Talk about that Druid Spec

We were talking about Caterwaul's feral / resto specs via email, but I think it's worth having this in public (since that's what gets the hits, right?)

Eric said:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceoccuqkbA0u

this is what I was thinking about for bear, to get more rage from enrage.

So Phil said:
That's close to where I'm leaning - with http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrzceRcczikbA0u:0zncMz

For resto, I'm thinking http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0VG0zZZf0IufuxwuAcsVo even though it's not as nourish-centric as I could get, and I don't know that living seed is effective enough to find a way to keep either. Still, might be a little better than my current build if only for the haste.

So Eric says:
Two questions - how useful is improved leader of the pack? The healing from it is good for soloing, but isn't really noticeable. Or wasn't when I last thought about it - 6 sec cooldown is a long enough time that it won't save your bacon very much. Better than nothing, I suppose, especially since with swipe spam you're guaranteed to proc it every time it's off cd. Or is it for the mana regen while you're in forms? King of the Jungle is a hard talent to pass up - 15% bonus
damage right at the start of the pull is pretty solid, since that's when you're establishing aggro. It's also a significant boost to catform DPS.

On the resto side, I'm not so sure about Revitalize. It's a really handy talent for the rest of the party, but I'm not sure it's worth reducing your healing throughput to get. Hard to say - at only 15% proc rate you'd expect to see around 0.4 energy/sec as a rogue if there was 100% uptime on you. 0.8 if you had rejuv and wild growth. But you regen 10 energy/sec, or usually around 14 or 15 really, once you factor in talents and stuff. So overall, it's not a really compelling way to spend three points. I've definitely noticed the energy procs when they happen on Jill, and they're nice, but they're relatively rare. I have yet to tank any real endgame situations, though, and the bonus rage on the tank might well be worth the price of admission. Most DK tanks have plenty of runic power.

Are you getting the glyph of rapid rejuvination? That might be the reason druids are stacking haste now, if your haste means your rejuv ticks faster, that's just more HPS flat-out. Especially since rejuv lasts so long to begin with.

Then again, I'm not keeping current on all things druid. The interesting thing seems to be (upon perusing EJ and some other forums) that druids don't really have a "one true spec" cookie cutter. There's a lot of different options for them, situational to gear, content, raid makeup, etc. Which makes them pretty interesting, actually.

To which Phil replies:
The rapid rejuv + haste trick is nice, but really the reason endgame druids are going gaga for haste (and are so pissed about the nerf to GotEM doubling the haste cap) is that the perception is that for a main tank raid healer, getting your nourish cast time and the gcd down to 1 second is vital. Personally, not being in that role, and being more of a group healer as a result, I don't have the need or desire to go 18 into balance for more haste and skip a lot of great group healing tanlents, plus rework my gems and enchants to get an effective haste of 800-something, but at the same time, a faster gcd means i can refresh my rejuvs quicker and faster nourish casts mean I can get them off faster and go on to other things. I think getting a balance between the HoT and flash heal sides of the coin is probably the way to go.

I think I'll end up moving a point from empowered touch (-10% bonus heal bonus to nourish) over to the one that adds 5%/point to nourish's crit rate, that 200ish spellpower probably isn't as good as a visible difference in the rate of +3000ish heals I get off, especially for a spell that's used to stop death - for a rolling hot the other scenario might be better, but nourish crit is going to save lives.

I might actually drop the glyph of rapid rejuvenation, to be honest, as my haste goes up. I'm pushing some pretty big rejuv numbers as it is and the glyph ticks the same number of times in a shorter duration, which means more frequent refresh, which means more mana burn and fewer free gcds for other heals. Adding some time to the rejuv duration would give me a chance to do more spot-heals and wild growth refreshes between rejuv refreshes. I might go back to the glyph of innervate which is a pretty substantial bonus that'll really help in places like HoR.

I think that revitalize is more useful with my healing style than it might be with other trees out there because I do tend to keep rejuv going on a lot of people, and in boss fights or splash trash, it's on everyone all the time, and I toss wild growth around a lot, either in addition to rejuv or instead of on trash pulls I'm not worried about because I try to give that revitalize proc chance cheaply if possible (though, the radius of wild growth can be an issue depending on party composition and the fight in question). If I was not as aggressive with party HoTs, it'd be a more questionable use of 3 points, especially since that style would need to improve nourish a lot, but I think that it's a situationally valid buy - like the 3% crit pvp talent, it just fits what I'm doing.

As far as enrage goes - I've noticed that when I'm able to get the show on the road and chain pull, the skill isn't off cooldown when the next fight starts and I have rage banked anyway, so KotJ doesn't come into play because I'm not using enrage. Plus, the easiest way to get to KotJ is to drop constant damage from something like naturalist, and I'd rather be more steady. In the end, I really think my feral spec is pretty good (it's a cookie cutter, afterall) and it's my technique that needs work. I could respec to compensate for that shortcoming, but sacrifice some potency when I'm running correctly to get there, or I could L2P and not have the problem to begin with. I think if I took the time to do nothing more than shift-to-pull, mark targets consistently, and to tell teh dps to let me get a couple of swipes in before they started dpsing a few times each run I'd be cured.

Or, I could stick to my original plan and only tank for guild-heavy groups, because we're not idiots.

Prompting Eric to quip on his way to the grocery store:

Also-also, we should copy-paste this discussion (the spec part at least) onto the blog. It's the kind of meaty back-and-forth that people might like to read about class mechanics.

Which caused Phil to post all this in our guild forums. But it's also good here.

That's so nine months ago

What's with all of the hunters rocking the Nessingwary 4000 all of the sudden? I hadn't seen (or used) one for ages before 3.3 came out, but in the last three or four days it seems like every single hunter I've grouped with is carrying one around. It got to the point where I started inspecting players to see if there was a new gun out there that recycled the model.

It's very odd seeing a guy in full T9 with a gun that's inferior to a bunch of naxx drops.

Have we turned a corner in the dungeon finder lifecycle? Are we seeing the second wave of toons coming into the queues with nothing better than crafted gear? Is it just coincidence? Why didn't they use the red version that's on the counter of the ammo shot in Dalaran instead?

T9 is the new black

While I can find very little to say which is anything but complimentary about the new random dungeon system (as the fact that it has consumed my life and that it seems to think I want to run HoS as a daily hardly count), I can still muster sufficient negativity to pen at least one lament in response to the new tool - which is to say that people really are overgeared these days.

Sure, it's great fun to get all that swag that just a few weeks ago was just out of reach for your main, but on the other side of that coin, characters who have not been played much recently and newly-80 characters are facing a gearing deficit which is reminiscent of the late vanilla days.

That said, as steep and severe as the difference in gear between the typical main and the average alt is now, there is at least one massive difference as compared to the days before BC dropped - accessibility is night and day. In vanilla, I knew I had no chance of catching up to the better-geared of my friends, at least in this era I can get up to par with a few weeks of random dungeons.

And the random dungeon system does do a good job of helping that fresh-faced toon through the gearing arc - anything that drops is almost certainly won uncontested on a need roll, since no one needs heroic drops anymore, and the matching system seems to do a fair job of mixing the people who can't quite cut it with those who can - though it has become all too common a sight for people to berate and taunt those who havn't quite caught up yet, which is just terrible considering that those who make the loudest noises about such things are dripping with badge gear themselves.

But above and beyond all of that, the place I'm really noticing the negative impact of the hot and cold running emblems of triumph is in aesthetics. Everyone looks even more homogenized than before, and they all looked pretty bog-standard before. Where once you would say that the lackluster pallete and general theme of LK gear made everyone more or less look the same, now they really do look exactly the same. Every warrior has the same shoulders, every Death Knight is running around with the same axe. Again, it's a repeat of the late vanilla era when the ubiquity of tier 0 and 0.5 gear made the average trip to ironforge akin to stepping into a hall of mirrors.

I can only hope that as the elites work their way through ICC that some degree of variety re-emerges as we at least find ourselves with a population divided into two gear sets, rather than just one. WoW's lack of outward appearance customization has long been a point of contention for some, and a point of indifference for most, but this blogger at least wishes we didn't all look exactly the same.

Leveling the Warrior: Protection at 51

I know I promised to give an overview of arms leveling up to 40, but the truth is: I'm not interested in Arms anymore. It really isn't anywhere near as compelling as protection leveling, especially from level 51 on. From level 1 to 50, you can make a good case for arms: you've got a big enough damage output that you can kill anybody you face, and if you get a multiple pull you've got tools for that - sweeping strikes, cleave, and if you change stances - whirlwind. The downside is that your health pool drops relatively quickly, so you spend time eating, and a 4+ multipull can lead to problems with dying. Since you don't have any really good ways to escape combat, and you don't have stealth, this can be an issue.

Protection on the other hand can easily deal with 4 mobs at once - it's better that way, since with shield block up you don't take much (or any) damage, and all those hits are a constant source of rage via shield specialization. Spam cleave and go to town. From 1-50, protection is a decent way to level, although you end up taking longer to kill solo mobs, you can handle multimob grinds with ease and you hardly ever have to stop to eat.

At 51, it all changes for the better, because you get two talents that totally revolutionize your play: Warbringer and Devastate. Devastate is great because it's a spammable attack that does decent damage. Before, you have to sit and wait for a revenge proc or for shield slam to cool down before you had a button to press. Now you've got devastate on GCD. My devastate is relatively cheap (between focused rage and a point in puncture), and at later levels with sword and board, will proc a free shield slam from time to time (which is very significant given how hard shield slam hits, but how much rage it costs).

Warbringer is also awesome: it makes charge available to use in defensive stance, and able to use in combat. Unlike the similar talent in arms (Juggernaut), it doesn't extend the cooldown on your charge. So now you have a great way to open combat, one that generates rage to boot. Even better, since you can charge while in combat, you can do stuff like round up a couple of mobs on your horse, then charge the last guy you want to fight. In long fights, you might still be in combat when the cooldown breaks, which makes charge useful for picking up runners, especially the ones you forgot to cleave (or the caster mobs which run off and start shooting at you from range.

Leveling Radish (who is now 60) has felt like two very different chapters. Before 51, the going was acceptable, but a little slow. I had to deal with rage starvation and boring waits in combat. I didn't die much (or take much damage), and if I ever wanted, I could get an instant PuG for an at-level instance. But it was still a lot of work grinding the levels. Starting at 50 when I got devastate, and moving on since then, Protection is the only tree for me.

Certainly Unexpected

I do suck at alts, unfortunately, that turns out to mean that my hunter is not getting out much anymore.

I'm not sure exactly when the tipping point from main to alt happened, but it's probably best traced back to the day I decided to log into the then-61 druid and run her up to 80 so I'd have some more role options.

I've really never put the druid down for more than a night since.

At first, it was level grinding, endless level grinding. Any huntering meant missed bubbles, so the hunter could wait.

Then it was gearing up. Any huntering meant missed dungeon drops and badges, the the hunter could wait.

And now it's preference. Any huntering meant not tanking or healing, so the hunter can wait.

There's just so many reasons I prefer to be a druid right now. With the dungeon finder and lots of gear still to gather up from badges there's endless opportunities for both the more enjoyable instance content and tangible rewards from every single run. And if I am going to be running instances, I'd just rather tank or heal. In those roles I have a 50% contribution to the success or failure of the run, as a dps I have little or no impact on the run - any three dps will be ok, but a good tank and healer makes the group happen, and if I am in one of those roles, I know I can trust it.

Plus, I just like those roles. Being a hunter, especially a marksman hunter is akin to being a turret, and it's a bit dull doing little more than managing a shot stack and staying out of the fire. The other roles have tension, responsibility, and dynamism. It's just more compelling.

All that doesn't even touch on queue times. A hunter has ten minute queue times on a good day if you're not grouped up with a buddy who's picked a shortage role - meanwhile, with the druid I have to wait about a minute, maybe two to get a job as a tree and if I'm in the mood to bear for my badges, a group is a a guaranteed instant pop. I can run more dungeons with less downtime as druid.

So there it is. I was logging onto Barls every day to do the cooking daily while I was trying to score the cooking hat achievement, but a main that doesn't make, and once a week he flies out to Dragonblight to fish up the druid's dragonfin ration, but that would seem to be his lot in life now - he's the toon that handles my main's food.

I'm actually feeling more than a little guilty about that. I've spent the better part of the last 4 years or so playing that old oft-renamed dwarf. For all of those years I was terrible at alts, nothing was ever able to tear me away from the hunter. I wore my inability to play other characters as a form of infamy. Sure, I was filled with envy when Eric was running around on his druid, wondering what life would be like if I'd never abandoned my first toon, that poor level 30 druid on some server or another wondering what he did wrong to be neglected so much, but it was no more able to pull me away from my hunter than my incessant regret that I wasn't playing a troll has ever been able to get me to either reroll or faction change over to do so.

Turns out that my attachment to my hunter is inversely proportional to the amount of pugging I do. All those years I couldn't give up the gun were spent almost always doing solo stuff, and I still say the hunter is better at that, but right now dungeon finder and badge gear is the flavor of the week, and the druid is the spoon. Or something.

The question is, though, what will happen when Cat gets all of her badge gear and I'm sick and tired of ret paladins tossing consecrate before I have enough rage to swipe a multipull, what will happen when I'm just plain done with pugs and puggers and missing seeing the world outside of instances?

Don't feel too bad for old Barls, his time will come back around.

Leveling the Warrior: Protection at 40

Yesterday, level 40 came and went for Radish. A few exciting things happen at level 40. Every class gets a fast horse and dual spec. Of course not everybody buys dual spec at 40, but Radish is my alt and I can afford it. Plus, I want to compare specs. Another really important thing happened at 40 as well: Shield Slam and Mortal Strike.

Up to this point, a lot of warrior leveling is just sitting, staring at the screen. Unlike the rogue, death knight, and druid, your pre-40 warrior doesn't have anything to do with spare GCDs. You engage a mob, apply rend, maybe do a demoralizing shout to reduce incoming damage, hit thunderclap if you've got the rage, and wait for the mob to die. Sometimes you wait a while. I've taken to using mocking blow as a damaging move while solo, it hits reasonably hard, especially if you get your target to 22% and he starts running away before you hit again to make him executable. Against single targets, thunderclap doesn't look so hot on the damage charts, but it's better than nothing. In prot spec with a shield, you can at least revenge from time to time, but you don't have execute or victory rush on the other hand, so it's a wash.

This changes at 40, and really would have changed sooner if I had been arms all the way, but 40 was when I picked up arms as a dual spec. Here are my two specs at 40: Protection / Arms. I'll talk about protection today, and arms pretty soon. The one thing I'll point out is that I skip anticipation and vigilance in this build. I've had no trouble tanking thus far, and I find that the talents you usually skip to pick those up in a standard raiding tank spec are too worthwhile while leveling.

The funny thing about protection spec is that you have to fight in defensive stance for most of your moves to work. This not only applies a flat 5% damage penalty to your damage, there's the opportunity cost of not having 10% ArP or 3% crit from being in battle or berserker stance. Plus, you've got a 1H weapon and fewer damage talents. However, you can do a lot of things still, provided you look at your defensive talents properly.

First of all: shield block is a DPS skill for you. Whenever you block somebody, it lights up revenge (a nice high-damage move) and you generate 5 rage. So use shield block on cooldown. Shield block also increases the damage of your shield slam, which is calculated based on your block value. Secondly: with the talent points in improved disarm, you get 10% more DPS on a disarmed target, so disarm often as this is another free source of extra damage. Even talented, thunderclap isn't all that sexy against single mobs, but if you've got the rage, use it.

The key to efficient mob killing as prot is getting the right number of mobs. If you're fighting only one at a time and they're yellow or green to you, you're WAY better off in an Arms spec- I can kill a single mob in about 60% of the time as an arms spec, compared to prot spec. In arms spec, if I pop sweeping strikes and retaliation and cleave, I can take down a pack of 3-5 yellow mobs and stay at about 25% health. As prot, I can take down the same pack in slightly more time, but I'll be at 80% health and don't need to eat afterwards. Paradoxically, I get killed more often as prot, because in that spec I feel more overconfident, and am likely to pull a ton of guys. I can also easily solo most at-level elites, or red-level nonelite mobs, for example, I was killing the level 40 ogres up in alterac at level 33 or so with prot.

Once you have the right number of mobs on you, remember to use demoralizing shout to reduce incoming damage, put up shield block and berserker rage, and go to town with cleaves if you have the rage. Thunderclap on cooldown, and hit revenge and shield slam whenever they're off cooldown and available as well. I usually put rend up on my first burn target, and if I'm feeling aggressive (or worried), I'll try and tab around and apply rend to everybody. But without glyphs or talents, rend doesn't really do enough damage for me to worry about it, spamming thunderclap and cleave seems to do more pack DPS for me as prot. Keep taunt handy as well, because it has a long range and you can use it to pull in extra mobs when your friends start dying.

But that's about it. Farming troll ears or tusks or whatever becomes a breeze. If you can afford a shield spike, you'll do a fair bit more damage, but up until now I've been going through shields quickly enough that I haven't gotten around to enhancing them. If only there was an heirloom shield, that would rock.

Fairly Random

After a week of nightly randomized delving, and the acquisition of a rather silly pet dog, I can say that there are definite patterns and curiosities emerging from the noise.

There are really just three kinds of groups:

1) The Steamroller - everyone is in really good gear, everyone knows the dungeon, and you proceed to roll through it with chainpulls and frightening efficiency, usually no one even bothers to say "hello" much less actually discuss what's going on. We're professionals, we're not here to make friends, give me my badges and get it done before my raid starts.

2) The Trickle-Down Terribad - maybe the DPS is good, but who can tell, the tank is horrible. I suppose it's likely that there are tanks out there noticing the same thing about healers, I just only really see this from the healer's perspective. When you have a bad tank (or healer) the whole run is just going to be unnecessarily complicated. He dashes out of heal range to chain-pull the next group while the party is looting and drinking, he isn't good at AoE threat, he is constantly getting caught by patrols, whatever the case may be, The role is vital, and being at least a little bit good at it is vital too. There's a tank shortage, so losing even these bad tanks would be a slowdown in play for the rest of us, but I can only hope that they're learning.

3) The Catastrophe - bad everything. I just try not to remember these runs. I have stuck some out, to the benefit of whoever gets all that repair gold we spend, because I feel really guilty about bailing on a group, but even then, there's groups that just need to die and 15 minutes of deserter is better than 15 minutes of corpse runs.

I suppose there's really a fourth kind of group - competent, but not remarkable, who are able to get through, friendly enough, and nothing worth complaining about, but they are so unremarkable and forgettable that I do just that.

I've decided that the worst instance to run with a random group is not Oculus. My experience thus far is that the people willing to stay in an Oculus group are people who know how to run Oculus. I've actually had some reasonably good experiences in that much-maligned little slice of scaley hell.

I'm still unsure which dungeon is the worst to pug. I've had a horrible experience in Old Kingdom, but I've only had that one pop up once, so the sample set is insufficient. Halls of Lightning has seen some of the worst in trick-down-terribad tanking displays on record, and I am thoroughly bored with the needlessly-long trash segments of Utgarde Keep. I do seem to get Halls of Stone an awful lot and Trial of the Champion almost never at all.

The random tool is also convinced that I am safe as houses as a healer in the new 5-man heroics. This is a marginal assumption at best. I did manage to squeak through the Forge of Souls with a really good supporting cast the one time I drew it, but Pit of Sauron has been a nightmare for me - I am frequently one and two-shot by trash and boss alike and the only time I completed it the party's over-geared Shaman had to pick up heals a couple of times when I was smacked into the dirt. I think I am about ready to just drop group on any new 5-man until I get some more gear sorted out, or unless I go with my guildies, who I trust to handle it.

Another unexpected twist to the delver's world this morning comes in the form of major nerfs to Ionar in HoL and Prophet Tharon’Ja in Drak'Theron. While running from Ionar's dissolves has long been a nuisance, they're hardly more difficult that so many other boss effects in the game and I've personally never seen anyone die to Tharon'Ja regardless of how many times we get shifted. When I think of bosses that I'd not weep over seeing nerfed, they don't really make the list, but hey, if that's one less hard phase to live through with a terrible group, huzzah!

So far, the new dungeon tool has to be put down as a success - for tanks and healers at any rate. We get groups fast, we get badges fast, and interest is still high. I don't relish the prospect of trying to wade through the queue as a pure dpser, though, which does not bode well for Barley's further gearing and adventures. I will be curious to watch the queue times evolve, especially as people get all of the badges they need and overall interest wanes in the late days of the patch pre-expansion. But for now, it's been great.

Leveling with LFG

As I mentioned earlier, I'm leveling a new warrior, and I'm doing it as prot spec. This is in part because I'm a little bored, in part because I want to have a warrior tank and that's how you learn - by doing, and in part because I've never seen a lot of the low-level instances. In all days before 3.3, I would just skip all instancing before the level cap (except very early on, when I was in a guild that actually had people all about the same level), because it was a lot of work to get a group together for an instance, especially at-level. If you got someone to angel you through, it's speedy, but where's the fun in that?

The new LFG changes everything. Whenever I queue as a tank/dps, I get a group within 30 seconds. I've only ever been DPS once, the rest of the time I was the tank. Each instance run provided a reasonable amount of XP - I got about 80% of a level, on average, from the mob and boss kills, and some of the times I got a lot more from dungeon quests. As far as time per level goes, it seems to be about the same as leveling solo with quests - there are times when you have like 15 quests all in the same place and you rip through the levels, but there are times when you need to drive for thirty minutes to get new skills and turn in those last two quests that are in your log and go grind out two more points of herbalism and then head over to the new quest hubs. If you include both parts, quest leveling and LFG leveling so far have been about the same.

I've had a mixed experience with the actual group compositions - the healers have all been pretty much on the ball, but the DPS has been ... uneven. A lot of that comes from actual gameplay experience - for some, this is the first or second dungeon they've ever actually been in. So I'm polite (and you should be polite too), but I try to instruct people of the basics, like: you should tank in defensive stance with a shield, not in battle stance dual-wielding. The one thing I've really noticed is that the novice players are a LOT more likely to body-aggro a room without noticing. Some ranged DPSers will run past me and stop 10 yards beyond, turn around, and start nuking. They quickly pull pats. Being a nice guy, I don't let them die, but still.

The rewards from doing a random quest are also pretty decent. You get a random blue-quality item that's pretty decent, if you can use it. I've gotten some good stuff, and some stuff with spellpower on it. These items are BoP, so you can't send them to your other alts or even give them to people at the end of the run. I'd like it if we could have a swap afters, but that's probably too much stress for new players.

On a whole, I'd say leveling through LFG is a really good way to go. I'll probably end up netting around 50-60% of my XP from dungeon runs. The only things stopping me from taking that number to 90% are: I'm only moderately sociable, I still need to level tradeskills, I still like to have flightpoints, I like some of the solo quests. What this will really do for me is let me skip some of the more boring level slogs and just have fun in the places I like. No more wandering around Desolace for hours on end, nosiree.

Here's some hints for the hopeful LFG leveler:

• You can't get quests inside the instance, and you don't know what you're going to get if you go random. So pick up lots of dungeon quests and keep them in your log. You can share quests, though.
• You probably can't get food/water from your teammates - only conjured items (and BoP stuff that dropped in the dungeon) can be traded. So, unless you're a mage, don't queue without food and water (and don't forget your bullets!)
• Be polite, and don't get crazy about loot. Roll need on things you actually need, and greed on things you don't (you probably don't want to DE stuff, as low-level DE mats tend to be cheap and useless, where the blues can still vendor for decent money). But if you lose a roll to someone you think doesn't "deserve" the loot, chill out - you can just re-queue and get it next time.
• Remember to run SilverDragon. It warns you when there's a rare spawn in your instance. I have seen two or three that I might not have noticed without it.
• Use WoWWiki to preview your dungeons at your level, and don't be afraid to ask for directions. Some of the other people in the group might know which way to go, and those old-world instances are confusing as all get-out.
• Have fun!
  

Leveling as a Prot Warrior: Intro

So, I haven't really touched the warrior class since Burning Crusade. Even then, I only got to level 24 or so. But since I'm the blogger who doesn't suck at alts, I figure I should try something out new. It helps that I came up with a reasonable theme for my new family of alts - dwarven farmers from Thelsamar with vegetable names: Radish (warrior), Rutabega (hunter), and Mizuna (paladin). Bonus points if you figure out why I wanted Carrot, and what the last names would have been (without googling it, of course).

Anyway, I went to town, bought some heirloom gear - the Reforged Truesilver Champion (which is, oddly, somewhat better than the Bloodied Arcanite Reaper in raw stats), the Strengthened Stockade Pauldrons, and the Polished Breastplate of Valor. I was planning on also getting a Bloodied Arcanite Reaper with tourney marks (breaking the cost down between stone keeper shards, tourney marks, and conquest marks (pre-3.3, with not much else to do with them) was a pretty good way to go. The heirloom gear is a must for warriors in particular - the weapon means you don't have to keep shopping for a new weapon as you level.

On a whim, because the 3.3 LFG tool is so interesting, I also got a Venerable Mass of McGowan, which is (again, curiously) better than the Venerable Dal'rend's Sacred Charge - it's got about the same stats, but the mace has agi on it, which isn't the worst stat for a warrior (crit/dodge), and it's apparently a free stat. The only bummer is that there's no heirloom shield, but I've found enough so far (to level 31) that I haven't spent any money in the AH on shields.

After running the first instance (Shadow Fang Keep, which is coming back in cataclysm with a heroic mode), I ran to the trainer and respecced full prot. The difference isn't much at this level, primarily a shorter cooldown on Thunderclap, which is a big deal for AoE threat generation. With all the heirloom gear, I've got plenty of health and threat generation, my healers and DPS never seem to worry about me dying or them pulling aggro.

I love prot spec.

I don't miss Arms talents while I'm soloing - I do enough DPS to take down single and double pulls pretty easily in battle stance with a 2H weapon. When it looks hinky, or there's casters around, I switch to defensive stance with a 1H and shield.

Tanking, it's all about spamming Thunderclap on cooldown, using rend to put DoTs everywhere (especially since most at-level groups seem to be bad at taking out runners), and using revenge and cleave when you feel like it. I am bummed that the mace is so slow - I'd rather have my cleave timer hit every 1.5 seconds so I can spend more time tabbing around, but such is life. If there's a big pull, or I feel like I'm in trouble, I've got shield block, shield wall, and last stand to help out.

I also picked up mining and herbalism as my two trade skills - extra health from mining and the heal from herbalism is pretty nice.

Here's my spec at level 30: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LZZVIzrbbz

I'll probably respec later on, and get more points in Puncture once I have devastate as a skill, but I never really bother with sunder. I think devastate will end up being a reasonably useful skill when I get it, not for the sundering, but for the damage - it's a spammable attack that's on the GCD and not the swing timer that hits respectably hard. In a situation where I have rage to dump, I'd way rather hit devastate than slam. But I don't know how much rage I will actually need to save - Focused Rage will already give me a 3 point deduction on it, and I have lots of things to do with my GCDs anyway. We'll see.

I think the only real problem with the spec is that when I end up getting into a dungeon as DPS (I queue as both tank and DPS), I'm at a slight disadvantage. The later prot talents really want you to be in defensive stance to work right, and I don't want to pull aggro from the tank - even if I can handle it, it's bad form and stresses the healers. So at level 40, I'll probably get dual-spec and pick up an arms spec for DPSing in instances (fury is nice too, but there's not a lot of hit rating to be had at that level, and you really need hit rating to make DW or TG work). But for leveling and tanking, it's prot spec for this new warrior baby.

More to come in later posts, as I get more experience.

Yay, Patch!

There's always something to be excited about. Today is patch day, which means lots of emblems of triumph for me. This is a really big deal, because my two main DPS characters (Mariwocket the warlock and Jillathee the rogue) have been sitting at more or less "pretty decent, you could run ToC for some upgrades" gearing levels. Having a lot of new iLevel 232 gear for the grabbing will be excellent.

Here's a protip: when you go to upgrade your kit, think about whether or not you like the 4t9 set bonus. Because there's two pieces of 245 level gear that are excellent on the emblem of triumph vendor for each class, but they're in the same body slot as t9 (head and shoulders). So you can either go with a piece of 232 that activates your 4t9, or you could go with a piece of 245 with higher raw stats.

I'm also excited because this patch gives rogues some free DPS. Murder now is 4% more damage on everybody (before it was a limited set of creature types, which was annoying). The deadly poison change is also a big boost to everybody's sustained DPS. Once you've got a 5-stack of deadly poison up on the target, extra DP procs will instead proc your mainhand poison. That's pretty huge all around (since it makes the need for weapon swapping kind of obsolete), but there's a funny mechanice to it that makes it even weirder: the two instant-damaging poisons (instant and wound) are on a PPM system, so they add predictable amounts of DPS to your rotation. Deadly, however, is not on a PPM, it's a flat percentage. But now deadly poison on your fast offhand will proc that wound on your mainhand (or instant, depending on your talent spec), and will do so pretty frequently, for a lot of damage. I imagine this will be nerfed eventually, so enjoy it while it lasts.

There's also quel'delar to look forward to. Just about every class can benefit from this, although not every spec. For example, there's no dagger reward. Which means, despite my love of assassination spec (rogues should use daggers, it's just the way it should be), I'll be heading back to a combat sword spec for the time being. Q'd is only a 251 weapon, so while it's a huge upgrade over the 219 black knight's rondels I've been using, it's equivalent to ICC-10 gear. So hopefully I'll be able to replace it somewhat soon. Depends on how soon the guild starts running ICC-10, or any 10-man raids for that matter. But between now and then, there's 3 new instances and all this wonderful auto-heroic-queuing system to play with. Whee!

It was nice getting to know you

So, as I write this patch 3.3 is being greased up and shoved into the server. It is truly a bittersweet moment for me. On the one hand, I am chomping at the bit to get the random dungeon tool and the anticipated drastic reduction in time and effort required to find a group to run an instance, as well as the inflated rewards, but on the other hand, I will miss only having one server's population of puggers to choose from.

This sense of loss was driven hom for me last night. I ran five dungeons with three different groups and I recognized people in all but one of those runs - heck, the last pair was a case of someone who'd tanked for me many times over the last few weeks specifically picking me out as a good healer he could trust.

Pugging has its downsides, sure, but you cannot dismiss the fact that it was always a way to get to know people on your server and for people who were actually good at playing the game, it was a doorway to content. Adding and being added to friends lists was always a compliment and you could expect to get that stray tell now and then when a tank or healer was needed.

Cross-server LFG is going to put something of an end to that networking componenet of pugging. We're going to be running things with a pool of people so very much larger, the vast majority of whom we will be completely unable to communicate with or to seek out for future runs. Sure, you can still have a little cadre of people from your server that you can form a group with and then finish out the roster with the tool, but the chances of meeting those people going forward will be much reduced.

Oh sure, you can still try to form a group just from people on your server. You can spam the server LFG channel, you can shout in trade and general, but why would you do that? The new tool will match you faster and give you greater rewards if you aren't picky about which dungeon you go to. What you can do will always take a back seat to what you will do.

In the end, we are getting to run more instances, shorter queue times, and less shouting in LFG, but the price we pay in anonymity - for ourselves and from the people we run with. This worries me somewhat. In server-only pugging, you had a reputation to play for. If you were a jerk, there were 4 people who might never run with you again. If you ninja'd that sword, someone would never forget it. If you were awesome, you went on the list of someone who could pay you back in the future. People would often appologize for mistakes, people would often ask politely to roll on off-spec gear, people seemed to have a sense that they were operating in a closed community for the most part. I worry that the new tools, with their combination of seperation and escape will only allow the worst in people to emerge - both the active asshattery and the passive inhumanity - and bring with it a general decline in civility and enjoyment.

Even if it doesn't, the odds of my ever getting paired with anyone I know ever again are slimmed. That is a bit sad. As I said to the group I ran ToC with well after I should have been in bed last night - this could very well be the last time any of us see one another, it was certainly nice getting to meet you all.

A bug that makes me more better than you

So, here's the thing. There's a bug in the dual-spec system that causes the spells in your inactive spec's toolbars to stop making automatic rank upgrades when you train new spells at the class trainer.

Normally, when you train new spells, the binds in your actionbars will automatically be replaced with their new, improved versions. This is very helpful, but it is also something we have all come to take for granted.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the spells bound in your inactive spec were not using this functionality - they would stay at lower ranks.

If you bought dual-spec at 80, and after training all of your spells, you'll never know the difference (at least not until Cataclysm, assuming they don't fix the bug by then), but for those of us who bought it early, this is a very big deal. On my druid, I dual-specced well-before 80, hoping to do some healing in dungeons while leveling.

I didn't know about the bug, though, and it turns out I've been running around with several downranked healing spells on my resto bars, most notably, my rejuvenation was 3 ranks off maximum and lifebloom was one rank lower than it could have been - and I wasn't even seeing a mana savings because the spells actually have somewhat similar mana costs, all the negatives of downranking and none of the benefits.

That's a lot of HPS I've been leaving on the table. In the case of rejuvenation, the effect of the version I'd been using is almost half of the healing done with what I could have been using had the spells upgraded as I thought they were.

And I was still rocking the heroic heals, oh yeah.

You know what this means?

I'm the best healer ever.

Strangers with candy

It is safe to say that I've gotten over my abject fear of pugs. At this point I am willing and able to run pretty much any heroic instance as either a DPS or a healer with my druid. I still don't tank, because to date I have only tanked one instance and I'm just not confident in the role, but I expect that will come in time as well.

The change from deathly afraid of pugs to willing participant is a combination of two things, neccessity and utility.

On the one hand, I simply had to pug in order to gear my alt. After swapping servers and going into an environment where I knew almost no one and where the people I did know were not running dungeons together in number sufficient to fill my immediate needs, the decision was reduced to a simple question, did I want to get gear or did I want to avoid strangers. Ambition, for once, won.

But role also had a big impact in my progress out of awkwardness. Being a healer means not worrying about whether or not the healer is going to fail you, assuming you're confident in yourself, which I eventually had no choice but accept as the case. After healing regular ToC run after regular ToC run, and only ever having to abandon the role once, and then only at the earliest stages of my gearing when I shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, I have come to the point where I know that while ther might be deaths, even wipes, we'll get over, and when things are bad, it's not because of me. Confidence is a good thing to have, and it makes the risks of random people easier to bear.

That's not to say I'll run anything, anywhere. I'm still pretty careful about what I agree to run - regular ToC, the easier end of the heroic dungeon spectrum, or harder content with a group I know is very strong are all I'll agree to heal, with more added to that list with every new bit of gear and every added level of confidence. Sure, I'll DPS anything in the 5-man catalog, though.

And next week, we'll have the new dungeon grouping system to play with, which should get us groups faster and more efficiently.

But can this continue, and can this be the shape of my WoW play indefinitely? There's no certainty that my tiny little guild will be running 10-man stuff anytime soon, and while I am pretty far from the gear cap available to me in 5-man pugs, there is a ceiling there, and what will I do when I get there?

Can I pug raids?

Pugging dungeons is a part of the game, pugging raids is both an admission of failure and an invitation for frustration. Pugging a raid means you don't have 9 friends, and people without friends are probably going to be trouble. They might just be antisocial, they might be jerks, they might be just fine but in tiny little guilds. The problem is, you just don't know, and you can probably assume the worst.

Wrath has been more accessible than any other phase of WoW's evolution to me. I've seen almost all of Ulduar, I've seen all but one fight in ToC, and I've cleared Naxx. Compared to my utter shutout on vanilla raiding and failure to jump from 10 to 25-man content in BC this is a huge achievement, but I don't expect that a pug-based future will allow me to progress any further in the progression chain, or to see the Cataclysm raids.

So pugging is not as bad as it used to be, and will potentially be getting better, but it is not a way to experience the game in its entirety. It's an interesting reversal - I used to have a big group of friends and guildies to do large-format content with, but was blocked by fear of strangers from doing small-group content only to now find myself in a situation where I am empowered to run small-group content but will be forced to establish new social contacts to do large-format runs.

Sometimes, virtual life is strange.