Healing Ramps

After dinging 60, Ciribrus the wonder chicken ported himself to Moonglade to learn some new skills and respec. Since there are so many great instances in Outland, and since healers are always in demand, I figured I'd try a Balance/Resto hybrid build. Specifically, I was gunning for the 15 points in Resto to pick up Subtlety, reducing threat by 20%. Seems like a pretty decent talent (if not required) for both healing and pew pew in groups. The remaining points went all back into Balance for now, can't quite give up the chicken for a tree just yet. :)

I tried out this build on a regular Hellfire Ramparts run, and was happy to find that it worked pretty well. The only times I drew aggro were on the accidental overpulls, but I think that's to be expected. For the majority of the run, though, it was fairly easy going. A little pre-HOT as the tank pulled, then just re-applying Rejuvination and Regrowth as needed. I don't think I had to cast a single Healing Touch, so mana efficiency was excellent.

Pretty fun, and I plan on going back to Ramps soon (as healer or chicken) before completing too many more Hellfire quests. (Ramps continues to give out HH rep until Honored, I believe.)

Is Outland Ready for This?!

Tonight was a big night for Ciribrus the Lazer Chicken alt. After dinging 58 in Eastern Plaguelands, he made a beeline for the Dark Portal and Honor Hold. Those early Hellfire quests are amazing: in less than an hour he gained a half level and got some neat early quest rewards, like the Staff of the Twin Worlds, which totally beat the crap outta my old level 50-ish of-the-Eagle staff.

His Skinning was already up to 300, so in the interest of not falling too far behind in Leatherworking I also spent some time powerleveling him up to 300. He chose Tribal Leatherworking, natch, as a caster. Someday perhaps, Windhawk Armor? :o

Also discovered the beauty of the Focus CC macro while grinding Turtle Scales. This ingenious bit of code will cast the CC of your choice (Roots or Hibernate in this case) and set the target as your focus. You can then move on to other targets (friendly or otherwise), and if the CC breaks/ends, simply hit the macro again and your original focus will be re-CC'ed:

/focus [target=focus, exists, nodead] focus; [btn:2][] target
/cast [target=focus] Entangling Roots

With that little gem, I was able to nuke down a turtle, root it around 25%, cast Insect Swarm and move on to the next mob while the turtle died a slow horrible death from DOTs.

Genius! :)

Laser Chicken

In the past few days, I've gone back to working on my original main, a (formerly Feral) Druid who has gone Balance since 47 or so. Thanks to a boatload of rested XP, he's now sitting at 54 after not too much effort. While leveling Balance has been noticeably slower than Feral, I decided to try it out as a caster playstyle experiment. Also, since our guild already has several excellent Feral Druids, going Balance with an eye on Resto seems like a natural fit.

The thing that draws me to hybrid classes of course is flexibility - being able to sling spells, cure stuff, throw a few HOTs around then going back to DPS is right up my alley.

Another reason for leveling said Druid is Leatherworking, which I'm envisioning could be useful in helping out my Enhancement Shaman... For example: I've been seeing a Cloak of Darkness float around the AH recently, which would be a fantastic DPS cloak for Exelus, but at 1500g, it's more than I'm willing to spend as a marginal upgrade from Aran's Drape of the Dark Reavers. Buuut, if Ciribrus can eventually make a few nice things for Exelus (esp during Wrath of the Lich King), then all the better, right?

Or, what I could do is get a 2nd account for the level grind from 70-80, transfer this Druid over and autofollow Exelus around and toss HOTs as needed. :O Hmm, this idea has merit...

Heh.

UPDATE: just read up a bit on Moonkin DPS, where a theorycrafter puts Starfire and Wrath spam up against a Mage's Fireball. Interesting! Also learned that Insect Swarm does roughly the same DPS as a Priest's Shadow Word Pain, at about half the mana cost.

Secured

I'm at work, banging my head against a particularly frustrating .NET/Safari bug - because you apparently can't debug Safari using "attach to process" from Visual Studio... WTF Microsoft? (Do you like how I blame MS rather than Apple? Yep, that's how I roll...)

So instead, I'm going to write a post about my shiny new Blizzard Authenticator. :) This little bad boy arrived yesterday in the mail, despite all the talk about out-of-stockness and shipping delays. (I must've gotten my order in just before the madness.)

After pairing it to my account at worldofwarcraft.com/account (there's a serial number on the back that creates the association from your device to your account), I'm now required to press a little button on the keychain device to retrieve a temporary PIN to enter along with my user name and password. It's like having a second password that changes every minute or so. Brilliant!

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that I'm 100% hackproof, but my limited knowledge of application security tells me that my WoW account is way more secure than it was 24 hours ago. The fact that many corporations and financial institutions use these seems to support the notion that multi-point authentication with physically-held security devices are the way to go.

In other news, iPhone's 2.0 software was released today, which now officially includes support for third-party applications. (ZOMG gamez!) Super Monkey Ball is superhard and superfun and super-better-graphics-than-I-expected. I now have something productive to do while flying from Darnassus to Gadgetzan. (Or from Seattle to Vegas?)

So given the surprising graphics and processing capability of the little iPhone, is it too much to expect we'll see some sort of mobile gaming experience from Blizzard? How about a 2D side-scroller-jump-n-shoot game in a Diablo/Starcraft/Warcraft theme? WTB!!!

Healy Gear, Etc.

It's been a little while since my last post, but am happy to report the computer is back from Apple, good as new. Let the postings begin again. :)

Tonight we had an absolutely great run through the first half of Karazhan - it's been a while since I've been able to run it and it was fun to join in again. 3-ish hours yielded six bosses down and 12 badges with ZERO wipes. Woots.

One of the highlights was off-healing the Maiden fight with my "caster set." It was a nice change of pace, and even though my spec is wrong and my gear was patchwork, I felt I did OK and was able to contribute to the fight without becoming another melee liability. Chain Heal, of course, made it pretty easy. :)

The gear wasn't really a true healer set (maybe 600-ish +healing?), since most of the bits were comprised of the Elemental reputation PvP set, but after running heroics/Kara a few times and getting exalted with Shattered Sun, I've come away with some decent healy epics so I figured it was time to step-up the other offspec gear.

After collecting the Resto-focused Seer's Ringmail PvP set along with various healy Jewelcrafting trinkets, gems and glyphs, I now sit at 932 +healing, 90 mp5 IFSR (241 OFSR) with just under 9k mana. Lol, not bad for a field medic, methinks.

I still need to look at some cheap enchants (including the Aldork shoulder 'chant), but am not totally sure where to start. More research is warranted, but it seems like I could use some more Int (and Stam, for that matter) in this getup.

In other news, I'm still 12k honor away from S2's Right Ripper. Maybe I'll grind out some honor as "restohancement." Lol.

This just in...

...Shaman to remain awesome and over-powered in WotLK.

Huge announcements coming in from Blizzards Invitational event in Paris, not the least of which involve Shamantic love in the forms of:

- raid-wide totem effects
- hex, a short-duration but very-needed CC
- windfury to affect sum bare durids
- rockbiter replaced(?) with earthliving, a +heal buff
- strength and agility totems to be combined into a single totem

ZOMG!

18k Honor, 20 EotS Marks

PvP here I come again? With the start of Season 4 Arena, Season 2's armor and weapons are now up for sale for honor and marks. I swore I'd never go to Eye of the Storm again, but looks like Merciless Gladiator's Right Ripper is the next best (easily achievable) weapon upgrade. -_-

That is, once I get my computer back. Waaah.