Meh

Well, I got to spend some time playing last night -- not much though because most of my time was spent haggling with BarTender4 trying to get it to get all my bars in the right place.

Now that I have more skills to use, I had to set it up so that I have more keys to activate those skills. So now most of my skills (at least the ones that I use) occupy 1-6, SHIFT+1-6, z,x,c,v,b, and f and g on the kb. Crazy! And everytime I got it like I liked, I'd save. But when I saved, my bars moved all around again! Gr. hehe.

But anyway. I lost Starshards, which sort of sucks. I gained Devouring Plague in its place, but that costs mana, and takes 24 seconds to tic all the way out -- most fights don't last 24s when you're questing, so I don't think that's going to become that useful.

I really don't understand the way VT works now as far as giving back mana. Crazy. Imp SF (when faded) reduces spell pushback by 70% (almost entirely) which is nice for those PvP moments. I ended up getting buffed from just over 550 to about 630 spellpower. That's still weak and I need to work on getting that upped. Shouldn't be too difficult though with the spellpower changes.

Additionally, Mind Flay CRITS now. That's one of the most incredible changes in my opinion. MF Crits hit for about 950 dmg, and with around a 12% crit chance, that's about 1 MF crit every 3 MF's.

I put EVERY SINGLE ONE of my talent points into shadow, totally leaving out Imp PW:F (which I kinda wish I hadn't), Meditation (which isn't so needed anymore) and Inner Focus -- which I didn't use too much anyway.

Dispersion -- take 90% less damage, regen around 35% health and mana in 6 seconds -- proved to be quite nice. Between mana pots, 3m shadowfiend, and dispersion, i should never run out of mana. My DPS should theoretically get bumped on the longer fights, but it was sitting round about the same (500 or so) in my encounters in shadowmoon. I can't wait to get into an instance!

Anyway, that's it. :)

New Server, New Patch, New Priest!

Well, if it hasn't been a long ass time since I posted. Things have chaaanged! My guild on my previous (very low pop) server has sort of disbanded. The two people there that I really cared to talk to both joined a different guild interested in raiding. Yeah, I'm interested in raiding, but got tired of the very low pop server.

In addition to that, a good friend of mine (that was also in that guild) transferred off server where a bunch of his other friends went. So! I followed him. Gorgonnash is the new one, and I'm in a guild with more 70's (even though they're more into the PvP aspect than I care to be), on a server with many more people.

I figured, since I was moving, I'd re-spec shadow again and gear up a bit before the coming expansion. That way, it'll make it easier for me to level up to 80 once Wrath comes out. I dropped Primal Mooncloth tailoring and picked up Shadoweave again (which I now realize that I probably shouldn't have done! gr. 150g out the window). Beyond that, I'm loving being shadow again!

Last night, the expansion (to 3.0.1?) came out with all new skills and talents! I respecced in my normal fashion -- took one of the "cookie cutter" builds (as much as they can be on the first day of a new patch) and tweaked it a little bit. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten that much of a chance to play since then. But I need to! I'm down to about zilch gold now that I've re-bought all the skills. Luckily, I can put a hiatus on gearing up, I think, and put on my Primal Mooncloth gear to DPS -- but how to make cash?

The one thing I've really noticed about this new server is that the horde is relentless on the Isle. That's where I do dailies because the're all so concentrated in a small area. I get ganked repeatedly everytime I'm over there. Being a shadowpriest, I was pretty gimped in the PvP area previously as well.. that, and I don't like it so much, so I don't play it that much. I may get more into BG's now that the new spec is out there though.

We'll see how it goes. :)

But, I'm very happy to be on a new server, and very excited to get to tinker with my new spec. :D L8z. More posts coming soon.

Take 2

So, we tried the raid again with a little more success. We downed the first boss with no issues and moved on to Moroes. We couldn't get him down, I don't know if it was what we were doing or what -- It's the boss, and 4 elite adds. Our OT was a friend of mine that had done it before, so he kind of took over the "Raid Leader" position this time. We had a full implement of 10 men, but only 2 healers this time, so we were still a little gimped on healers.

We got to Moroes and had the MT tank Moroes and 3 of his adds while the OT tanked the target we were DPSing and tried to keep second aggro on Moroes for when he stunned the MT. The issue though was that when Moroes stunned the MT, he went pretty much straight for the healers. The healers were the first to die in both of the times we tried. Sucked. I'll have to look up how to take him.

Next up, we left him and tried for Maiden. We tried once and wiped because I (on healing our OT that was tanking her) couldn't get heals off quick enough after the stun to keep the OT from dying. He was a bear druid and not in tanking gear, so between his gear and mine, we just weren't quite geared enough. I'll bet a druid healer in that instance would be amazing.

Anyway, that was about it. I did Heroic SV again the other night as well and got the Serpentcrest Life-Staff which dropped my +heals by about 40 and my mp5 by about 4, but pumped my stamina up a bit. So I'm glad about that.

I also got a sweet glove drop from Midnight in Kara to replace my next to last green item. I still have a green trinket that I need to replace and then I'll be all blue and purple. Like a bruise.

KarOWNED

Not the raid, but us. I’ll preface by saying that we had little to no trouble with trash mobs, but weren’t able to take a boss.

Any boss.

We started off by trying Midnite – we made it to him, but we were going slow, taking our time because it was our FIRST time, and also because we were 9-manning it because one of our ranged DPS dropped and we weren’t able to find another. So! By the time we got there, some of the mobs that we’d killed had respawned. I’ve heard they’re on an hour timer. I call bullshit on that, or either we were bugged. We made it to him in maybe 30 minutes (which, granted, is too long – we could probably do it now in 10-15 knowing what to do). But when we attacked him, all the mobs that we had killed and had respawned came running to his aid and so we wiped.

We all go back and re-enter the instance, killing our way to him again. This time, it did only take about 15 minutes, but the mobs were already respawning again by the time we got to him. Yeah, hour my ass. :P

So we eventually give up on midnight and make our way to Maiden. No problem getting there again. Our MT is a pally and she kept interrupting him (not totally sure how) but that was the call. He wasn’t able to hold agro as well as usual and so we wiped on her twice. By this time, it had been a couple of hours, we’re STILL running with only 9, and we decide to call it a night.

As to our group make-up – Pally MT, Warrior OT, 2 Priest healers, 1 Pally healer (healing the OT), Mage, 2 DPS warriors, and 1 Hunter. The one we lost was another hunter.

Next time? Lose one of the DPS warriors, pick up another hunter, and some other DPS class. Maybe a shadowpriest or a shaman or someone who brings some utility as well. I say “DPS Warriors” but they were really both Arms warriors with PVP gear, so they weren’t the best. The hunter was topping the DPS charts with the mage close behind. I was topping the heal charts (in charge mainly of raid healing and helping with the MT since I had the highest MP5 and had specced Circle of Healing for the occasion). The other priest was right behind with the pally a distant third.

I say distant third – it wasn’t because he was slacking off, he was doing a good job keeping the OT alive and I didn’t see him below 60% mana except on the occasions when we wiped. He wasn’t bad at all. We tried shackling the undead mobs and I had some issues with that, but once I got it down (focus, shackle) it wasn’t too bad.

All in all, I think we would do OK with a little more DPS and a raid leader (no offense to the GM, he did what he could and did get a couple of guides ahead of time) that has been through the instance a few times. You just can’t beat experience, I think. Or even if one of those DPS warriors had been willing/able to throw on a shield and 1h and pick up one of the Adds, it would have made life easier.

I also realize that I need more stamina. A lot. I have 1350 heals and over 200 Mp5, but just under 7k health. I lost some of the +heals to get to about 7,500 h and 1100 or so +heal for some of the encounters but it’s just not enough. QUITE. So I guess I should work on gearing up a little more.

Anyway, that’s my story.

Lack Of Interesting

I really don't have too much to say as the priest front goes. I've come to the conslusion that I'd rather level characters than play end-game content. Although I've never really DONE much endgame stuff. My guild is trying our first Kara run tomorrow night, actually. I'm not very optimistic about how it's going to go, because we're a small guild, and getting enough people to run with us will likely be a challenge.

We're trying it with a Main Tank, an Off Tank (who I'm not sure who is going to be yet). The GM wants to get one of our warriors to do it, but he's trying to ding 70 by Friday -- I'm almost 100% certain that a new 70 can't offtank Kara. I've never even been IN Kara, so I can't say for sure, but it seems a logical conclusion.

Aside from that, we've got a Holy Pally, me, and another holy priest doing the healing. I feel pretty comfortable about that because I have faith in my healing abilities as well as the other holy priest's. He's as good as I am, he has more +heal but not as much mp5. He's mostly in BG healing gear. I don't have a clue about the holy pally but I'd imagine spamming flash of light on the tank isn't too hard. (*poke poke* *jab jab* :P)

I haven't even been ON my priest in a while besides to craft some bags and stuff. I've been tinkering with alts and doing some BG's on the rogue. I also fired up Crysis the other day because I started getting tired of BG grinding. I've almost got the 18k honor for my MH weapon, I guess offhand's next. Then I'm thinking shoulders, bracers, boots.. basically going in the order of what would be the least cost / biggest upgrade. It's going to take me ages I think, even though I have sort of figured out the pattern that works for me. AV = Honor. I intersperse the BG that I need the marks for among my AV games so that I don't get too ridiculously bored of AV.

I've gotten really good at capping GY's and the towers are pretty fun to cap too as a shadowstep rogue. It's entertaining to leap off the top to get followed by horde and then shadowstep back up to the top and finish what I was doing. By the time they get back up there, I've either re-stealthed or healed or something.

It's pretty hard to solo-kill most of the people in there because I just don't do enough damage. I'm hoping the MH and OH weapons will help that, but I'm not the best geared right now.

Anyway, I guess that's it. I'll post after we run Kara to see how it went. lol. I'm HOPING that we can at least down ONE boss. I don't really much care beyond that. That'll be an accomplishment IMHO.

Now What?!

I'm just about to a point again now where I'm not overly excited about playing the priest. I guess there's nothing really that's causing it. But, I feel like I have pretty solid gear. Sure, it could use upgrading, but I'd really need to BG to upgrade it easily. Other than that, it's either dungeons, heroics, or Kara. That's what I want to do, run some stuff like that. Thing is, I have to wait til this weekend!!

It's okay though. I don't even know whether I'm geared properly enough to heal a heroic, but I feel like I should be fine. I think I'm a very good healer, and I have a strong enough gearset to back me up in most cases. Sitting at around 1200 +heals and 150 or so MP5. So I'm hoping saturday we have enough people on that we can run heroic ramps or BF or steam vaults or something.

That's about all. I've been playing the rogue waiting for a good chunk of time. Once I do, then maybe I can get a good chance to run some instances, but I think until then, it's alt time! I'll have another 70 in no time. :D That'll be sweet.

Gruul Down!

So, as I've said time and time again, I'm a very casual player. Sure, I enjoy instancing and BGing and just about everything else the game has to offer, but rarely do I have a solid chunk of 3 hours to devote to playing the game at a time.

Last Night, I was tweaking around on my rogue (63 now), and the wife had gone out, and a guild mate asks me if I wanted to join a raid to go after Gruul. I actually (literally) laughed, not thinking that I would have time and/or stand a chance of healing the raid. After talking to the raid leader, him telling me that there were going to be 5-7 healers (with me included) and that the run (if successful) typically took 45 minutes, I said "Sure, what the hey."

So off we go, in to kill some trash. I'm not having the slightest idea what we're doing. The raid leader tries to explain on Vent, and does a good job of marking. It was another guild organizing it mainly but there were a good number of folks that I knew in the raid group -- a couple of our players had left to join a couple of other guilds, and several others I'd grouped up with. Four of the guys from ours guild were included as well (70 mage, 70 pally tanking, 70 hunter, and myself, the 70 priest). Normally a very solid group, but c'mon. It's Gruul. The rest of the group compisition .. I can't even tell you. There was a lot of ranged DPS, and only 2 other priests.. and one of them was shadow. I figured I had a pretty good shot of getting SOMETHING. (I'll forget later .. my highest "roll" out of about 7 of them was a 25. Not my night)

So anyway, not having a clue what to do, I'm clicking on healbot to heal the tanks where I feel like I need to. The issue is that I'm slow. My heals kept landing a half second after someone else's heal and not healing for anything but a good chunk of overheal. So, I give up on the tanks and start healing the occasional random damage as it pops up. Goes fine, we get to the first set of bosses.

It's 5 "bosses" in a room. A Priest, a Shaman, a Lock, a Mage, and the "main boss." Some king or something. (I'll look up more detail later I'm sure) We've got our guild pally tanking the priest because he doesn't hit very hard. A few people interrupting the priest, and I'm assigned "Raid Healing, and help out with the mage tanking the mage." Yep, that's right, mage tank. Some wierd trick where the mage spell-steals the mage boss's spellshield that absorbs something like 70% of spell damage, makes the mage an ideal tank. Yeah ok sure.

Well, we wiped a couple of times, but on the third try, blew through. I was third of 5 on the healing charts after that because of the AOE damage I was healing -- most of my heals landed good and solid and healed for their full amount, or close.

So anyway, I didn't get any drops, but our tank and our mage both did, so they ported out to shatt to get their new gear, got summoned back, and headed on our way. BTW, this is about an hour and a half after we'd started that we headed on in to Gruul.

Some overeager shammy pulled him accidentally and that led to another wipe. We got him down to 50% that fight though so at least the group got a pretty good idea of what the fight was like. I got killed pretty early because of the stone shatter thing he does. He basically turns everyone in the raid into an AOE bomb, and if you're near anyone (specially 5 of your group members), you take like 2k damage from everyone you're near. I have 7.5k health. Let's see, 2k * 5 > 7.5k. Yeah, painful.

Anyway, second time around, tanks pulled him and all the groups got into position. Everytime we got "stoned" i got a shield up on myself for that extra 2k or so health boost which helped drastically -- as did not standing near 5 group members, I got far enough away from most of the others that I didn't take their damage as well as mine. ALMOST died the first time but after that, everyone sorta got their position down. Sorta a shame that he tosses you randomly into the air before turning you to a bomb, so it takes a bit to reposition. ANYWAY.

Everytime the raid took AOE damage I took to healing them up, helping on the tank when there wasn't anyone else low -- I got into the mode of stopcasting -- you cast a heal, and before it "finishes", if the tank isn't down on health, you "stop" the cast and immediately begin re-castin. You can do this by jumping, moving, or whatever.. or you can macro it in. I've got it macro'd into my downranked GHeal (rank 2) and my main GHeal, so I just stand there clicking on the tank on healbot -- when the heal's about done, I click on him again to cancel, or let it go if he needs a heal. That worked out MUCH better for me than my "click on him when he needs it" approach.

So, we down'ed Gruul on that second attempt. Wicked. Pretty decent gear, I got an epic neck piece that actually had less heal than my previous piece, but a lot more MP5. The Teeth of Gruul! The hunter in our group got an epic leather piece too -- it was an upgrade in stats, but still only leather. So anyway, good times! I didn't think I'd ever SEE Gruul, much less be involved in taking him down. And I feel like I was partially "carried" due to the rest of the group, but I was #2 of 7 healers in that fight against gruul -- JUST behind the lead healer.. I was almost TOP of the healing charts. Which feels excellent to me since I'd never done the fight, never raid healed, and I'm NOT epic geared (much) at all. I had something like 1200 +heal and 175 mp5 casting during the fight. So anyway. Sweeeet. That's my story.

May give it a shot again sometime to see if I can win s'more gear out of the deal. And, it did take us close to 3 hours (which made the wife less than happy) but that's mostly because of the wipes. I think if I got in a solid group that could 1 or 2-shot the bosses then it would go a lot quicker. 45 minutes is probably pushing it, but an hour and a half or so shouldn't be unreasonable. It's a very short instance, other than the 15 minute long fights. hehe.