I’d Rather Be Wowing!

1. Dinged to 80! Now reputation grinding time…
2. WoW armory is updated with new looks, complete with achievement, etc. Good stuff!
3. Finally finished with the quests in Scholazar Basin area. I justified picking The Oracles side because of the Mysterious Egg that can hatch to 4 different pets. Just a heads up, if you are a JC that likes to complete your recipes, don’t forget to grab either the Design: Vivid Dark Jade (The Oracles) before doing A Hero’s Burden quest if you are switching to Frenzyheart or Design: Reckless Huge Citrine (The Frenzyheart) before doing Just Following Orders quest if you are going for the Oracles. Also, as far as I know, if you ever thinking of switching factions, you can go back and kill Artruis and save the other faction’s NPC instead. Completing the repeatable quest offered by this NPC will automatically put you in Honored standing with the new faction.

1. Waking up to the polar cub in the mailbox, the cutest thing ever (after the penguin).
2. Being able to use my drake again for leveling (yay for lvl 77).
3. Completing the Old Crafty and The Fishing Diplomat (hint - and possible spoiler: If you are an alliance and you haven’t started with the quest related to the Battle for Undercity in Dragonblight, while doing the part of the quest chain where you are being teleported to Ogrimmar, you can actually walk around in the city safely and complete these achievements easily).
4. The sentimental and tear-jerking quests in Dragonblight. And seeing Alexstrasza in all her awesomeness (while using my own drake to fly right in front her face).
5. Seeing Mind Sear does about 20k per tick during part of the Battle of Undercity quest :).
6. The “poo” quest, the Harrison Jones’ quest, Emily and Mr. Floppy’s quest in Grizzly Hill.

E run two more new instances over the weekend: Violet Hold (75-77) and Gundrak (76-78). I notice that from all the instances that E now has run, there is a certain lack of CC required - almost every pulls is: tank going in, and regardless to how many number of mobs in the pull, and we would just proceed to AoE them down. These were done even in the context of groups that are about the same level or lower than the recommended instance levels. The only exception was on the Gundrak’s run, where we actually utilized the rogue’s sap - but it was mainly because we have a shadow priest healing on his healing gears (not yours truly obviously :)). I am going to echo the sentiment that, the instances so far are all seems too easy. Not that I am complaining about it or anything.

I remember that when we first start running the BC’s dungeons, we have to utilize many tricks in the book in order to successfully go through them. Even now, I still remember our guild’s hatred for Auch Crypts due to so many wipes in the trash pulls. In those runs,  we use focus fire, various forms of cc including MC and off-tanking. For every group makeup, there’s a bit of thinking that may be required to get through the dungeons by utilizing every player’s (class) unique strengths. I found this to be completely missing in Wrath. It does seem to resonate with the change of direction that Blizzard has took to make sure that players are invited because of their skills and not their classes. Being a spec/class whose only forms of CC are situational and often undesirable, I welcome the change completely in the regular 5-man settings. I like to be able to put myself in the LFG, actually gets a group and without seeing things like - LF for dps - need Mage/Lock/Rogue/Hunter (choose your pick). But somehow, I miss having the feeling of accomplishment from being able to clear dungeons with a less than optimal group makeup.

I’ve yet to run heroic versions of any of the Wrath’s dungeons. I remember reading a Blizzard’s blue posters sometimes ago that heroic will be a different kind of beast. Also, according to GC in his post about adding AE capabilities to shammy, rogues, and feral druid, in Heroic and Naxx, we cannot (or shouldn’t be able to) simply AoE down everything. I wonder by the time we reach that point in the progression, will players, especially newer players that just recently involve in the grouping aspect of the game, have enough experience to be a good team player? I wonder if the cc-less classes will have problem in getting a group once again?

One thing I noticed as I gained a level higher is that mana regen plummeted as well. I initially started with the talent build that picks up the good stuff (aka dps enhancing) in the shadow tree up to Dispersion, before going to Disc. At lvl 75, I still don’t have enough points for Meditation. During levelling, I don’t find it to be too troublesome. With spirit tap after every single kill, rotating shadowfiend and dispersion whenever they are up, I could kill things fast and usually don’t have to stop and drink. There’s also enough traveling between locations that my mana will be full in time for me to start another batch of quests.

While instancing, however, the lack of mana regeration is much more noticeable. I noticed that I am the only one from the group that usually needs to sit and drink after 2-3 pulls - seeing that my GL/MT never wants to wait between pull, I often end up resorting to less mana intensive priorities. Darn those warlocks and their life tap. Replenishment doesn’t really do squat for me, with my crits rating plummeting as well, the frequency of spirit tap to proc is less and less, and I need to time my shadowfiend and dispersion so that I don’t have them in cooldown in time for boss fight.

Afterward, I respecced and grabbed all the 3 points of Meditation before going into the shadow tree. At my level, I am able to go all the way to Dispersion while only sacrificing the talent that gives more crit chances and other utilities (VE, threat reduction, and shadowfiend cd reduction). This spec works quite as well during levelling and it provides more longevity during instances. But I found that it’s still not enough.

From the 5 instances that I’ve done (Ut Keep, Nexus, Azjol-Nerub, Ahn’Kahet, and Drak’tharon), there are at least 1 boss fight that involves repeated phases, where in each of the phase, you would have to redo all your dots (think Lurker). For example in Ut Keep, the last boss will die and ress back, so you need to re-apply your dots all over again. This is probably the least taxing example of this type of fights. In the latter 3 instances I listed, it is common for a boss fight to go as long as 3-4 repeated phases.

In Azjol-Nerub, the 2nd boss that you encounter consisted of 3 “pulls” of trashes before the boss appears. It is not really a pull per se, however, as you are placed in combat from the moment you pulled the first trash until you killed the boss. So even when you just sit around waiting, you cannot drink up in between. The last boss of that instance repeatedly burrows himself, spawning a bunch of trashes, and come back up - each time the period in which he stays above the ground becomes shorter. During these types of fights, I’ve been so challenged in managing my mana that even with drinking pots, shadowfiend, and dispersion, I can end up oom toward the end of the fight.

Granted that I still use much of my lvl 70 gears that are sorely lacking in spirit (I think only 1 piece has spirit in it, and I replaced one of boots with one that has spirit). I remember when some people in beta are complaining about this, GC simply said for us to equip more spirit based gear. But most of the time, spirit-based gears don’t really have other good stats, such as crits, hits, and hastes (this actually a bit more common than the previous two).  Well, maybe I just need to suck it up, put more spirit-based gears even if I need to sacrifice some of my spell power.

E dinged 75 yesterday and had been Mind Sear-ing ever since! (Also died twice because of being over-excited and tried it on to more mobs that E can handle :)).

Having an AoE type arsenal, especially one with “unique” mechanism such as Mind Sear, certainly adds an interesting twist in her playstyle. So Mind-sear:

1. is a 5-sec channeled spell that ticks every one second with the cost of 28% base mana.
2. damages the mobs 10 yds around the target, but not the target itself.

With these characteristics, it seems reasonable to only cast Mind Sear on the target that won’t die too fast, in order for Mind Sear to be cost-effective. What I am struggling with is finding a good spell “rotation” prior doing Mind Sear. There are some approaches that I can think of.

The first strategy is to maintain full dots on one mob and use that mob to start Mind Sear. With this approach, it is generally easy to interleave other spells in order to maintain full dots and replenishment. But we may run into the problem of having the main target dies prematurely. I found this approach works great for pulls with one elite and multiple non-elite adds or in boss fights that have multiple waves of adds (some encounters that come to mind: first boss in Utgarde Keep, the first boss in Azjol-Nerub, and the Novos the Summoner fight in Drak’Tharon keep).

The second strategy is to keep the dots on multiple mobs, usually SW:P because it’s instant and spammable before proceeding to mind sear them. This way, we spread the Misery debuffs on multiple target and increases mind sear damage on these targets up to 15% of your spell power. Unfortunately since SW:P is only refreshed by Mind Flay - with long fights, we might end up with the debuffs and SW:P dropping prematurely. Also the upfront overhead to unload the dots may be not ideal for too short of fight. This approach seems preferrable for groups of multiple Elites.

Of course, there are the extremes of just doing Mind Sear right away if you have groups on non-elites and combining the first strategy with 2nd one. Based on your experience, do you have a good approach/tips to when and how Mind Sear should be used?

I just realized that there’s quite a change in the way tailoring specialization work, at least by looking at the current recipe list available in Wowhead.

First, there isn’t a new tailoring specialization. Whatever specialization that we chose in BC is “carried over” to WotLK. What do I mean by this? In WotLK, we have 3 new types of clothes: spellweave, ebonweave, and moonshroud. This is in parallel with spellcloth, shadowcloth, and primal mooncloth, respectively. Looking at the tooltip for Shadoweave Tailoring, for example, it reveals that choosing shadoweave specialization allows us to create additional ebonweave clothes along with shadowcloth, with an exception to the 4 days cooldown to create the clothes (instead of 2 days for the BC clothes). Similarly with spellfire and mooncloth tailoring specialization.

Second, choosing a specific tailoring specialization doesn’t lock us for wearing only a certain set of gears, unlike in BC. For example, this Ebonweave Gloves requires ebonweave clothes to create. However, nothing in the tooltip reveals that it requires you to specialize in shadoweave tailoring to make or equip the items. So, instead of choosing specialization for the gears that we can wear, maybe the question becomes which specialization is potentially be the most profitable.

Note: I should probably put a disclaimer that any speculation made in this post is based on the current data, i.e., of Nov 11.

I used Wowhead to list me what items that require spellweave, ebonweave, or moonshroud as a reagent. A short survey shows 8 items for spellweave - two of them are bags (enchanting and soul shard bags). I believe that the embroidery made from this cloth, Swordguard Embroidery, is the most useless (borderline silly - this is of course based on assumption that no melee dps would ever spec into Tailoring, and the embroidery itself is BOP). The gears that can be made from this clothes are filled with haste, spirit, int, and spell power but without any stam nor crits, which may be more desirable by healing spec classes.

Ebonweave, on the other hand, is a reagent for 7 items. It is a reagent for two bags - soul shard and the regular 22 slot bags. It also creates Darkglow Embroidery, which may be desirable for any caster/healing classes (depending on how good the mana management is). The gears made are filled with hit rating, stam, int, and spell dmg - but sorely lacking of crits and spirit. The hit rating may be appealing for dps caster class as entry level raiding gears.

Moonshroud is a reagant for a whooping 9 items, among which is the enchanting and the 22 slot bag. The embroidery, Lightweave Embroidery, is clearly targeted for the dps casters, and from the look of it, it’s a decent addition to the dps. The gears made from this clothes are full of stam, spirit, stam, and spell dmg - but nothing special otherwise. I’m not exactly sure which class role do they target for.

For right now, I don’t care much for the spellfire specialization - I sincerely think that they need to juice this one up. I am leaning toward keeping the shadoweave specialization to create ebonweave cloth - being part of the requirement to create the 22 slot bag and the fact that there are more dps wearing clothes classes than healers, I think, will create a good demand for this cloth.

But anyway…it’s probably not something to worry about until we are in much higher level…:)

I’m still contemplating on how I am going to level all my 3 characters. Right now, I have 1 dps - E, a shadow priest, 1 tanking - V, a pally, and 1 healer - Vh, a shammy. The good thing about it is that all of my characters are a hybrid. With the exception of V (she will never be a ret or a holy), I can switch E and Vh around (I do hope that we never comes to that), I am not a big fan of doing dps as a shaman.

The big problem of choosing what to level first lies on the lack of tank and healer in our guild. Even though I want to level E first, I am not sure if another dps is what the guild will be needing. I was also talking to G, our MT extraordinaere, and he mentions that he has been wanting to get back to do more healing with his priest. He, like me, has a character for each class roles. And I think he understand that he is not going to able to do the thing that he wants to do the most because of what the guild needs. That doesn’t seem fair to me…

***

The days before Wrath is spent grinding reputations, leveling the appropriate professions for each character (V finally switched to mining), and gold farming in general. I am still working on my cenarion circle rep, but I don’t think I’ll get to my target before the expansion hits. Yesterday, E finally hits exalted with Sporregar, and she’s now the proud owner of Tiny Sporebat. I still need 7 more pets to get my hands on the skunk pet.

The gold farming is a bit boring, since the option is now limited to doing dailies. In another note, the prices of items are dropping, I am unable to sell many items that I have hoarded in the past years, and I am left confused to how the heck I am going to clean up all my characters’ banks to get ready for the plethora of new items. To make things worse, I am a person who cannot throw anything away, especially gears, in case that I am going to need it eventually. I need help…