31 Points of Unfinished Work

After the new beta trees were released this morning I've been haveing a good play around with them trying to get a good feel for how they work and figureout any good tricks for my respective classes.

Admitedly I've been very excited about the prospect of a 31 talent tree and the implications for leveling alts is very nice indeed, however my current thoughts on what i've seen of the first draft leave quite a bit to be filled out properly.

Currently there are places in these trees where they completely screw over something that I rather enjoy doing which is filling in talents to full.
Nothing is more infuriateing to me then haveing to leave a 3 point talent at 2 points because I need the points elsewhere (I'm looking at you enduring winter) and with a few of the charecter builds that I've tried out I've managed to tag all of the interesting stuff to full leaveing me with exactly 1 talent point to spare which in the case of the frost tree on the current draft has to be taken somewhere in order to advance properly.

That 1 talent point barrier is annoying as hell to me especialy when I have no idea where to put it, I get the same problem with my priests builds.


I think the problem right now is that blizz have trimmed the fat a bit too far down so we now have too little talents to choose from, Perhaps balanceing out the tiers so that theres always exactly 5 points to spend in 3 and 2 point talents to get to the next level without any issues, in cases where theres an ability you can balance it out with either 2 2 point talents or 3 3 point talents either way they need a bit of balance adding to them in order to make them more appropiate.

Thankfully this is only a priliminary look at the whole escapade and they have specified that some classes have not had as much grooming as others have which means I can at least look forward to what I hope will be a significantly cleaner 2nd draft.

It's too early to tell how it's all going to work out in the end.

Playing with Styles

Something that i'm realy getting into after looking over the current beta talents for cataclysm is the enhanced ability to spec in a prefered style, i've even managed to chalk up a good level 80 talent build for an easy solo grinding spec with large healing capabilities for grouping with.

This has also got me thinking about how I may be able to change my play style in cata to suit me better, one of the things I'm thinking about is changeing my currently abandoned DK or maybe even refiting my warrior in order to create a "Dodge Tank" charecter.

This would involve haveing lower effective health with the trade off of outright avoiding most melee damage, I'd like to try it out with a Blood Tanking spec as I could then include a heavy emphasis on Parry in order to obtain some assemblance of magic avoidence though spell deflection.

I'm sure some people can remember back in TBC when night elf rogues could spec in a specific way and take advantage of specific charecter buffs and debuffs in order to obtain a 100% dodge chance which effectively allowed them to tank anything which did not cast spells (which included some of the highest level bosses in the game at the time).

I'd be interesting in createing such a charecter set up when cataclysm comes round just so I could see how it would play out, I'm sure they will be people who will complian that I have low health for a tank but It's experiments like this that make the game interesting.

I'm even contemplating taking the recuperation talents in the Combat tree for my rogue to use so that I can become far more self-sufficent then I am now, which should make soloing far more interesting and also reduce the need for me to carry potato bread with me everywhere I go.

So my plans for cataclysm is to have my Healers DPS, my DPS heal and my Tanks to dance (Imagine someone with a long sword dodgeing and parrying blows in a chain sequence, it makes me feel like the person would be sword dancing).

A Handful of Side-grades

Everyone keeping track of the Undergeared project on Gevlons blog has seen my current level of performance on Festurgut on my Priest, I managed to pull 4.4k DPS as shadow which was better then the 4.1k I pulled on the 2 tries previous but I'm not proud of the performance as most of the gear I was using was my healing set.

Fortunately for me I can use most of my gear in a double dip scenario but if i want to perform better in future combat situations I need to gather some more items to create a more apropiate shadow set.

2 items I've managed to replace are the MP5 ring from occulus with the spirit ring from drak'tharon keep, now there are still better rings out there as spirit is only good for a pittance of spell power and a bit of regen, I'm still hoping to obtain the crit ring from Violet Hold or possible the haste rings from VH or UP as they would provide me with better itemisation for the set.

I also managed to replace my wand from the Argent Crusade MP5 wand with the Spirit wand from gundrak, this is a huge upgrade as the previous wand had no intelect on it and less spell power then the wand i've got now making the new one better for both healing and DPS.

Perhaps best of all is that I managed to obtain the Forge Ember from HOS which replaced my MP5/on use SP trinket from HOL, which although it lowers my burst damage it gives me a higher sustained damage and better itemisation for DPSing with, I may even find it an upgrade for healing with as it gives more crit for my Disc set and a spell power burst.

On top of that I replaced a lot of my gems with more suitable ones which should help me out a bit during future raids.

I Still have a few items that i would like which include the DPS trinket from Occu, the Crit belt from Gun'drak and Another blue helmet so I can get a better DPS meta gem which can come from either Occu or Strat.

What Trade Chat Actually Means

Boredom post here:

Statement: "5.6k gs required"
Translation: "Will wipe on trash and disband within 5 minutes, will also take at least 40 minutes to assemble the group"

Statement: "Need more for ICC25, aiming 7/12 link achieve"
Translation: "Might make it to saurfang if your lucky but will then wipe once and disband, Will take at least an hour to form the group and unfortunately for the group leader the item he's reserving will not drop"

Statement: "Need dk tank for VoA 10 cr"
Translation: "not you, never you, come back when you have 50k health unbuffed and when all items dropped within are useless to you, lololololol"

Statement: "Looking for a tank and healer for heroic farming"
Translation: "Looking for 2 people to run though heroic instances where the rest of us will afk and wait for you to finish, the group will eventually disband when either the tank or healer gets sick of boosting lazy people or when they get an ICC heroic which will then wipe them"

Statement "LFM Totc10 5.5k GS required"
Translation: "LFM to wait forever while i try and form a totc10 group to boost my 4k gs arse which even if it does form (highly unlikely) will disband on Faction Champs (if your lucky enouth to make it that far) and will likely have a ninja as a raid leader"

The last statement annoys me the most as if you have a gearscore that high odds are you'll never have to set foot in totc10 ever again, I find most of these statements to be true aswell.
Be perticularly weary of groups that are spamming trade again after pauseing for 20 minutes, it usualy means they have just wiped and anyone left is made of pure fail.

How a Tank is born

Due to some recent luck i've managed to get my warrior in a guild as an off-tank and while the DPS certainly need to improve before we can start easy clearing hard raids i'm finding it fun to mess around on my new tanking class.

This recently lead to me wondering exactly how I choose to roll a tanking class in the first place, what made me leave the comfort zone of my mage, priest and rogue and play a class thats designed to go first in combat.

I think one of the key contributers to my new fondness of tanking is quite honestly haveing been a specialist tank on raid encounters on my other classes.

My priest and mage have both tanked mimirons head before and i've had quite a lot of fun working out exactly what spells that lie dormant in my spell book would help me furfil this roll better.

My mage has even tanken it one step further as i've actively tanked the zombie spawns on gluth in naxx before and this was a realy hard task for a arcane mage to do but i somehow managed to pull it off after a bit of practice.

From these specialist tanking roles these cloth casters have created a small seed inside me making me wonder why i havent choson to play the role of the tank.
Looking back at it the responsibility and high entry barrier certainly put me off in the past but haveing taken that responsibility in special cases it becomes a lot less scary.

I had a lot of spare time so I decided to play a plate class and do a bit of experimenting into the whole tanking aspect of wow, this led to a very poor choice in playing my DK up to 80 while leveling with friends, hitting the def cap was much harder back then especialy for a class with no shield slot and the squishy nature of DKs was a bad stigma to have.

Needless to say that this charecter was scrapped, it wasent so much because of the whole cap issue thing it was more that the class did not agree with me, the rotation while tanking felt clunky and badly done so i never managed to master it very well.

I'd tried tanking on my paladin too but that felt equaly misplaced as i ran out of mana incredibly quickly in low level dungeons and that essentialy put me off playing the class as a tank at all.

My warrior on the other hand seemed to agree with me from the get go, the aspects of the class seemed to just click with me and i found myself playing protection as if i was in a state of constant fury.

Everything was kept quite simple from the start and new tanking abilities were added at just the right pace to keep me learning, it's no wonder the warrior was considered the only tank back in vanila wow as it seems just so well suited to the roll.

So i managed to get the class evolved right up to the point that I could start seriousley considering raiding with him, i'd learned the encounters for most boss fights and have managed to aquire much experiance from running dungeons while gearing.

There seems to be a sense of nervousness that I get when i'm tanking using the warrior class which is quite scary for the first raid that i did but everything managed to work well.

So from humble beginnings of being a specialist tank in raid encounters a new tank can easily be formed with enouth time and effort.
I'd encourage most players who are experianced at playing the game to roll a tanking class as it's one of the best ways to experiance encounters and a very nice experiance to have.

I can almost envision me taking this class and role into cata with ease and manageing to play it properly as a main, but wether it can stand up to my love of healing is another matter.
At least it'll keep me a lot to do when i finally manage to get round to leveling alts to 85.

Undergeared Healing Experiance

Haveing run with undergeared for awhile now i'm gradually strating to pick up the art of healing at low gear levels, because of the differance between the strength and regeneration healing becomes far more technical at low gear levels.

The main point that all our healers have to go on is quite simple, the correct use of cooldowns (both tank saving and mana restoring) at the correct time.
Even when i've been DPSing as shadow i've always payed attention to the mana of my fellow healers and have timed my hymn of hope and divine hymn spells when they needed it most.

A big example is on one of our saurfang wipes i managed to time my hymn of hope to restore the mana of both the shaman and paladin healers (and to lesser extent the Arcane mage) by a small bit which helped them plug along for another 30 seconds or so.
When the paladin healer went down at around 15% I immediantly brought out the big guns and hit Divine hymn to stabilise the raid then I started using Flash heal until i ran out of mana, in my atempt at a cluth healing situation we managed to get to 6% on that wipe.

Of course healing is a very complicated game and something I have to ask is what point does the game end?, one of the best experiances i've had healing for Undergeared has undoubtfully been jaraxus in totc10.
while the fight may have been one shot it was by no means an easy accomplishment as when our 3rd leg healer fell down at 25% things started getting hairy and then we ran out of mana just as the boss was at 10%.
Both of us (me and the shaman healer) had no mana and had to keep a group of 9 people alive for at least 30 seconds before the boss went down, in my opinion it is at this point that the healing game begins neither healer can just throw mana at a problem anymore as they don't have any to spare.

Basically what happens at this point is that you have to cast a heal every time you've generated enouth mana to cast one and you damn well better make sure you cast the right one or else it's basically over at that point.
Due to the lack of raid health healing spells like Circle of Healing become considerable more potent as they can hit multiple targets for the full amount, you can also throw any surge of light procs where they're needed immediantly as it won't effect your mana regen (5 second rule).

The tanks represent a completely differant problem as they will always need a steady flow of heals to live, needless to say that all of my surge of light procs went here and I also made sure that circle of healing would always hit him too.
Other then that I also hit the tank with Greater Heal (it heals the most and has a higher mana efficency then flash) whenever I had generated enouth mana to do so.
Sometime during the last 5% I managed to throw Guardian Spirit on the tank too which both of us simply let proc and then followed up with a few heals to keep the tank going when were realy hitting rock bottom.

The DPS were almost abandoned and left to their own devices, if they couldent live on the rare Circle of healing and Chain Heal spells we throw out maybe every 10 seconds at best then they would just have to die as we just couldent spare the mana for them.

I remember haveing a similar experiance in naxx25 at the very beginning of wrath and most veteran healers know what I mean when I say that healing dosent realy begin until your out of mana, because when you just come down to it these days healing involves wasting a lot of mana and being in a situation where it's just you, tirage and your most efficent healing spells can make you panic greatly.

Nothing is more exciting to me as a healer then pulling through what at first appears to be an enevitable wipe though nothing but serenity and the best application of your spells.

At Deaths Door

As i'm sure you'll hear on gevlons blog sometime either monday or tuesday Undergeared has managed to claw it's way though to Deathbringer Saurfang by downing both Lady Deathwhisper and the Gunship Encounters.

Completeing these amazing feats in just blue gear is realy making me think at what is allowing us to get this far into high level territory with gear thats over a year old by now.
Although some people might claim it to be a great feat of skill and co-ordination i don't agree with that, maybe what we realy have over everyone else is just perseverance along with a little bit of invation.

For whatever reason i don't have a large ego or a great deal of self-confidence which i view as a personal advantage considering the alternative, the cynical side of me is somewhat worried that the only reason that i get to even come on such amazing expeditions is because i'm the only commonly appearing priest in the guild and they just need the buffs i bring (namely the improved stamina buff).

but even so i find that i can at the very least stick to the 2 aspects i mentioned above, i'm persistant in wanting to down the bosses and am willing to try even the little inovations that get brain stormed out of the rest of the group.
wether we will ever get to the lich king is a moot point, we're proving that even the hardest content in the game you can still make it though with just sheer perseverence.

A lot of what we do is baised completely on luck aswell, such as our atempts on saurfang tonight where 2 times we lost the fight to a very unlucky placement of the champions debuff, if one of those things lands on a DPS we can just let them die off and brute force our way though but when it happens to land on a healer to which we only have 2 of then we enevitably wipe due to not being able to heal the tanks though it.
We'll win the fight next week when we finally hit the lucky number and the debuff lands on the units that can effectively cleanse it, which makes things far easiser.

Wether we'll make it any further into ICC after this is still unclear especialy when some of the hardest fights in the place are the trash mobs but either way i'll still have a lot of fun dealing with it when the time comes and i hope the rest the guild will enjoy it just as much.

Facing Ones Elementality

My mage has recently turned quite curious as far as talent specs go, i seem to have recently lost whatever made me a good arcane mage or maybe i never had it in the first place.
Either way i'm finding that i do the least amount of Damage as arcane compared to the elemental counter parts, in some cases i'm doing more damage as Frost then I am as Fire.

So currently i'm wracking my brian trying to find out whats making my mage tick in such a way, my frost damage on festurgut today was 5.1k DPS while I was only doing 4.3k as fire and i've realy got to wonder whats causeing such unusual Damage performance.
My arcane damage is down in the bucket too, i can't seem to keep very high figures of damage using it as I used to.

Of course i'm normally running with fire these days as setting up Living Bombs and Firestarter combos to go off together is a lot of fun.
But i've realy got to start wondering if it would be best for me to go frost for the remainder of my wrath career, if none of the other people bring replinishment then i'll have to start using Frost more often as there is not much differance between the 2 for me.

Chakra Co-ordination

I'm sure anybody whos been keeping up to date with the cataclysm changes knows about the holy priests new defineing talent called chakra thats being added into the game, I figured it would be a good time to clarify my thoughs on it.

I've seen some bloggers being very cautious about this talent and with good reason as we may end up being balanced around it for the most part but i realy like the idea of a gear changeing talent.

Holys greatest strength has always been the ability to do pretty much all healing styles very well, if you want to HoT healing like a druid simply grab the renew talents and mental agility and start spamming them hots, if you want to take a more direct approach to healing then you can simply grab divine fury and serendipity and use flash and greater heal as your go to spells and if you want to pile on the AoE like a mad man then you grab the Circle and Prayer of healing talents and go wild.

I can envision chakra working as a way to shift gears between the 3 aforementioned healing styles, when your raid healing then spamming HoTs around will cause you to enter HoT mode where your renews become considerable improved and you can then stick to this mode of healing while ever the fight is going well.
Suddenly however the raid starts taking huge damage so you wind up a few prayer / circle of healing to get things sorted and as soon as you reach 3 casts you enter AoE healing mode (or the oh shit healing mode as it will probably only be used when the raids damage is in dire striaghts) bam your now an AoE healing machine and you should be able to stabilise the situation like that before switching back to the previous gear.
Or perhaps the tank suddenly starts getting heavily thrashed about and you need to focus heals on them, so you start throwing Greater heals out to keep him up and again bam things get kicked up a notch and suddenly your throwing out the raw healing power to keep the tank going.

The problem with the sheer level of versitility that a holy priest has is that if they were too good at everything then the other healing classes would get shunned to make more room for the wonder priests, so the idea behind chakra is that our healing styles will be a little less then the specialist healers out there at first then once we reach 3 casts we catch up and reach to an on par level of capability.

When we enter renew mode we can go toe to toe with the resto druid HoT masters, when we enter AoE mode we can go toe to toe with the shamans raid healing, when we enter Single healing mode we can then go toe to toe with the paladins tank healing capabilitys.

The three other healing classes don't get to choose their speciality so they will always be realy good at what they do and reasonable good at everything else whereas we get to occupy the unique position to jump between whichever mode we choose at the cost of a small ramp up time, this will allow us to fill in the gaps in raiding enviroments, if the raid needs stability gogo renew spam, if the raids getting hit hard then AoE kicks off and if the tank needs looking after then bring out the big heals.

In conclusion i'm hoping that chakra will end up being a talent that allows a priest to diversitise his healing capabilities and focus on his own play style while at the same time allowing him to fill in any gaps that enevitably open up in the middle of battle chaos, wether it will only time will tell but either way this talent will make priest healing interesting.

Alts, Mains and Role Complaints

I'm getting the urge to make another alt again, this time as a shaman as it's one of the few classes I havent played to death already, i'll probably make it on the same server as my priest as I can pool more resources over there and get the full hierloom experiance.

Of course i've been putting a lot of thought into which class i want to champion going into cataclysm as right now i'm in a position to chose which class i want to main going into the next expansion.
Despite being quite fun to play i'm finding the pure classes to be realy cumbersome to play, although the play styles for my rogue and mage can vary wildly depending on spec the ques to do instances on them is catastrophic.
When a hybrid class wants to get into a dungeon group faster they just have to switch to thier other role whereas a pure class dosent get that flexibility and considering that most people who play a hybrid class don't want to do their other role, it creates a huge que system where the pure classes are shunted because they don't have a skip the que button.

Although to be perfectly honest some of the hybrid "I only DPS lolol" people should probably stay away from their other role as they're barely competent at DPS (sometimes they can't even do that) and haveing those kind of people in the que as tanks and healers would spell disaster for the competant people who happen to get in with them.

Now I have tried to do some tanking and do have fun doing it at low levels but at a certain point the randoms that I get grouped with just start to get pushy and annoying, let's face it tanks get the smallest margin of error and being even slightly undergeared for anything leads to ridicule from the masses of incompetant fools out there, god help the level 80 tank who only has 30k health as he will not enjoy the company of the rest of the group despite the fact that when wrath was first released haveing 20k health was considered good.

So I relagate myself to Healing as my other role option as I quite enjoy it and it gives me many options and ways to play without ever changeing my spec, of course then i have to eat the compliants of any group that wipes in an encounter cause god knows it isent the retarded DPS's fault even when he dosent know the first thing about CC or Target Priority.
Sometimes I can even get stuck with tanks who don't even bother pulling stray mobs off me and still expect me to keep them, myself and the retardin whos attacking the wrong target at full health.

So no matter which role you play your going to screw yourself over at least some of the time if not most of the time when you enter the dungeon finder, so pick your poison and prepare for the worst.

PS: for those of you that still care i'm almost definately playing my priest as my main charecter in the next expansion, i'm more experianced with her and have her skills in all roles and specs polished brilliantly.

Mooraghh...

Well it finally happend, dispite my dislike of the tauren race I decided i'd finally roll a decent druid alt and mess around with him.
I'm leveling as feral as i already have the gear for it left over from my rogue and i've been saveing the huge ass mace for this scenario too.
This means i get to have another shot at rage tanking with a more simplified toon although i think i'll avoid doing feral as DPS if i ever reach max level as the kitty rotation is realy confusing.
With this new toon running i'm now only one class off haveing at least started on all of them, i can't seem to get myself to play a shaman for whatever reason.

Well i'm bringing this up right now because i had my first feral tanking experiance today and it was surprisingly fun, although there's very little substance to it right now.
Currently i just run in and attack to get rage and then funel it into either swipe for large numbers or maul for small groups.
With the glyph of maul going i can keep 2 mobs on me quite easily as that skill hit's like a truck, thank you savage fury.

Well we'll see how far my little cow can go as i'm sure things can only get better for me as i grab more tanking talents.

I Play on Rotaion

Now that i've got a few 80s it's becoming a habbit to play them all in a rotation so that I can gear them all up equaly.
This is causeing me a bit of annoyance as without focusing on one charecter I'm not getting a good enouth level of gear to enter places like ICC.
Of course the biggest issue here is mostly the elitist attitude on my server which makes it impossible to get into a PuG unless you've got the kingslayer title, I wish I was joking about that too but I'm realy not.
I'm even haveing problems getting into places like TotC-10 without haveing a Gearscore of 5.4k, It seems I may have to just transfer to a server with more mature players as it's rediculous trying to get into a PuG on my server.

My Mage is the best geared of my charecters at 5.2k but she can't run any PuGs because nobody needs mages for places like VoA and as i said before guilds / PuGs have higher standards on my server.

My Rogue is at 5k with the only heroic upgrade being from HoR (Yeah i'm not getting that sword), which again is too low for any PuGs and the guild i managed to get her in seems to have fallen though.

My Priest on the other hand is at 4.9k and is off the main server as she's running with Gevlons Undergeared Project but is probably my best bet to do any raiding whatsoever but even then I don't have the achievements to get into groups with her.

Well sorry for making a post about me complianing but it's getting realy frustrating not being able to do anything, maybe I'll have better luck when i gear my Priest up a bit more.

Conservative Healing

In an atempt to ease the transition into what i believe cataclysm healing will be like i decided to make another Priest alt so that i can practise precise healing in lowbie dungeons.
Trying to estimate how much a heal hits for and only casting it when it won't overheal is difficult as my main heal spell hits like a truck.

Currently i wait for a tank to fall under half health before casting as it would overheal otherwise, this creates a type of healing that seems to stress any tanks that don't trust me.
One of the paladins that i was healing with my efficent (albiet seat of your pants) style of healing kept starting a holy light cast around half a second before my heal hit.
It works better for druids and warriors as they tend to focus on their job and put blind faith into the healer of the group.

I'd encourage any healer to roll an alt of the same healing toon they currently play just to practise the difficult art of not overhealing as it's likely to be the differance between a good and great healer in cata.
It also helps with your mana pool a lot, in some cases i've managed to run an instance without my mana taking even a slight dip, where as in others i've had to cahin drink to get it done.

of course the worst thing for a healer in a low level dungeon is a warlock with a penchant for casting rain of fire and then life tapping his mana back, if i ever get into a dungeon where all 3 DPS are warlocks i think i'd probably break down and cry.

I've been haveing some thoughts to trying it in heroics at 80 but i don't think many tanks would appreciate it as most of them are annoyed at a healer who can't keep them at 100% health all the time, to paraphase ghost crawler "A healers job is to make sure everyones health dosent hit 0% not to keep everyone at 100%".

It's nice to play around with Ideas of a Greater Heal orientated Holy build, i might try it out for fun anyways ^^

First Blood

An interesting thing happend to me yesturday while i was unlocking the Ebon Blade quatermaster on my new 80 Rogue Vivio.
I'd just finished a few heroics and thought it would be a good idea to unlock the Ebon Blades Arcanum of Torment for when i get a head piece worthy to put it on.

While there i came across a Human Paladin (level 77) and decided to play it safe and fly to a good altitude as i was at 1/3 of my health bar, as is usual with most paladins this guy was an asshole and imediantly says what i assume was an insult to my rogue and then divine storms her while jumping off his mount.

I survive and he almost dies from the fall, i decide to fly off in a differant direction out of his range but still able to target him to stop off and eat, when at full health and fly back and stealth where he can't see me.

At this point i assume that he was taking down the oculus eye at the top of the black watch as his health is going down and he's still on his mount, so i wait in an alcove next to the quest giver and lie in wait.

It wasent long before he lands at half health next to the quest giver at starts chargeing up a Holy Light on himself, I quickly move in behind him and cheap shot, mutilate and he drops dead just before I kidney shot him.

Considering that the asshole was prohibiting me questing i found my vengence perticularly sweet, but as an added insult to this idiot I got the ahievement for my first honor kill right in front of him, to add salt to the wound I /hugged him and got the Make love not Warcraft achievement and because I was in the mind set of evil I tea-bagged his corpse several times before he released.

of course while thats all fine and good the paladin had higher health then me and i'm not good enouth with my rogue in PvP to get a win agianst him in fair combat, i grab a few scourge essences for my quest then restealth for what I expected to be a second round that I would lose.

I go back to the alcove and watch as he respawns on top of the quest giver and consecrates / Divine storm the area before he flys off to fight a few scourge on an upper level, he comes back down drops another consecrate while i'm contemplating my next move when to my surprise he suddenly decides to bubble hearth.

I found this rediculously amusing he even goes at yelling the same insult he used to introduce himself to me earlier, I finsihed the quests there to unlock the quatermaster in complete safety and without worry.

I honestly never thought that ganking someone could so easily instill fear into them, as i said in fair combat the paladin can long outlast my offensive capabilities with his heals and Dps me down without too many problems, but with just one very humiliating gank i knocked all sense of safety out of him.

Either way this is the story of Vivios first blood, i'd like to see other bloggers rogue or otherwise to regail is in stories of their first world PvP kill or even their most interesting PvP kill as this memory will provide endless amusment to me.

Undergearing

I've recently been taking part in Gevlons Undergeared project by completeing raids in Blue gear, i've found that this is quite fun to pull off and i've been amused at how easy it's been going so far.
I've also been quite annoyed by the fact that most of the raids have been going smoother then when i was in guilds with a higher level of gear.

We have a solid group of skilled people filling the raid roles with me being the 3rd healer / off-DPS.
I'm feeling that my performance in these raids has varied a lot but find that i'm performing only average.

I'm never realy very confident in my skills and i think the constant switching of roles makes more of an impact on the meters, which probably creates an illusion that i'm doing worse then i am.

Hopefully doing these raids will help me fine tune my priest to be a multi-talented charecter with skills for both of my roles.

I'm currently re-itemising my gear for Disc spec as we have more raid healing between the resto druid and the shaman then is completely nessacery, me being holy on top of that is overkill.
This should allow me to spend more time on the tanks giving them better survival rates as well as some new raid buffs to help out with.

Of course the biggest plus for gevlon is that i'll no longer be saying "the tank just died" when i make a lucky save with Guardian Spirit (happens more often then i'm comfortable with), of course this time if i'm not on top of it the tank actually will die so we'll see how this goes.

5 Point Barrier

The next expansion for WoW, cataclysm is now in the part where it's far away but yet close enouth to be talked about.
The incoming changes slated by blizzerd seem to be a huge change to the gaming dynamic which should help curbe burst damage and dull healing enouth to make PvP interesting as well as making it easier to switch roles especialy with regards to tanking in PvE.

The main point of interest to me is the addition of 5 more talent points where our talent trees remain relatively unchanged.
I'm looking forward to seeing what these extra talent point actually bring to the table as far as specing goes.

However there is obviousley going to be some classes that benefit from five extra talent points a lot more then others, for example i can use the extra points to tag abilities i wouldent normaly have on my arcane spec mage such as Prismatic Cloak and Magic Resistence, which is good because i'd normally have to give up 6 yards of arcane reach and Incanters Absorbtion to tag these skills.

My frost spec on the other hand is relatively tight and in all honesty i don't think i'll get much benefit from the extra points, after putting the final point in Endless Winter i'd have nowhere else to put them (although i guess i'll tag Magic Resistence and Frost Warding).

Then there are specs where the 5 extra talent points open up a door you never even knew was there, from what i can tell the reason why Sword spec is good for rogues but not warriors is because they have 2 swords that hit faster then the arms warriors one sword thus procing more often.
Blizz tried to fix this by increasing the proc chance, now imagine warriors could dual wield big 2 handed Swords (Titans Grip), add in a talent that could increase swing speed to be closer to the rogues (Flurry) and suddenly warriors could see a sharp increase in sword spec procs.
The only thing stopping them from using this spec right now is that they can't take titans grip and a specialisation at the same time, even if you trim down the Fury tree points you'll still only get 20 points to spend in arms.
However as some may have notcied by now in cata they'll have 25 points spare, just enouth to tag a specialisation, i can imagine haste being a strong stat for a fury warrior useing swords as it would proc this a lot.

This is the one i've noticed though short skimming but i'm sure theres other specs where 5 more points allows them to tag stuff they wouldent normally have, or revolutionise a spec that wouldent even be good as it is now.
Of course there will always be specs like frost mages where the 5 extra points is going to be hard to find a strong use for.

So what will you do with your 5 extra points?.

Hubris is my Nemesis

One of the tings that always pissed me off when i was in my guild was the massively overconfident people, they are ok if they keep their hubrism to themselfs but when they are the vocal majority of the guild then problems spring up.

There was always one guy who would always remind us how "easy" a progression fight was mid-raid and how pathetic we are at wiping on Faction Champions (on heroic), when the fights we were atempting were anything but easy.

I don't mind the encouraging types, as in the ones that say "that was unlucky we'll do it better next time", theres a big distinction between encouraging the raiding team and out right insulting them.

Perhaps the worst issue i had in the guild was that the hubristic people were also friends of the Guild Leader in real life so they had officer powers despite not keeping up with the responisbilities of them, we had maybe 1 or 2 good officers and everyone else there was just a hubristic ass.

The point of this post is:
"Don't be that asshole that belittles the raid groups effort by cliaming the fights are easier then they are and raging over how bad everyone else is"

Shadow after Dark

Recently i had my guild disband on me when some of the more hubris members took their E-peen competition too far and pissed off the modest players of the guild (some were rediculously perverse too, i feel sorry for the girl that was in the guild for 1 day and they wouldent let the fact drop).

When one of my friends left the guild i decided to leave aswell because there was no point sticking round without someone i know being there, i never quite got the full story of what happend but it seems almost all the healers in the guild left leaveing a large hole that would be impossible to fill (the healers there were awesome).

While this has been very disapointing for me it has given me a lot of time to play some of my more neglected charecters and as such i have been playing my priest and rogue a lot, getting back into shadow after so long has been realy fun for me as the last time i was a serious shadow priest was back in karazhan.

Playing a support DPS role has always been my prefered style, if i played DnD i'd be either a bard or an Abduration specialised wizard.
being a shadow priest opens up a lot of support opertunitys such as dispeling and abolishing diseases which i have as a reflex action with the help of decurseive.
Replinishment from Vampiric touch and the healing from Vampiric embrace gives healers more room for thought during fights.
I could even drop Shadowform and pinch heal for a short amount of time, i even have Inner focus and Divine Hymn on a macro together exactly for this purpose
The ability to shield yourself and even disperse can allow you to get though a lot of tight situations without taking too much damage or adding additional stress to your healers.
Thanks to 3.3 changes mindflay now keeps it's snare on the mobs which can help out a lot when kiting or controlling mobs

All in all the shadow priest is probably the best support class in the game right now (with the possible exceptions of a good Shaman or Paladin), the only major thorn in our side is the inability to do large bursts of damage but coupled with Vampiric Embrace that might make us too strong a support class.

Small update

Might start blogging again, i have been playing my mage Nanoha for most of last year and have a huge herd of alts that i like to mess with aswell, so i might not make as many priest posts anymore although i did get back into shadow a bit (I always did like playing a support DPS role).