Yay Fire Birdie Down!

My guild went back into Firelands last night (with a new tank and a pug hunter) and managed to down Alysrazor.  And it only took us 5 tries!  Our big problems were our flying dps weren't comfortable flying and dpsing at the same time, and the cyclones in phase 2 were kicking my fellow healer's ass.  However, she managed to live through that phase when her husband told her to just follow him and he'd lead her around.

Firebirdie dropped my new boots (yay) and a dagger that our pug hunter took (what?).  And with that upgrade, I only have 2 pieces that are not 365 or higher.  (My pants and a ring.)

Anyway.  We moved onto Baleroc and beat against him for 3 tries before we had to call it.  The healers (all two of us) couldn't figure it out at first.  However, I've done some reading now (I was not prepared for that boss last night.  Usually we take a short break after a kill but we just moved right along and the husband tried to explain but he didn't explain what the healers have to do, probably because he didn't care.) and I know that we need to rotate.  My shaman buddy kept healing the tank because his health kept dropping.  And I kept healing the DPS because THEIR health was dropping, and then I would throw a heal onto the tank.  It was all messy.

I"m going to talk to my healing buddy tonight and see how we want to approach this.  I was really bummed that my hots won't help stack the buff I need.  Dude.  Way to gimp me!  Ugh.

Anyway.  I have a busy day ahead of me.  I'd best get moving!!

Yay heals!

We went into Firelands last night with 9 guildies and our usual PUG death knight.  Do you know what that means?  Aw yeah, I got to heal with my bestie.  We easily two healed Beth, with only 1 wipe because the downstairs tank took the first web pulley thing and I took the next.  When he realized what he did, instead of staying up and just switching for that phase, he jumped down and (since I had taken my usual 2nd web) Beth turned to ME and ate my face.  We wiped pretty fast after that.

We 1 shot Shannox, despite both puppies eating my face within the first 5 seconds of the encounter.  (The DK battle rezed me.)  I didn't get above 50% mana the entire time.  Heh.  Stupid puppies.

Then we went to Lord Rhyolith and wiped on him 5 times before finally killing him.  That wasn't hard, but I swear that some of my dps went, found the fire, and stood in it.  We did get him to 2nd phase at least 3 times, so we're definately improving on that fight.

Loot wise, I made out like a freaking bandit.  I got the haste caster hat off Beth, and then both pieces off Rhyolith.  He dropped the leather agility hat and the leather caster chest.  I have my tier chestpiece so I'm not going to replace that but I'm looking towards my boomkin set.  The best part is that my 'old' hat, which was the hat from Atramedes (not my tier hat), can now be repurposed for boomkin.  I'm hoping we go back and do Nef or Cho'gall so I can get my tier hat or shoulders so I can have my 4 piece boomkin bonus.

Tonight, we head back in and face down Alysrazor.  I think we can do this if people just learn to 1. fly and 2. dodge shit.  :)  I'm hopeful!

The Great Wild Growth Nerf of PTR 4.3

A lot of bloggers have already discussed this in much better terms then I can.  (Beru, Jasyla, Tzufit and I know that the other Resto bloggers will hit this up as well).  I wouldn't even discuss it but I am feeling a bit betrayed by the developers right now.

We, the resto druids, don't have a damage mitigation cooldown.  In order to 'make up for this', you gave us Tranquility as a 3 minute cooldown.  You buffed our Wild Growth in 4.0.6.  And you gave us absolute crap for glyphs.

Now, I've never been a fan of Wild Growth spamming.  It's not my preferred method of healing.  However, in certain situations it is helpful.  I glyphed my Wild Growth because I do raid and hitting that extra person is very helpful.  (However, half the time I swear it hits people's pets!)

Did this make my output 'better' then other healers?  Yes, a bit.  Last night, after this nerf was announced, I did a bit of number crunching (which I'm really not good at).  I looked at my Wild Growth numbers from a couple weeks ago (since I ran boom last week), and figured out that with a 20% nerf to WG, my numbers would drop by just abut 5%.

And that doesn't include numbers for the new cooldown if I keep my Wild Growth glyphed.  (Which, at this point, I probably won't keep.)

Now, let's talk about Resto glyphs.  From what I see, we have 4, maybe 5 major glyphs for us.  There's Healing Touch (which I didn't have until they nerfed Innervate), Innervate (which is nerfed), Wild Growth, Thorns and Rebirth.  Now, I don't believe in glyphing things I never use.  So why would I glyph Thorns or Innervate?  That leaves behind Wild Growth, Rebirth and Healing Touch.  If you want to make us choose between glyphs, GIVE US GLYPHS TO CHOOSE BETWEEN!

And I swear to the Earthmother, if my husband says to me again that mitigation cooldowns are for tanks, I'm going to punt him into a wall.

Hooray!

It's looking like we're going to have 10 guild members for our raids this week.  That means ... I GET TO HEAL!  YAY!  /dance

I had a really hard weekend, I went on a trip across the state for my nephew's 1st birthday party.  It was very stressful, we left Saturday morning (I spent 12 hours in the car, there and back) and I got home Sunday evening and barely got to log in.  I logged in and just idled.  I was so burned out from driving back and forth that I just wanted to play without anyone pestering me.  So I went to a server that I have a level 5 toon on, where I don't know anyone, and tried to play her.

I ended up having to adjust her interface, so that took me all the time I had before bed.  But I logged her on again on Monday night and got my little goblin warlock to level 12, and out of the starting zone.

I'm trying to decide if I want to find a leveling guild over there or just stay unguilded and all that.  I've never been on a server where I didn't have a community before.  And I actually do know people there, but I haven't contacted them because I'm only level 12 and what if they don't really like me and only tolerate me?  Heh.  I'm such a mess.

Anyway.  If anyone wants to say hi.  My goblin warlock is Annanda on the Llane server.

Firelands - Post Nerf

So, last night we went back into Firelands.  My raid leading husband had texted me a few days ago, as I went to pick up my resto shaman buddy from work, "Talk to CoolShaman about 2 healing".  I kind of rolled my eyes but I brought it up with her when she got into the car.  "What do you think about 2 healing Firelands?"  She thought about it for a few moments and then said "Sure, why not.  We can probably do it!  And if we can AwesomePriest will be there to back us up."  So we had a loose plan.  She and I would try to 2 heal Firelands, as a resto druid and a resto shaman.

Well, Wednesday comes and we can't get the people together.  One of our raiders is sick (food poisoning) and another one just didn't show up.  We picked up our usual 2 old guildy pugs but still weren't able to get into Firelands.  We did Baradon Hold, and 2 healed that.  (We decided to stop 3 healing the new boss when my over heal was 60%.)

Then Thursday comes around.  And we realize that since one of our usual pugs is a holy pally without a dps spec, one of us was going to have to DPS.  Well, my shaman friend just switched her 2nd spec to enhancement but she's not very familiar with it yet and she's not hit capped.  So she decides to switch to elemental for the raid (since my output is higher then hers apparently).

However, as we get to talking, it turns out she doesn't have any kind of real elemental gear, she just does it in her resto gear.  Which is what I do, but I have two pieces of boomkin tier gear to give me a 2 piece bonus.  She decides that I should DPS and she'll heal but if it turns out this isn't working, I would flip back to tree.

We get into Beth'tilac and the pally goes up on the web and my shaman stays down with us.  It takes us two tries but we kill her rather easily.  The only death was my husband's pally tank, but I battle ressed him and we moved on.

Next was Shannox.  I want to say we 1 shot him.  I don't remember and apparently our log for last night isn't up so I can't check.  But that went pretty well.

So we went to Lord Rhyolith and beat against his legs for a while.  Took us 3-4 tries (I think) but we did finally get him.  I did pop tranquility at the phase transition, which I think helped a lot.  It was a messy kill and I think there were 4 or 5 of us laying around holding down the floor after he died, but he did die.  We'd only ever gotten to phase 2 once before, so yay there.

We spent the remaining hour or so trying to clip Alysrazor's wings.  And honestly.  That seemed like a fun fight!!  I was paired with our pug DK to kill things on the left side of the area (left as you look at the cave).  Our flying DPS kept falling, so we kept wiping to that.  But eventually we will get better at that.  It's just a learning curve.

I will admit I saw red when I saw Staghelm kill those poor captured Druids of the Talon.  Oh he just makes me so mad!  Grrrrrr!

I am a bit bummed that I'm progressing through Firelands as a chicken.  I love healing.  It's all I've wanted to do for years now.  But I lost my healing spot to a pug because we need warm bodies.  *sighs*  It sucks so bad.  I am very happy that we have people willing to help us, but all I want to do is heal.  I don't want to be a sucky dps (which I am).  I'm just so sad about it.  I want to heal with my shaman buddy, like we've been doing since Kara.  Oh well.  There's always next expansion I guess.

Tier 13 - Thoughts

I have made no secret of the fact that I find most tier gear ugly.  However, I do have a new favorite.  Paladin Tier 13.  Honestly Blizzard, THIS is what druids should be wearing.

Those feathers?  Totally druid-ish!  I know people are saying it looks like Pally Birdman, Attorney at Law, but I so want those shoulders.  I can do without the hat, but I do like the coloration of this set.  

Instead, I'm stuck with mushrooms.  I look like I fell asleep in a freaking cave for 3 weeks.  Plus, look at that hat.

I will look like a freaking cyclops!  I have two eyes!! Not 1!!

However, I do like the mage tier as well.  The quilted look with gears is actually really awesome.  It's very 'steam punk' and that is so SO cool.

The rest of the tier sets don't impress me.  

Shamans - My resto shaman buddy says "It looks like I crawled into a cave for 100 years and had small animals die on me!"  

Rogues - Really?  You're going to put lights on someone who is trying to stealth in the dark?  That just doesn't make sense.  

Warlocks - Well, at least their inner beauty is coming out.  They look like human sized Faceless Ones!

Warriors - Not too bad.  I like the Deathwing look.

Honestly, I can't wait to see what Blizz pulls out for hunters, death knights and priests.  

Birthdays and 4.3 and nerfs

My birthday was on Thursday so I've been rather busy the last few days.  However, I did get some WoW in.

We went back into Firelands on Wednesday and Thursday, downing Shannox and Beth'ilac.  We got some good attempts on Lord Rhyolith on Thursday, getting him to 2nd phase with only 1 death, me.  They wiped pretty quickly but at least we've now seen it!  Now we just need to tighten it up and make it work.

This weekend I got sometime leveling my little troll warlock.   She's level 64 now and questing in Terokkar Forest.  We're trying to get to level 65 so the husband can take his little goblin rogue out and farm lock boxes for his Insane acheesement.

Other then that, I ran 4 troll heroics on Sunday.  It was very lazy, but we wanted to at least try to cap out points.  I have 60 points to go and hopefully we'll get to run another heroic tonight.  We have another birthday gathering for me after work, so we'll see if I actually get time to do that.

And like everyone else, I've been anxiously awaiting word of 4.3.  And the WoW gods blessed me with news this morning.  I read about the new 5 mans, and End Time sounds awesome.  I always loved the concept of the Caverns of Time instances and this one just excites me.  Yay!

As for the epic gems, I'm torn on this.  My druid is a jewelcrafter and I've always liked having a ton of gems lying around to use.  However, this sounds like it will make it harder to obtain and I'm not sure I like that.  It would be awesome if they had a JC ability to have a higher chance to get an epic gem from the geode thing.

Also, the Deathwing raid sounds so awesome.  Cthulu Deathwing!  Awesome!  I'm really excited about the idea of an outside raid that is all over Dragonblight.  This is going to be epic.

Lastly, I should probably talk about my take on the Firelands nerf.  I'm really unhappy about it.  I haven't had a chance to do everything I wanted to do pre-nerf and 4.3 isn't even on the PTR yet.  Jeez Blizz.  I'm not a hard core raider but I want a chance to defeat the bosses at their original hardness.  Ugh.

Anyway, over all, with the new information on 4.3, I'm getting excited about it.  Not about the void storage and transmog, but the content.  So cool!!

Shannox down!

We downed Shannox relatively early on Thursday evening.  It wasn't too bad, but it was kind of messy.  We managed to do it with only the death of 5 people?  Including both tanks I think.  Heh.  I'm not sure what happened there honestly.

He dropped my offhand but I only rolled a 16 so my favorite shadow priest won it with a ... 19.  It will drop again.  I know it!

We then headed towards Lord Rhyolith but didn't have much success with the steering.  My darling husband and I had a disagreement about a few things and I got all huffy at him.  (I love having my raid leader be my husband.  I can argue with him and no one can hear me!!)  I did end up logging off angry and going to bed mad at him over something really stupid.  But whatever.  That's marriage.  I was fine the next morning and able to see that I was not completely rational the night before.  The funny thing was that we were discussing things in the officer channel and I got pissy at the husband there and my best friend is like "Woah, I'm not getting in the middle of this argument" and stopped talking to us.  So I took my argument to the verbal arena.

I spent my weekend playing my 'baby' hunter off and on.  She's level 75 now and she JUST got the heirloom bow last night.  Yeah. I know.  A waste of JP.  But I have a rogue who is level 72 who can use it too.  I don't 'get' hunters.  I just send my pet in and arcane shot.  I don't know if that's how you 'do' it but it works for me.

In non-WoW news, my doctor put me on a new medication to stabilize my moods.  I started it on Friday night and now I'm just waiting for it to kick in.  Could take a few days or a couple of weeks.  I can't wait to be back to 'normal'.  Where I get upset or joyous over things that make sense and not because of a random whim.  I'm only mentioning this because I may be a bit slow on updating since I only want to blog when I'm feeling decent.  When I'm down, I feel like no one reads this and no one cares.  Which is probably true but I need to write anyway.  And maybe there's a audience out there somewhere!

Beth'tilac Down!

We did get to go to Firelands last night.  We ended up pulling two of our old guildies in, one holy pally and one deathknight (unsure of his spec).

We did change a bit of our last strategy and instead of sending our prot warrior, resto shaman and shadow priest up top, we sent our prot pally (my husband), myself (resto druid), a warlock (affliction I think) and our non-guilded DK.  That worked pretty well and we were able to get her to about 80% before phase 2 started.  Except that if the warlock and DK would go up the 3rd time, when she came down there would be a ton of spiderlings that she'd eat and heal up to full again.  So we only had me and husband go up the 3rd time so the dps could clean up the spiderlings easier.

I think we did that for about an hour, maybe hour and half before we downed her.  Then we went off and cleared trash until Shannox spawned and we did 2 attempts on him.  That was much easier compared to Bethy in my opinion.  Of course, at that point I was only half paying attention.  So I don't know what the rest of the raid felt.  Hehe.

My only complaint is that I kept dying.  Husband would either fall through the hole in the webs or not taunt Beth at the right time.  As a result, she'd turn to me and go "whack whack" and I'd be a corpse.  I am not a sacrificial cow!!

Beth dropped her BOE plate boots and her BOE caster shield.  The DK got the boots and my healing shaman buddy got the shield.  Apparently Beth has some nice haste gloves and my hat, which also has haste on it.  So I'll definitely be grabbing them when I see them.  I'm not sure about my tier, because those haste pieces are so nice.

And I see that Shannox drops my haste offhand.  (I think I'm starting to drool here.)  Haste everywhere.  MMMM!  (And looking ahead, apparently the flaming bird has my trinket!  And Baleroc has HASTE BRACERS.  ZOMG.  Okay, yeah. I don't look at loot lists until I know I will actually get there.  I hate getting excited about things I can do nothing about.)

Tonight we're going in again, depending on what we can get.  A couple of our guildies have gone MIA.  So, not too sure what we're going to do about that.  However, one that had been MIA seems to be back, so maybe he'll start raiding again.  *crosses fingers*

Back in the saddle again ...

So, last week I was on vacation.  Now I'm back and it's been rather hectic around here.  Mostly real life engagements and what not.

However, I did get to step into Firelands last week and take a few swings at the spider boss, Beth'tilac.  We three healed it and didn't really succeed.  We were mostly trying to check it out and exploring it.  I think that we'll try 2 healing it however next time.  Our healing team that we'd have would be a resto shaman up top and a resto druid down below.  We (the players of the healing toons) know that's not the best, but it's what we have and love.  So we're going to make it work.

We ended up doing 1 day of Firelands as when we went back the next day, 3 of our team couldn't make it.  So we picked up a couple members of our guild that don't raid often and went to Blackwing Descent.  Cleared that, which was awesome.  And that was raiding for that night.

This week, we're supposed to go back into Firelands.  However, I don't know how sign ups look because the husband was feeling sick and went to bed before the other officers were online.  I hope we can go.  I'll be pretty bummed if it doesn't happen!

In other news, I worked on my troll warlock a bit this weekend.  The husband wants to get his rogue to at least 65 before he starts farming lockboxes for the Insane acheesement.  He's only got the lockboxes to go and I won't farm them for him on my rogue.  Because I'm mean!

But I haven't gotten a lot of WoW time in recently.  I'm hoping that will change in the future though!