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.

Slowly It Grows

Whee! This is going to be a scatterbrained post, even more so than usual.

Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.

Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!

I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.

So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.

Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.

So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.

I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.

For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.