Boomba the Noble

Dear Blizzard,

Thank you SO much for the Noblegarden event.  I never have any luck with the RNG (except for the new daily fishing quests, yay!) and this event made it possible for me to grind the achievements in my own time.  Also, thank you for not including Dressed for the Occassion as a requirement for completing the event.  I hated the other holidays…having to log in every hour to maybe get the item that I need is extremely frustrating for a casual player like me.

I’m only bothering with the holiday achievements for the Violet Proto-drake.  I’m not really hardcore enough to have access to the Red, Black, Plagued or the new Proto-drakes that are for the Ulduar achievements.  I keep buying the Oracle eggs, so maybe I will get a Green Proto-drake one day, but the Random Number Generator is a cruel mistress and I know that if I keep grinding the holiday achievements out I have a good shot at the Violet Proto-drake.  I love the way the Proto-drakes look and I can’t wait to have one of my own.

I know that you probably don’t want to make it super easy to get the drake, but let’s face it – this is a game after all.   I think we all agree that real  life is a pretty serious grind, we play to have fun and succeed.

So thank you again for making Noblegarden as easy as it is.  It definitely made me happy.

A casual player and big fan,
Alliance Girl 😉

PS – The Spring Circlet (bunny ears) are my FAVORITE new item.  I love them and now have them on all of my characters.  Also, big fan of Tome of Polymorph: Rabbit.  Rabbiting the Horde is made of WIN.

Lucky Number 11!

Late last night after Ulduar, one of my guildies asked if I wanted to go for a Timed CoT.  I wasn’t feeling it 100%, but decided to go for it anyway.  It was my 11th successful run and three guildies in the group passed on the drake so I could finally have him.  Squee!!   😀

Ulduar: Part I

This week will be our second round of attempts in Big Bad Ulduar 10.  Last week, we were able to take out the Flame Leviathan, but got stuck on the other bosses.

My biggest critic and harshest competitor is myself and I’m wondering whether or not I’m ready for Ulduar at all.  My main spec is Discipline which I really love, but information on stat balancing and baselines is very hard to find online…and when you do find it, the very next person will completely contradict it – “Stack crit to the heavens!  That’s all you should be concerned with!”  “No, no, stack haste!  The faster you can toss flashes the better!”

I’ve gone through my bags of gear to try to rotate some pieces in and out to try to find a happy balance.

Currently, I’m trying to maintain this type of baseline:  (all of these numbers are self-buffed, by the way.)

-20,000 Mana
-28% Crit
-10% Haste

I’d like to stack more MP5, because I think I’m down around 215 – but with Glyph of Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope, Runic Mana Potions, the general nature of Disc healing, and whatever Replenishment type buff the raid provides…well, mana regen really doesn’t seem to be an evil that is plaguing me.

I was stacking crit and was up to 32% self-buffed at one point, but then I started reading about how Disc priest should be stacking Haste and decided to look into that school of thought.  With 10% Haste and all of my triggered fast-healing abilities on a target active, I can toss out a Flash Heal in .903 seconds.   I’ve recently glyphed for Penance, which reduces its cooldown by 2 seconds.  So, I can basically hit the MT or OT with a Penance every 6 seconds for close to their entire HP and I can toss Flashes out on the raid that take less than a second to cast.

Also, 10 man raid buffed, I’m sitting pretty at 30% crit.  From what I’ve noticed, my tank is almost always going to get the Divine Aegis affect from my third bolt of Penance.  I’ve come to Penancing the tank even if he’s not taking damage because of the changes to Grace and Divine Aegis.  It isn’t a bad thing to have Grace up on the Tank/OT at all times – increased healing and decreased damage makes me happy.  😀

All of this just makes me wonder if there’s anything else I can do (short of pugging Naxx25 for gear – so not happening) to improve my performance in Ulduar.  Even with all of my damage absorption abilities and buffs, the tanks are still getting hit HARD and the DPS – well…they’re not staying alive long enough.

One of my new tactics is to roll Power Word: Shields on all of the tanks.  When we did Naxx25 the other night (mostly a guild run and went ridiculously smoothly) I was rolling the shields on all three Patchwerk tanks.  The timing had to be on point, but I think I did an awesome job.  It wasn’t necessarily difficult and I can’t see in numbers how much damage I was able to absorb that fight, but I have a feeling that it was a helpful tactic.  I am doing that in Ulduar as well – making sure the MT and OT are always shielded.  They have no problems with rage starvation or losing aggro, and it helps give the healers a little bit of a break right at the beginning of the fight to save an unlucky DPS or to concentrate on our placement while the tank gets into position.

I was hoping that in 3.1, Blizzard was going to give Disc Priests some sort of party-wide shield or barrier.  Another time that I use the shielding method mentioned above is when I heal for Timed CoT.  I wind up keeping the entire party shielded throughout the run.  It sounds very mana inefficient, but it actually saves me from having to spam heal – which is one of the biggest mana killers for Disc priests – and going OOM – which is critical to avoid for successful timed runs.  It’s also like a mini-game to me – rolling the shields and making sure that they don’t fall off of party members.

I’m working towards Exalted with Hodir for the better shoulder enchant and once I get it, I will be able to swap in a different piece of gear with either more Haste or more Int.   I’d still like the crit bracers from H VH or from Naxx10, but it doesn’t seem that I will get lucky on those as I have been grinding for them for months.  And in Naxx25 the other night, SEVEN different pieces of gear – including robes, boots, cloak, and bracers dropped and I lost the roll on every single piece.  It would’ve been nice to get at least one of them (the bracers or cloak would’ve been the biggest upgrades) for the tiny boost for the Ulduar attempts.  Oh well.  The RNG definitely wasn’t with me that night.

I’m really hoping that Blizzard didn’t make it so you would need Naxx25 gear in order to complete Ulduar10 – our guild isn’t big enough to fill a 25 man and having to pug makes me crazy – I can’t even believe the maturity level and vulgarity of the players on my server…all they talk about is drugs, doing drugs, being high while running stuff, f this and f that, it’s just not my cup of tea while I’m trying to enjoy the run.  I’m very spoiled with my guild’s maturity level – it’s hard to deal with people who don’t act like us, lol.

Just An Update

Naxx10 with two healers.
It was me (Still a Holy Mage/Disc Priest and loving it) and a Resto Druid.  Some of the fights were down to the wire, but we pulled them off and it was great for my morale.  Before doing that, I had a bad night in Naxx and let my tank die like four times because of bad positioning/silences.  I felt like crap about it.  So, coming off of that crushing defeat and being able to redeem myself (to myself since I am my fiercest critic) was great for my healery self-esteem.  It felt really good to heal that place with just the two of us.  The extra DPS person made a HUGE difference.  It was a lot of fun.

Got a battleground mount for Bayloo.
You know, the 30 badges from AV, AB, and WSG kind.  I had a blast as Disc in WSG to grind the rest of the badges I needed for the mount and we won a ton today, which I’m definitely not used to at all – my old server was in favor of the Horde in every BG but AV.  So, now my Priest has a shiny new black war kitty.  >^..^<

Timed CoT.
I’m up to eight successful CoT runs with no drake.  I keep losing the rolls.  I’ve set up a consistent 5-man guild group and we will be doing this instance together until we each get a drake since we know we can do it successfully.  Then, depending on desire…we can just swap people in so they can get one too.  I don’t know why it’s such an obsession to me lately, but I’ve been wanting the drake badly.  Hopefully my time will come soon.

Update:  Up to 10 successful timed runs with no drake. Will he ever be mine?  😦

Ulduar.
We poked our heads in last night and tonight.  The server crashed at least twice last night so we didn’t get far.  Tonight, we downed Flame Leviathan (SO FREAKING FUN!) and took a few shots at the next few bosses.  We decided that we weren’t going to research the bosses or strats and just see if we could figure them out.  Wow, does that trash hit HARD!   I had a blast driving the Demolisher (that’s what I always drive in Wintergrasp) and nuking the heck out of stuff.  From all of the stuff I’ve read on Ulduar, it seems that the main points are that the content is hard…that crowd control will be making a comeback and you need better gear than Naxx10 for Normal Mode Ulduar 10?  (This makes no sense to me…if you can only run 10 mans, are they saying that you are forced to PUG for the better gear?  That’s crap.)

Dual Specs
I wasn’t going to bother picking this up on my Priest, but then decided that it might be worth it to have for solo questing or to fill in a DPS role in an instance/raid slot.  My original plan was for my Primary Spec to be Discipline and the Secondary Spec to be Holy (since I have a really nice fully epic holy set just collecting dust in the bank at the mo’) but it’s a long story why I didn’t go that route for now.  My First Spec is Disc, second spec is Shadow.  I fully intend on this changing down the line, I’m really just playing around with the DPS spec when doing my dailies or questing for cash.  Shadow is fun, but as far as caster DPS goes, I’d rather level my 70 Mage to 80 and just blast things in the face.  I must say that I’m pretty impressed so far though – wearing my Disc gea and without any Shadow glyphs, I was able to pull 2200 dps on an 80 target dummy!  I’ll need to collect  some +hit gear (never thought I’d go DPS with this toon so I never bothered) before I could run a heroic or raid with her effectively in a DPS role, but it’s still good to know that I can DPS in a pinch without switching my gear.

Argent Tournament Stuff
You know I’m a sucker for mounts and pets…so I’ll be grinding this on the side when I have time.  I love the titles too…would be cool to be Bayloo of Exodar and Boomba of Stormwind.  I liked the beginning quests (not all the travel, but the simplicity of them) especially the quests on horseback.  I love mounted combat, it should be a lot of fun going forward in the tourney.

Finally made enough extra cash to afford the Red Drake!
He’s so pretty!   I’m reading the Warcraft novel, War of the Ancients, and ever since I started it, I wanted to own the Wyrmrest Accord dragon.  I’m very happy with him.

My First Title

The other night, my guild was going for another Maly kill and I signed up as heals.  Both times we’ve killed him have been very lucky.  The first time, we killed him with about a second left before we went berserk and the most recent kill, we were all dead, but the dots finished him off, lol.  A kill is still a kill!  😉

I got my first title on my healer, Bayloo…as shown above.  Pretty cool!  😀

I’ve been having a blast playing the Priest lately.  I actually like to raid now – as long as it’s with good groups.  I haven’t really had the desire to PUG outside of my guild for Naxx25, but after my third whisper in a day asking me to come heal, I decided to peek in and see what it was like.  It was pretty awful.  People were pulling when the group wasn’t ready, no one was giving out healing assignments, we only cleared Spider Wing then got stuck on Noth.  I wound up leaving, but not before winning a crit belt that I’m VERY happy with.  😀  I just need a few more pieces and I’ll have an entirely epic Disc set to go with my fully epic Holy set that is currently collecting dust in the bank at the moment.  😛

Ps – Does anyone know why the widgets aren’t showing in WordPress if you’re using Firefox?  Grrrr.