Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Altoholism!

Wow, been a whole month since my last post--ack!  Didn't mean to go nearly that long.

Jerexain is now decently geared and running LFR as a Holydin, and working on getting there with his Ret kit with about a 340 iLevel, pulling about 11k.  In a metaphorical leap well off the deep end, I've decided to take him tri-spec, heals/DPS/tanking.  The goal is to be competent and well-geared enough to complete LFR in all three specs, with the possibility of filling in for friends' raids.

Healing with him is a LOT of fun--my previous experience healing had mostly been with Heraqawa/Ulthnar who occasionally healed while levelling if the queue called him as heals instead of tank, and Val (see below), who levelled through most of the 60's as Disc, a process which was alternately OOM! or yawn-worthy, depending on the quality of the LFD tank I happened to be stuck with.  Pally healing is very reactive except for very brief periods--there's no HoT/Shield and forget.  The closest we can come is Hand of Sacrifice + Divine Shield, or Blessing of Protection, through which some classes can't attack--you can only cast through it.  I may have, ah, misused this a few times, placing threat-happy DPS in 'Pally Jail' for eight seconds because they kept pulling things and yanking aggro.

Yeah, that's me, saving your life by any means necessary, even if it pisses you off.

I'm rather excited about this project--I've been looking for something to occupy my time in the lull between expansions, and this may well fill up a decent bit of it.  My knowledge of Ret, and my knowledge of the finer workings of Holy, both still leave a great deal to be desired, and I'm firmly of the opinion that knowing how to fill alternative roles makes you better at your main role.

I've also been levelling Valineria, my former-warlock whom I rerolled as a Shadowpriest for RP purposes at the beginning of Cataclysm.  Well, partially RP reasons--but in truth I was horrifically un-thrilled with the state of warlocks at the start of Cata (go check out Cynwise's series of posts on the State of Warlocks, and bring Kleenex, you might need them).  Val was no longer my main, having been replaced by Ges with her oh-so-in-demand tank spec.

So I rerolled her.  And it's taken me this long to get to 80ish.  Up to 68 or so was quite a grind, with me questing as Shadow and running dungeons as Disc.  I really sucked at Shadow until I got into Northrend and early quests in Howling Fjord presented me with more difficult mobs and forced me to work out a better rotation.  It was worth it.  I go OOM a lot less, and I haven't died since then.  I ran Northrend in about three days, I think--it was definitely very fast, friends commented on it.  And now Val is 82 and in Deepholm and 485 Jewelcrafting and mining her own Elementium to prospect, and she's doing JC dailies!  I'm very excited about it all, and I've decided that her project is going to be getting her legendary staff.

It's exciting playing a caster again, after a year and a half (more, really, since I wasn't terribly active with her in Wrath).  It forces you to pay attention to entirely different things than tanking or playing melee DPS.  I'm not sure what her second spec is going to be, yet--right now it's Disc, of course, but I may go PvP Shadow.

PvP has, of course, been on my mind a fair bit lately, for a few reasons.
1) Transmog!  Some of those season tiers look amazing, either as sets or with other pieces.
2) It's something of a final frontier for me--I've raided, I've farrmed, I've played the AH, I've soloed old content, I've healed, tanked, and DPSed.  PvP's a different skillset, totally new.  For a long time it's intimidated me, but I think I'm ready to get over that now.  And what better time?  There'll be no new raid content for a few months, and no major class changes until MoP.  Plenty of time for me to get comfortable with something.

So, that brings the "gap projects" to the following:
1) Tri-spec Jere.
2) Val's legendary staff.
3) Learn to PvP, if only for Jere's tanking shield transmog which requires 7800 earned Conquest Points.
4) Stable of alts to level.


Ulthnar's guild continues to clear DS-Normal in one night (Thursday night).  There's no talk, currently, of adding heroics--that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

The Vhelaire has got Hagara down, and we hope to work on Ultraxion this Friday.  I took Ges into a Madness PuG this past weekend, one of those last-minute things.  We wiped five or six times, mostly on Kalecgos' platform (we went Green-Red-Yellow-Blue, a fairly standard Normal order), and mostly due to the same things.  It was the only Normal raiding of anything I got to do all week (Ulth's group was cancelled because of technical issues), and I had an absolute blast.  When you've been a week and a half with no raiding, even wiping is cathartic.

Fuck that.  Wiping is cathartic in itself, because it's an end.

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