Lots of Alterac Valley

My wife and I had a baby on the 30th Nov. At the moment life is very good, although rather tiring and I spend a lot of time being quite vague.

Raiding is clearly a no-no at the moment, although my wife has hinted that I may be able to start again in a few weeks, at least in moderation. I the meantime, when I have been able to log on to Warcraft I've been working the battlegrounds in order to keep my healing gear reasonably up to date.

While I'm concentrating on battlegrounds I've respecced to Enhancement, trying to do as much damage as possible with my Torn-heart Axe of Battle. Resto is just hopeless as a battleground spec - you can heal just fine, but if you try and do anything by yourself (such as re-cap a tower) you're stuffed, and elemental - though a powerful damage spec - is too immobile to be as useful as it should be. Also my enhancement gear is fairly good - nice blues with a few epics - from picking up unwanted mail dps gear from instances and raids.

Horde in my battlegroup are starting to work out that we can only win if we defend at least a little, and although there are still some games that are just hopeless I've recently seen an OK win ratio. Last night I was in an Alterac Valley battle that lasted over an hour, with the Horde successfully defending all of our towers for nearly the whole match. Towards the end the Alliance summoned their druids, which I think most players had forgotten was even possible. Unfortunately this put us onto the back foot, and the Alliance managed to take the opportunity to win a game they'd looked certain to lose. Still, it was nice to see a proper battle underway.

I've also managed to tick off a few more goals from my list, finally maxing out my cooking skill while doing a daily quest, killing the gronn so that I can do the Ogri'la dailies, and getting my Tidefury Gauntlets from a slightly painful but ultimately successful SV run.

Ding! 40!

I levelled Adanadel, my NE hunter, to 40 at the weekend, and so hit the mount cash crisis. Although I could have twinked him using my shaman's money via the neutral auction house I felt I should cross this first hurdle without that. So I auctioned or vendored everything I could, left my level 38 and 40 skills training until later, and just about scrapped together 90g. It's difficult being really skint - a couple of times I've done things like restock on arrows and then find I can't afford a griffon ride - but eventually I'll get over that. The next problem will be that having now got an epic land mount for my shaman (in order to get the flying mount) I don't think I'll be able to put off getting my hunter his epic mount until 70.

Things are working out pretty well at the moment, so I might even be able to stick to just the two characters going forward... It's really handy being able to scout things out using Eyes of the Beast and my prowling moonstalker, and traps and Feign Death are as useful as you'd expect.

Goals Revisited - part 3

I've noticed that my healing gear is starting to slip behind that of our other regular raid healers, so I need to address this to avoid being a weak link. I want to raid to see new content, for the guild first kills and that magic moment when a group syncs together and you finally "get" a boss fight. It's great when this happens - fights like Hakkar can become almost like a dance. I'm not interested in farming content for gear, but at the same time I need to upgrade.

Thanks to Draezele's rather excellent analysis of all the resto gear in the game I can see that I actually need to upgrade my main hand even more than my bracers. So, for my last goals list, I need (in order) upgrades to -

Main hand, Head, Wrists, Chest, Feet, Neck, Back

- ideally without relying on drops. So I'll be PvPing for a enough honour to be able to buy Gladiator's Salvation and doing Kara and ZA with the guild for badges. If I get any decent drops from the raids that will shortcut the process, which would be nice.

Meanwhile my NE hunter hit level 38 last night, and I've found myself what seems like a nice guild for him.

Fix to water shield incoming

I see from WoW Insider that they're fixing water shield. That is good news and I hope it comes quickly. Having to recast the spell every 60 seconds got old really quickly - if you were doing something important like raid healing you tended to forget!

The question to be asked of course is whether anyone actually tests anything on the PTR...

Still the High King

My guild had our second attempt at knocking over High King High King Maulgar this weekend. A two hour wipe fest ensued, so he's still there...

Last time we got the pull down but didn't have a mage geared enough to tank Krosh Firehand, this time we had two mages with enough health but couldn't do the pull. We did learn some things, and killed Blindeye the Seer a couple of times, but generally weren't good or lucky enough.

Hopefully next time we'll have more than one hunter, which will help the pull a lot. In general we could have done with a better class balance, but until we get past the first stage of the fight that's not really the main issue. Our next attempt is in two weeks, we'll see how that goes.

On the alt front I put a level each on my druid and hunter.

My (balance) druid has a real problem with the lack of a spell interrupt, especially against healer mobs, and generally is a bit slow to kill things. I used to find feral (i.e. cat) levelling a bit monotonous, as they're like rogues without the useful bits (i.e. stuns). Perhaps it's worth giving that another go, now I'm a bit more comfortable with rogues, at least until level 43 (when I could have both Moonkin and maxed-out Dreamstate). On the other hand I quite like spending my time in caster form, so I might find Moonkin a step backwards at that point, and feral less fun now.

My hunter was as you'd expect - killed things easily, handled casters fine once every minute (thank you Intimidation), and ditto with adds (thanks to traps).

Right now I'm thinking I'll concentrate on just / mainly the hunter - I already have an end-game healing hybrid after all. I'd be happier knowing what WotLK will do in terms of character customisation though - I'd be totally happy with my hunter if I could give him the same colouring as my druid.

If I'd known then what I know now

I've mentioned before that I have an alt problem. I currently have 10 characters over level 10 in addition to Grulnak, my 70 orc shaman (70 troll priest, 60 undead warrior, 45 orc warlock, 35 NE hunter, 33 undead mage, 32 NE druid, 22 BE paladin, 22 orc rogue, 20 human mage and 11 orc warrior) and a bunch more that I've deleted (34 orc hunter, 28 orc rogue, 22 human rogue, 16 troll mage, 14 orc hunter).

In an ideal world (say, one where I could play WoW all day and still get paid) I'd have known the lessons this legion have taught me from day 1:

• Pick one (or a small number of) character(s) and stick with him/them.
• Undead may be human-like, but their stooped posture and shambling walk make them unappealing characters to have.
• Trolls may be the tallest, but they never stand up straight. Their sitting posture is quite cool though.
• Male trolls look silly in robes.
• The troll accent will never grow on me, despite the voodoo priest feel it gives.
• Tanking as a warrior can be fun / awesome / stressful / exhasperating.
• Grinding as fury rocks, grinding as protection sucks.
• Warlocks may be grinding gods, and very tough to kill, but my heart just isn't in it.
• Mages can destroy things in cool ways, but you spend a lot of time drinking.
• Male humans have a constipated run and odd faces.
• Female humans have a very vacant "idle" animation.
• Be very careful what face / skin / etc you chose - it will be with you forever.
• One day shamans will be perfectly viable main healers - don't spend time levelling a priest.
• "For the Alliance" is slightly patronising... "For the Horde!" is a rallying cry.
• Kill gnomes on sight. But they'll never really understand why you're doing it.

Having learned all this, I'd hence have the following chars:

• Orc shaman: I may be biased, since this is my original character, but my main is still the character I'm happiest with. Damage and healing are a great combination, and although you're a jack of all trades, master of none, there is a definite place for you. And orcs just have a great look.
• Night elf druid: The one thing I miss on my shaman is being able to buff people. I also miss being able to tank, although tanking in humanoid form (i.e. warrior or paladin) is more appealing. One side of me thinks I should stay loyal to one faction, another side says I miss half of the game that way.
• A rogue of some sort (dwarf? human? orc?): Stealth, pickpocketing and sap make this a great fun class, and stuns give you a huge amount of control over a fight. A difficult class to pick up, and very difficult to master, make it less than ideal as an alt though.
• Night elf hunter (or perhaps an orc): A much derided cliche, and you might find it hard to form or join a group, but the class has great tactical possibilities and soloing potential.
• Orc or dwarf warrior: For the ability to wear lots of armour and carry a big axe. Although my shaman fulfils this need to some extent.

Patch goodness

I've not had much time to play since the patch was released, but there's lots of goods stuff in there:

The addition of spell damage to healing gear is lovely. I've found that some of my healing gear is now as good or better than my elemental gear for damage. So not only do I get to free up some bag space, but I also keep the survivability of my resto gear while grinding.

Trainable two handed axes and maces. Purely for effect it's cool to be able to carry a big axe around.

Being able to track fishing nodes is also quite nice.