Oh, last night’s BDL run in ICC was the first time I’ve healed on my pally since the talent reset last week. Wow! I don’t know if they’re going to change us again but damn, I love the recent changes: like how Word of Glory doesn’t always use your Holy Power (free heals!) and that AoE heal (I forget the name) that sprays the raid with heals. And Beacon lasts for 5 minutes! I was like a kid in a candy shop, just shooting FoL/HS/WoG on everyone. I started to run low on mana for the boss fights, so I need to watch that, but really I was healing with reckless abandon so that’s easy to address.
And my first time off-tanking a raid. Heh 5 Pallies in a group of 9 was pretty amusing. 2 Paladins, 1 Healadin and 2 Retadins, right?
Tankings easy when you have an experienced Maintank shouting clear instructions. Tanks Shin! 
Been having a lot of fun this past week–I’m leveling a blood elf warrior, and I love him! I had two goals with him–see the Tirisfal/Silverpine/Hillsbrad quest chain (and the new EPL and WPL) because I heard they were cool, and learn how to properly play a warrior (my other warrior is level 65 and was leveled completely as a refer a friend secondary, which means he was literally dragged from 1 to 65 without ever having to do anything, so I have no idea how to play him). So I don’t have a goblin trike yet on my mage or my DK because my every spare moment has been spent leveling this guy. He’s level 46 now, and I’m really impressed with the overhaul that Blizz has done to the questing experience. Now instead of doing a bunch of disjointed quests and running all over trying to find new ones, I feel like I’m participating in a long story. Every series of quest and hub follows logically from the last one, there are tons of flight points now, and not once have I felt like I’m doing boring grinding (okay, once–in Hammerfall. Once I realized they hadn’t really updated those quests, I got out of there and moved on to WPL).
Also, something happened this week that made me very happy. It was last Friday, and I was running my warrior around Silverpine doing the Gilneas quests, when suddenly our GM whispered me and asked me to get in Vent with him. “Hmm,” I wondered, since this never happens. “What’s this about, I wonder?” So I get in Vent, and he tells me that they’ve decided to promote me to officer. I was amazed–though I’d dropped a couple of feelers a while ago that I was interested should a spot open up, I had given up hope of it happening since nobody’d said anything about them. So I’m now the newest officer for our 450+ member guild. All in all, it’s been a good week!
Gratz on the promotion, Infovore.
I’ve been avoiding guild officialdom like it burns, myself. I think it’s a great leadership training tool, it did wonders for my confidence in my own leadership abilities and made leading projects at work a lot easier, but I already got that one achievement ticked off and now I’m happy to play noncom. Being an officer in a guild the size of yours… that’s heavy stuff, man!
Yeah, I checked the total healing at the end of the raid and you had done about 2/3 of the healing to my 1/3. Part of that’s gear, I would guess (Nahren’s been in ICC three times and still doesn’t have a single 251+ piece), but from my POV it seemed like you were very much on top of the healing and I was barely able to keep up.
I haven’t investigated the Druid healing changes that closely, and I was dismayed to realize that spamming Rejuvenation drains my mana visibly and swiftly. Nourish, the Druid’s primary direct heal, now costs 1/3 as much as Rejuvenation does. In order to keep from completely bombing out on mana during the longer fights, I was obliged to throw down as many Nourishes as I could. Problem is my haste sucks and each Nourish took ages to cast, and almost every one landed too late; you’d already healed up the damage by then, unless the target was in serious danger of dying and needed both of our heals. The only reason I managed 1/3 of the total healing was due to Rejuvenation and Wild Growth ticking away.
I can definitely see where they’re going with wanting healers to use more of their toolboxes and forcing you to make quick decisions about what to use on who. When I first started healing, I tried to use everything I had available, but eventually I lapsed into spamming Rejuvenation, Wild Growth, and Nourish because that was all that was necessary. Last night in ICC, though, I saw several instances where Swiftmend was downright necessary to save someone’s ass right away, and on reflection Lifebloom could have been used for better efficiency and less headache on my part. There’s probably a couple other spells I could stand to think about too.
Grats!
I can’t stop rolling new toons, last night a dwarf mage kept me entertained the whole evening. Again the experience is a lot more linear up to 10 and has a more ‘epic’ feel, off to Elwynn tonight to take on Hogger and do Westfall which I hear from guidlies is very well done indeed.
Yeah, it’s going to be a challenge, but I hope a fun one. I was the GM in everything but name (long story) of my first real raiding guild, and then worked my way up to deputy GM of my next one (which was the top guild on our server during most of BC) so I have experience, but this is going to be a bit different. For being so big the guild has a very small officer group (right now it’s four, because one stepped down recently due to family issues, and another (also our WotLK raid leader) stepped down last night because he’s burned out on leadership and wants to just play for awhile. The other three are all close friends, but fortunately they’re also all very good officers. I expect they’ll pick up at least one more in the next few days, but who knows? Right now I’m definitely feeling a little like the clueless kid among the grownups, but given that my strengths are more behind the scenes (planning and strategy, conflict avoidance/mediation, anticipating problems, etc.) I doubt they’ll expect me to take a visible leadership role for awhile.
The weird thing about our guild is that it’s in transition right now–we were successfuly 25 man raiding guild with a solid officer corps and a solid raid leader, but now for Cata we’re splitting into 10 man autonomous raids that are organized by whoever wants to organize them, and that raid leader will have full control over recruiting for his or her raid. This all means that the centralized structure of the guild will likely become a lot less important, since individual raid leaders are the first line of defense for discipline problems and whatnot. It should be interesting.
No they aren’t going away post 74 from Bashiok in this thread: World of Warcraft Forums
No, they’re staying, but with Cata coming, who knows how long it’ll be before I get bored enough to go back to the Argent Tourney!
Gotcha. Same here.
Ok, now that I’ve been able to go to WoW Insider: cool, Mister Rik!
Count me in as another who loves the new lowbie areas.
By the way, going through the new Ashenvale and Stonetalon quests on Horde side gave me an entirely new perspective of Garrosh – I’m actually starting to like him a tiny bit (just a tiny bit) and hope they further develop him in later zones (I’m on Desolace now – and the opening chain for this zone is hilariously awesome). I highly recommend the Stonetalon chain, it’s really cool (and a fun shout-out to Bioshock, heh).
Also, in case you hadn’t realized it, wearing the city tabards on your lowbies works in level-appropriate normal dungeons, too. My new resto shaman is pulling in 1-2k goblin rep per DF (15 pts per trash, 300 per boss).
I had an unusual experience at the entrance to Silverpine (the one just south of Undercity)…the “event” between Garrosh and Sylvanas actually made me agree with Garrosh just a bit (even though my alt is a zombo). At the same time, his heavy-handed reaction to the event raised my hackles. It was a very mild sort of emotional whiplash.
You know what? Western Plaguelands really needs an inn. Somewhere. Anywhere. All those quest hubs, three flight points, and no inns. There isn’t even an inn at Hearthglen, the Argent Crusade’s HQ. So my toon there is having to fly down to Aerie Peak in Hinterlands when she logs out (she hasn’t made it to Light’s Hope Chapel in EPL yet).
In some places, that word “inn” is VERY loosely defined, Rik! 
Q
You know, you guys aren’t so bad your own selves. I wish I could join you on BDL. Maybe one day! 
Q
Infovore, I didn’t know that an alt could even join my guild! I’ll do that, and thank you!
Q
Actually, if your characters are all on the same account, you’ll need to have someone else invite–does anyone else in your guild have invite privileges? In order to promote your alt to guild leader, you’d have to promote somebody else to guild leader and then have them promote your alt. If there isn’t anyone else in your guild that you trust enough to have them do it, I’m sure there are folks here (including me) who’d be happy to start a level 1 on your server and help you out with it.
Edit: No, I’m wrong. You’ll need help inviting somebody else on your account, but you’ll be able to promote them to GL yourself once they’re in.
Well it takes either you owning a second account, or cooperation from another live person. If your alt is not in your guild, and you do not have two accounts, then you need the second person to join your guild, and get promoted to officer rank, with the ability to invite new members. Not sure exactly how you configure that in the guild leader controls, but it isn’t too hard.
If no one else is available, I will roll an alt on your server for this purpose. You can invite me to your guild on your level 80, promote me to officer rank, and then I’ll invite any and/or all of your alts to the guild and promote them as you instruct. Odds are good I probably won’t actually level that character anytime soon, but it would be there to help you make the transition.
[QUOTE=Mister Rik]
For those of you who want fox pets for your hunters, there are some “normal” orange-colored foxes above the Northridge Lumber Mill in WPL, near the road to Hearthglen.
[/QUOTE]
I got a reddish one from the NE corner of Loch Modan.