Yes, I’m still here! Yes, I know it’s not Monday, but I’m behind! Between vacation, WoW and the Holidays I’m just running short on time to post as frequently as I am accustomed to doing :) The days that I work, I get home in time to raid and then have a ton of things to do after the raid (you know, like eat dinner, do my random heroic, get ready for tomorrow night’s raid, etc), and the days I don’t work…well, I’m doing a lot of playing! However, now that the rush is over, and I’m starting to fall back into a somewhat normal schedule, I suspect that my posting schedule will settle back into place as well.
Until then, let me give you a bit of (a brief) recap of what I’ve been up to lately!
Our 25 mans are set to start up in about 10 days, and I’m quite excited for them. In the interim we have been trucking through the new content with a 10 man group, that is constantly shifting with different members of our 25 man progression team. We have currently cleared through 8 of the 12 available encounters, and will hopefully add another one or two notches to our belt this week.
I am finding that the healing is extremely challenging, and every now and again, borderline frustrating. There are times that I just don’t feel that I have the tools to optimally do what the encounter is asking of me, and that is a bit stressful. To the point that I while I was hesitant to offer it before, I will say that I think Resto Druids need some tweaking in a PvE Raid environment. Now, I’m not saying that the sky is falling or that we are terrible healers, I just think that the way our heals are designed are not meshing well with some of the encounter mechanics…or with what the other healers can bring to a raid. I do think that resto druids, as a whole, need some re-evaluation to put us in a “good” spot.
Outside of that complaint, I am finding most of the new encounters to be enjoyable and interesting…even if Blizzard over-utilized the “get out of the bad” mechanic.
I finally got Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. And I have to say that it’s a fantastic trinket…as long as you remember to use the cooldown! I’ve set up a Power Aura to let me know when mine was off of Cooldown. However, after last night’s Chimearon work, I realized that I wasn’t using it on cooldown as I should, and so I added a sound to the aura.
I had originally thought that the mana return had a chance to proc, however, after some testing I realized that is not the case. Both the mana return and the damage done by the trinket is called “Detonate Mana”. From what I can tell, the mana is always a return of 4200 (which is an astounding 25,000 mana in a 6 minute fight!), but the damage done by the trinket far exceeds that. I had hits on a single target that ranged from 4369 to 8700, with very limited testing. And, on some AE things over the past few days, I’ve seen hits exceed 40,000 damage. Which makes me wonder how the trinket plays out for a DPS class, assuming of course that it is already quite good due to the static intellect attribute of the trinket.
In short, I’ve been very pleased with the trinket since I have acquired it. I would absolutely recommend grinding it out if you are on the fence about acquiring one.
As for the rest of Beru’s gear, I’ve basically finished out my “346” set, and my only upgrades will now come from raiding and valor points.
On Time Sinks
Archeology seems to be the mother of all time sinks. And now that I’m entrenched in it, I can’t seem to find a way out. So I pull out a movie, toss it in, and dig. I’m sure that right as I “finish” with it, Blizzard will unleash that 8th, as yet undiscoverable, race that we see in the interface, and then I’ll have to start all over again.
Of course, just about everything that I want is in Uldum and the digsites there are so rare. I really with that after you’ve “completed” a race tree and obtained all of the rare items from the tree, the other digsites would be favored to spawn.
On Twilight Jasmine
I hate it. It’s used for everything…and in very high quantity. It’s over farmed, and there are too few nodes in the zone since the nerf, and I’ve yet to find a consistently good “farming path” for it. Honestly, if you are going to require 12 herbs for a flask, it really should be a bit easier to obtain. This herb is the bane of my existence right now. I loathe having to farm for it and I loathe having to use it, because it means I will have to go and farm more. Oh…and while I am ranting about herbing:
On Phased Gathering Nodes
PLEASE FIX THIS! There is absolutely nothing more frustrating that trying to farm herbs than having half of your nodes phase out as you approach them. Sure it wasn’t the intent that nodes were phased, was it? I mean, they weren’t in any of the WotLK zones, so I can only assume that it’s a bug here. Right now, Twilight Jasmine (and herbing in Twilight Highlands) basically does nothing but piss me off.
On Deepsea Sagefish Pools
Speaking of things that are pissing me off….
Why are there no deepsea sagefish pools? Almost every caster is going to want 90 int or 90 spirit food, and yet we can’t fish them out of a pool? WTF! Not only do we get screwed trying to help our guild fish their fish feast up by having to cast outside of pools, we get MURGLESNORT (or whatever the heck it’s called). I get about 3 murglesnort to every 1 sagefish that I catch. AND THERE ISN’T EVEN A RECIPE FOR THAT STUPID FISH!
I can only hope that this was an oversight, and that soon, in one of these GC posts or patch notes that are coming up we will see “deepsea sagefish have decided to be more social, and can now be found swimming together in pools”.
On Non-WoW things
I saw True Grit over the weekend. It was amazing. Go see it!
I got a Xbox/Kinect for Christmas, and I’m loving it. I have just two games for it (Kinect Adventures and Dance Central), but I’ve had a lot of fun (and a good workout!) from both. If anyone else has any experiences with some of the other games out that they’d recommend, please let me know!
All in all
I’ve been enjoying the new content. I’m really looking forward to pushing forward with our 25 man team and seeing where we will go. I’m also having a good deal of fun working through the content in our 10 mans, and will only believe that our 25s will be smoother as a result of the experience.
How have you been spending your time? What Cataclysm things are really bothering you?