Whilst some of you lot over the sea are having fun in Ulduar waiting for the servers to come back up / stop sucking, I’m sitting here wondering if I’ve managed to get everything done that I could for 3.1.  I was surprised to see it drop this week but, despite the mad rush, I’m glad I didn’t have another week to wait.

Events

I was concerned, to be honest, about them putting 3.1 out next week and having Noblegarden on when I’d also wanting to be starting the Argent Tournament – I didn’t like the idea of having to choose one over the other and wondering if I had time to do my Noblegarden achievements whilst also making enough time for the first few mad days of raiding Ulduar.

As it is, hopefully Noblegarden will seem like some nice light relief after a week of jousting and getting to grips with the 3.1 changes – I tried the argent tournament on the ptr but I’d imagine there are a lot of people who did not and will spend the first week getting used to the various quests.  If you want a guide for that, by the way, you might want to check out Siha’s wonderful posts starting here.

Of course, the week after Noblegarden will run into Children’s Week so expect an oncoming three weeks of achievement, bunny and orphan filled madness!

I have posts in the works for Noblegarden and Children’s Week but I thought I’d have more time to do them so it’ll be a squeeze getting them out on time – moreso because I didn’t manage to get onto the ptr during testing for Noblegarden and so haven’t experienced the ‘new’ version firsthand.

Specs

For Avarix, my restoration shaman, I will be taking a spec much akin to Drug’s – though I might take imp. reincarnation at the moment simply because I know I do mess up on learning nights and if I can come back more often with more mana and health I’m at least a little less useless…. Also, following his advice, I’ll be trying out the new Earth Shield glyph along with Chain Heal and an as-yet-to-be-decided third – contenders include Healing Stream, and Mana Tide though once things are a bit less wip-ey I’ll want to test the riptide glyph.

For my other spec? Elemental! Y helo thar thunderf*ck. Definately not taking the Thunderstorm Glyph *grin* I’m debating taking a slightly pvp-based spec for the moment so that when I have time I can finish up getting my marks towards tabards / mounts without feeling so utterly useless.

For Jhai, she’ll be going back to feral bear for the main spec, probably one of the ones recommended by darksend.  For the resto side of things? I haven’t even begun to look – maybe once things have calmed down a bit I’ll take the time.

Raiding

I’m looking forward to getting into Ulduar as, I guess, most raiders are. Our 25-man nights start tommorrow so hopefully the servers will be settled down by then – The EU servers don’t seem to suffer as much as the US ones as they apply the fixes to our servers before ours even go live so we might even see a 10-man tonight for the admins and role leaders to get a grip with the fight mechanics before we have to lead 15 other enthusiastic people into the breach!

Anyways, sleep time for now – no pictures for this post as the laptop I have all of my graphics stuff on is currently a littler overheated from a little pic I’m working on for Noblegarden.