I’ll be more careful next time and not undercut by more than a few silver, so I don’t deflate the market with my one stack of Runecloth 
Lots more stuff at www.mmo-champion.com, as usual.
Okay, this is weird. I went to the server select screen to switch from Cairne to Lightbringer. Lightbringer pretty much always shows a “High” population, and Cairne is always “Medium”. But this time, a bit after 4:00PM PDT no less, Lightbringer showed “Medium” and Cairne showed “New Players”. What, were there some mass bannings I didn’t hear about?
It was very strange running around Dalaran in the afternoon without lagging like hell. I was actually getting nearly 40fps, where I usually get something like 4.7fps. Even stranger, my latency was showing as >800ms, when it’s usually around 22-25ms.
(As a side note, a bit of insomnia a few nights ago prompted me to get out of bed at 2:00AM and play until about 4:00AM. No lag at all that time of night, and it was so quiet. I discovered for the first time that a flying carpet mount is utterly silent when in motion.)
I have to admit, the level 10 special abilities is a bit of brilliance. I’m highly skeptical of the talent trees changes – while I make an effort to embrace change, this is a big one – but I think the specs will be much improved and gameplay will be much more fun by frontloading the specs with unique abilities.
Alas, I’m still about 10 levels short…but at least I should be ready to go by the time Cataclysm hits…
I might…but all of my Alliance toons are on Wildhammer, and I don’t know if I really want to spend money on a server transfer. Maybe we could find enough people who would be willing to start from scratch and level together?
I’d roll alliance and could lead it, if people are behind it. I started BDL and I’m very casual about raiding. A nice central realm like Sageras is probably the right spot. Great alliance realm that.
(By started I mean got 10 silver and scammed enough signatures.)
Squeee!
Because of an insane work schedule my WoW time has been severely limited. As a result, no raiding for several months. Honestly, I thought I would never see Icecrown Citadel.
Well, I logged on last night, my guild was a bit short for a 25-man, someone noticed I was one, and asked me to come along. I cautioned I didn’t know the fights and couldn’t guarantee staying til the end. They said come anyway.
So, I did finally get to see the inside of ICC.
Let’s see… we got Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, the Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, and Rotface. After the second Professor Putricide wipe I bowed out, as I needed to get to bed so I could get up and go to work on time. Don’t know when, or if, I’ll see the rest but really it was quite challenging. (Only died four times - which probably isn’t bad for the first time in ICC. I followed directions as best I could, shared a bunch of fish feasts, and had a blast.
Today I was back grinding out Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms on my limited time in the game, but hey, I feel invigorated.
Thing is, I’m a generalist irl and I like hybrid builds in some of my chars. My DK is now blood and frost, but before he was blood/unholy and frost. That blood/unholy build was surprisingly good both for DPS and survivability. The blood build I’m using is quite different from what I see on other people, which by the way brings me to a question: any Blood Tanks here do use the “dancing sword”? I keep seeing tanks that have it but who as far as I can tell never pop it, so it looks to me like they got it “because it’s there”. I haven’t taken it.
My favorite druid is balance/resto (one build, not double spec). There have been times when someone would take a look at her talents and start criticising them… and you could see the people in the guild moving sideways away from the two of them… and the new guy would start getting tells of “you DO realize she’s the healer, right?” “don’t piss her off, man, she’s the healer and her husband’s the tank!” “you’re lucky we can’t kill same-faction, go on like that and we’ll be rezzing you in no time” “it’s your repair bill, you know” She’s both a good DPS (but not usually not the highest-ranked on Recount) and a good healer (but usually not the highest-ranked on Recount). Note that “highest-ranked on Recount” isn’t the same as “the best”: having great DPS is worth shit if you spend half of each bossfight staring at the ceiling cos you don’t know when to pull back.
Amen.
Lich King last night… better than last week, getting past the first transition most of the time. Progress but I’m still not looking forward to next week, I’m tired of wiping for three hours and I don’t care about unlocking hard modes. I’d rather reset the lock and blow through the other bosses again just for something different. The only fun thing that happened last night is during a wipe I jumped over the edge of the platform just as a Val’kyr was summoned, said Val’kyr picked me up just after I jumped, flew me back up to the platform and dropped me to my doom.
ICC 25… the tanking pants from Marrowgar drop. I lose the roll and say a joke in chat, so the guy who won starts telling me to take the pants he won. Opening trade all the way up to Deathwhisper even though I’m telling him it was a joke, I don’t want the pants, he’s tanking too and deserves the loot. I end up taking the pants and feeling a little guilty, but they’re an upgrade so Reins is now wearing them. I really do hope they drop for him next week. Now I get the fun of regemming since my hit is through the roof and I’m just one point under the expertise cap.
On a good note, I finally scraped together a healing set for my paladin and successfully healed regular ToC. No trinket dropped but nobody died so I call that a victory.
We didn’t have a full guild party for MT last night (just me, my healer friend, and Flightlessbird’s druid) so instead of trying to pug MT we did the random queue and did UK. Actually Bird was late, but one of our dps dropped after the first pull so we were able to invite him as a replacement.
Didn’t go too badly, although I had a tougher time than usual keeping aggro and the rogue (I think) kept dying to the bombs that some of the mobs drop. Interestingly, we had a lot more trouble with the next-to-last pair of bosses than I usually have - we wiped three times I think. Finally the priest put up Shadow Protection and that seemed to put us over the top.
For Ingvar, the rogue went down right away in phase I (got smashed, I think) and the rest of the party went down one by one. But thanks to Bird’s offheals we managed to kill him with just me left alive, and down to 140 hp.
The goal is still to do MT next week, but I want to do it when we have at least 4 guildies in the group.
Evidently, Blizzard agrees with your assessment - it looks like they’ve buffed dancing sword a fair bit in Cata. At least I don’t think it currently provides a 20% evasion bonus.
Re: new trees, I’m annoyed that Unholy DKs still have to take (what feel like) PVP talents to fill out their 31; also, the anti-magic aura/zone talents are still sitting there being useless (I guess they’re useful for PvP, in fact I know they’re really irritating to casters in PVP, but as someone who does PvP purely for the gems, I find it annoying to have those talents sitting there where no tank will be able to take them).
It does something like 5% of my DPS on boss fights, which seems like a bargain for 1 talent point (especially considering that the threat is now converted correctly).
It’s also quite useful for building threat at the start of a fight, IMO. So yeah, I take it.
I guess I don’t understand this. When you say balance/resto do you mean half points in each? Or 51 in Resto and then the rest in balance. I just don’t see how you could be an effective Resto Druid without Tree of Life Form (which requires a minimum of 41 points in the Resto tree)
The problem with true hybrid builds (something like 30/31/10) is that they are very rarely effective, and when they are it’s because of an unintended talent being reachable, and Blizz quickly fixes it.
Well, to each his own but I don’t see how doing the same 11 bosses on normal is “something different”. For me I always tend to prefer progression, as long as progress is actually being made (i.e. the blocks aren’t gear-related but performance-related).
About half and half, she’s got a bit more points in balance. No tree form. She has, how to put this, less raw firepower for either job than someone who wasn’t a hybrid, but what makes her good and capable of doing both is her brain. She knows when to cast what better than most people.
No tree form. No Eclipse. No Starfall. No Wild Growth. Does she even have Moonkin Form?
Well, I normally don’t slag off people for their spec, and if a resto druid wants to heal me in a 5-man in caster form, no problem as long as I don’t die (which, really, can’t happen these days - I can solo a few of them on my DK).
However, I would never let a resto druid in my raid if they didn’t have Tree Form. No way, no how, no matter how good they are. Same with a boomkin without Eclipse. I’d be shocked if any raid leader is different (unless, of course, it’s her husband…). If that makes me a jerk, so be it.
ETA: Let me add that I think this spec could be a lot of fun for 5-mans, where you normally don’t need the healing. A toon that could do 2-3k and keep me alive would be a welcome addition to any heroic run.
Yeah, Blizzard really doesn’t want hybrid specs. Hybrid classes are fine, and the decision to remove Tree of Life as a constant form in Cata was to better allow Resto Druids to be more flexible. But talent-wise, they want you to specialize.
I’ve been DPSing a lot as a Resto Druid in 5-mans. Survival is so ridiculously easy that it’s no trouble to stay out of Tree Form and keep everyone up with Rejuvs while Wrathing the hell out of the enemies. I can typically do 1-1.5k DPS, which is weak in heroics, but since the other DPS are already doing their jobs it’s pure gravy. I don’t really need to be half and half for that.
Blizzard tunes their group content around 1 tank, 3 DPS, and 1 healer. There’s really not much room for half DPS/half healer except in overgeared teams, and nearly all heroic teams are overgeared these days, which is why it’s safe to play with experimental builds. If they kept the talent trees as they were into Cata, I suspect you’d have a lot of trouble maintaining the group.
Anyone cleared H: Ruby Sanctum yet? We gave 10 man a go last night, but couldn’t keep anyone with soul consumption alive in P2 long enough to get out of their own void zone. Short of waiting for cataclysm and bringing in a priest with Life Grip, any suggestions?
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOGMOMG!!!
We did our auction for the Shadowmourne chest items last night… AND I WON THE MOUNT! Got away with only paying 23k for it–I could have gone up to 34k, since my pocket-healer friend very generously loaned me 10k. So now I’m down to about a thousand gold, but it was totally, utterly worth it.
Squeeeeeeeee!
The one bitter note about the whole thing is that one of the other bidders was apparently intentionally driving the price up because he knew I wanted it, so it’s possible I could have ended up paying even less. It’s all going to the gbank anyway, but. Honestly, the more time I spend in this guild, the more I’m disliking some of the members.
Sorry, it just seemed like you were freaking out about a bunch of stuff that’s in its very early stages and therefore very liable to change–I just wanted to make sure that you knew that these trees are almost certainly in no way representative of what will end up on the live servers.
No, they just do that sometimes, to encourage people to roll characters on the less-populated servers. (Note that Cairne almost never goes above “Medium.”)
Grats on all the kills! And only a handful of deaths means you were probably doing a great job of following instructions and paying attention. 
Has your RL discussed this at all? Even hardcore raiders get sick of wiping on the same fight night after night–it’s a lot to ask from casuals. And it sounds like your team could probably still use a lot of upgrades off the earlier bosses–upgrades that will help your performance on LK.
I had that happen once! I IRL LOL’d, as the kids say.
It’s currently a DPS talent. Take it if you need more threat; spend the point on something that will give you more survivability if that’s your current need.
Well, there have been some fights where having a defensive cooldown is useful, even as DPS–Twin Valks, for example. But that doesn’t happen too often. Unholy is really designed to be the DK PvP tree, though, so you should expect to see more PvP-oriented talents there.
I have to put another vote in for, “I really hope she’s using this spec for five-mans or very, *very *casual raiding.” Otherwise, from your other post, it looks like she’s using her position as healer and her husband’s position as tank to pretty much blackmail the raid to take her along, even with sub-par performance. There is no call for someone who at any one time is half-healer and half-DPS. The raid needs someone in that slot who is 100% heals or 100% DPS, and there is no way she can perform up to the level the raid needs with a truly hybrid build. That means that the rest of the raid has to step up their own performance to accomodate her–i.e., carry her through.
Congrats on the mount, SFG!
Re: Cairne, I remember the day of 300+ queues to log into Cairne. It’s really wasted away. I’m glad they’re steering new players into it.