Kiryn's Rants

I has a gool. It follows me around and gnaws the limbs off of things for me. And unlike my previous goolz, it has a name and lasts until it dies or I run too far away from it. Then I have to make a new one with a new name. The names are always random, noun-verb. My first gool was named Toothsmasher.

I also have gone back to playing my hunter again, since my druid had enough stone keeper's shards and extra heroic badges to by a +10% experience shoulder and an heirloom bone bow to send to my alt. Bind on Account items are teh awesome. My hunter decided she didn't want to be Marks anymore, but is leaving most of her points there for now because of the yummy int-AP conversion. Probably will be going BM so that my new tanky crocolisk pet can threat well enough to keep up with my uber heirloom bow's damage.

So I seem to have settled on a talent spec I like. I took the basic idea behind the Dual-Wield tri-spec, and moved the points from Blood to go deeper into Unholy. I have just enough points in Frost to reach Howling Blast, which is my core DPS ability. But moving extra points into Unholy allows me to get a non-temporary pet, which is the main thing I really liked about Unholy from the beginning. (And as soon as I pick that up next level, I'll be able to squee about the neat random names it comes up with for my ghoul!)

Also, being Unholy allows me to pick up On a Pale Horse and Unholy Aura, which increase my movement speed the same way Crusader Aura and Pursuit of Justice once did on my paladin. It's interesting how I initially really liked the idea of being Unholy, then disliked it because it was popular, but then found myself skewing more and more in that direction eventually. Not enough to be full Unholy, but enough to have the majority of my points there.

So I got my death knight to 68 today so that she can start in Northrend. I wanted to make a decision about her second profession (the first being mining of course) since it was a placeholder of 104 skinning. I thought about it for a while and realized that I really didn't want skinning on my death knight.

It really interferes with her role as an unstoppable killing machine. It's a lot of fun to kill things in five seconds. But with skinning, "KILL KILL move on to next mob KILL KILL" becomes "KILL KILL! skin skin skin... move on to next mob KILL KILL! skin skin skin..." It's a real mood-killer.

And so she's in the process of leveling engineering, partly so that I can harvest those pretty-looking crystal clouds, and partly so I can have goggles and a helicopter, and partly so that I can have neat little toys to play with. I've been hearing a lot about this way to make any cape into a parachute cloak, binoculars you can strap to your belt, and rocket boosters for your boots.

I've been putting a lot of thought lately into my death knight's backstory. As much as I don't RP, I've always been a fan of RPGs, and I like my characters to have, well, character. Since the beginning, I've always seen my death knight as being my paladin corrupted and reborn. A righteous force of fury and destruction, turned to the dark side and trying to right her past wrongs and return to what she once was.

But as I may or may not have mentioned in the past, I saw Kareja as a kind of older sister to Kalya, despite Kalya being created first and therefore "older" than Kareja. Kalya represented me, Kareja represented my own sister. Kalya looked up to Kareja, was always a force of holiness and light, just like her sister. I would say that Kalya achieved more, but in the end both were similarly-geared, both had been similarly successful in the fight against the forces of the burning legion.

I'm still not sure where Kazzarae comes in. She's always felt like a half-sister or a stepsister or something, not quite so connected to the other two, always doing her own thing. And don't get me started on Kassari. She'll have a backstory someday, but I need to figure out what her deal is first.

So more or less, the way my story goes, Kareja went missing around the time the scourge invasion happened. When the Alliance forces invaded Northrend, Kalya went with them to help because that's what her sister would have done. She eventually gave up hope on finding her sister, lost her will to fight for the forces of light that had forsaken her. Nowadays, she's just a simple jeweler/alchemist making a day's wages in the mage city of Dalaran. Her mourning for her sister will explain her inevitable respec into shadow.

On the other side, Kareja, who is now known as Kavalkyr after the Val'kyr battle maidens of the Lich King, has fought free of his grasp. The only thing in her mind now is finding her sister, so she immediately heads off to Shattrath (my best personal explanation for why the hell my death knight is in Outland when it doesn't make any lore sense after the DK starting quests) only to find a ghost town. Nobody there knows what has happened to her sister. She spends weeks searching Outland, only to come to the realization that her sister must have been lost during the Scourge invasion like so many others. She heads off to Northrend to get revenge against the Lich King for her sister's death.

I don't know if I'll ever have a reunion between the two characters, with Kalya's reaction to her sister no longer being a force of holy righteousness, or Kavalkyr discovering that her sister is alive and well in Dalaran. I'll just have to see how I feel about it later.

Someone on WoW_Ladies posts:

Recently, I have switched back to my resto druid as my main, and I have come to a couple of rather disturbing conclusions:

1. Druid healing sucks. I don't know if this is just me, but I feel like I'm casting the sames spells at 80 that I was at 70- and by 'the same spells', I mean the only thing that's changed has been their mana cost. The heal isn't as effective as it used to be, especially Lifebloom. Now, I'm not asking to be a chart topping healer, but people should not be almost 20% higher than me, period. We're not even competative anymore. I mean, in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter what the charts say, but its generally a good indication that something needs work. I heal my treebutt off, and I cannot even keep up with priests, pallies, and shaman. My HoTs used to put me somewhere around 5% above or below other healing classes... now I feel like I'm useless.

2. Gear itemization SUCKS right now. Haste? CRIT? Are you kidding me? The only way I can see putting haste and crit on druid healing gear is to make it easier for dual- speccing. Seriously, haste and crit would be nice on a boomkin, but they are useless on a tree, epsecially if you're HoT specced. I mean, is Blizzard seriously planning ahead for dual- speccing with our gear? It seems that way.

Ok, QQ over. Thoughts?

EDIT: apparently, I did not make this clear: I am a HoT specced Druid, which means I rely on HoTs to do the majority of my healing, not direct heals. Thanks!

Later on in the comments she complains that she's running OOM all the time too, "thank you, Blizz, for nerfing mana regen, btw."

My reaction to this is... HUH? This post is going to come off as being rather spiteful towards BC resto druids in general, but that's just because this girl set off my stupidity-anger. I'm posting it here so that I don't post anything spiteful in her direction specifically.

What exactly do you mean when you call yourself a "HoT specced Druid"? My druid has literally put talent points in EVERY talent in the tree that helps HoTs, and has far more than enough left over to help things like Tranquility and Regrowth. Are you trying to say that you have a spec similar to mine but you refuse to use it to its full potential? Well then DUH of course you're not healing worth a damn.

I'm often on or near the top of the healing meters, with more mana regen than I know what to do with, to the point where I'm planning on moving some regen off of my gear in favor of more haste and crit. I don't even know why I carry mana potions if I never have to use them.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized something important. The main reason why I'm so effective at being a druid right now is because I learned how to heal on a priest.

When I was playing on my priest, I was used to having a TON of options and needing to know which spell to use in what situation. I'd be keeping Renew up, tossing out Prayer of Mending whenever the cooldown is up, using Power-Word Shield on people if they need it, using Prayer of Healing or Circle of Healing to do group heals, maybe even the occasional Binding Heal if I got injured, while cast-canceling Greater Heals in the meantime or hitting Flash Heal in emergencies.

The average resto druid in BC, on the other hand, was used to being amazingly good by doing nothing but keeping stacks of Lifebloom on people. Everything else was so inefficient that it wasn't worth using, and there were no glyphs for Swiftmend or Regrowth.

Now, druids have changed. Lifebloom has been nerfed to hell, costing almost as much as Rejuv but needing to be stacked three times. We've been given an AoE heal that's SO good, they're giving it a cooldown in the next patch. Talents and glyphs to make using Regrowth and Swiftmend extremely viable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the Swiftmend glyph is the single best improvement to the resto druid spec in WotLK. I have an instant-cast 7000+ heal on a 15-second cooldown? With its only requirement being that you need to have a HoT on the target first, I can dish out close to 8k healing in less than 1.5 seconds on a pretty regular basis. The Rejuv-Swiftmend combo saved a good number of lives during the Kel'thuzad fight when people got hit and only had a few seconds to live. I would have KILLED for that kind of ability on my priest.

As an ex-priest-now-druid, I'm busily keeping up my Lifeblooms on the tank the same way I was used to keeping up Renew. I hit Rejuv the same way I used to hit Prayer of Mending. I hit Swiftmend the same way I used to hit Power-Word Shield. I use Regrowth the same way I used to use Flash Heal. I use Wild Growth the same way I used to use Circle of Healing. But they're all BETTER. Lifebloom heals for more than Renew. Regrowth is actually mana-efficient. Rejuv heals for a TON. I've already sung the praises of Swiftmend. Seriously, it's the best healing spell EVER.

Though I sometimes find myself not using certain things that I didn't have as a priest, for instance I keep cursing myself for forgetting to use Tranquility in situations where it would probably save the raid. I'm just not used to having this kind of ultimate power. I'm very proud of myself that I remembered to use it during our 25-man Sartharion today.

Whereas an ex-BC-druid like this girl would be spamming lifeblooms and complaining that they're not working as well as they used to, QQ Blizzard nerfed my class waaah.

Being a resto druid in BC made resto druids lazy. I'm sure resto shamans are having a similar turnover, where Chain Heal is no longer THE answer to every situation. I used to wonder to myself why I ever played a holy priest now that I've tried druid and found it better, but now I don't regret it. Being a priest for so long made me the druid I am today, by teaching me a versatile healing style, honing my reflexes to be able to use the best spells in the best situations, and react as quickly as possible.

If I'd been a druid in BC, I probably would have hated it.

So yesterday, we discovered Google is MAGIC. We had switched over to using Gmail's voice chat when Long told us about it, since Skype had been giving us problems with not detecting the other person online. ("I'm calling you, why aren't you online?" "I've been online! I've been trying to call YOU!" "So why does it keep telling me you're offline?" "Ugh, I'm just going to restart Skype and try again....")

We were having some trouble with lag, not just in-game but on websites as well. Khoa says to me over our headsets "I'm going to reset the router now, okay?" and a minute or two later, I get disconnected from WoW like I was expecting. Khoa and I had been chatting away about something or other, when suddenly both of us stopped and said "wait... how are we still talking to each other?" I looked at my Gmail page and it said I was not connected to Chat at all. My internet connection was NOT ACTIVE. With the router in the process of restarting, there isn't any way that our two computers were connected whatsoever.

I still don't know how it managed to keep us connected despite our lack of internet connection, and when I don't understand, the best explanation is Google is made of wonder and magic. I'd love an explanation from someone who knows more about internets.

So after that Naxx run the other day, I started thinking. Our intention this expansion was to raid everything in the game without being in a raiding guild, but I never expected it would be this EASY. It doesn't seem to take any longer to put together a 10-man Sartharion or Archavon run than it does to find a group for a heroic. And most of the time, these groups are immensely successful, killing the boss on the first try. We even pugged a 25-man Archavon with no wipes twice already. And you already know about our success in Naxx grouped with people we had never even met before. We haven't tried the more difficult Sartharion modes, but I'd imagine we can move on to that once we start finding more people who aren't mouth breathers.

(On the subject of mouth breathers, there was this Death Knight in our timed run of Culling of Stratholme today that made my brain hurt. Bitch be trippin balls! He seemed to go down just deep enough in all three trees to pick up worthless talents while seemingly intentionally avoiding the ones that are actually good. For example, he went down just far enough in Frost to pick up the dual wielding talent and runic power mastery, when he doesn't even dual wield and he skipped the talent that increases frost damage AND gives himself 20% haste in order to grab the talent to buff Obliterate when if he'd put just THREE more points in Unholy, he wouldn't be using Obliterate in the first place! UGH)

But it seems to me that though a lot of people complain about the combined loot of healers and dps casters, it really helps everyone out a lot. Healers need crit and haste just as much as the DPS do, and DPS generally want spirit as much as the healers do. The only items that specifically go to one over the other are the +hit items.

In the old system, you could be raiding Karazhan for 6 months before you FINALLY saw that one +healing mace from Prince that had spirit on it. When it did finally drop, the competition for it was crazy, because none of the healers wanted to spend the next six months waiting for it to drop again. There would be pretty sore feelings about losing it. I know I saw it drop one of the first ever times I killed Prince, lost it because I was new and it was literally the only piece of loot the other priest still needed from that whole place, and never saw it again until one time I pugged Kara on my paladin months later and had no use for a +spirit healing mace.

But in the new system, you don't need a +healing mace with spirit, and then a separate +healing mace somewhere else in the instance with mp5 instead, and then a +healing and spirit staff yet elsewhere. You need a +spellpower mace with crit and haste on it, maybe some MP5. Now instead of being an item that only holy priests and resto druids want, it's an item that all priests, all caster druids, all caster shamans and holy paladins want. Fewer pieces of loot overall means a very high chance for it to drop.

It's much less stressful losing a roll for a drop when you know the boss only drops 3 different things and you'll most likely see it again next week. It really is a good answer to have a LOT of relatively quick boss fights, each boss having only 3-4 possible pieces of loot. The competition is high because a lot of people can use those pieces, but it's much more relaxed because you know you'll see it again soon. I find that complicated loot systems will likely become a thing of the past, with long-term raiders not worrying very much about losing a roll to a newcomer as much.

Oh, and also it points out something better about being a druid. As a druid, my only competition for leather spellpower/spirit pieces are other druids. Clothies can't use them, and shamans don't want spirit. I don't feel bad about taking their spellpower cloth though ^_^ Prot paladins are in a similar situation, in that any plate items with +block value go to them by default since I haven't seen many prot warriors lately and death knights can't block.

Class balance in 10-man raids has been interesting. Hunters, shamans and warlocks have been almost nonexistent. Generally there will be exactly one frostfire mage, one fury warrior, and one shadow priest. I've had a few runs with two rogues, but just as many with none at all. Almost all groups have 2-3 paladins, druids and death knights of various specs.

Also, I am seriously contemplating moving a lot more of my gear AWAY from spirit and mp5 and more towards output stats like haste and crit. There were many places in Naxx where I was practically wasting my mana on PURPOSE just so I'd have things to spend it on, putting Wild Growth on people even if they were only missing a few hundred HP or stacking hots on people who weren't even hurt at all, in the off-chance they MIGHT take damage soon. I was regenning so much that I'd be sitting at full mana the whole fight if all I was doing was healing the people who were actually hurt.

Not that my healing output is lacking, but I obviously have FAR too much mana regen if I don't even need to innervate myself during 90% of the boss fights. I'm seriously thinking about giving my innervates to the mages and shadowpriests so they can keep up full damage without worrying about running oom, since I'm not really using it anyway.

So, Naxxramas. It was once, long ago, the highest-tier raid instance, back when my hunter was attempting to raid Molten Core. I had a friend at work at Namco (my first year there) who played a priest in one of the world's top raiding guilds. He would tell me stories of this place. Of staying up until three in the morning raiding every night to wake up at 8 in the morning to go back to work.

And tonight, I got to go inside and experience it for myself. In Wrath of the Lich King, it was retuned to be the entry-level raid instance in Northrend. Yesterday, a death knight we ran Heroic Drak'theron Keep with asked us to come with him to Naxx today. We said it sounded like fun.

Today, at 4 PM, we went inside. I don't have a lot to say about the various bosses, except that they have many mechanics that I am familiar with from raiding in BC. For example, Thaddius is a lot like the first boss in Mechanar. He puts charges on people, if you stand too close to people with the opposite charge, you pretty much die. But if you stand near people of your own charge, you do extra damage.

I think my favorite fight as far as interesting mechanics is Grobbulus. It involves a lot of slowly-expanding circles of disease on the ground, and you have some choice in where these circles are located. The fun part is covering the entire floor with circles in a pattern that still leaves everyone with somewhere to stand.

But then, we finished all four wings. By that time, I'd gotten a necklace from a boss in the first wing, and also my tier 7 pants from Gluth. We finished the four wings... and people said "hey, want to try Sapphiron?"

That little thing in the middle of the room is his skull. When you run into the room, all these bones start swirling around and come together to form this massive skeletal dragon. It's one of the most amazing moments I've seen next to the bridge lifting up in Serpentshrine Cavern. I remember watching videos of this opening part.

Now, remember that guy I told you about who told me stories of Naxx? He would tell me about Sapphiron, the giant frostwyrm. Of the hours and hours of wipes to that boss, that nobody could figure out how to defeat him. How basically at some point during the fight, the boss just flies up into the air and hits the whole room with a nova that insta-kills everyone inside. How they've been searching for places to stand, buffs to cast, how they literally can't get enough frost resistance to survive it. How no matter what they did, everyone drops dead.

I think I stopped working there before he ever found out how to defeat that boss. So Sapphiron had some kind of epic, legendary quality to it. Even the best player I knew was stopped cold. And now... I have killed Sapphiron. I know he's been retuned for entry-level raiders, but I still feel extremely epic.

Before we joined, people told us this group has never killed Sapphiron before. Before we fought him, the raid said we didn't have any frost resist gear. But "I've heard it can be done without frost resist gear if you've got really awesome healers." Did I mention I feel like I'm the best damn healer on the server right now? It only took us three tries to get Sapphiron down.

And then we moved on to Kel'Thuzad, the final boss.

I swear, half of our wipes to him were because our tank was standing somewhere bad and didn't see it in time. It had a lot of "don't stand near other people" combined with the "zomgheal frozen people asap" of Rage Winterchill in Hyjal (that I have to admit, I was never really any good at, but then, I was a priest back then). I swear we wiped about 7 or 8 times, but the time before we killed him, he was down to 3% and we just HAD to try again.

I really feel right now that nothing is out of my grasp. I'm totally the best healer evar. Two weeks at 80 and I'm mostly decked out in epics with 3/5 tier 7 already. I feel like it was singlehandedly my amazing healing skills that allowed us to clear the whole instance in one night.

And I'm loving my druid even more now that my lack of mana concerns has been validated in a raiding environment. I rarely even had to innervate myself when I was there. I was keeping half of the raid alive most of the time, spamming spells on people with little regard to my mana. I feel like my druid is much more well-rounded in the healing department than my priest was, since I've got both very strong over-time heals AND very good emergency instant heals as well. I can do anything!