Out and In

I know I haven't posted in a bit, but work has been insane. I would type up a post, get about half through it before something or someone needing railroad repair information or reassignment contract information from me side tracked me. Dammit! Can't they see I'm trying to blog here at work???

So let me catch you up on Bacon's Take of Cataclysm.

Last Tuesday Cataclysm was released, but you already knew that. I had to work that day (I'm not burning a valuable vacation day on a Tuesday no matter what the excuse is - well ok maybe something medical, but that's it). So I got home that night, logged in and found a queue of 2400+ staring back at me. To let you know how long that is, I was able to eat, bottle a batch of beer, brew another batch and get it into the fermenting bucket by the time my position was at 150. And that still means I had another 20 minutes to wait. :)

That first night consisted of 2 nice runs in Blackrock Caverns and one in Thron of Tides. I healed all three of them and I did find it challenging. I had read blogs and reviews saying that I should be ok and I was, but it wasn't a cake walk. I'm thinking it had more to do with the fact my gear is a mixture of 251/264 items with a couple of 277 pieces. The blog/review writers are running with mostly 277 gear from their 25 man ICC runs. But that's not the main jist of it, what really curdled my milk was the first run of Blackrock Caverns.
I queued up in the Dungeon Finder with our GM (who is our Main Tank) and our leet killing machine Mage. We picked up a level 81 Death Knight and a level 83 Ret Pally. Now, me and my guildmates had never been in this place and we took our normal, "Kick ass and take names later" approach like we always do. Sometimes that backfires and sometimes it only goes so far. For this run it went only as far as the first boss where I got a little too close and pounded by the boss. We wiped and as we're running back (this always happens as someone is running back from a wipe), the Ret Pally asks if we have done this fight before. Uh let me see, the expansion has been out maybe 16 hours and I've been on for maybe 30 minutes of it. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a first time for me and others. So I say so and the pally goes off with his IPhone text Chat, "Dood, say so. No need 2 wipe cuz u dont know fight". "Ur gerd and I wuz healing 2 help u." Hmmm... ok. The expansion isn't yet a day old and we already have experts. Thanks. And if he was healing, it was because I was dead. It didn't matter after this, because the pally left when we decided that we would take no shortcuts and kill ALL the trash there was. I mean hell, we're trying to level at the same time. Oh well, there's one in every bunch, right?

I finished the night doing a couple of quests in Vashj'ir. I really like the whole underwater environment and the storylines are well done.

My next night was Thursday since I have bowling on Wednesdays. I did some more questing in Vashj'ir and managed to push halfway past 81, but nothing else worth while mentioning here. I did noticed that the queues were still bad on KT as are the quest rewards. I'm thinking/hoping the quest rewards will get better in the next zone.

Friday and Saturday I had planned to spend some good time on questing and leveling. I saw that our GM and leading mage had hit 85 in between the last time I had been on and tonight. From some blogs I read, it's possible to hit level 85 in 16-20 hours or a few days. Unfortunately that's not me. I quest like an old woman drives, slow and methodically (or clueless). The whole quest line in Vashj'ir is somewhat remarkable especially when I started getting into the storyline with the Naga. I really don't want to go into any spoilers here, but I enjoyed the background. I never knew why these guys wanted to kick my ass, but now I know.

Saturday was a bad day for gaming and I was unable to get anything going with my she bacon bear till Sunday afternoon. But once I was on, I was locked on. I leveled to 82 and headed out to Deepholm. I'll come back to Vashj'ir and finish the zone, but as for now I want more feral lootz. And once I got to Deepholm, I realized that I need the lootz. Damn mobs just won't die and it feels like I'm tickling these guys to death. My 5200 gearscore wasn't going to cut it with some of these guys. I think I'm going to have to stop leveling in my tank spec and drop the resto spec for know. At least till I get to level 85.

Now Deepholm is just one horrible and ugly place. It reminds me of Netherstorm with troggs and exploding rock columns. While the quests rewards are better for me and what I'm going to need in Uldum, I can't wait to finish out this place. I can't believe Blizzard thought this place looked good.

Melting Faces and Stealing Souls

I haven't posted alot regarding my druid. I've really only played that character on nights that the guild's been attempting the Lich Kin. We were really close last week getting him below 38%. Apparently you only have to get him to 10% and then it's over. I didn't make the raid Sunday night because Trick or Treating with the boy took precendence over my other extracurricular activities.

So on my other nights throughout the week I've been toying around with my warlock. I've kept this character around because he's been the polar opposite of my druid. Where I'm counting down HoTs with her and when to refresh them, Uthben (the lock) counts down his DoTs and when to fresh them. I've always enjoyed the Affliction side of warlocks and the thought that someone could still die even after they buried me gave me a sense of satisfaction. "Sure you got me, but just wait..." Hehe. I love it.

The class has been so fun that I've been wondering what class I want to take with me as a main character into the expansion. Should I stay with the tried and true druid, or do I switch gears and focus on the lock?
The druid has been a HUGE part of my gaming identity since I've been playing WOW. I'm really attached to the character. But as I'm really good at healing and somewhat at tanking, I've been wanting something different. I know I would like tanking, but at this point and time in the game the calls for fairly geared off tanks are few. The expansion is so close that most of the trade calls are for tanks at a gearscore of 5.6K+ is all that's sought.

The lock isn't much better on gear and my skill on playing him is marginal at best. Ok, maybe I'm selling myself short, but I'm not near the player that I've seen or read about (namely Fulguralis at http://killingemslowly.blogspot.com/). So I'll continue this holding pattern and see what happens.

4.0.1 AMPed

Back in the Spring of this year I started building a feral tanking set for my druid and made it her secondary spec. Though as things have gone, I haven't had much use for it since the healing ranks in our guild are pretty thin. However, that's going to prevent me from staying with feral for a secondary spec now that Patch 4.0.1 was released.
 http://www.wowhead.com/item=50001 or known among other feral druids, the Sack of Awesome).
Tonight I'll learn/set up a feral talent build as my secondary spec. I've done some considerable reading from the The Big Bear Butt (well in reading I mean his thoughts on the new feral builds, even though I love the personal stories) and Kalon over at ThinkTank. It seems that if there was one of the four druid styles that got AMPed, it was the feral tanking tree.

Feral tanks already held their own in tanking before this patch and I felt pretty secure tanking as a druid (though I lack some faith in my abilities to tank, but that's not the class's fault). Anyway, after reading the 2 bloggers above, it appears that feral tanks didn't lose much (if anything at all) in terms of survivability. But they did pick up some nice threat generation tools/talents that should inflict more damage than before (see Vengeance) as well as mitigating damage (see Savage Defense). Getting and keeping threat has always been my problem. I felt I had to get a leg up in pulls and continually tag every mob otherwise someone in the party was going to die. And dead party/raid members get upset pretty quick when the tank fails. But really the big problem was the damage being thrown around by DPS since tier gear is easy to obtain with emblems (now Justice Points).

So threat is great, but what about survivability? The good news here is that ferals now have a "shield wall" sorta. Survival Instincts reduces damage taken by 60% and lasts for 12 seconds. Not too shabby for a 5 minute cooldown. Frenzied Regeneration now increases health by 30% (or up to 30% if you're below that) and if you glyph for it, it won't eat up your rage.

As for gear, Kalon states that the additional armor on leather is gone. So the stats to look for on armor for a feral is to look mainly for those that will help with mitigation (namely stamina, agility, dodge, and mastery). This means that we'll still have a dilemma with rogues when some hot leather item drops like Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder, http://www.wowhead.com/item=50001 (or known among other feral druids, the Sack of Awesome).

Not Quite

We all knew the patch from last week had contained some extreme changes to nearly all the classes, but I wasn't to sure how it was going to impact my healing. For the moment I am reserving judgement on the changes because one night of raid healing doesn't quite equate to a fair trial.

I had logged on and started going through my list of things I needed to do when I get a whisper from our raid leader asking, "You healing tonight?"

I replied, "Sure thing, I just need to spec, pick up some glyphs, maybe a gem or 2, and set up my keybindings." Yeah I know I should have had at least the glyphs and gems bought by this time.

Our raid leader replies, "Well you got 15 minutes."

OH CRAP!!! It was 15 minutes before our raid time. So I go through my talents, select the resto summary and decide on a build like this (2/3/31)  http://wowtal.com/#k=RqSJ9KSs.a6d.druid. I had figured I wanted to go for the stronger HoTs and maximum manan since we never know on our raid nights what our 3rd healer might be. We've been fielding just me and our discipline priest lately and he does a great job on tank healing. Therefore, I try to field the raid heals and hope whoever we pickup can swing between tank and raid healing.

I check in and our raid still isn't full, so I play around with regemming some gear for haste and try to get that dismal 710 (21.65%) haste rating up some. After changing gems and finding the reforging guy in Stormwind, I ended up with a haste rating of 896 (27.5%). Eh... it'll have to do for now. The whole goal is to hit that soft cap of 1016 (37.5%) and add in a 6th tick on a single Rejuvenation cast.

I start in setting my keybindings when I get an invite to the raid. I wasn't quite worried since we were still waiting on our tank to log on. Fortunately I am a creature of habit and the keybindings went pretty fast and I made my way to Ice Crown.

Now, I'm heading into ICC with no addons (yep not even DBM) and clueless on how my rotation is going to work with the restrictions on Lifebloom and the ever so long casting Nourish. I used those 2 spells so fluidily before these changes that I knew there were going to be some tough habits to break. It was just something I'm going to have to watch. This was definitely going to be an entertaining night in ICC since we were starting with an old id and on Sindy.

Our raid finally gets going an hour late with 3 PuGs, a mage, a hunter, and a discipline priest. Our regular priest is missing and probably had something to do at the school. I did come to find out that during my fishing excursion, the guild had recruited a resto shaman. Yea for chain heal and herosim (BTW, what happened to heroic presence?).

The Sindy fight goes along pretty well considering that the hunter and mage hadn't seen this fight. I found using my Tree of Life form for her last phase was a good place for it since things tend to go south of hell at that point. Tree of Life is extremely useful and powerful on phases like that, but it's a really bug mana drain.
We head up to the Lich King throne and I was surprised that we were attempting him with the 4 new people. But what the hell! I'm game.

We ended up attempting him 6 times and our best was the 3rd when we pushed him below 30%. Our biggest problems were in DPSing the orbs and slowing the Valkyries. Other than that, our raid was on.
As for the resto evaluation, I really like Efflorescence, Rejuvenation is a monster, and the faster and crittable Regrowth are nice. I am bummed with the 30 minute cool down on Rebirth and the restricted use of Lifebloom. I can tell it's going to take a few raids to square everything out. So everything looks good, but we're not quite there.

The Slow Heal

A week ago patch 4.0.1 was released and yet here Bacon sits unspecced. What are you talking about Bacon? Why are you still there untouched?

Ah... those are good questions there. And I have some very good, yet poor reasons . Let's begin so I can get it over with.

The initial problem/delay was that the patch was extremely long in updating at the house and the wife felt the need to go to her yoga class. So this left me at home with nothing to, but pack for my trip (I'll get to that later) while the PC was updating. Therefore, I used the time to pack (as I mentioned) and spend some quality time with the boy. Sure I should have used a bit of that time to research my class changes and what I'd need come the time I can get into the game. But DAMN, I was having fun rounding up shoes with Luke on Goofey's roundup at playhousedisney.com.

The second delay came in the form in my bowling night on Wednesday nights. I'm at the bowling alley from 6 pm till 9ish pm every Wednesday. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity that night for any remote possibility to do anything with my druid.

The final and longest hiatus from the game came in the form of my trip to Baldwin, MI (see I told you I'd get to it later). Every later September to mid October I plan a trip to Michigan for the fall King Salmon run. This year it came a little later, but the salmon only run when the weather has worked them out of the lake into the rivers. And this year the weather hasn't been cooperating thus causing me to push my trip back till almost the last minute. I left on Thursday morning and didn't return to the comfortable Bacon domicile till Monday night. I suppose I could have logged in last night, but my bacon butt was dragging and I just knew that had I logged in, I would have made some bad choices regarding my spec, glyphs, gear, and keybindings.

Now that I'm done crying about all this, I'm ready to get down to work. I mean, I have to and there's a core group of friends in the guild that need me (at least I hope they still need me) to heal them throughout the remaining raid encounters that we have. I've had sometime to finish out reviewing the changes and figured out the biggest decision I have to make is to whether or not I want really, really strong and quick HoTs without much in the ways of Nourish, or do I wander in something that has fairly strong HoTs with a quicker (but still slower) Nourish. So there you have it. Tune in tomorrow to see what happened.

Problems with Progression and PuGs

Last night we had a run of ICC's plague and blood wings It went very well considering we had one humbling wipe on on trash and another on the Blood Queen.

For the most part, me and our Disc/Holy priest filled out the healing roster very well and we make for a good compliment of healing partners. Our DPS was rock solid as were our tanks, but we did have to pick up 3 DPS slots and ran the night pretty melee heavy with only 2 ranged DPS.

I've been noticing that since we've transferred servers that PuGs are somewhat more selective and hesitant to go on progression runs. Some players running alts appear to only want a full run and not mess with progression attempts (be it heroic or boss progression). Even players running on their main characters could care less about running heroic or boss progression attempts at this point in time.

I suppose the ALT players go hoping for some gear drops, pick up some emblems, and get a few achievements. I can see that. On most larger servers people ask for gearscores and achievements on raids which you can't get with an alt character unless you PuG yourself into a raid. So it's a catch-22 at that point.
However, I've seen people playing what they claim to be their mains join our raid only to back out once they realize out what we're running. Our guild is good about letting people know that in trade chat what we're looking for and for what. We don't spring surprises on anyone. The thing is, we advertise some heroic progressions, but we're also not going to spend 2 hours on one heroic boss attempt.

Fortunately, we did raid with another player who did very well. An older player who has a couple of kids and prefers to play after they go to bed. Which is alot of what our guild is. Older players whose real life obligations vastly surpass that of the game. And you can't find those "fits" for your guild unless you pug players. And at this point, we need to pug about 3 more people.

On a personal note, I did manage to pick up another piece for tanking (Precious's Putrid Collar, http://www.wowhead.com/item=50852).

The Vicarious Druid

Vicarious? My that's such a big word for you Bacon. Yeah, yeah I know. But as I was listening to the song Vicarious by Tool and I was wondering, "what in the hell does that word exactly mean?" I mean I'm not surrounded by alot of people who use it. Most of the people I deal with on a daily basis develop software and ignore all other biological forms near them. I do hear other terms (or homonyms for you grammar geeks) similar in sound used like precarious from the rare conversation with the administrative assistant, but I've never really heard common usage for vicarious. So off to Google I go.

Vicarious is an adjective that describes "taking the place of another person or thing; acting or serving as a substitute."

Oh wow! That sounds just like a druid in the game. Granted most of my time playing a druid has been as a healer, but there are a few times this last year I have taken on the role of tank and ranged DPS. It's been a fun time and there are times like last night when our guild leader asked me before the raid if I was interested in tanking.

Hell ya I'm interested, but I had a few things working against me (unfortunately our DK tank had his ISP working against him). To begin with I had just got back home from a trip up to Green Bay, Wisconsin where me and the family had a great time. Unfortunately, I was beat. I drove all day Monday to get home at 1:30 am Tuesday morning. Of course things don't stop the minute you pull into the garage. No siree, you still have to unload the car and clean out the trash. So it was around 2 am that I finally went to bed. Problems with my house is that the kid wakes up at 6 am and is ready to get everyone going.

Secondly, I caught the beginnings of what feels like a head cold which ended up being a crushing headache and sinus pain.

So with me being tired and not feeling too hot, I declined on tanking. I don't want the raid to suffer through some mistake that I made due to not being a 100%. Which really sucks, because I want this and here was the prime opportunity. Oh well, there'll be future opportunities.

We attempted heroic Marrowgar a few times and Lady Deathwhisper twice. We pushed on through heroic Gunship and that was really nothing special. By this time, I was feeling real crappy and I prayed that we could push on through Saurfang with no heroic attempts. Unfortunately that wasn't case and he proceeded to show us why heroic mode is hard. By then it was 11am and this Vicarious Druid had to call it a night. I just hope they found another healer to continue on.