Upon learning to speak to the wind one must also, apparently, learn to wear the appropriate vestments. There is so much choice, though, and so little of it within my grasp. One must still work to attain that which will increase ones inherent spirituality - though I am still not sure why putting more layers on brings one closer to the elements…

Kara
Over the past few weeks the guild has started running up to two Kara runs - usually a mix of alts and mains for badges and gear. I’m often not often able to go on Wednesdays (or Mondays and Fridays) as I duly give up the computer so the other half can play Oblivion but the past two weeks things have ended up so that I have been available.

Last week the guild needed a healer for the second run or it was a no-go. ‘Sure’ said I, and dashed onto my shaman, respecced (I’d been elemental for Magtheridon, I think) and grabbed all the consumables I could think of. I posted about my phat lewts.
This week I wasn’t expecting to be on but the other half was late home. I figured I’d nip on, patch up and do my transumtes / glass / make pots and flasks for Thursdays raid. I logged on to Aurik. “You are invited to a group by G”. Eh? *DECLINE*.

I hate being ninja invited and never accept unless someone tells me what I’m getting myself into - even from guildies. A few whispers later and I hear that there’s a sort-of competition going on - two groups are getting together and each thinks they can run Kara faster than the other. I was feeling a bit headachey but I didn’t want to say no when there were such high stakes *ahem*. I jumped over to Avarix, joined a team and then proceeded to run around like an idiot, respeccing elemental, grabbing different food buffs and joining TeamSpeak whilst being disconnected from the game a few times (patch issues, I think).

We ran through Kara, finishing in about two and a half hours. Although we were slow in doing the bosses we managed to actually finish before the other team despite starting about 15-20 mins later! Ahaha. Ah well, was all fun and we even managed to 9-man Netherspite when one of our mages had to go offline. Not bad for an almost completely alt character team!

My dps was terrible but I’ll excuse myself this once, hehe. My totem bar, Yata, suddenly stopped working with the patch (no surprises) so I had to relog and configure totemtimers and was still tweaking it until after Moroes!

Totem Timers

As much as my GM and the shammie class-leader recommend totemtimers over Yata I just… don’t like it. I’d tried it before and was willing to give it another shot but I’ll be going back to yata as soon as it’s working (got it working using the pre-update files) - if for nothing else than auto-totemic recall on a right click. I also prefer its timers - which are a lot bigger and include totems other than the four you have in your bar - so I can see when my elemental and mana tide totems come off cooldown - I also like the quickly configuarable and lockable buttons!

Maybe I’m just missing something with totemtimers (or any other totems + timers addon) but… I really don’t see why it’s so much better? I would be happy to be edumacated!

Gear Mathifications

Managed to pick up a few shinies but two pieces of the healing loot I got were really druid pieces ([Forest Wind Shoulderpads] and [Mitts of the Treemender]) - which takes me to three bits of leather armour! It would be four, except that I also grabbed the [Belt of Gale Force] from Moroes!

I have a habit of grabbing any loot noone else wants if it might, possibly, be useful - I hate seeing stuff sharded when the guild bank is full of void crystals - but on second look my [Gauntlets of the Tranquil Waves] from Magister’s Terrace seem to be on par with the druid leather Mitts for me. The higher int and stamina on the mitts is tempting, though… Time to look more closely!

I use Skyhoof’s shaman healing gear thread as a base list but it’s all calculated at t5 level which puts less emphasis on int and a bit more on haste - both represented unequally on these peices of gear. Using the t4 stat weights she gives irecalculated their values:

Mitts:
+25 Stamina - 5
+22 Intellect - 22
+14 Spirit - ignored (as is socket bonus)
+64 Healing - 64
= 91

Gauntlets:
+12 Stamina - 2.4
+10 Intellect - 10
+1 mp5 (socket bonus) - 3.4
+55 Healing - 55
+24 Haste - 16.32
= 87.12

As I suspected, for my level the mitts come out as higher base but there’s not much in it. However! Each still has two gem slots.

1. (+2 x Living Ruby - 36)
2. (+2 x Royal Nightseye - 27.6)
3. (+1 x Royal Nighseye and 1x Luminous Topaz - 26.8)

Mitts with 1. = 127, 2. = 118.6, 3. = 117.8
Gauntlets with 1. = 123.12, 2. = 114.72, 3. 110.52 (would lose the socket bonus)

The reason I’m calculating the last set of gems? I have myself an [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] which needs to be activated and it requires two yellow gems (I have another in my bracers). The value of an ISD is around 63 (at conservative estimates of it’s worth being 15mp5) So - adding the 63 to both mitts and gauntlets assuming taking the Nightseye and Topaz combination they come out as, rounded down:

Mitts: 180
Gauntlets: 173

The Magister’s Terrace loot is really nice but the stats on them are preferable for higher level content. My main gripe at the moment is lack of mp5 / mana so I think I’ll be enchanting then wearing those leather mitts and banking the gauntlets until I have higher mana regen and a bigger mana pool. Druid-shaman hybrid ftw! *ahem*

Rogue gear is so much simpler…

I was also lucky enough, though, to grab my t4 helm (hence the new meta-gem)! My alt now officially has better headgear than my main… /cry as well as some nice off-spec gear - [The Lightning Capacitor] (passed to me by a very kind warlock whose main is a shaman and insisted that I take it as he could get far better - Thank you A!) - and something for enhance-spec… though I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. I’m so enthusiastic about enhancement… *cough*.

Badge Loot Decisions

The actual point of this post, when I started it, was to look at the fact that I now have lots of badges - more than I ever expected to get on Avarix - and to figure out what I could get with them. Last week I had figured that would be my last Kara for a while and was leaning towards picking up an [Essence of the Martyr] but now I have 73 badges. That puts me an awful lot closer to some really nice, shiny stuff.

But, once again, I’m torn… I could do the badge-giving dailies for the next few days and hope for some badges, get 75 and grab myself some [Natural Life Leggings] or wait and get the [Wave of Life Chestguard] / [Runed Scales of Antiquity]. If Avarix were my main it would be a no-brainer - wait for the big ‘uns - but I cannot be guaranteed badges on my shammie. The last two weeks have been fun but I might not be in Kara for a while now. The other thing which bugs me is that a new chest would be a bigger upgrade, too, but there isn’t a 75 badge chest /cry.

I could, of course, also go for the boots, gloves or belt badge upgrades but I don’t really need those at the moment. I think I’ll maybe try a bit harder to grab myself one more Kara run if possible and then a heroic or so - that chest piece would be the biggest upgrade to my current gear and, unless they added more badge gear, would not be upgraded before WotLK.

Once again a post has spiraled out of control into something way bigger than it was meant to be, whoops.