Enhancement vs. Elemental Grinding

In the time between raids this week and last I’ve been doing a pile of different things.  The biggest change was once again speccing enhance as my offspec.  About once every six months I get the urge to try the ‘other spec’ and go through my bank and various reps to see if I can get myself a decent set of kit to try it out with.  Well, this time I had collected a small pile of Ulduar-10 gear (we had no other shamans and no hunters so I was pretty much snapped up all of the dps-mail drops) – head gloves, shoulders and a belt.  I then grabbed rep legs, boots, chest and back, crafted some cheap rings and a necklace and bought a pair of BoE gloves cheap off the AH.  I was left with a ‘hybrid trinket’ and a spellpower one but I fgured that’d do for now.

The main reason for the change was that I wanted to grind some TBC rep.  Whilst it was totally possible for me to make my way through Botanica as elemental I felt that I had a hard time balancing healing and damage and that I had a lot of down-time.  I thought that enhance might be a bit less problematic for mana, would be a bit tougher and wouldn’t suffer versus spell-interruption.  Really, I think I made a good choice.  Even without having much of a clue, keeping a ‘rotation’ as enhance is so much easier versus multiple mobs and Ghost Wolves make it a lot easier to control 5-6 mob pulls (there are a few in Botanica) and were really nice on the boss fights simply as extra healing which meant I could output more dps.

Looking incredibly at home, here amongst all those crystals before taking on Thorngrim. The feral staff dropped every time I killed him… never had luck with that in TBC on my duid, of course.  I am incredibly tempted  keep enhancement as my offspec for some time – I’ll be keeping it at least until I’m done grinding reps.

Of course, this would be the week where I’ve ended up being asked to go along to a few heroics as dps since we have a baby resto shammy to train up!.  I was also asked to go along to help one of the guild’s priests to get his [Reins of the Bronze Drake] from a timed CoT: Strat run.  I had only gone on to take some screenshots for this post, but I knew he’d been trying hard for it so what the hey.  The upshot of it was (after half an hour of instance server busy) we got in, he got his shiny new drake on his 33rd attempt (gz Maca!) and karma smiled on me with a shiny new enhance fist weapon:

I’m very tempted to buy its counterpart but I think I’ll wait a little while longer to see if this enhance ‘phase’ wears off, hehe.

Moar Pets!

Whilst waiting on said instance server to stop playing silly-buggers I took the screenshots that I’d actually gone on for:

Whilst raiding last night, our GM Indigo spied two of the horde pets cheap on the auction house.  When I go to  the auction house they’re never less than 5-8k so I asked her to grab me them.  So, when I finished the raid, I had these two beauties in my mailbox – [Sen'jin Fetish] and [Enchanted Broom].  Thanks again, Indi! Now the only two I have left to buy are the scorpion and batling.  Personally, I love how the scorpion looks so that’ll probab be my next one once I actually have some gold again.  I need to save up to get my herbalist epic flying first, though, so it might be a wee while.

‘Sekrit’ Alt

Although I am levelling my herbalist (my baby priest), I’ve done a ‘bad thing’ and created another alt.  Or, really, started using an old one.  I had a bank alt whom is now my ‘peace’ character – I love being in my guild and I love my guildies dearly, but sometimes I need to be totally on my own in-game and this is the character for those times.  There’s just something so very different about the game when you play it without your guild ‘blanket’.  It makes WoW feel almost ‘new’ again.

I got a few odd looks when I turned up in the starter zone with a pink dress on, but it was quickly replaced and my baby warrior is now running around Dun-Morogh in knee-length trousers and a chain bikini-top with half-bare feet.  I know dwarves are tough but I can’t help but shiver when I see her running over snowy areas in that kind of get-up!

Shortasses

Talking of short warriors, I finally spied a certain one in-game for the first time:

/wave at Namthe.  Unfortunately I was on my (other) bank alt at the time.  Typical.

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So, you’ve just got your shaman alt to 80 and you want to try out resto – or maybe you decided to grab that dual spec and don’t know where to start or you finally realised that being a priest / druid was far too easymode and you wanted to try a class which actually took skill to heal with?  If so, this here is the guide for you!  In the last few days I’ve had a  two guildies get their alts near / to 80 and start asking these questions and have had a few others ask for offspecs etc.  Whilst I love to wax lyrical about my favourite class, I felt it would be better to actually write something down which I could refer people to rather than trying to explain (badly) in relatively short sentences how to ‘do it rite’.  (It’s also a good excuse for me to do a cathartic outpouring of shamanyness).

This guide is meant as an entry-level guide – going into spells, stats, mana regen, talents and tips at a relatively basic level.  The aim is to give people who’re just starting at resto shamaning a primer with a few quick-start points but enough detail for those who like to know ‘why?’.  In depth and number crunching is not here – that’s for someone else to teach – and I’ll provide a few links for further reading at the end of the guide.  It’s also based around lower-end healing such as heroics and t7 content where most fights are over in 5 minutes or less.

The only assumption I am going to make here, though, is that you are already level 80.  I will not assume that you’ve levelled as ele or enhance, I will not assume you have any clue at all about healing as a shaman (or any other class).  I’ll also point out where things will differ depending on if your focus is towards eventually raiding 10 mans, 25’s or doing heroics with your friends.

Caveats done, let’s start:

• Spells
• Stats
• Mana Regen
• Talents
• Addons
• Gear / Gems / Enchants
  
• Random Extras
• Links

Spells

Chain Heal (CH)- Multi-target, moderately heavy on your mana.

Chain heal used to be the bread and butter of shaman healing.  In fact, it used to be the filling, too – and for good reason – with downranking and high spellpower, it became more efficient than any of our other heals – even on a single target.  Thankfully this is not the case anymore. Using chain heal and only chain heal will run you dry pretty fast – so it has to be used with a bit more care, especially in 5 and 10-mans.  Chain heal, moving from target to target, is usually referred to as it ‘bouncing’ – i.e. ‘Bounce the chain heal off the tank onto the melee’.

One thing to be clear about – if only one person has taken damage, or if people are more than 8 yards away from the player targeted, chain heal will not bounce.  Practice shows that the chain chooses where it will jump when the heal lands – so preemptive casting when there’s incoming AoE damage is a good trick to learn.

Chain heal, whilst very pretty and the supposed ’signature heal’ of Shamans will not work in a good number of situations.  Get used to using it only when people are close together and multiple people are taking damage as your other heals are faster (with tidal waves), can heal for more and don’t run you out of mana so quickly.

You should also get used to using this with Riptide to maximise its effects in heavy-damage situations.

Things which can effect this heal:

Riptide: Boosts the amount of healing done by your chain heal by 25%

Glyph of Chain Heal: Chain Heal may now hit 4 targets.

~o~

Lesser Healing Wave (LHW)- Fast, small heal

This heal used to be the red-headed step-child of Burning Crusade healing.  Woe was he who touched the lesser healing wave button!  In Wrath, this spell has come back into its own – especially when glyphed it is relatively efficient and good for tank healing.  In situations where the group is very spread out to the point where chain heal will not bounce, this heal is a good one for topping people off.  Having a decent amount of crit on your gear really helps to make this heal more effective – LHW used to trigger an improved water shield proc 100% of the time when it crit but, alas, no longer – only 60% of the time and thus it’s not as super-efficient as it was.  Nonetheless, it’s a very potent tool for 5-mans and sometimes larger groups too.

Things which can effect this heal:

Tidal Waves: Chain Heal and Riptide can proc this effect which reduces cast time by 30% and gives a 10% bonus healing.

Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave: A really nice glyph which is good for 5-mans.  In raids, its value really depends on how often you’re likely to be assigned to heal the tank.

~o~

Healing Wave (HW)- Slow, big heal

Healing wave is the big daddy of heals – it’s tricky to master using this heal as it is rather slow, but once you have it down it’s a very nice healing tool.  In raids this heal tends to go to waste on overheal unless you’re the only person healing your assigned target, or your target is not a tank.

Things which can effect this heal:

Tidal Waves: Chain Heal and Riptide can proc this effect which reduces cast time by 30% and gives a 20% bonus healing.

Healing Way: This resto talent was buffed to only require one heal to put up the full buff rather than three. Whilst of limited use in 5-mans, it can be a valuable tool in 10/25-mans – especially if you are often assigned to tank healing.

Glyph of Healing Wave:  This glyph doesn’t really effect the spell much except to heal yourself when you use Healing Wave on someone else.  In my opinion, this is a weak glyph compared to the others – though I imagine it has its pvp uses.

~o~

Riptide (WOOSH!)- instant, mana heavy, HoT

This is the new kid on the block – fast, makes a cool sound and has a fun spell effect.  It’s a very tempting heal to use but, if abused, can eat through your mana.  It’s a spell which can also end up being a bit of a crutch and you should make sure not to use it where the hot will be completely wasted or an instant heal is not needed – often a LHW may be better.  The secondary function of riptide is to boost chain heals and it can be very useful to riptide your tank (the hot is rarely completely wasted in a 5-man) and bounce CH’s onto the melee – keeping your tank topped off and your melee un-dead (despite them standing in fires).

Riptide has a high synergy with other heals – boosting chain heal and proccing tidal waves.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Riptide: Increases the Duration of your riptide by six seconds.

~o~

Earth Shield (ES)- ‘reactive’ heal

Earth shield is flying rocks you can put on another person.  It is very cool! Most people use this on the tank, but in 5-mans it can be a lifesaver for any squishies and can even be used on yourself if you’re having trouble with mobs / attacks hitting you and increasing your cast time – especially so when a boss has a channelled AoE or direct damage attack.

Earth Shield should be up at all times.

Things which can effect this heal:

Improved Shields: Going into enhancement for this is a good idea and part of most standard resto builds – esecially as it also boosts your water shield.

Glyph of Earth Shield: boosts your Earth Shield by 20% – a decent raiding glyph, though I feel it lacks utility for 5-mans in comparison to the other glyphs available.

Spellpower:  Earth shield can be super-charged by trinketing or using other buff effects before putting it on someone – including your totems.  It is good to get into the habit of laying your Flametongue totem (if you’re using it) before you put your earth shield up.

~o~

Healing Stream Totem – Passive ‘hot’

Not a true ‘heal’ per-se, but if you happen to run with a group which does not need your mana-stream totem (you have two paladins, say) then this little totem comes into its own.  It still only works in your own group, but can be used to some effect for low-level, constant damage – allowing you to keep your attention elsewhere for longer and can buy an extra second or two if someone is reduced to very low health suddenly.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Healing Stream Totem:  This boosts the output of your healing stream totem and, whilst nice padding, isn’t really all that great outside of high AoE-damage encounters.

~o~

Earthliving Weapon – weapon imbue, small ‘hot’

This is your restoration weapon imbue – use it, love it and cherish it.  Besides giving you a hefty healing boost, it also sometimes triggers a small hot on the targets it hits.  The healing by Earthliving is never omgimbapwn but there is no reason you should not have this on your weapon at all times whilst healing.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Earthliving Weapon: Earthliving has a 5% increased chance to trigger.

Elemental Weapons:  This is another enhancement talent – one which you may or may not have depending on your build.  Various sources seem to calculate its worth at around 45 sp – so whilst it is a nice boost when you’re just starting, you might eventually want to put your points elsewhere.

Stats

Yes, horrible numbers, but they let you know which shiny gear you want.  You do want shiny gear don’t you?  Yes, yes I thought so! Greedy buggers.

• Int

Intellect is the base stat which determines how big your mana pool is.  It also gives you a small amount of crit per point of intellect (it takes around 166 points of Int to gain 1% spell crit for a Shaman). With the talent Nature’s Blessing – which is pretty bread-and-butter in a resto spec – you’ll also gain a little bit of spellpower from your intellect.  Intellect is also very good regen stat for shamans – which I will go into in the regen section, below.

Intellect is, thus, a pretty well-rounded stat for a shaman – more mana, more crit, more spellpower.

• Bonus Healing (spellpower)

Spellpower is the thing which gives meat to your spell – boosting the shiny green numbers which you see above peoples heads when you heal them.  Using your Flametongue Totem will net you an extra 144 sp.

• Crit Chance

Crit is a stat which gives a lot of bang for your buck: it sometimes increases the size of your heals – those heals can add armor and may proc ancestral awakening if you have the talents.  Crit also gives you come mana back from improved water shield, if you take it.  It is now a very desirable stat for a shaman.

• Mana Regen

Mana regen, or mana per 5.  The number you care about here, when  you mouse over it, is the while casting one.  Generally you want to have about 110-150 before you start doing heroics and closer to 200+ for starting Naxx (including water shield).  This is your ‘base’ regen which you can count on to sit, ticking merrily away, slowly adding to your mana pool.  

• Haste

Haste makes heals faster.  Whilst this has the benefit of getting more heals where they need to be in a short amount of time, if you’re a bit trigger-happy you can end up running yourself out of mana faster.  Two of our heals – Healing Wave and Chain Heal have relatively long cast times and both benefit from having a good bit of haste to reduce time spent casting.  It also benefits us by allowing us to cast and move more frequently if needed.  If you are using your Wrath of Air totem you will get 5% spell haste from that alone.

~o~

You want some of all of these – though you don’t want too much haste to start with.  At first, go for a decent mana pool and mp5, crit as a side dish, and then eventually start putting some haste on top once you’re having few mana problems.  You don’t want no haste at all, you’ll probably end up with around 200 haste rating on your gear very early on even if you’re not trying to stack it.

Shoot for:

• 18k Mana
• 1.9k SP
• 150-200mp5
• ~200 haste rating
• ~20-25% crit

This is pre-Naxx, and  although you can go there with a bit less, these numbers will probably see you most of the way through with little trouble.

Mana Regen

As a healer, a large part of your time may be spent managing your mana.  If you constantly spam spells you will end up running oom, but, of course, not doing enough healing is bad.  Therefore, we have to look at the various methods of mana regen.

First of all, you can forget spirit-based regen – that’s for druids and priests.  Spirit means bugger all to a shaman and is wasted stats on any item which has it.

Intellect Based Regen

Intellect regen is based on the idea of utilising the multiple talents you and others have which return a % of your base mana.  The higher your base mana, thus, the more they return per tick to you.

Replenishment is the ‘best known’ of these and can be given by:

• Survival Hunters
• Shadow Priests
• Retribution Paladins
• Frost Mages
• Destruction Warlocks

This is, of course, if they have each specced into the necessary talent!

The other source of intellect based regen is your Mana Tide Totem.  A lot of people seem to forget this totem and, worse, some seem to think it’s a wonderful thing to never have to use it! First off, it benefits not only you but your whole party (not raid!) so be aware that even if you’re at full mana, others may get something out of you using this totem.  Secondarily, if you have so much mana you are never going below 75% then re-gem or re-enchant or twist around some gear and boost your throughout.  You will always have your mana tide totem,  so you can gear around using it – especially for fights where your heals need to be beefy.

I know not all will agree with me on this point but I see absolutely no point in ending a fight above 50% mana unless you vastly out-gear it, have too many healers, have had a lull to stand around regenning or accidentally took a mana pot just before the end of the fight! 10 Intellect = ~6 mp5 if you can count on replenishment and always use your Mana Tide totem.

Mana Per Five

At the beginning of The Burning Crusade this stuff was shaman-crack – you could not get enough of it, you always wanted more and you’d do a lot to get your fix including hanging around with 24 other people looking for trouble…  However, when Water Shield got its buff – becoming both free to cast and giving a hell of a lot more mp5, the extreme lust for that same stat dropped.

In Wrath, Water Shield gives a whopping 100mp5.  Still, even though you don’t need to stack mp5 to the hilt like in TBC, this little stat, beloved of shamans, is still relatively important.

If you mouse-over your ‘mana regen’ (under spells in your character pane) you’ll see two numbers.  The first is your non-casting mana regen.  That is the rate at which you will regen mana when you’ve not cast something within the last 5 seconds.  The other number, which will be a bit smaller, is your mana-regen whilst casting.  As a shaman, standing around and waggling your tail (or other appendage of choice for orcs and trolls…), will net you very little – you don’t have a huge difference between your casting and non-casting regen like a priest or druid does and cannot regen a whole lot of mana that way in a short time.

Therefore – mp5 is a solid base of incoming mana which is always ticking away in the background.  Having a reasonable amount of this is essential, even in crit-heavy builds.

Crit

Crit heavy builds?  What?!  Crit is for Paladins, isn’t it? Well, yes, but with the homogenisation of gear it made sense for Blizzard to prod the two non-spirit using healing classes closer together so that they can use similar gear.  So where does crit come into the equation?

Improved Water Shield.

This little talent, fully maxed, will allow for a water shield orb to be consumed when you crit on a Healing Wave or 60% of the time on a Lesser Healing Wave.  Each of those little balls of water is ~400 mana (depending on talents and glyphs) – not a huge deal, but it somewhat helps lighten the heavy costs of both HW and LHW.  The one issue with this regen is that it is rng based – if you do not crit you do not get mana back and an unlucky streak may leave you dry.

There is also the other issue of keeping water shield up – if you crit, use your shield up and don’t refresh it then you can end up with a net loss of mana – the best choice is usually to refresh it any time you have a spare global cooldown so that you need not stop healing at an important part of the fight to refresh it.

Talents

5-Man Build

This build ignores healing way and picks up healing focus.  Even after the mechanic change, pushback can be a killer on your longer spells and you’re more likely to have loose mobs chomping on you in a 5 man than a raid.  If you know your tank is solid then you could consider putting points in focused mind, healing way or even some in totemic focus since you’re more likely to be uprooting and replacing your totems more frequently.

Note the recommended glyphs: LHW, Water Mastery and Chain Heal.

Water Mastery glyph works out as 30mp5 so if you feel your mana is in a good place you can drop it and take something with more utility – HW, Riptide, Healing Stream glyphs for example.

Mixed Raid Build

This is my current build and glyphs – I can be assigned to tank heal on one fight and raid the next so I pick up Healing Way and drop elemental weapons.  As much as I’ve never been a huge fan of focused mind it can be useful  in a raid build – though you could easily switch those points to elemental weapons or imp. reincarnation.  Totemic focus is generally not needed in a raid setting as you will often  able to ‘fire and forget’ your totems for the less-than 5-minute duration of most boss fights in Naxx.  Even in Ulduar there aren’t many fights which require repositioning of totems, either.

Tip from Drug:

In a raid situation, 1/3 healing way works pretty good for me. Sometimes you get an unlucky RNG and it takes some time to get the buff to proc, but if you really need to spam HW over a long time, it really does the trick.

Addons

For those who’ve never been healers before:

As a healer, a lot of the information you’re going to be digesting will come in the form of health bars.  You need to be aware that only concentrating on these is bad and can lead to healer-in-a-fire syndrome where you’re so busy healing that you don’t realise you’re bringing about your own doom.

Using a good, specialised unit interface for groups and raids can mean you can spend less time figuring out what’s going on and more time staying out of fires. A good raid unit frame will give you health and mana bars, notification of debuffs and, if you want it, buffs as well as being relatively compact so that they do not obscure your view.

Grid / Healbot / VuhDo

These three addons are those recommended by many healers – VuhDo is a new addon which I’ve not tried yet but it’s gotten some good reviews.  Grid and healbot are both tried and tested with Healbot being said to be the easiest to install and get going, but grid being the more customisable and flexible one with many additional specialist modules.  Personally I use grid and I may do a post about the particular way in which I set up grid in the near future.

This addon simply allows you to cast a spell by clicking on your unit frames of choice rather than selecting a person then hitting a heal or using mouse-over macros.  Personally I like to keep my left hand free for trinkets, nature’s swiftness, tidal force, and push-to-talk so clique is perfect for me.  Having a 5-button mouse really helps in this regard – though you can do every shaman heal in your book with a three-button mouse and modifiers!

It is important that you are able to see curses, diseases and poisons on your unit frames so that you can remove them when needed.

Gear

I started a section on some nice pre-raid pieces and then realised that it really needed a post of it’s own. I’ll link it here when I’m finished with it so <under construction>.

Gems / Enchants Quick Reference

• Meta: Insightful Earthsiege Diamond
• Red: Runed Scarlet Ruby or Luminous Monarch Topaz
• Yellow: Brilliant Autumn’s Glow or Luminous Monarch Topaz
• Blue: Dazzling Forest Emerald or Royal Twilight Opal

• Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending (Wyrmrest Revered) or Arcanum of Burning Mysteries (KT Revered)
• Back: Speed / Greater Speed
• Shoulders: Lesser / Greater Inscription of the Crag or Lesser / Greater Inscription of the Storm
• Chest:  Super Stats / Powerful Stats or Greater Mana Restoration or, if you’re cash strapped Exceptional Mana
• Wrist:  Superior Spellpower
• Hands:  Exceptional Spellpower
• Legs: Azure / Sapphire Spellthread
• Feet:  Greater Vitality / Tuskarr’s Vitality

“Wait, what, Tuskarr’s Vitality?  But that’s a tank enchant!”  In a raiding situation I’d take extra run-speed over a tiny bit of mp5 and hp5.  We are not terribly mobile healers and any little bit helps – especially if many of those you’re going to be healing will have some form of movement boost.  Utility here, for me, wins out over raw stats.

In general I’d always use the cheaper enchants unless you don’t expect to upgrade a piece for a long time – the stat differences are often minimal for the extra expense.

Random Stuff

So you healed at 70…?

Maybe your guild needed an extra resto shammy for raiding, or you switched chars and, for whatever reason, you’ve come into Wrath and you’re not sure ‘what’s changed’.

No down-ranking – You have four direct heals, and none of them is Chain Heal (Rank 5).

Chain Heal is no longer your God – We are now polytheistic and worship all spells more-or-less equally.

Your mana spring totem doesn’t stack with a paladin’s Blessing of Wisdom (improved) so if you have a paladin using that, you should use Healing Stream (or any of the others if they happen to be useful for a particular fight).

You now have a weapon imbue especially for healing – no more stacks of mana oil, woohoo!

Priests still cry about your ‘op raid healing’ despite the gazillion buffs they’ve gotten.  Some things never change.

Practice Makes Perfect

Twee, perhaps, but very true – especially if you’ve never healed before.  Get yourself out there and heal some pvp matches to get used to your key bindings, then hit up some easier instances and, eventually, jump in and grab some heroics.  Never be afraid to tell people you need them to slow down a little bit or wait for you to regen your mana.  If you’re used to playing a priest or druid be aware that you may need to drink a bit more between pulls – shamans don’t regen mana that much faster out of combat than in!

When I first levelled my shaman I was a hyrid ele/resto spec 60-70 so that I could heal.  Without half-decent gear, though, some of the Wrath instances may be tough to heal for an offspec, newbie healer.  Dual specs are expensive but helpful in this regard.  If you cannot afford that then I’d suggest getting to level 78 (or before!) and then switching to a resto spec and then healing your way to 80 from there.  That way, you’ll get plenty of experience, a little gear and, more importantly, realise if healing is for you or not.

Nature’s Swiftness

This spell, contrary to popular belief, does not come married to Healing Wave.  Quite often it will be more useful for you to use in conjunction with Chain Heal so get used to activating it and utilising it in a number of situations.

Links

• Drug @ Shield’s Up and Faulsey @ Faulsey.com – both of whom read over my post and helped me polish it up.  /hug /kudos
• Llyra@ Healing Way – Drug linked me to this  blog – she has a number of awesome posts up which are well worth reading for those new and not-so-new to resto-shamaning.  Specific reccomendations are her post on wanted raid buffs and which totems work in raid or party only.
• Elitist Jerks – Not always the best resource for those brand-new to the class or who are not raiding, but EJ has the number crunching that I don’t.
• Shield’s Up – Drug is a wonderful resto shaman with good articles about best-in-slot gear,  glyphs and raiding as a shaman in general.
• Wowwiki – I am terrible with numbers and stats so most of the above statistics / numbers come from Wowwiki.
• Wowhead – See above.

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I’ve continued my busy streak this week, tidying up loose ends:

Netherwing Exalted

I mentioned that I was using far sight to scout the Netherwing mines out for eggs – one time I managed to far sight outside of existance! I think I centred my far sight a little too high and ended up seeing the  mines from outside of the 3d-space.  Somewhat cool – I could see the crust burster mobs loller-skating underneath the ground.  As you can also see from this screenshot (randomly at the same time), Softi got her mount! Big gratz, Softimoo!

After spending about 4 days grinding eggs, and nearly giving up when it got to stupid-o’clock on the last day, a lucky streak of finds and drops brought me to the eggs I needed to grab exalted Netherwing.  I was so tired I knew I wouldn’t enjoy getting my ‘little ding’ there and then, so I played the delayed-gratification game and left the last egg until I logged in the next morning.

I’m pretty sure we killed this guy, but apparently he’s still hanging out in Black Temple, and now expecting the Dragonmaw Commander to bring him my carcass.  Oh well, sucks to be him.  *ahem* In all honesty, I really do miss Black Temple. Nostalgia is really setting in for ‘the good old TBC days’.  Loving my tbc-style netherdrake, too:

Hordeside Inclinations

Look, Ma, I’m a tauren! I sent a little note to a player who had a mulgore hatchling listed on the auction house – the second I’d tried – and asked if she’d be willing to trade her hatchling for any of the Alliance pets, as I have some seals spare, now.  I got a message back saying she was and only a few hours later was the proud owner of a [Mulgore Hatchling]! On Bloodhoof the horde-side pets are rarely going for anything under 5k gold on the Alliance auction house (and the neutral one!) so I was rather happy to be able to trade – I’ve set myself an amount for spending on pets and that was far and away more than my limit.

I have always been a Tauren at heart, and I miss my horde characters, so having both my kodo and hatchling is soothing to that side of me.  Tauren in spirit, if not in form.

Whelp!

After 15 levels of grinding whelps, a total of 3884 whelpling kills, I finally got one.  I honestly thought the bugger was never going to drop and had resigned myself to moving on if I reached level 50 without getting one.  Cue a great deal of squeeing and joy in guild chat (and real life…heh).  I don’t know if I will have the stamina to go back and try for the other two for a while, but the joy of grinding them far outweighs that of just buying them, so I will, no doubt, eventually subject myself to that particular grind again.

It’ll be odd to actually quest on my priest again – I’ve barely done any so far, just under 200 at level 47.  Outlands in 11 levels.  I think I can manage that…

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Aside from the rampant pet collecting suggested by my last post, I’ve been storming through a number of other achievements…

Argent Tournament

First and foremost I’ve been keeping up with my Argent Crusade dailies – though after I had gotten all of the pets I wanted I gave myself a break and stopped doing it on three characters at once.  So, when I did my dailies for today I grabbed five achievements at once:

Champion of Gnomeregan > Exalted Champion of Gnomeregan

Champion of the Alliance > Exalted Champion of the Alliance > Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance

As much as I do enjoy the dings and titles brought by these dailies I can’t help feel that it’s a little ‘too much for too little’.  I guess that, though, might be because I was already exalted with all of the alliance factions and the argent crusade – if you factor in all of those, the time taken is a lot more.  Still – 6 titles in the space of a few weeks is a pretty big haul!

Now that Avarix has what he wanted (I’m not really that interested in the current mounts – I love my Kodo on Avarix and my Raven mount on Jhai) I am gong to go back and get Jhai the [Silvery Sylvan Stave] and Yjin the [Claymore of the Prophet].  I may also pick up the [Dagger of Lunar Purity] for Jhai but, with the offhands available to me it’s abit of a sidegrade to my [Sulfur Stave], despite that being a dps weapon… /sadface

I keep meaning to do a small video tutorial with various ways to do the jousting since some people seem to still be having trouble doing it – I use several methods based on what I’m fighting and which computer I’m on (the laptop is a lot slower).  Gotta get off my lazy rear and add those before people stop doing it altogether!  I’m also considering a small grid tutorial specifically aimed at shamaning after helping the guild’s other (awesome) resto shaman set it up and failing miserably at explaining in text.

Shamaning

On that note, I’m really glad to finally have another shaman in the guild to talk to.  Whilst I am always wary of new healers (it’s hard to judge if they’re ‘doing it right’ compared to other  roles),  I am very glad to have Sci as my co-shammy healer. He and I have slightly different play-styles and having another resto shammy around means I can be free to tank-heal a bit more!

I think I may do another look into LHW / HW / CH like I did just post 3.0 – I feel that, even in 25 man, LHW and HW are taking a much larger part of my healing quotient and are, in fact, the better way to heal some encounters.  Riptide glyphed and with 2-pc T8 bonus is wonderful, by the way, I’ve become a big fan of the spell and keeping this up on multiple people is really nice in 25 and wonderful in 10-man.  Shamans are not hot healers, I know, but I can’t help but enjoy keeping people topped off or instantly bringing them back from the edge of disaster – though it doesn’t half eat through your mana.  I would like to be able to use the bonus on Hodir but 4pc-t7 boosted Chain Heals are just too nice!

Speaking of 2-pc – I was lucky enough to grab the legs and shoulders (t8 and 8.5 respectively) these last few weeks and have been playing about with them in my tank-healing set.  Whilst pootering about in Dalaran, though, I was amused to note that both my new shoulders and my new weapon were bigger than a gnome is wide – wonderfully modelled here by Grav!

Other Rep

The day before, too, I spammed guild chat with another few milestones hit at once, though these I had not even realised were so close:

The Kirin Tor > Northrend Vanguard / 25 Exalted Reputations

I’m now also working on Ogri’la and Netherwing Rep (hence the orcish nature of the last post!) and, to be honest, I’m really enjoying the old Burning Crusade landscapes – I guess when you don’t have to play it all the time you can look back with rose-tinted glasses.  It’s been fun cruising around Netherwing Ledge looking for eggs and abusing Far Sight to check the mines, and after three days I’m now almost 6k into revered – it’s a lot easier to level when there’s, at most, 3 people grinding the rep /eggs and usually only me by my lonesome!

Priest-let

With her current gear I like to think of my priest as some sort of holy-ninja-priest.  White face mask r cool, k?

I’m now at over 13 levels of grinding whelps and no luck with drops (I’ve had a world-drop epic, but no pet) – I’m working on the dark whelp at the moment – killing circuits of them in Badlands. I figure I can stay there for another few levels before they become so little xp it’s not worth it.  After that it’s ooze time…

I am enjoying my wee priest, though it’s very different to any of the classes I normally play – dotting things up and being generally a little more mobile whilst casting that my druid or shaman ever felt.  I am now considering a second spec, though.  Personally, I’ve always loved the idea of discipline but I intend to try and get as many instances as I can on my way through Outlands / Northrend and was wondering if it would be more worthwhile for me to be holy for those – if it would be a bit easier to ‘learn’ priest healing as holy then switch to disc or whether disc is good enough to do with not-so-great levelling gear and as a newbie priest?  Any help and hints here are appreciated.

Druid

When I’ve had a spare moment from the above I was slotting in runs of UBRS.  Why there?  Well, I wanted to grab myself an [Ace of Beasts] so I could make a [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] for Jhai.  She had two pretty poor trinkets (a green borean tundra one and one of the brewfest ones, if I remember right) and had some trouble with regen in harder instances.  One of the guild’s resto druids, Qain,  had mentioned how nice this trinket could be so I figured that I’d collect my cards.

Despite quite a few runs, I had no luck getting the Ace.  However, Indigo came to the rescue and used a few mats she had to create [Darkmoon Cards] with inscription and lo and behold… an Ace!  So a big thanks to Indi for getting me my first darkmoon trinket!

On that note – I have finally tweaked my druid’s grid to be actually useful for her – with timed hots á la Keeva.  For some reasons poisons and curses aren’t showing, though, and I can’t get wild growth to go where I want it, so further poking of grid is required.  I may post at some point of the length I go to to abuse grid. /grin The new setup is also helping with regen – I’m not clipping my hots as much as I was and tracking lifebloom is so much easier when you can see stacks and time.  I, personally, love the lifebloom changes as they suit what I like abusing lifebloom for – a short, sharp heal which is slightly time delayed – there are so many times where that can come in handy if you’re used to pre-emptive cast healing.

Raiding

Lightwalkers has been progressing through the content at what I think of as a ‘decent’ pace for us – we’re having major trouble with Bloodhoof’s ‘Thursday Fail’ – wherein the server always seems to lag, dc people, fall over, stutter and all of those lovely things even more than usual.  I am sure we’d have gotten further, too, if it wasn’t for Kologarn’s pissing annoying habit of continuing to ‘Grip’ people after they’ve been freed.  Buggy encounters are pure joy…

Still, we’re up to Mimiron on ten, now and have Thorim and Mimiron left on 25 out of the watchers – we haven’t tried Thorim yet due to time constraints imposed by said buggy Kologarn but I don’t think it’ll take us long to down him on 25 given our practice on tens (which has really helped for all boss kills, in my opinion).  We’ve also now completed FL +2 on 10, which was amazingly fun, if a little frustrating at times.

One boss we were having issues on where we should not have is Freya – wtb people who understand STOP DPS, pst. *ahem* It only takes one nuke happy dps to screw that encounter up,  annoyingly, much to the chagrin of the other 24 people.  We got her down eventually, though, and I don’t really consider her a ‘hard’ fight – though it is interesting and I imagine the reason she’s so ‘easy’ is because she scales up so much with the addition of her adds – much like Sartharion +0 is extremely easy for his ‘position’ in the tier hierarchy.

Obligatory Gratuitous Screenshots:

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Lil’ Game Hunter

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Children’s week follows hotly on the heels of Noblegarden this year – a double-whammy of eventful goodness.  Children’s week has fewer achievements than most holidays, but it has trickier ones and a whole pile of quests to do and some nice rewards for pet collectors.

Achievements

For The Children

• Home Alone
• Daily Chores
• School of Hard Knocks
• Bad Example
• Aw, Isn’t It Cute?
• Hail to the King, Baby

Not needed for the meta, but an available achievement:

• Veteran Nanny

As of last night, Home Alone was bugged and resetting all the time – I would expect that we’ll see a patch or fix for this soon if it’s not already been done since I went to sleep!

Bad Example requires several cooking-only items alongside a pile of vendor-bought treats so I whipped up a quick list of where each comes from.

Stormwind / Orgrimmar

Usually this ice cream is buyable from Shimmering Flats, but for the duration of the holiday there are vendors in Stormwind and Orgrimmar where you can purchase some ice cream!  You’ll also need this ice cream for giving to your old-world orphan so don’t throw any spare away! (it sells in stacks of five, like most of this food does)

• [Tigule and Foror's Strawberry Ice Cream]

Dalaran Vendor

Aimee, the high elf vendor near the northern bank in Dalaran sells these treats – the lovely cake slice comes from the Lovely Cake she sells – you get 5 pieces per cake you buy so you could share with a friend of take them all and send them to alts.

• [Lovely Cake Slice]
• [Red Velvelt Cupcake]
• [Dalaran Donut]
• [Dalaran Brownie]

Crafted

You’ll either need to craft these, get a guildie to make them, or buy them off of the auction house.  Personally I recommend not going to the auction house as, unless you’re lucky, delicious chocolate cakes will cost a fortune.  Happily for me, someone was selling the cupcakes for 1g / cake.  Extortionate, really, except for the fact others were selling northern eggs – which are required to make them -  for about 15g / 1.  A great place to farm small eggs for the chocolate cake recipe is just outside of Auberdine – i’m not sure if there’s a closer place for the horde (see below) but the moonkins here have a 90+% drop rate and are packed relatively close.

• [Delicious Chocolate Cake]
• [Tasty Cupcake]

Indigo:  Second, a little hint about the small egg farming: belf starter zone is full of dragonhawks with a 100% droprate, and about 50% chance that they actually drop 2.

Quests

Remember: All of the achievements require you to have an orphan out, do not complete the ‘Back to the Orphanage’ or ‘Warden of the <Faction>’ quests until you’re done with achievements as you will then not be able to take out your orphan any more!

Sephrenia:  You can give your orphans back to get your pet rewards. If you talk to one of the matrons again she will give you a new orphan to care for during the rest of the week. I tested it in SW, so is not just a rumour :D

Stormwind / Orgrimmar Quests

Stormwind Orphan // Orgrimmar Orphan

• A Warden of the Alliance // A Warden of the Horde
• Spooky Lighthouse // Gateway to the Frontier
• The Stonewrought Dam // Down at the Docks
• The Bough of the Eternals // Lordaeron Throne Room

Each of these is a visit to somewhere reasonably close to each faction’s main cities – having extra hearth cooldowns here is handy and the new 30-min cooldown will probably help a lot but if you don’t have this luxury then I reccomend:

Alliance: Start in Ironforge – > Fly to Thelsamar – Ride to Stonewrought Dam -> Fly to Westfall – Ride out to the Lighthouse -> Fly to Stormwind – Boat to Thelsamar -> Fly to Darnassus.  Don’t forget to pick up some ice cream for your orphan whilst you’re in Stormwind!

Horde: Start in Orgrimmar -> Fly to Ratchet- Ride down to the Docks -> Fly to Crossroads or Orgrimmar – Ride to the Mor’shan Rampart -> Ride back to Orgrimmar – take the Zeppelin to Undercity – Ride into the throne room. Don’t forget to pick up some ice cream for your orphan whilst you’re in Orgrimmar!

I suggest you save your hearthstone for once these are done, as you’ll get more quests which require zipping about the world:

• You Scream, I Scream… // You Scream, I Scream…
• Jaina’s Autograph // Cairne’s Hoofprint
• A Warden of the Alliance // A Warden of the Horde

If you got your ice cream on the way past Orgrimmar and Stormwind, the first should be easy.  For Jaina’s Autograph you can portal to Ironforge -> fly to Menethil and take the boat or, if you want to be lazy, portal to Gadgetzan (Caverns of Time) and fly there.  The final part requires you to return your orphan back to the capital city you got them in.

Shattrath Quests

Alliance Orphan // Horde Orphan

• A Trip to the Dark Portal // A Trip to the Dark Portal
• Auchindon and the Ring of Observation // Visit the Throne of the Elements
• Time to Visit the Caverns // Time to Visit the Caverns
• Jheel is at Aeris Landing! // Hch’uu and the Mushroom People
• Time to Visit the Caverns // Time to Visit the Caverns

These are all in Outlands – if you have an epic flyer, use that, if not, flightpaths are your friends.  It’ll take a little while as Outlands is pretty big but all of them are relatively easy.  For the Alliance, visiting the Ring of Observation, you need to take your orphan right up to the meeting stone to get credit.

• The Seat of the Naaru // Now, When I grow Up…
• Call on the Farseer

I’m not sure what they’ve done with the horde side quest since they took Mu’ru away – I know it used to have a follow up to the ‘visiting Silvermoon’ section, too, but I can’t find any information on that and I haven’t been on my horde character for a while now.  Any info from someone whose done it would be appreciated!  Once this is all done…

• Back to the Orphanage // Back to the Orphanage

Most of these are easy enough to fly around and, hopefully, by the time you get to ‘Time to Visit the Caverns’ your hearth will be off cooldown.  Remember you can portal directly to the Caverns of Time from Dalaran or you can go from Shattrath if you’ve got revered reputation with the Keepers of Time.

PvP

Child Soldiers…

Once again there’s some pvp in the event’s achievements.  I didn’t mind the other ones too much but the ones for children’s week are particularly obnoxious. I can only offer what I was trying for those who cannot get premades:

• AB: Either be lucky and get to the farm / stables first or wait until a flag is capped and you see all the horde run off.  If you’re lucky you might get a hordie / alli to ‘trade’ captures with you.
• WSG: This was the most painful for me – I was eventually ’saved’ from my plight of fighting 6 people for the return by a friendly tauren (Achuk?) who ran into our flag room, took the flag and dutifully waited to be killed.  I tried to return the favour but some people seemed intent on winning or something silly like that…  If you want to help the other faction you can run into their room, spam a /wait macro, grab the flag and then click the buff to remove it and drop the flag.  If they aren’t silly you can do this a few times for everyone to get their achievements.
• EOTS: Stand in the middle and ignore the pained cries from your teammates who’re not doing the achievements.  Thunderstorm is lovely here by the way.  Spell reflect is not! Hehe.
• AV: Either run down the bottom and hope you’re fast enough and get to a tower before someone else or stay up the top end and re-cap horde towers once they take them.  Otherwise, hope you get a friendly hordie who is kind enough to take the flag not one, but four or five times to let you all have a shot at taking the flag.  Roben, I salute you!

I think that Blizzard picked the wrong kind of things  for this achievement – they encourage bad play and I get the feeling that it will only frustrate pvpers to have a bunch of pve nubs come in and ruin their games just to get achievements done.  I know there are some pvpers who pve and vice versa but I would guess by what I seen last night that the pve-ers who care about achievements outnumber those who care about winning games…

On the up-side, as you may be able to see from my blog’s sidebar I  earned a few pvp-based achievements last night from these:

• Not In My House
• Storm Capper

Rewards

Title

For all of the achievements complete you get the title Matron or Patron.  It’s not a title I’ll be using but I guess it’s kind of cute and will probably be nice for some people on RP servers or for those who are guild Mums.

Reputation

Doing all of the holiday quests nets a tidy little packet of reputation for your faction’s cities.  If you’re not already exalted or can’t be bothered doing the argent dailies for rep, then make sure to do these quests and boost your rep!

Pets

The yearly pet reward for Children’s Week will be a welcome boost to many people’s collections – especially those like me who’re sitting so very close to 75 pets (i’ve had no luck with baby dragons and crocs nor do I have the MgT pet on Ava – chainging mains sucks sometimes, hehe).

From the Stormwind // Orgrimmar orphans:

• [Piglet's Collar]
• [Turtle Box]
• [Rat Cage]

From the Shattrath orphans:

• [Egbert's Egg]
  
• [Elekk Training Collar]
• [Sleepy Willy]

You could always take the [Curmudgeon's Payoff], of course, but 5 gold really is hardly worth it these days unless you’re really anti-pets.

As a small aside, if you have a warcraftpets account, remember to update it! (though the poor site is a little sickly at the moment).

Orphans

I still can’t get past hoping that they’ll add orphans for each faction.  It’d be nice for my druid to take a night elf child around and teach them about Darnassus and its alliance with the other nations, or a Tauren child for my horde druid, to show them why we must ally with questionable types!  I guess I just feel it’s a little odd than only four factions seem to have any children running about.

Replayability

This is something I like to look at with all events – is it worthwhile to do again, has it been updated?  Children’s week was updated last year and I had hoped they would add another set of quests this year for Dalaran (or the Oracles / Frenzyhearts).  With Noblegarden so close, though, and such a big content patch, too, I can’t blame them but I do rather hope they add something new next year.

Children’s week is rather odd in the fact that year-to-year the same rewards are available but you’re limited to two of six – or more realistically, you’re limited to two sets of one out of three.  This means that to get the full compliment of ‘items’ you have to re-do it each year.  I do like this to some extent – though, as a character who has changed mains twice now, it can be a little frustrating.  It does keep the interest in the holiday alive, though, and Children’s Week was one of the few events I always seen people participating in pre-achievements and pre-epic rewards.

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First, a minor rant I want to get out of the way…

I love events, a look over this blog should tell you that – I also like achivements – I find them fun – I like that they encourage me to seek out certain things and do silly stuff I might not otherwise have tried but I am getting a bit tired of the holiday ones. Now, don’t get me wrong – I still like the little dings of the achievements there and I don’t mind a little extra work to get them done and spending maybe an hour or so more on an event than I might have done otherwise but achivements have meant my holiday fun is being ruined by people who don’t give a shit about the event but want the achievement points or the proto-drake.

I’m not really talking about the spawn camping, the egg-stealing and general asshattery going on. Shit happens, people do stupid things for pixels, whatever.  That I can deal with or write about and thusly feel better.  What I really, really dislike is none of those.  It’s comment like so:

“this holiday is shit”

“I don’t want to farm these stupid eggs”

“omg this is so boring”

I can even understand that they might not enjoy an event, that’s fine.  But I really, really, don’t want to have to listen to it constantly.  It’s like coming to my birthday and saying ‘hi, this party kinda sucks… you only have jelly and no ice cream’.   If you’re determined to have a bad time, you will and by sitting whining about it, you’re affecting my ability to have a good time too.  There are ways to express dislike which are less ruinous of others fun, in my opinion – “I don’t like this event, it’s a bit grindy for me” is better than “this sucks, I cba”.

Even better, you have the choice not to do it at all.  You want your proto drake?  Noone is forcing you to do it – there are other ways to get a proto drake.  It’s like you’re farming for the time-lost and whining about it not spawning fast enough or never being there when you go – stop doing it or stop whining about it.

I actually was personally enjoying the event – I did camp a small spot, but mainly because my wrist got sore after running in a circle for a while.  Whilst I was there I ended up chatting and doing silly stuff with the others who had settled down to guard their little patches and chatted away quite happily, commiserating their 8th dress or celebrating a bunny pet.

As I see it, holiday’s are a social occassion – many people are pushed into a smaller area and are completing the same thing at the same time – they are meant as chances to get together, have fun and bump into people we wouldn’t usually.  If you are so jaded that you cannot see your way to having fun during an event which turns you into a bunny, or asks you to wear silly clothes, or run around planting flowers in the desert or chasing female orcs then I suggest the problem is not the event, but you.

Anyway…

Pretty in Pink with Pets

I had gone to Shattrath to see what the daily fishing quest was and, because of things I’d been doing just before that, both my hearthstone and my astral recall were on cooldown for another few minutes.  Since I was sitting around doing nothing I figured I’d take a few pictures of my new brood and erm wardrobe.

Bunny ears look rather oddly like they should be part of a male draenei’s body… Taking a picture of a rabbit whose ‘idle’ behavior is to run around is no mean feat – he just wouldn’t sit still! I really like the Dun Morogh cub – the proportions and colour are cute and, of course, who could not love the sapling – your own personal dancing treelet!  It’s possibly a good thing that Shattrath City is so quiet these days with how much I was cavorting about.

Shadow Priesting

When not doing my argent dailies i’ve been taking a little time to play on my baby priest – she hit level 40 and I gleefully snapped up shadowform – I’ve always liked the effect it has and how it turns mounts into shadow-mounts, too.  I’m not too sure I like the fact it turns my black stallion’s feathers an odd pink colour, though!

Pot Luck

Finally, I found these nodes in borean tundra when I was doing my fishing daily.  One was moonglow cuttlefish, the other deep sea monsterbellies!

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Noblegarden, the most underrated of holidays and the only one I’ve never managed to participate in! I am looking forward to experiencing the newly extended event but the fact I’ve not done it myself (and that few people have via the ptr as its testing phase was short there) will mean that some information may not be as entirely accurate as I’d like it to be.

Achievements

Meta:

• Noble Gardener (A) // Noble Gardener (H)

Sub-achievements:

• I Found One!
• Chocoholic
• Hard Boiled
• Spring Fling (A) // Spring Fling (H)
• Noblegarden (A) // Noblegarden (H)
• Shake your Bunny-Maker
• Desert Rose
• Blushing Bride

Two other achievements directly associated with the event, but not required to get the meta achievement for Noblegarden are:

• Dressed for the Occasion
• Sunday’s Finest

The achievement Chocolate Lover is also associated with this holiday but it is the prequel to Chocoholic and so will be gotten on the way to that achievement should you decide to do it.

Quests

Like most events, there aren’t a whole lot of quests which come with Noblegarden

Spring Collectors (A) // Spring Gatherers (H)

which lead to

The Great Egg Hunt (A) // The Great Egg Hunt (H)

Nothing much, but a small introduction and gives you an idea of how the event is run – like most holiday questlets.

Egg Hunting

Whilst eggs will be in similar areas to previous years (iIn the secondary starting areas such as Goldshire, Razor Hill and the like) they will apparently be more common and, no matter how many are trying to find them,  there will be available eggs (the first comment on this item references a blue post). Of course, even if eggs are constantly spawning as others are used there will still be a mad scrabble for them – I think I will probably make my way to Dolanaar because it’s inconvenient enough to get to compared to the other starting zones that it will hopefully be quieter.

Almost the whole event is based around egg collecting – they are the currency you need to buy items and, if you’re lucky, the items themselves so that you don’t need to buy them in the first place.   The currency itself is also used to do quests and is eaten up by some achievements – 100 chocolates alone for Chocoholic, so expect to be collecting quite a few.

Of course, with 3.1 items are now able to be sold back to the vendor for their purchase price in non-gold ‘currency’ within two hours of buying them.  This means that if you’re not bothered about keeping the items, but need to use them for achievements, you can buy the items, do the achievement and sell them back – so don’t do Chocoholic until after you’ve done all of your other achievements! *ahem*.

RNG

Unlike the other events so far, the RNG is mitigated by a system whereby you can buy the items if you do not find them in eggs – this means that people are not subject to not getting this section of  their “What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been” achievement due to bad luck.

Of course,  it wouldn’t be a blizzard holiday event without some form of RNG based luck so two achievements – Sunday’s Finest and Dressed for the Occasion – require you to find the items in eggs, not buy them.   Luckily, as mentioned, these are not needed for the holiday meta achievement but I would guess that this will still frustrate some avid achievement hunters.

Shinies

• [Tome of Polymorph: Rabbit]
• [Elegant Dress]
• [White Tuxedo Shirt]
• [Black Tuxedo Pants]
• [Spring Circlet]
• [Spring Robes]
• [Spring Flowers]
• [Egg Basket]
• [Blossoming Branch]

The first six come from eggs or from the vendor for chocolates, the last three come from the quests – though the blossoming branches can also be bought for eggs.  Blossoming branches can be used to help in completing achievements so make sure you don’t use them all up randomly until you’re done with ‘Hard Boiled’.

Shiny of the Event

I’m giving one item a spotlight here as I feel that it’s one of those little things which Blizzard has added to  the game which is just a nice touch – one of the things you can imagine started as a ‘wouldn’t it be kinda cool if…’.

[Spring Rabbit's Foot]

Wrath brought a plethora of new things for non-combat pets – it was the expansion which has really seen ncp’s go from being something not many people (except the dedicated few) wasted bag slots on to something which many people are interested in – even if only because of achievements!

Not only do pets have grooming kits, leashes, balls and the like, they can also act out little skits with other ncps – such as that between the Black Tabby and Stinker.  The pet from the Noblegarden event, whilst unassuming in its looks, is another step in that direction:

Noblegarden Rabbit Video

For those unable to view video’s or who just don’t want to – the rabbits, when brought next to others of their own kind, create little lovehearts, and erm.. the best word for it is ‘eject’ eggs into the surrounding area… which hatch into cute baby bunnies.   If that wasn’t enough, if one rabbit is then put away the remaining one’s heart will break – identical to the way the loved and heartbroken buffs looked during ‘Love is in the Air’.

The achievement ’spring fling’ is based around doing this, but I hadn’t quite expected much more than just bringing them near each other and pop, achievement, move onto the next… This is just absolutely awesome in my opinion – it’s a small thing but a nice detail which makes it more than just a fire and forget achievement and pet.

Reccomended Reading

Kaliope has a great Noblegarden guide which gives you tips on how to find eggs and get your achievements more easily!

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This week has been pretty mad – between running 10 and 25-man  Ulduar and all of the new quests available.  Lightwalkers has taken down Flame Leviathan with one tower up on both 10 and 25.

…but this didn’t leave us with enough time to kill XT on 25 (yes, I know he’s not the easiest next choice)  with some tactics changes we hope to deconstruct him next raid.  Unfortunately our raids are short so we don’t get a long time to work on bosses.  It was some solid progess, though, and I really am enjoying the challenge again – especially as a healer, things are hellishly hectic! *grin*

Dual Specs

When not doing raids I’ve been taking part in all of the other new things 3.1 brought us – two of my characters have dual specs though I haven’t even utilised Jhai’s second spec as can’t decide whether to go cat-dps, boomkin or resto as my offspec! Probably it’ll end up being whatever people need first.

On Avarix, I’m completely in love with dual-specs – rocking a pvp-elemental which is also nice to grind with for offspec.   It’s so nice not to take an age just to kill some mobs and dailies have just become trivial by comparison to what I had before.  Of course, I’ve already made the mistake of forgetting which spec I’m in – I was thinking Grid was copletely broken as it wouldn’t let me Earth Shield people.  Luckily I realised the actual reason for this before we engaged the boss! Hehe.

Fishing

The RNG seems to have been very much in my favour these last few days with the fishing daily.  On the first day all I got was a price of junk glass but on the second?  A [Jeweled Fishing Pole] and a  [Tiny Titanium Lockbox].  For those not in the know, the lockboxes seem to often contain the new epic gems – stormjewels and, true to form, I picked up a  [Rigid Stormjewel] alongside a few other blue-quality gems.  Talk about score.  I sold the gem for a silly amount (seriously, who pays 400g for a gem?) as I wouldn’t use it.  Sadly, I won’t be able to use the pole in higher fishing areas as I have a fishing line on my [Mastercraft Kalu'ak Fishing Pole] but I spent plenty of time fishing salmon and musselback sculpin with it for the guild’s quota of fish feasts.  I am amused at my big male draenei using what looks like a Cardcaptor Sakura weapon.

On that note, [Fish Feasts] are not longer BoP, thank goodness! I hadn’t noticed this in the patchnotes so it came as a pleasant surprise when we were pondering what to do with the over-500 fish myself and another guild fisherman had stuffed into the guild bank.

Why so many fish?  Well, we were both wanting a [Sea Turtle], of course! I’ll let the picture say it…

There is a completely unsubstantiated rumour that people are finding a higher drop rate when having the Ghostfish fishing daily and fishing in Borean Tundra [Musselback Sculpin] pools.  I wrote this off as spurious but, oddly enough, guess when I got mine? One of the guild’s other prolific fishers also got his in the exact same circumstances – though we had both been fishing for hours prior to that.

Now off to do another round of dailies…

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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.

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