At Deaths Door

As i'm sure you'll hear on gevlons blog sometime either monday or tuesday Undergeared has managed to claw it's way though to Deathbringer Saurfang by downing both Lady Deathwhisper and the Gunship Encounters.

Completeing these amazing feats in just blue gear is realy making me think at what is allowing us to get this far into high level territory with gear thats over a year old by now.
Although some people might claim it to be a great feat of skill and co-ordination i don't agree with that, maybe what we realy have over everyone else is just perseverance along with a little bit of invation.

For whatever reason i don't have a large ego or a great deal of self-confidence which i view as a personal advantage considering the alternative, the cynical side of me is somewhat worried that the only reason that i get to even come on such amazing expeditions is because i'm the only commonly appearing priest in the guild and they just need the buffs i bring (namely the improved stamina buff).

but even so i find that i can at the very least stick to the 2 aspects i mentioned above, i'm persistant in wanting to down the bosses and am willing to try even the little inovations that get brain stormed out of the rest of the group.
wether we will ever get to the lich king is a moot point, we're proving that even the hardest content in the game you can still make it though with just sheer perseverence.

A lot of what we do is baised completely on luck aswell, such as our atempts on saurfang tonight where 2 times we lost the fight to a very unlucky placement of the champions debuff, if one of those things lands on a DPS we can just let them die off and brute force our way though but when it happens to land on a healer to which we only have 2 of then we enevitably wipe due to not being able to heal the tanks though it.
We'll win the fight next week when we finally hit the lucky number and the debuff lands on the units that can effectively cleanse it, which makes things far easiser.

Wether we'll make it any further into ICC after this is still unclear especialy when some of the hardest fights in the place are the trash mobs but either way i'll still have a lot of fun dealing with it when the time comes and i hope the rest the guild will enjoy it just as much.

Facing Ones Elementality

My mage has recently turned quite curious as far as talent specs go, i seem to have recently lost whatever made me a good arcane mage or maybe i never had it in the first place.
Either way i'm finding that i do the least amount of Damage as arcane compared to the elemental counter parts, in some cases i'm doing more damage as Frost then I am as Fire.

So currently i'm wracking my brian trying to find out whats making my mage tick in such a way, my frost damage on festurgut today was 5.1k DPS while I was only doing 4.3k as fire and i've realy got to wonder whats causeing such unusual Damage performance.
My arcane damage is down in the bucket too, i can't seem to keep very high figures of damage using it as I used to.

Of course i'm normally running with fire these days as setting up Living Bombs and Firestarter combos to go off together is a lot of fun.
But i've realy got to start wondering if it would be best for me to go frost for the remainder of my wrath career, if none of the other people bring replinishment then i'll have to start using Frost more often as there is not much differance between the 2 for me.

Chakra Co-ordination

I'm sure anybody whos been keeping up to date with the cataclysm changes knows about the holy priests new defineing talent called chakra thats being added into the game, I figured it would be a good time to clarify my thoughs on it.

I've seen some bloggers being very cautious about this talent and with good reason as we may end up being balanced around it for the most part but i realy like the idea of a gear changeing talent.

Holys greatest strength has always been the ability to do pretty much all healing styles very well, if you want to HoT healing like a druid simply grab the renew talents and mental agility and start spamming them hots, if you want to take a more direct approach to healing then you can simply grab divine fury and serendipity and use flash and greater heal as your go to spells and if you want to pile on the AoE like a mad man then you grab the Circle and Prayer of healing talents and go wild.

I can envision chakra working as a way to shift gears between the 3 aforementioned healing styles, when your raid healing then spamming HoTs around will cause you to enter HoT mode where your renews become considerable improved and you can then stick to this mode of healing while ever the fight is going well.
Suddenly however the raid starts taking huge damage so you wind up a few prayer / circle of healing to get things sorted and as soon as you reach 3 casts you enter AoE healing mode (or the oh shit healing mode as it will probably only be used when the raids damage is in dire striaghts) bam your now an AoE healing machine and you should be able to stabilise the situation like that before switching back to the previous gear.
Or perhaps the tank suddenly starts getting heavily thrashed about and you need to focus heals on them, so you start throwing Greater heals out to keep him up and again bam things get kicked up a notch and suddenly your throwing out the raw healing power to keep the tank going.

The problem with the sheer level of versitility that a holy priest has is that if they were too good at everything then the other healing classes would get shunned to make more room for the wonder priests, so the idea behind chakra is that our healing styles will be a little less then the specialist healers out there at first then once we reach 3 casts we catch up and reach to an on par level of capability.

When we enter renew mode we can go toe to toe with the resto druid HoT masters, when we enter AoE mode we can go toe to toe with the shamans raid healing, when we enter Single healing mode we can then go toe to toe with the paladins tank healing capabilitys.

The three other healing classes don't get to choose their speciality so they will always be realy good at what they do and reasonable good at everything else whereas we get to occupy the unique position to jump between whichever mode we choose at the cost of a small ramp up time, this will allow us to fill in the gaps in raiding enviroments, if the raid needs stability gogo renew spam, if the raids getting hit hard then AoE kicks off and if the tank needs looking after then bring out the big heals.

In conclusion i'm hoping that chakra will end up being a talent that allows a priest to diversitise his healing capabilities and focus on his own play style while at the same time allowing him to fill in any gaps that enevitably open up in the middle of battle chaos, wether it will only time will tell but either way this talent will make priest healing interesting.

Alts, Mains and Role Complaints

I'm getting the urge to make another alt again, this time as a shaman as it's one of the few classes I havent played to death already, i'll probably make it on the same server as my priest as I can pool more resources over there and get the full hierloom experiance.

Of course i've been putting a lot of thought into which class i want to champion going into cataclysm as right now i'm in a position to chose which class i want to main going into the next expansion.
Despite being quite fun to play i'm finding the pure classes to be realy cumbersome to play, although the play styles for my rogue and mage can vary wildly depending on spec the ques to do instances on them is catastrophic.
When a hybrid class wants to get into a dungeon group faster they just have to switch to thier other role whereas a pure class dosent get that flexibility and considering that most people who play a hybrid class don't want to do their other role, it creates a huge que system where the pure classes are shunted because they don't have a skip the que button.

Although to be perfectly honest some of the hybrid "I only DPS lolol" people should probably stay away from their other role as they're barely competent at DPS (sometimes they can't even do that) and haveing those kind of people in the que as tanks and healers would spell disaster for the competant people who happen to get in with them.

Now I have tried to do some tanking and do have fun doing it at low levels but at a certain point the randoms that I get grouped with just start to get pushy and annoying, let's face it tanks get the smallest margin of error and being even slightly undergeared for anything leads to ridicule from the masses of incompetant fools out there, god help the level 80 tank who only has 30k health as he will not enjoy the company of the rest of the group despite the fact that when wrath was first released haveing 20k health was considered good.

So I relagate myself to Healing as my other role option as I quite enjoy it and it gives me many options and ways to play without ever changeing my spec, of course then i have to eat the compliants of any group that wipes in an encounter cause god knows it isent the retarded DPS's fault even when he dosent know the first thing about CC or Target Priority.
Sometimes I can even get stuck with tanks who don't even bother pulling stray mobs off me and still expect me to keep them, myself and the retardin whos attacking the wrong target at full health.

So no matter which role you play your going to screw yourself over at least some of the time if not most of the time when you enter the dungeon finder, so pick your poison and prepare for the worst.

PS: for those of you that still care i'm almost definately playing my priest as my main charecter in the next expansion, i'm more experianced with her and have her skills in all roles and specs polished brilliantly.

Mooraghh...

Well it finally happend, dispite my dislike of the tauren race I decided i'd finally roll a decent druid alt and mess around with him.
I'm leveling as feral as i already have the gear for it left over from my rogue and i've been saveing the huge ass mace for this scenario too.
This means i get to have another shot at rage tanking with a more simplified toon although i think i'll avoid doing feral as DPS if i ever reach max level as the kitty rotation is realy confusing.
With this new toon running i'm now only one class off haveing at least started on all of them, i can't seem to get myself to play a shaman for whatever reason.

Well i'm bringing this up right now because i had my first feral tanking experiance today and it was surprisingly fun, although there's very little substance to it right now.
Currently i just run in and attack to get rage and then funel it into either swipe for large numbers or maul for small groups.
With the glyph of maul going i can keep 2 mobs on me quite easily as that skill hit's like a truck, thank you savage fury.

Well we'll see how far my little cow can go as i'm sure things can only get better for me as i grab more tanking talents.