This is not the greatest shirt in the world.

It is merely a tribute!


My favorite blizzcon shirt. More pics to come soon.

Blizzcon news...

I was struck near dead by some Blizzcon Super Virus this week. Today is the first day I managed to crawl into work. I'll get pics and info from my point of view posted this weekend after the Halloween party.

I would like to have a word with AT&t

That word would be a big F.U. Ok that's technically two words, but you get the idea. I can not post anything from blizzcon. The network is so super saturated that nothing is going up. So I will just do a massive dump of information and pictures Sunday or Monday.

Opening ceremony.

I think the 10:30 start time on the wall is erroneous!

Figuring out iPhone blogger app.

Here is the pic of swag bag.

First look at blizzcon loot!

Finally in Anaheim checked in and registered. I finally have a 1/2 dozen beers in me and I have time to look at the goodie bag. The first thing you see in the bag is a large box of something. It is a "Deathling". Which is a stoneware mini featuring statue. It will look awesome on my desk! There is a poster for the wow magazine, some swag flyers directing you to booths and a Starcraft 2 trial as well as the 2010 limited authenticator. I spend almost 7 hours driving today. It is 11:30 and I have a Lon day tomorrow. The janky hotel has no wifi in my room so I'll post from my iPhone when I can. Hopefully some pics will come too. I'll try to get good pics from my slr up tomorrow night too. See you all tomorrow. BLIZZCON!

Two Days Until Blizzcon!

It is 4:15 Monday afternoon, and I am at work. But I am also trying to get all my last minute things together for my trip down south to Blizzcon Thursday. Today I had to take my car in for oil change and rotate/balance the tires to make it ready for the 400 mile drive to Southern California. So check here Thursday, Friday and Saturday for pics and video from this years Blizzcon oh and hopefully some hot cosplay girls ;) (don' tell the wife)

I also just confirmed my reservation for the hotel, and FINALLY got my ticket emails from Blizzard over the weekend. I was a bit worried that I had not seen them yet. Oh by the way...I totally win the internet at online hotel reservations. I am staying at the hotel across the street from the convention center, I got the room for Thursday, Friday and Saturday for the amazing sum of $108! It is probably a pit though. I was really looking forward to taking my son to the convention, but because he has his head in his ass and has gotten unsatisfactory grades in both Math and English he will be staying home. Instead I will be taking my cousin. So yay for a guys weekend at the convention, boo for the boy missing it and his poor grades.

I did two runs of ICC over the weekend. ICC 25 as DPS on my Mage, and ICC 10 on Skraps healing. The 25 run was tons of fun, the tanks really didn't have threat issues, and the DPS were kind enough to wait 3 seconds before opening up on bosses. I pretty much switched specs from Arcane to Fire between each trash pull and boss fight so I could get the feel for both. They are both a lot of fun right now, with Arcane doing slightly more DPS but I think that has more to do with my familiarity than any raw numbers. We made it through Professor Putricide in less than 2 hours with only one or two wipes on Festergut. Those were strictly due to people not knowing the fight and bad RNG.

Last night was ICC 10, I was healing with the awesome new resto toolbox. A few thoughts. Healing Wave isn't really a great replacement for Lesser Healing Wave. I found myself using riptide almost exclusively to top off the raid. During boss fights I was using Greater Healing Wave on the tanks, rolling Riptide on the raid and the occasional Healing Surge.

Let me tell you about Healing Surge. I think it may be by far the single most OP heal in the game. Again don't quote me, as I don't really know what other similar spells are out there for other classes, I just know what Healing Surge does. When a tank dropped below 45% health I was able to get a hasted Healing Surge from the T10 4 piece bonus off in .74 seconds that healed for 20k+. Supposedly there is going to be some mana limiting factor in Cataclysm, but I didn't see it in T10 gear. I was able to spam Healing Surge during phase 3 of Putricide almost indefinitely, I cast it at least 30 times before I thought I might want to drop Mana Tide.

Speaking of Mana Tide. How awesome is that? My rough numbers, possibly based on old spirit to mana regen numbers puts it to about 862 mana per second for 12 seconds every 3 minutes. (based on my current spirit and intellect numbers, unbuffed) for a total of 10,344 mana returned! And that goes for everyone in your group!

Things I have learned from 4.01

Wrath Heroics are hard again, at least for the first 5 minutes. That's when everybody figures out where they put their buttons and things go mostly smooth again.

Most of my glyphs diapered and I have neglected to buy any to replace them.

Healing Surge, Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave all seem to do the job as advertised, although I am not seeing the new "Mana Management Game" I so feared. After healing through a few heroics last night, I never dipped below 85% mana. This may change in a raid setting where boss fights are 5 minutes or longer.

My Rogue friends are having issues. They claim that combo points are "Just Disappearing", I don't deny that this is happening, I just have not sen it first hand. I bet it sucks.

Arcane Mages are a bit more fun than before, they are a little more "proccy". Meaning you cant just spam arcane blast and arcane missile when you get to 4 stacks. But boy when Arcane Missile is up, and it is improved. It is freekin awesome to see all those missiles flying at your target.

Earthquake is super fun! I will be going into ICC tonight and I will see what it does damage-wise. I think it will be fun on the trash mobs before Marrowgar and the Gunship battle. I mean that is if I am not healing.

Wrath Heroics are HARD 4SRSLY!

Last night after tinkering with my Arcane spec on my mage for a bit and reforging my stupid 28% hit to an awesome 355 Mastery, a tank in the guild announced he was going to queue for a Heroic, and did anybody want to join him.

As a DPS I jumped at the chance, cause come on...skip the 15 minute DPS queue time? Sure! Well we got Halls of Lightning, one of the harder instances in early Wrath. Well we had wiped before the first boss. Everybody said no biggie, we ended up pugging the heals, the rest of the run was guild. We gave the healer the benefit of the doubt, since it is a new spec, and things were just generally wonky.

Well by the 3rd wipe on General Bjarngrim we were like WTF? Heals just were not happening. The healer was kind of dickish, and then dropped group.

I volunteered to switch over to Skraps and heal. I logged on, set my talents bought my skills that were new or missing and ported into the dungeon. Soon as I ported into the dungeon I found why the original healer had such a problem. Healbot is broken, and I am betting the healer never healed before there were healing ad-ons to make healing simple a whack-a-mole game.

Admittedly it has been a few years since I healed without an ad-on, and I think I would stroke out if I had to heal a raid without some kind of unit frame/cast click interface. But healing is perfectly doable with some smart key bindings, and focus-casting macros. Oh and you have to turn off auto self cast, unless you are just going to stand in melee and chain-heal yourself and let it bounce to the rest of the group, not the most efficient way to heal.

In the end, with only one more death, and some really ginormous fails on my part we completed the dungeon and got our justice points and a bit of experience for the five Natural Order folks with our new specs.

Welcome to Patch 4.01

This is what my Resto spec will look like tonight when the servers come back up. Natural Order will we going into Ulduar tonight to try out the new specs, and attempt a drake run. There is really no point in trying any progression raiding for a few days, between server stability and people trying to work out new specs.

I'll give you a run down on this spec, and why I selected the talents I selected.

Remember at level 80 we get fewer talent points, and I tried to pick talents I thought would benefit the raiding shaman the most.

I took all the talents in the first tier, not because I think they are all that important, but mostly because I need to spend the points to get higher in the tree, and I skipped Soothing Rains because we only get 1/2 the bang for its buck until lever 83, the 85 build will be quite different. I also skipped any talent that looked vaguely pvp oriented. So for tier 2 that left only Improved Water Shield and Totemic Focus and I figured anything that helps with Mana will pretty much be a must.

I am kind of conflicted about Nature's Blessing but I took it anyway. Outside of 5 mans I am not sure of how much tank healing I am going to be doing, but as I understand it with our new tool kit, we are better suited to tank healing than ever before.

I still skipped Telluric Currents for progression raiding, but if I decide to run more 5 mans to pick up my last 2 pieces of T10 that could be quite awesome since I am throwing Lightning bolts as often as heals in 5 mans. From here out the rest of the resto talents are a no-brainer. There is some decision on taking points in Elemental or Enhancement. If you drop 3 points into Elemental you get a 3% crit increase in all spells, but I choose to dump my last 5 points into Enhancement, mostly because I am afraid of being mana short, and a 40% spell power buff to Earthliving Weapon is nothing to blink at.

If I make it into the raid tonight I will let you know how it goes. Tuesdays are always iffy for raiding as it is Boy Scout night with the boy, and you know family first and all that jazz. Just a little side note, he completed his First Class Scout requirements last week, and is 3/4 done with Star Scout. He is working his way towards Eagle quite nicely, I'm pretty proud.

Natural Order's 25 man raid is progressing nicely

Natural Order's 25 man raid is progressing nicely. I seem to DPS for one night of raiding on my mage, and heal the other night on the Shaman. I'm pretty happy with this. I get to heal the stuff that isn't quite on farm, with drops I need and DPS all the farm content and get upgrades for my alt, although Nibelung refuses to drop for my mage. I know this item isn't BiS or anything, I just REALLY want to have a Val'kyr at my beck and call.

Last weekend I was super productive on my shaman. I finally completed the Argent Tournament stuff and got a bevy of titles and achievements.

Exalted Champion of the Horde, Exalted Champion of Silvermoon City, Exalted Argent Champion of the Horde, Champion of the Horde, Champion of Silvermoon City

That's a lot of achievement spam in guild chat I tell ya!

Last week's ICC run was particularly fruitful for Skraps as well, even though I used up all my PR points in EPGP. I walked away with the most epic gear ever! Plus some gear, that I guess is good and useful...Mail of Crimson Coins and Unclean Surgical Gloves.

I guess one good thing about raiding in a EPGP guild and going weeks on end without picking up any gear, when gear does finally drop for you, even from multiple bosses you get to clean up and loot whore it all. (although if another of the shaman in the guild had needed either I would have passed, cause I'm cool like that, and luckily there was only one other resto Shaman on the run last week who already had those pieces)

This week we again ran the first 2 wings, no Nibelung again, we will see what happens next week. Thursday it is back to the upper spire, we will see if I finally get my shot at the LK