Back To Ulduar!

For fun and gear, a loose bunch of people decided to start running through Ulduar again. There's a plan to progress to Onyxia and ToC and then start flailing around in ICC. I think we're all alts or people new to this raiding malarky, and this is a fun way to take those characters for a spin.

So, drood gets to play with trains! (She even managed to avoid falling off this time).

Ulduar went pretty well, considering. We're rather stupidly overgeared from triumph badge gear of course, but there were equally plenty of people who'd never seen the fights or in some cases, raided at all. This made it fun, and I'd forgotten just how interesting Ulduar is to raid. We got to Yogg within one lockout and after bouncing off P2 for a bit decided progress had been sufficiently good. I'm looking forward to trying out Ony. My druid even offtanked her in a pug a week or two ago, which is a testament to just how easily she falls over, and she gave me a supershiny tanking ring.

My main still hasn't killed Yogg. What can I say, scrub shaman.

I've started PvPing a bit more on the tree spec. It's kinda fun, and I made a bit of a commitment by respeccing into more PvP talents. I think this is reasonable, though, as it allowed me to pick up Living Seed and nab a few other handy-in-PvE bits (now an 11/0/60 build). I'll miss the 3% haste, but I think the added versatility makes for a viable trade in the context of 10-man raids.

What else...

Baby disc priest got to go to Gnomeregan. Ugh. There were some awful DPS that kept pulling for the tank, pulling off the tank (who was quietly competent, but there's only so many tools in the paladin toolbox at level 28), standing in what little fire they could find and generally making everyone's life needlessly painful.

Hmm.

My primary healing spells at this level (PW:S, renew, flash heal) cost very roughly 100 mana each. Resurrect only costs 300, and I can drink before casting that.

Some new, draconian policies were put in place: you pull for the tank, you don't get heals at all. You get one bubble for self-inflicted hurt such as pulling off the tank or standing in bad; the next heal you get will be Resurrect. Randomly targeted or accidental, unavoidable damage (categorised thus by mine discerning and increasingly hateful eye) I heal through to the best of my ability as long as the tank is safe.

This made for a happy, contented healer and tank, and some deeply unhappy DPS who were apparently unable to comprehend why pulling the next group with a Blizzard whilst the tank is drinking might be silly. Eventually they dropped group, we found replacements and proceeded to finish the dungeon with a far nicer lot of damage dealers.

So, yes. The old adage 'It costs less to resurrect you than heal through your stupid' applies when levelling, too. More so, in fact, because I have less mana to waste making up for the mistakes of others.