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!