 of the 12 available encounters, and will hopefully add another one or two notches to our belt this week.

I am finding that the healing is extremely challenging, and every now and again, borderline frustrating. There are times that I just don’t feel that I have the tools to optimally do what the encounter is asking of me, and that is a bit stressful. To the point that I while I was hesitant to offer it before, I will say that I think Resto Druids need some tweaking in a PvE Raid environment. Now, I’m not saying that the sky is falling or that we are terrible healers, I just think that the way our heals are designed are not meshing well with some of the encounter mechanics…or with what the other healers can bring to a raid. I do think that resto druids, as a whole, need some re-evaluation to put us in a “good” spot.

Outside of that complaint, I am finding most of the new encounters to be enjoyable and interesting…even if Blizzard over-utilized the “get out of the bad” mechanic.

On Gear

I finally got Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. And I have to say that it’s a fantastic trinket…as long as you remember to use the cooldown! I’ve set up a Power Aura to let me know when mine was off of Cooldown. However, after last night’s Chimearon work, I realized that I wasn’t using it on cooldown as I should, and so I added a sound to the aura.

I had originally thought that the mana return had a chance to proc, however, after some testing I realized that is not the case. Both the mana return and the damage done by the trinket is called “Detonate Mana”. From what I can tell, the mana is always a return of 4200 (which is an astounding 25,000 mana in a 6 minute fight!), but the damage done by the trinket far exceeds that. I had hits on a single target that ranged from 4369 to 8700, with very limited testing. And, on some AE things over the past few days, I’ve seen hits exceed 40,000 damage. Which makes me wonder how the trinket plays out for a DPS class, assuming of course that it is already quite good due to the static intellect attribute of the trinket.

In short, I’ve been very pleased with the trinket since I have acquired it. I would absolutely recommend grinding it out if you are on the fence about acquiring one.

As for the rest of Beru’s gear, I’ve basically finished out my “346” set, and my only upgrades will now come from raiding and valor points.

On Time Sinks

Archeology seems to be the mother of all time sinks. And now that I’m entrenched in it, I can’t seem to find a way out. So I pull out a movie, toss it in, and dig. I’m sure that right as I “finish” with it, Blizzard will unleash that 8th, as yet undiscoverable, race that we see in the interface, and then I’ll have to start all over again.

Of course, just about everything that I want is in Uldum and the digsites there are so rare. I really with that after you’ve “completed” a race tree and obtained all of the rare items from the tree, the other digsites would be favored to spawn.

On Twilight Jasmine

I hate it. It’s used for everything…and in very high quantity. It’s over farmed, and there are too few nodes in the zone since the nerf, and I’ve yet to find a consistently good “farming path” for it. Honestly, if you are going to require 12 herbs for a flask, it really should be a bit easier to obtain. This herb is the bane of my existence right now. I loathe having to farm for it and I loathe having to use it, because it means I will have to go and farm more. Oh…and while I am ranting about herbing:

On Phased Gathering Nodes

PLEASE FIX THIS! There is absolutely nothing more frustrating that trying to farm herbs than having half of your nodes phase out as you approach them. Sure it wasn’t the intent that nodes were phased, was it? I mean, they weren’t in any of the WotLK zones, so I can only assume that it’s a bug here. Right now, Twilight Jasmine (and herbing in Twilight Highlands) basically does nothing but piss me off.

On Deepsea Sagefish Pools

Speaking of things that are pissing me off….

Why are there no deepsea sagefish pools? Almost every caster is going to want 90 int or 90 spirit food, and yet we can’t fish them out of a pool? WTF! Not only do we get screwed trying to help our guild fish their fish feast up by having to cast outside of pools, we get MURGLESNORT (or whatever the heck it’s called). I get about 3 murglesnort to every 1 sagefish that I catch. AND THERE ISN’T EVEN A RECIPE FOR THAT STUPID FISH!

I can only hope that this was an oversight, and that soon, in one of these GC posts or patch notes that are coming up we will see “deepsea sagefish have decided to be more social, and can now be found swimming together in pools”.

On Non-WoW things

I saw True Grit over the weekend. It was amazing. Go see it!

I got a Xbox/Kinect for Christmas, and I’m loving it. I have just two games for it (Kinect Adventures and Dance Central), but I’ve had a lot of fun (and a good workout!) from both. If anyone else has any experiences with some of the other games out that they’d recommend, please let me know!

All in all

I’ve been enjoying the new content. I’m really looking forward to pushing forward with our 25 man team and seeing where we will go. I’m also having a good deal of fun working through the content in our 10 mans, and will only believe that our 25s will be smoother as a result of the experience.

How have you been spending your time? What Cataclysm things are really bothering you?

As any healer who has spent any amount of time healing at level 85 may know, everything is always all about your mana bar. More specifically, it is how your mana bar bleeds as you work to keep your group alive. You put a lot of thought and effort into making sure that you chose the right spell, at the right time, all in an effort to make sure that your blue bar stays full enough to survive the encounter.

Now sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you need a little blue bar boost from your local alchemist. The kind that restores enough of your mana to push just a little bit further. Those alchemists can be tricksy folks – and are often found lurking amongst their herbs in the darker corners of Orgrimar and Stormwind. While they may look a tad frightening sitting there with their herbs, vials and distillers surrounding them, fear not, they are generally a gentile group of people. Just, uh, don’t drink in anything that you are freely offered and didn’t ask for! Heed this advice, because if you turn yourself into a toad don’t say that I didn’t warn you!

Anyhow, aside from the scariness of the alchemist in general, they do have a few brews that you will absolutely want to explore to assist you with your mana needs.

Potion of Concentration – the new version of the Dreamless Sleep potion, this potion has quickly become one of my favorite mana restoratives. It will allow you to regain 22,000 mana over a period of 10 seconds. But there is a kick, you cannot do anything for those 10 seconds if you want to get the full effect of the potion. Now, this will not be ideal for every encounter, however there are some raid encounters where it is absolutely perfect (Magmaw’s exposed head, for example).

Basically, anytime that you can get at least 5 seconds of this bad boy off, it is your best bet mana wise and will restore the most mana. Just be sure to communicate to your other healers that you are going to be out of commission for a few seconds so that they can cover any healing that may need to be done while you are “concentrating”. Should you need to break your concentration, don’t worry, all you have to do is cast and it will cancel the effect (damage taken does not seem to cancel it, from what I can tell). I have been using this as my mana potion anytime I can. Double the mana is absolutely worth trying to time using this potion.

This potion requires 2 Azshara’s Veil to craft.

Mythical Mana Potion – This is your typical stock mana potion. It will restore a constant amount of mana (~10,000). If you cannot slip in a potion of concentration (and believe me there will be times you just can’t), this would be your go to mana potion. Oddly enough, enemies no longer seem to drop these, and so the only way to obtain them is via crafting or the Auction House.

This potion requires 1 Cinderbloom and 2 Whiptail to craft.

Mysterious Potion – This potion is a little bit like playing Russian roulette with your mana pot. It can restore anywhere from 1 to 15,000 mana (and I’ve seen some reports of up to 20,000). And while the high end seems pretty great, the low end is pretty terrible. I’ve seen reports with mana returns as low as 4,300, which is pretty awful if you are really hurting for mana. Additionally, unlike its counterparts in the past two expansions, this potion no longer grants a random elixir effect, making it even less desirable. In short, I would not recommend this potion. The variance is just too great, and too unreliable.

This potion requires 2 Deepstone Oil to craft.

Migh ty Rejuvenation Potion – This potion will grant you 8,550 mana and health. And while this is less mana than both the Concentration and Mythical Mana potions, you should not discount the health return benefit to this potion. There may be times when you need that extra boost of health to survive. However, utilizing just a healing potion leaves your potion on cooldown, and provides you with zero mana benefit. As such, anytime that you find you need to chug a healing potion, I would recommend this guy here.

This potion requires 2 Whiptail to craft.

And there you have it! Gather up all of your flowers and vials and visit your, er, friendly alchemist today! Remember, tipping your alchemist may make them less likely to slip
something…unfortunate…into your potions

So after a bit of rambling on Monday, and getting some feedback from folks, and doing a little more research on it, I have decided that I am going to take the leap and redo our front page utilizing WordPress. Now, I’m sure that you are thinking that this really isn’t anything huge – and certainly isn’t worth its own blog posting here. But I disagree!

When I took everything over regarding the website at the twilight of Vanilla, I knew nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

When it was put in my lap, I evaluated what the most important piece was to keep the guild functioning, and determined it was the forums. I printed out, and bound, the PhPbb instruction guide and taught myself how to administrate our forums…which is a bit of an undertaking for someone with my background. But, I figured I’m nothing if not a great researcher, and just about all problems can be solved with a bit of time, effort, research and elbow grease.

However, when it came to our front page, which was done completely via HTML coding and style sheets and OH GOD WHAT IS THIS – I was absolutely lost and incredibly intimidated. One of the guys in the guild offered to step up and manage the front page updates for me. And I all but threw it into his arms and ran the other direction screaming in terror. Somewhere in the process, he registered us for the service that we have now that completely simplifies everything – utilizing bb code instead of HTML to update. Something that I know and I am familiar with, and we’ve been using that for the past 4 years.

But somewhere between then and now, I started this blog.

So here we are, almost one full week after patch 4.0 deployed onto live servers. There have certainly been ups and downs with this patch, and I have enjoyed some things and completely hated others. So here, I will present you with my random Monday thoughts on them. If they are extra rambly, please forgive me, I just got back from a week of travel and I am staring Blizzcon down, so my mind is wandering in about a million different places right now!

FUCK YES!

edit – I’d like to give a shout out to Kae and Vortex for their US first, World second, 10 Strict HM LK Kill today as well! You guys amaze me!

After ordering my very own copy of SC II so that I could get my in game WoW pet, after learning that I wouldn’t be able to snag Brade’s (DON’T JUDGE ME!!!), I decided that I’d go ahead and install SC II and give it a go. I mean why not? I used to play all kinds of RTS games before I started my fairly monogamous gaming relationship with WoW. Not only that, but I was actually pretty good at those that I played. But, I never really got much into Starcraft. This would be my first foray into this world.

As Brade and I sat down last night to start up the SC II campaigns I felt pretty rusty with my RTS skills and mildly uncertain about what I was about to do. So, after watching the introduction, as Brade was debating over which difficulty to start with, I went straight to the “Tutorial” section of the game. I figured I may as well get some guidance before getting started.

Now, some of what was in the tutorial was pretty basic, and I was like “I get this!” and some of it I, quite honestly, just kind of tuned out. Of course, I partly blame that on my passing notes during class via the in game Real ID system (which by the way, is pretty cool!). However, I went through all eight or so tutorials, and then decided it was time to start the game.

The first hurdle that I needed to cross was selecting a difficulty setting for myself. And let’s be perfectly honest here, even though there were technically four options, for me there existed only two: Casual or Normal. After giving it some serious thought, and reading the descriptions associated with each setting, my pride got the better of my brain and I decided to go with “Normal”.

On starting my campaigns, my first big shock came when I realized that I didn’t get to start as the big blue guy that we saw in the opening cut scene. No, I was some sentimental, seemingly alcoholic guy that hangs out in bars and doesn’t even smoke cigars! WTF. Ok, I can deal with this. I’m sure if I had some knowledge of the first game I’d know a bit more about the back story here, but when all of the advertising seems to show the protagonist of the game as this totally bad ass, mean looking, cigar smoking beast of a man, a girl has her expectations set. Y’know?

Alright, no biggie. I don’t get to be the blue dude (yet?). Let’s carry on.

As I enter my first campaign, I look to see what my objectives for the mission is and get started on my way. Now, in the tutorial, they tell you to select your troops and move them by right clicking on the ground where you’d like them to travel or on the mini-map. This will instruct your troops to go from point A to point B. (I was paying attention for this part!). You even had to move your troops in this fashion in the tutorial in order to complete that segment.

And so I looked at my map, and my mission, and I gathered up all my troops and started right clicking on the map with my non-blue suited guy. However, I was quick to learn that if you don’t move your dudes with the attack command, they will not stop and fight any enemies that they find along the way. Nope, not at all. In fact, they will just continue trooping along as your enemies gleefully shoot at your backside and deliver headshots (BOOM!) destroying your, seemingly oblivious, troops.

This is very bad.

And so, as Raynor approached the final objective of the first mission alone, and with a whopping forty life, I was eternally grateful that the captives, uh, assisted, with the completion of my mission. I actually speculate that it is impossible to fail this first mission, there is no way I should have made it to the end with my four health.

Lesson One: Always Attack While Moving!

As I am barely not failing my very first mission, Brade is completing his second. I kindly request (read: beg) that he hold off on starting the next and help me with the second, more involved mission. I am more comfortable with this mission as it starts with gathering resources and building. I can create until I feel like I am awesome enough to completely annihilate the enemy when they should have the misfortune of crossing my path. Because, honestly, is there any other way?!?!

But it’s here that Brade teaches me about how to create “groupings” of units that I can separate and monitor outside. Of course, as he’s trying to tell me what to do, I am all “I took the damn tutorial, they didn’t say to do it this way!!!”. Or we could just call me stubborn. So it is in this fashion that I learn that I can gather a specific unit of my troops and via the use of CTRL + 1 (or 2, 3, etc) create a setting just for them. And that if I double click 1, it will take me directly to those units.

Ok, I’ll admit to you (as long as you promise not to tell Brade) that is pretty damn handy!

This mission feels more comfortable to me, and I build a massive army that is most certainly overkill for my given objective, and then go and annihilate my foes. I feel the rust shaking off.

Lesson Two: Creating set units to monitor saves time, and streamlines your command of the forces.

Feeling somewhat confident, I enter my third mission. This is a timed mission with the objective being simple survival. And lo and behold, it’s another building your forces up mission. Only I get more toys to build and play with! Oh, and they already started my base and I have reinforcements in place.

And so, with my first barracks, I attach a “Reactor”. I have no idea wtf it does…but hey, it’s new!

As I’m training up my completely overpowered army, I hear a call for assistance from people stuck in different areas of the map. I know straight away that I need to take a force (using my newly acquired ctrl + 1 ability!) to rescue them, and start my preparations to leave my completely, no one is getting in here, fortress of awesomeness. It is then that I realize I can’t make any of the medics to heal my marines. And, I panic.

Brade calmly points out that the reason I can’t train any medics is because I haven’t built the right things (um…wtf, I have a reactor! A REACTOR!). He tells me to attach a medic creating thingie (that is a blizzard trademarked term…just in case you were wondering!) to my barracks, which then causes more panic because HELLO I DO NOT HAVE THAT OPTION! But apparently, I do. I just can’t have a reactor and a medic training thingie on the same barracks.

I finally get some medics trained up and head out (all the while adding more bunkers, rocket turret things and lots and lots of marines!). I remember to utilize my “attack” command to direct movement so that my people don’t have zerglings hanging from their asses as they move. And I easily rescue the appropriate people. I was able to hold the front until the rescue arrived and continued to build and stockpile.

Oh…and I learned what a reactor did. It makes two marines at a time instead of one!

Lesson Three: Know what you are creating and what it does before creating it!

After all of that excitement, it was sadly time for bed. Which I was actually a little sad about, because I was starting to have some fun!

However, I thought that I would share, and impart on you the knowledge that I learned that the tutorial didn’t teach me. Three key lessons that I am sure will help me along with my next missions.

Now comes the real challenge…let Brade learn all my strategies as I work my way through the campaigns, and expose my weaknesses to him, or go top secret so that I can totally kick his butt in the 2v2?

On Raiding – after only about 2 days of work on Sindragosa’s Hardmode, we saw 3% last night. However, more exciting than that was the fact that by the end of the night everyone was putting ice blocks in the proper locations for the air phase, our tanks weren’t dying and we were starting to get the hang of our new phase 3 positioning. Hell, we were getting into phase three in just about 5 minutes. I think we are very close to a kill on this, and I’m quite excited about it. All in all, it seems to be an easier encounter for us than HM Putricide. There will be drakes for everyone soon!

On WoW in General – I’m at a little bit of a meh point. I have a number of alts to level, but then I just think about what I’d do with them once I got them to level, and end up just doing something else. At this point I have Beru who is extremely well geared; both Mynn and Dannie who are very well geared; Kitai who is working on being very well geared; Earenn who is decently geared; and Tsuname who is ok geared. And I find myself starting to get increasingly bored in game, looking at my loading screen and going “meh”, or logging in for a bit and not really having the motivation to do much. I’ve been opting to either veg in front of the television…or try to get out of the house some while we have nice weather.

Of course, I’m bored outside of the game a lot too. So perhaps I’m just in an “I’m bored with everything” phase right now. It’s possible…but I hope that it passes, because it could get expensive! Although, I saw an advert on the playstation store the other day for a Monkey Island Anthology and I was pretty excited by it, so perhaps I’ll go snag that. I also still have the newest Final Fantasy to play, with only about 3 hours currently invested in it. I’ll need something to keep me occupied while Brade’s trudging through SCII!

I also really wish they’d announce the release date for Cataclysm already.