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

Back into ICC...One more time

Natural Order runs a few different raids per week. We have a 10 man who has already killed the Lich King. Another 10 man that is currently on the Lich King, and a 25 man progression that will be on our 3rd raid extension working on a Lich King kill. (To be fair we only raid about 2 hours per week per raid group, so we have just under 4 hours into the LK fight)

This weekend we started a alt run 10 man group. Well Skraps has now gone into ICC as a healer once more. Strangely I find raid healing much less stressful than DPS. I know that is usually the opposite reaction most people have, but when DPS'ing I find myself constantly trying to make sure I am doing the most DPS possible, while trying not to do something stupid like stand in a defile.

I think my job as a healer can be distilled to a few simple things.

1.) Don't let people die.
2.) Don't die.
3.) Cleanse when something needs to be cleansed.

I know this is an over simplification of a healers job, but I only have to react to situations and I find that calming. When DPS'ing I have to make sure my debuffs are up, I am maximizing my DPS, de-curisng, slowing, and watching fro procs.

Oh and I finally got my super awesome T10 Resto Shaman shoulders. I broke my 4 piece T9, because I didn't thing the extra 5% crit on chain heal was really worth the extra stats from the T10.

And I get FRIKEN antelope jumping out of my shoulders! I think my next piece will have to be the helm to complete the awesome forest animal look of the T10.

Blizzcon 2010

Well Finally got off my lazy bum and booked the hotel for the trip. I will be driving from the San Francisco area to Anaheim Thursday October 21st. I plan to work a 1/2 day, and be on the road by 12:30. Pick up "The Boy" from school about 1ish and make the 6 hour drive. I should make it to Anaheim in time for whatever Thursday night party is going on. If you want to meet up drop me a line, would love to share a beer with my tens of ones of readers. I'll probably be dropping by the WoW.com soiree as Matt "Matticus" Low owes me a beer for sending him a SC2 beta key. If anybody from the SF Bay Area are heading down and needs a ride and wants to share expenses, and can stomach hours of Kevin Smith podcasts on the trip I have room for 1 or 2 more people in the car.

What happened to Improved Reincarnation?

One thing that troubles me about being a shaman in wow, we still have the LONGEST cool down ability in the game. While the new 30 minute cool down is awesome, and I am more likely to use it when ever it is up (That is if I am actually dead). It still confuses and angers me that that in order to make the ability usable with some degree of certainty requires the additional penalty of wasting two talent points, and then we STILL have the longest cool down in the game out side of professions.

As it stands now in a raid situation, especially on progression raiding it is an incredibly difficult decision on weather or not to pop. You need to look at how long into the fight you are, what other members of the raid are still up, boss health left and the likely hood of a wipe, because with a 30 minute CD you do not want to pop it, only to still wipe. Especially if having that CD available on the next attempt could have made the difference between a 1% wipe and a successful boss kill.

Luckily for my my current guilds 25 man team has a GINORMOUS stack of druids, we have something like 6 battle resurrections available, so blowing the CD isn't always that big a deal. But on our 10's it is a huge difference, considering we are usually running with 2-3 healers and 1 druid 50% of the time.

One thing that still confuses me is when the CD was lowered from 60 minutes down to 30 minutes with the ability to talent into it to drop it to 15 minutes, the devs claimed it was so powerful that they didn't want Shaman to be able to use it on every fight. They wanted us to have to choose when to use it. Now don't get me wrong, but I LOVE! being able to pop when I make a dumb mistake, I think it is one of the signature abilities of the class. But I think the Druids battle rez, or even the Warloc's Soulstone provide quite a bit more utility seeing as how they can cast it on others.

What concerns me now is the fact that in all the Cataclysm preview data that has come out I have not seen the current CD on Reincarnate. Nor is the talent in the talent tree anymore. So I see it going one of two ways.

1.) They finally see it my way and dropped the CD to 15 minutes, still the longest CD in the game.

or

2.) They see that nobody uses the Improved Reincarnation talent in live, and think therefore nobody likes it and thinks 30 minutes is just fine. Without taking into account that spending those two talent points somewhere else provides much more bang for the buck. Talent points are expensive after all, and it really hurts to have to give up on mana regen, spell power or something else to make your ability ALMOST on par with other class abilities.

My Cataclysm Fantasy

What I would love to see is a legendary shaman shield, or off hand or whatever you want to call it, that emulates the warcraft 3 giant totem the Tauren shaman carries around.

But what are the odds that blizzard would put in a legendary item aimed at a single class, and a under represented class to boot.

Back into ICC

This isn't me, just more mocking thereof
So Natural Order's 10 man team have successfully beaten the Lich King, and Ruby Sanctum. I am on the 2nd 10 man team and we are a bit behind that but not to terribly far behind that, im confident we will see the Lich Kind defeated and some of the hard modes down as well. We are also now hitting ICC 25 every week or so with full guild runs. We are 9/12 complete in ICC. Last night we spent a great night wiping on Putricide after clearing the Blood Wing Tuesday. We had a number of great attempts and have gotten him into phase 3 a few times, but just can't quite seal the deal. I suspect we will get him next time, we were so close this week.

Now here is what I am really here to talk about. Nibelung. It has eluded me since the opening of ICC. Every person in NO that can wield a staff has one, and they take it out on AOE intensive fights and there is 100 Valkyr flying around the raid mocking me. I understand that staff isnt exactly BiS for a mage, but the proc is so pretty I feel like I am reverting to my 6 year old self. Ever week when we get to Lady Deathwhisper I scream "I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I NEED IT!" Alas she never drops it when I am around. If for some reason I miss the first part of the raid, RNG be damned, she drops 2 of them. It is getting to the point that hunters and warriors are getting them just to mock me.

Congratulations to all my friends who can now marry in CA