my faith in GM's returns

After an abysmal experience some months back when I tried to find out why I could not log onto an area of my account on wow only to be told that I had to supply some nobody in a country I don't have a lot of faith in their security with details that would allow them to have my entire identity in their hands ... at one point I was informed that it was okay to mail my birth certificate and a bunch of other documentation as US mail is federally protected .... fine I replied, that will do me great after someone has flogged my stuff and anyway, it ain't in US mail until it gets to the US .... anyway, it wasn't the mail I didn't trust, it was the guy on the other end of the email that I just didn't trust .... (okay get out off my soap box and tell my story) ... the stupid thing was that the guy kept trying to tell me that I had the controls set to a different email ... rot and nonsense if ever I'd heard.

On Thursday last I was playing on line trying to grind some gold as you do so that I could buy a bike ... hey ... if I own one in real life, why not have one in game (although I do think the engine noise spoils the game sound). Come Friday night while in an instance (ICC one on less sigh) my long time partner in crime of a shadow priest whispers me to ask why my gear score was so low (in the middle of a boss fight lol) I flicked open my resto's character tab and saw with a sinking heart that there was no weapon equipped and, of course, in the middle of a fight, you can't equip anything! I whisper back, open my bags and start juggling healing a boss fight with reading through my bags as fast as possible for my Midnight Sun Dagger ... but alas ... it was not there. My shadow priest friend assured me that even without it, my healing was going well (don't want to boast but ... IGJAM - by the way, I'm not a fan of swearing).

Come Saturday I'd gone through my bags and bank several times and noticed that not only was my dagger gone, but so was my Alliance Lance - not a big deal, I could grab one easy. I still have no recollection of throwing out the dagger or vendoring it and the lance, well the lance could only be dumped - vendors don't buy them and I don't remember throwing it out.

So, somewhat reluctantly given my past experience I opened a new ticket basically saying, can you tell me if I either threw it out or vendored it so that I would know which to be annoyed with myself for. I logged my email (the one that is supposed to be linked to my account that the previous GM said was not linked to my account so go figure) and there was a letter from the GM saying that there is a limit to how often they will return items, but I should now find it either in my inventory or my mail ... I'm going to log after this and see ... baited breath ... but has my faith in the GM system returned?

Mind you, it would be cool if they replaced it with this version of the dagger - it's from the 25 man version of ICC and so I just can't imagine getting a chance at getting it.

Raiding continues

Okay so we went to ICC again last night ...

We downed Lord Marrowgar on our third attempt at him with a bit of go-go juice in the tank and only one of us flat on the floor pixelated at the end of the fight (not counting the two battle rez's during the fight). We were most impressed and decided in a moment of comunal forgetfulness to ingore the somewhat ignoble wipe we had on one of the trash mobs at the start of our second run. At that point, I was asked by a mate if they thought we'd get there and, well, you can imagine my response. I had expected to have to work a couple more tries so was a little surprised to get him down. Both loot items were hunter gear and so the one hunter in the group was, to say the least a little happy and as we are all about the same with our gearing, and we are all pretty cool guildies, none of us had a bad word to say about that outcome.

oh I would so like a new weapon for my tree. She still weilds the titansteel guardian and a book. I don't know if bosses are frightened by a tree waving a book. I rather suspect that they laugh at her instead.

Rather than stopping there we decided to roll on to Lady Deathwisper and have a 'cuppa tea' with her and a bit of a natter. Instead her adds and trash handed out butts to us on a platter. We gave it two goes and then admitted that while it was nice that one of the guildies was able to talk us through the fight, nothing beat being battered one week and going back the next to exact revenge in a similar way to beating the Lord some half hour or so earlier. I did hear a story of someone being able to down the ICC bosses in not much more than an hour ... my thought ... yerrrr right ... show me the logs so to speak.

I'm not sure how my healing is going. I tend to spec tallents for mana regen/threat reduction and haste over crit and then gem for spell power as I use a lot of HoT and while crit is nice, not running out of mana and keeping out of the eye of the boss so that I can get in one more cast I sort of feel is a little more important. Even though we are not maxed on hp or anything like that (can you max your health? good question ... I don't know but our health as a group is mmm growing) it is not often that I find myself wishing for a bit more health on a tank so long as the healers are doing their job. Anyway, last night the MT healer (the pally healer) ran at about 30 - 35% of the healing, the raid healer at about 25% I think and me a little under that so my first reaction was hmmm third in the healing. But ... I then looked at the overhealing stats and saw the same pattern. Does this suggest that although I'm not outputting as many heals as the other two, more of them are actually being effectively used by the system to top up a character's health or are the other two better healers because they output more heals than I do. I can shift a few tallents around in my build to pick up mastershape shifter, I've always avoided as you need 3 points in shapeshifter that just reduce the mana consumed in shapeshifting (which is sparrow fartish small in the first place) to gain a 2% bonus in my healing of master shapeshifting. There is another tallent I can pick up that gives nourish and healing touch bonuses I've avoided in the past as those two tended to be less used spells. I do use nourish in raids more often so it may now be worth my while picking them up. I suppose I could finally dual spec, one for my day to day and instance work and one for raids. hmmm dunno.... but I've also not answered my own question about whether or not I think I'm a better healer as I'm not over healing as much. I use to watch the over heal stats like a hawk and try to keep them as low as possible in instances pushing my timing on HoT on the theory that a good player manages their resourcse and over healing represented wasted mana. Now I don't bother and just spam HoT giving the tank in particular a slightly inflated sense of invincibility by rarely not having full health.

raiding

Well we finally stuck our noses into ICC. Completely inexperienced we got the boss down to about 1/5th of his hp on our second of three wipes. The MT pally healer was 'embarrassed' that we wiped 3 times on the first boss and then called it (the wiping apparently was the embarrassing bit). That just cheesed me off as we'd all gone in knowing that we wanted to have a look but also knowing that we really should be only in maybe EoE or somewhere like that. We were inexperienced as a group both at raiding but also raiding as a group. ... some had raided ICC with pugs. Which part of all that spelt 'walk in the park' to the pally healer. The fact that she seemed to think that all she had to do was heal the MT and not worry about herself and was the first healer dead each time leaving a pair of inexperienced druid heals. grrrr. When I did throw a few heals at her I got told not to bother, she'd be right ... go figure.

what did I say in my last post about raids having nobs on?

The positive of the night was that people just generally went in with a suck it and see approach and enjoyed them selves.

urgh raiding bah

Raiding has nobs on it.

There really is no nice way to put it.

It has nobs on it big time.

You list for a run and log before the scheduled departure time so as to be ready and it is half an hour after start time that you actually step foot into the raid for starters.

Then there is the inevitability of either someone not showing or after the first catastrophic wipe, someone leaving resulting in the rest of the group twiddling their toes in the sand for the next 20 min trying to work out if anyone knows someone.

oo and don't get me started on the nob heads who spam for raiders but insist on full gear scores, well hello, like the first raiders into an area had high gs! I don't volunteer for these runs. Pulling my toe nails out would be more fun. So would picking Tsu's bark off one sliver at a time.

Invariably you run out of time and don't finish the whole run (okay so Naxx is an exception there as you can do one wing at a time)

so mmm give me a good heroic group any day over a raid. Fewer people fast, coordinated play, less dummy spitting and childish crap ... much better. I like the sheer speed that the groups in the random pick up function produce. They are not in it for a Mother's club natter meeting giving the run an almost ruthless feeling with no time to make a mess of things.

maybe ICC and those areas are more interesting, but all in all, I think Tsu's a heroics girl and not a raider. Raids are too slow for her liking.

... *cough* *cough* ..... ding

Yes,

You read it here first ....

well sort of ... I did announce it in game to mates first but out side of that ... you read it here first ... well sort of ... there were those people I emailed ... okay ... so you read it blogged here first ... now that I can honestly say ...

DING!!!

:)

yes, my 'I can't tank ... I'm Resto ...' lass is all grown up and is now 80. She was my first character made about eighteen months ago and so is special to me to such a degree that I wanted to make sure she was the first character I got to 80. In fact, I have always made sure she was my highest ranked character so she is special :)

I'm not sure what to do now ... I know there are heroics and raids to work through, but you know how it is, when you are so use to working on leveling, when that goes, you get a bit lost.

still ...

DING DING wooooot DING

Thou shall research before runs ... thou shall research before ...

uhuh

Now ... how many times have I been in discussions about the importance of researching before you go on runs and how much difference this actually makes.

My woody little druid has had two experiences recently that illustrate the worth and meaningless of this advice.

We had a guild run ... our second officially organised as a guild run type event. It was into Dire Maul for a guildies Warlock mount. We'd convinced her that it would be more fun to run the quest line rather than just train it. It lead to our first ever guild run where ten people registered for a run through Stratholme. Two level 80 tanks and a collection of other high level characters made this a walk in the park. It helped that they also KNEW WHERE TO GO! We used the raid function to sort two groups then degrouped to form the two groups for the run. The only people online were the ones who were in the run. We rolled through the place having had plenty of chatter in guild chat between the two groups. The positive feel in guild after was palpable and only made us more enthusiastic to tackle the next part of the warlock quest ... leading us to Dire Maul. I had not bothered reading ... I am ashamed to admit ... assuming that the two or three runs I'd done 20 levels ago on my furry kitty druid would be sufficient and hey ... someone else would know ... wouldn't they ... ahhhh no. Again we used raid to build the groups so every one knew who was with who then split to form two running groups. The first group went in with the warlock for its quest and got to the busy part of the group. My woody druid's group went in and we all turned to each other and went ... soooo ... Who knows the way? One moment of the experience saw the five of us running around one of the rooms in confusion as we could not even see the door to the next section right in front of our noses. Much tabbing in and out got us to a point where we knew what to do for the first section when the main group announced that they had what they needed to do and we should all come and see the newly aquired horse ... ahhh if only we'd read strategy notes on Dire Maul ... even just looking at a map would have been good!

Last weekend the same woody druid had an opportunity to go on a guild run to Halls of Lightning. She'd been hinted to that this event might be coming up and spent an evening reading Halls of Stone and Halls of Lighting strategy notes as the hint had not been clear about which of the two we'd been able to go on. Friday night dawned and saw us in HoL. A very nice place, the run went slickly, again tanked by one of our level 80 tanks admirably supported by a level 80 shadow priest, a 78 shadow priest and the woody druid at 77 ... yup ... we had a 4 man guild run through HoL that was smooth and slick. ... The only problem my woody resto druid had? Despite learning from the Dire Maul trip and spending time doing 'homework' so that she would be 'prepared' ... she did not recognise a damn thing in the place until she's cleared the final boss and was running back to the entry (why she did not hearth I am not sure) when she went 'hmmm I wonder if these were the ramps and platforms the notes were talking about?'

sooo .... does she keep researching before runs, or is she better to suck it and see then go read the notes to work out what the goodness was going on?

To Enhance or not to Enhance

A chance chat with my GM the other night lead to a mention of heros of wow ... yesum, you know who I'm talking about ... and lead me to go have a look at how my resto was looking. A quick scan of the data showed that by and large she is by and large unenhanced with items such as spellthread, enchants or armor kits and lead me to think about the extent to which I should do this. 

I am intending redoing her talents when she dings 80 mainly because there are tweaks I want to make to her tree but want to do it a bit like a 'now you are all grown up' type thing. I've thought about having a mate of mine do some swish stuff and enchant her but ... well ... what is the point of doing this when I'll replace her gear when something nice drops? ... but then argh ... I level her so slowly just enjoying the trip with her that, well, to be honest, I don't get to change her gear often and so some enhancements would be good ..... argh can you see my problem?