Jindi Ysera

I’m still here! It’s been a long time since I posted last, and… a pretty huge amount of stuff has happened. I found a new guild. Agony. They are currently #6 on my realm, Ysera. By sheer luck, they were in need of resto shaman around the time of my last post. Some folks helped me out by recommending that I apply, and by putting in a good word… that was nice :)

In terms of raid progression, the guild hasn’t exactly been firing on all cylinders since TBC came out. They started with Hyjal and Black Temple in December of ’07, and when I applied in early January of this year, they had killed the first three bosses in each. Since then has been very steady and fulfilling progression. Certainly, not always amazing… we definitely have our share of off nights (standing in fire, let’s say…), but in general it’s been quite good.

Really, though, the progression can be summed up by one single item link! [item]32757[/item]. Roughly 6 hours before all realms were to go down for the 2.4 patch (which introduced newer, harder raid content), Agony killed Illidan. For those 6 hours, we had defeated the world of warcraft :)

For my part, I am not able to maintain the same relative performance levels that I once ‘enjoyed’ (before Agony), though position on the charts is still pretty much the same. The gear upgrades have been coming at a decent rate. Actually the best one had nothing to do with raid progression… the [item]32964[/item] finally replaced the damn kara mace (even though I’m pretty sick of Arena on Jindi… more on that later, maybe). I also am now sporting two pieces of tier 6 ([item]Skyshatter Gloves[/item] and [item]Skyshatter Leggings[/item]), and the two piece bonus (10% reduced cost for Chain Heal) does great things for longevity on those long fights. I’ve updated the gear page with the rest of the current stuff.

In other news, I also have a 70 druid called Geotic. In general, I enjoy playing him more than Jindi in PvE due to the extreme versatility (not ‘versatile with a respec’, I’m talking about ‘versatile with a given spec’) I get to enjoy in the off-tank / dps role. Main tanking is ok, but you’re pretty much stuck in bear most of the time. I prefer shifting a lot, trying to burn as many useful cooldowns as possible in all forms. PvP is also exciting because I have more of an ability to act offensively when I want, and there is no defense better than stealth. Going from shaman which has basically zero CC to druid with feral charge, bash, maim, cyclone, and roots is pretty awesome also!

Then there’s also the 53 frost mage, Xovius. He did levels 1 through about 44 running with a priest friend every step of the way. Then we stopped playing together for a while… the priest kept going while I focused on Jindi. Anyway, the priest is now 70, so the medium / long term plan is to get the mage to 70 and possibly get set up for some 2v2 arena. The mage is definitely the most fun for battlegrounds; warsong gulch in particular is friggin fantastic with a frost spec. In general, I rather dig the tradeoffs that come with the mage class… very good dps potential, but also pretty close to death at all times (even with full health, heh). Doing AoE grinds in PvE will never get old, either… killing stuff out in the world is just so much faster than on any other class I’ve played.

Oh yeah, almost forgot!

Earning that title is definitely the longest-term achievement so far, considering I started earning rep towards that somewhere in my early 20s…

That is all for now :)

Woot!

Woof!

The stats: http://wowwebstats.com/t3t2o5hqd13ra

And… the very same night, my guild imploded! So, now I’m searching for a suitable home… focused on raid progression. I have my eye on a couple guilds, we’ll see how it goes.

Perhaps as a reminder that life in the world of warcraft never stops, most of this went down while I was happily engaged in battle with trolls and other unsavory beasts in ZG with the SukkaFREE friends :)

Some changes for Shaman; to both Earth Shield and Water Shield (again). 

 

 

 

This is kinda nice. The 2.3 changes were already quite good, giving us the spell as described above, but with a 1 minute duration instead of 10, and no passive mp5. Also, any remaining globes at the time the shield expired would automatically proc, which means a free 600 mana per minute, (roughly 50 mp5), and more than that if you’re taking damage and refreshing the shield. Also, no casting cost, it doesn’t trip the five second rule, which means casting it isn’t actually a cast, which means it won’t mess up your mana regen. Now in 2.3.2 PTR, it’s back up to 10 minute duration with the addition of a passive 50 mp5.

 

Some shaman complained after 2.3 that having to refresh the shield once per minute was a pain / annoying / whatever. Personally, I tend to refresh it a lot more often than that in combat anyway (pvp), so it doesn’t really bother me. In an apparent move to appease this concern, the cooldown was changed to 10 minutes and they added the passive mp5, roughly equal to what you would have received by refreshing it once per minute after the expiry procs.

 

Then of course there’s Earth Shield. Funny story about that. There was a blue post somewhere on the europe forums describing the 2.3.2 changes… it looked very much like the change list that was present on the US forums, and the one on the main ptr patch notes web page.  They all described the new reduced mana cost of earth shield (cut in half from about 900 to 450), but the europe version also listed the addition of a 30 second cooldown on earth shield. Predictably, the forums erupted. Meanwhile, on the PTR, earth shield has been changed according to the US notes (half cost, no new cooldown). For a good while, no official response was given, which sort of inflamed the issue, on the forums anyway (which is not entirely like real life). Then finally an official response comes, saying only “we’re aware”, and that more info is forthcoming, etc.

 

This still leaves some questions, such as “aware of what?”. Aware that there’s a very odd typo on the europe version? Aware that they intended to add the cooldown at one point, then removed it, but forgot to update the europe notes? Aware that everybody thinks it’s an absurd idea? I suspect somewhere, somehow, somebody at blizzard actually *did* think this was a good idea. I’m eagerly awaiting an explanation, as I really can’t think of any good reasons to add a cooldown to earth shield. It’s a 41 point talent, it’s already uber expensive to cast, and it’s the primary component of survivability against the remaining 5/9 classes that can’t dispell it (yet). It also has zero dispell resistance, unlike many other magical effects of other classes.

 

*** 

 

So anyway, the realms all go down for weekly maintenance. But not the PTR! So I do the updates, hop on, try to get my UI straightened out… fortunately the bigger mods I use can all import profiles from other toons, so it wasn’t hard. Water shield is sweet, definitely 50 mp5. Earth Shield is half the cost with no cooldown. 1.5s casts seem a lot smoother to me now, they did some stuff with the GCD (which is also 1.5s). Specifically, it’s easier to chain-cast without ‘missing’ (I don’t spam).

 

Did a bunch of duels in front of Org, won most of them. At one point somebody mentioned something about killing some alliance… I’m always down for some pvp raiding, but I figured the type of folks on the PTR wouldn’t be into it. I was wrong. I was able to assemble a raid of 9 people to go wreak some havok… as it happened, as I was recruiting on /2, some dude responded who was already in stormwind… apparently major cities join you up to trade channel regardless of faction :) This unfortunately meant that ally probably had some notion that a plan was afoot… I grouped everybody out of visual range of the front entrance, then we all ran straight through the front gates, grouped up tight… and headed for the tram.

 

 

All but 2 of us made it, and those two just happened to be a rogue and mage… both of whom can stealth / invisi, so we all regrouped in the tram. We rode it over to IF.

 

At that point I remembered that this is the test realm, but I still have all my stuff, including roughly 300 herbs, 60 vials, some [item]Savory Deviate Delight[/item], and a 5 stack of [item]Invisibility Potion[/item]. And 5 [item]Flask of Mighty Restoration[/item]. Like, in my bags, on my person. Since it’s all free / doesn’t matter, I started handing everything out. This is the first time that being a pack rat has really paid off :)

 

Coked up and ready to rock, we began to explore inside of IF a bit and found some resistance around the outside of the tram portal. That’s when it turned ‘bad action movie’. We got a reasonable assault, but retreated into the tram with no deaths. Then, alliance proceeded to send a slow stream of between 1 and 4 people through the portal at a time… each of whom were thoroughly cooked by us. Maybe their computer speeds are really that different that the variation in zone times accounts for it… or maybe they were just being dumb. Eventually there were more dead corpses than there were people in our little raid… somebody had the bright idea to get the hell out, since they would likely all pop together. We took the next tram back to SW. One guy was screwing around and didn’t get on the tram in time, so was left there alone. He was dead about 5 seconds after the tram left.

 

Then we headed out of the SW tram and into the church, figuring we’d need a spot to hide out for a bit. We started killing stuff in the church, but it wasn’t long before alliance found us. We had the ‘boss’ in the church (some priest lady) down to like 60% maybe before we got killed. Fun times, and we definitely had way more kills than aliance, so gg :)

 

 

Why, you ask? Well, the armory is great, but provides absolutely zero historical perspective on anything. I suppose it makes sense in a way… time is a nebulous concept when it comes to the hard-core WoW player, right? :o The idea here is to keep a diary of sorts… significant loots, spec changes, play style insights, game mechanics / engine exploration, my lame attempts at what people refer to as ‘theorycrafting’, and even records of notable social events.

 

I got some Armory-style tooltips working on this blog (wordpress) using the excellent instructions over at thebronzekettle.

 

Let’s start out with my current spec and gear sets. This will also be an opportunity to showcase the differences between various gear sets, focusing on which stats are useful for which occasions. For each of my named gear sets, I will list all items in the set.  You’ll see that there is a large amount of crossover between sets. This should be obvious, but I’ll go ahead and state that in no way do I assert that my gear choices are ‘the best’ for anyone. I pick gear that suits my particular play style, but more on that later. I’ll first briefly describe each gear set, then list all the items for each slot.

 

MP5: This is the set I usually wear for boss fights, or any other time that mp5 is paramount (e.g. stuck trying to take stormpike graveyard in AV).

 

Heal: Maximum +healing bonus. Used mostly for trinketed HOTs.

 

Instance:  Instance trash pulls. Ready to take damage, balanced between healing throughput and sustainability.

 

DPS: For soloing / farming. Focus on spell damage, specifically nature damage, and spell crit.

 

PvP:  Arena, and most battlegrounds situations. Basically any time I think I’m going to get attacked by another player. Focused on stam and resilience.

 

There are a few others that are more special-case (e.g. riding, specific farming spots), so I’ll skip them. On to the items!

 

Slot	MP5	Heal	Instance	DPS	PvP
Head	[item]Cyclone Headdress[/item]	[item]Cyclone Headdress[/item]	[item]Cyclone Headdress[/item]	[item]Lightning Crown[/item]	[item]Cyclone Headdress[/item]
Neck	[item]Emberspur Talisman[/item]	[item]Emberspur Talisman[/item]	[item]33068[/item]	[item]33065[/item]	[item]33068[/item]
Shoulders	[item]32033[/item]	[item]32033[/item]	[item]32033[/item]	[item]32033[/item]	[item]32033[/item]
Back	[item]Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted[/item]	[item]Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted[/item]	[item]28378[/item]	[item]28378[/item]	[item]33333[/item]
Chest	[item]32029[/item]	[item]32029[/item]	[item]32029[/item]	[item]Tidefury Chestpiece[/item]	[item]32029[/item]
Wrists	[item]Whirlwind Bracers[/item]	[item]Whirlwind Bracers[/item]	[item]32997[/item]	[item]32817[/item]	[item]32997[/item]
Hands	[item]Cyclone Gloves[/item]	[item]Cyclone Gloves[/item]	[item]Cyclone Gloves[/item]	[item]Tidefury Gauntlets[/item]	[item]Cyclone Gloves[/item]
Waist	[item]Belt of Gale Force[/item]	[item]32998[/item]	[item]32998[/item]	[item]32804[/item]	[item]32998[/item]
Legs	[item]Heart-Flame Leggings[/item]	[item]Heart-Flame Leggings[/item]	[item]Heart-Flame Leggings[/item]	[item]Stormsong Kilt[/item]	[item]Heart-Flame Leggings[/item]
Feet	[item]32999[/item]	[item]32999[/item]	[item]32999[/item]	[item]32792[/item]	[item]32999[/item]
Ring	[item]Jade Ring of the Everliving[/item]	[item]Jade Ring of the Everliving[/item]	[item]Jade Ring of the Everliving[/item]	[item]Ring of Unrelenting Storms[/item]	[item]Violet Signet of the Grand Restorer[/item]
Ring	[item]33064[/item]	[item]33064[/item]	[item]33064[/item]	[item]34073[/item]	[item]33064[/item]
Trinket	[item]Lower City Prayerbook[/item]	[item]29179[/item]	[item]Lower City Prayerbook[/item]	[item]29179[/item]	[item]Talisman of the Horde[/item]
Trinket	[item]13503[/item]	[item]Essence of the Martyr[/item]	[item]Scarab of the Infinite Cycle[/item]	[item]29132[/item]	[item]Medallion of the Horde[/item]
Main Hand	[item]Shard of the Virtuous[/item]	[item]Shard of the Virtuous[/item]	[item]Shard of the Virtuous[/item]	[item]Gavel of Unearthed Secrets[/item]	[item]Shard of the Virtuous[/item]
Off hand	[item]Triptych Shield of the Ancients[/item]	[item]Triptych Shield of the Ancients[/item]	[item]Triptych Shield of the Ancients[/item]	[item]Triptych Shield of the Ancients[/item]	[item]Triptych Shield of the Ancients[/item]
Relic	[item]Totem of the Maelstrom[/item]	[item]Totem of Healing Rains[/item]	[item]Totem of Healing Rains[/item]	[item]Totem of the Void[/item]	[item]Totem of the Plains[/item]

 

Finally, my current talent build. He’s going deeeeeep!