WoW Goals

Ithato:

• Find a new 25-man raiding guild FFS – Of all things, my first serious raiding guild of Wrath, Celestial Being, has been resurrected and is currently kicking ass and taking names! We’re 9/12 in ICC-25 and have one 10-man group doing LK attempts and another hitting second or third wing each week.

Tyliman:

• Nothing. Not a one, didn’t accomplish anything I set out to do on Tyliman. He got put on the back burner with my renewed raiding on Ithato and my recent move.

Tharae:

• Ding 58 and head to Outlands – Tharae’s currently languishing at 64.
• Train Riding and get a flying mount
• Heal through 5-10 distinct Outland 5-mans in LFD as I level – only got about 3, didn’t level as often as I planned to

Caffeine

Maintain current trend, avoid all energy drinks altogether and keep caffeinated pop to a minimum.
Went out the window when I started raiding again and gaming a lot more outside of WoW with my new roommate.

Reading

Read at least two e-books that are over 7500 Kindle locations long and at least one more that’s over 5000.
Nope.

iPhone Development

Produce what I consider to be a feature-complete iPhone app or game and begin beta testing amongst my friends who own iPhone/iPod Touches. Will likely be ugly as sin unless @_erica helps me out big-time.
Nope.

Curse you, Icecrown Citadel, for ruining what should’ve been a perfectly productive month.

WoW Goals

Ithato:

• Nothing :<

Tyliman:

• Ding 80 (1-7-2010)
• Maxed out Mining
• Maxed out Jewelcrafting
• Superior achievement
• 2500-3000 DPS in heroics: I’m starting to see 4000+ on some bosses in Heroics

Reading

• Re-read Neuromancer

Caffeine

• Reduce caffeine intake as close to 0 as possible – 0 energy drinks, 3 bottles of Mountain Dew since January 18th, 2010

New Goals For February

WoW Goals

Ithato:

• Find a new 25-man raiding guild FFS

Tyliman:

• 5000 DPS on a raid/heroic boss
• Epic achievement, which includes getting rid of my last two blues
• Complete at least one full 10- or 25-man raid as DPS without failing at melee strategies
• Tank a heroic

Tharae:

• Ding 58 and head to Outlands
• Train Riding and get a flying mount
• Heal through 5-10 distinct Outland 5-mans in LFD as I level
• (This one is stretching it, but) ding 68 and head to Northrend

Caffeine

Maintain current trend, avoid all energy drinks altogether and keep caffeinated pop to a minimum.

Reading

Read at least two e-books that are over 7500 Kindle locations long and at least one more that’s over 5000.

iPhone Development

Produce what I consider to be a feature-complete iPhone app or game and begin beta testing amongst my friends who own iPhone/iPod Touches. Will likely be ugly as sin unless @_erica helps me out big-time.

Reading back over all of this it looks like a lot to bite off at once, especially with my potential move to a new apartment in the next few weeks. I hope I’m not setting myself up to fail.

It’s been almost two months now since I was part of a guild regularly doing 25-man content, so I’ve been able to get away with using a bastardized catch-all Resto spec, leaving my other spec slot free for whatever tomfoolery I wished. (Lately, this has been bear tanking.) So, I’m returning to my old ways, of optimizing top-to-bottom for a given role, with regards to my talents. I’ll be using two somewhat distinct, and highly focused builds to fill either the role of raid healing or tank healing as need arises.

Tank Healing

The first, my tank-healing build, is 14/0/57. Using the Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Innervate, and Glyph of Swiftmend, it is tailored to HoT up my chosen tank(s) and then bombard him with big-number, high-crit Nourishes. The only real allowance I’ve made for the changes in 3.2 is adding Empowered Touch to the mix, for the extra 20% of spellpower added to my Nourishes (along with the original 40% of spellpower to Healing Touch.)

I’ve sometimes comtemplated rocking out my 4-piece Tier 7.5 set in this build to nearly duplicate the effect of the Nourish Glyph: “Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.” (Lifebloom counts as one HoT whether it’s a single stack, double or triple.)

Raid Healing

For the purposes of raid healing, I’m using 11/0/60 with glyphed Healing Touch, Swiftmend, and Wild Growth. I can hit up to 6 targets with my AoE heal, cast sub-1.0 second Healing Touches for anywhere up to ~11K crits, and Swiftmend all those Rejuvs I’m tossing out to the raid. This build will really shine if I ever get that elusive fourth piece of tier 8, which will add an extra instant Rejuv tick to the target as soon as it’s cast, healing for upwards of 2K and then another ~12K over 15 seconds. Since 3.1 I’ve dropped Revitalize in favor of Living Seed, as my glyphed HT gets tossed around a lot and has a great crit rate.

I’m still adjusting to the new Innervate mechanics, but I so seldom need to Innervate myself anyway that it hasn’t tripped me up yet.

All that having been said, looking forward to getting back into 25-man content again!

Cross-posted via email from Shane’s Posterous

WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INC

Anywho, I’m back from a brief, voluntary hiatus, although my return wasn’t really planned, nor was my leaving announced to the general public. Back at the end of June, I was in a position to inherit leadership of the guild I’d raided with since mid-January, Celestial Being. We were raiding Ulduar-25 three nights a week, and had gotten as far as Mimiron phase 4 when the summer raiding slump earned another victim. Our attendance was slipping, tempers and egos were running high, and I had a lot of other stuff going on IRL that I won’t bore you with. But suffice to say, I called it quits, intending on not playing WoW for a healthy amount of time. This was basically the last nail in the coffin for CB, which is something I still regret somewhat.

My annoying, wonderful friends kept talking about the game, and wanting me to play again, and I still had a bunch of time left because my account renewed a few days before I made the decision to quit. I played my lowbie paladin Tharae here and there, maybe one day a week, and healed the odd Heroic on Ithato for my buddies. I played a lot of offline games in the meantime, and had a brief fling with EVE Online as a one-player-two-Podder mining team. That game…I could write pages about my forays with that game.

So now, it was a gradual process, but I’m back to playing quasi-regularly. Tharae is up to level 42 at the time of this writing. Some of my closest friends from Celestial Being and/or the real world decided to make their own guild, and I got dragged along for the ride, and somehow wound up an officer again. I don’t really have any responsibilities, aside from volunteering to host/admin our forums and a Vent server through TypeFrag.

We’re just big enough to do Ulduar-10 regularly, and I’ve learned that I highly, highly enjoy the lower stress and better, er, intimacy of 10-man raiding. There’s a lot more room for goofing off in vent and raid chat when 7 or 8 of you are seasoned veterans of Ulduar-25, and when all 10 of you seem to be highly competent. I really enjoy the whole crowd we have and it’s only going to get better as time goes on.

Due to the aforementioned kickassery, we cleared up through to General Vezax in two nights in our first lockout, and last night we cleared up to General V again in a single 2.5-hour raid, our second week in. Really looking forward to getting more attempts on him tomorrow night, because last week we almost had him. Big shout-out to some of our members, like Ampharos, Aliatris, Quintas and Khulgar/Kyliana, who all hadn’t seen Ulduar before and still listen/learn well enough to be 1-shotting bosses all night last night.

I’d never seen anything past Mimiron in 25-man nor 10-man prior to this, so it’s all very new and exciting, even though it means I need to be watching TankSpot vids and reading boss strats again.

As far as loot and gear goes, I’m still sitting pretty decent in terms of gear, although I thank the FSM every day that I can shift into Tree and not have to stare at my god-awful Soot-Covered Mantle. It clashes hard with all the rest of my gear. I currently have 3/5 T8.5, and I keep getting bad luck with token drops on Freya/Thorim for either my shoulders or gloves. I want that elusive 4-pc bonus so bad!

• Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs
• Heroic: Nerf Engineering – great job guys!

Last night, we finished off Iron Council again, and moved on to down Auriya for our first kill! That wraps up the Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar achievement, too.

I’m having a blast having two resto specs. Sure, it makes respeccing for the weekends just as time consuming and expensive as it was pre-patch, but I feel so versatile! One is able to put some serious single-target healing down with glyphed Nourish, Nature’s Grace and my 4-piece Tier 7 bonus. I had something like 68% crits on Nourish and 50% crits on Regrowth on one WWS log. The other is able to throw around 5-8k glyphed Healing Touches in under a second!

Lastly, my baby Paladin Tharae hit 30 on Sunday night and I’m happily riding around on a Warhorse now. I can’t wait to get him to 80, he’s so much fun!

We flew through our weekly Heroic Naxxramas run, which finished far enough ahead of schedule to sneak in an attempt at You Don’t Have An Eternity, as well.

We got done in about three and a half hours, and finished up with a total of 4 new achievements for most of us:

• Arachnophobia
• The Safety Dance
• Make Quick Werk of Him
• The Hundred Club

The astounding part to me, was that our first boss death whatsoever was on Instructor Razuvious, while trying out at least 3 new raiders. Really, a great job on all of their parts. Our new warlock, I know, walked out of his first raid with two T7.5 pieces and a few other odds and ends.

All told, I picked up some boomkin gloves, a best-in-slot trinket (Forethought Talisman), and a hefty head upgrade that was better than my Helm of Anomalus un-gemmed and un-enchanted.

For the raid as a whole, we moved fast and got an astounding amount of awesome loot. Lots of high bidding on the Saph and KT stuff in particular.
Some highlights include:

• Damnation off of 4H
• Surplus Limb from Patchwerk
• Soul of the Dead, Extract of Necromantic Power, and Bandit’s Insignia all on Saph
• Last Laugh, Torch of Holy Fire, and Sinister Revenge all dropped from KT

I also earned myself a promotion within the guild, due to both performance and attendance I suspect, and am now considered a Veteran. Hooray for priority on raid slots!

Definitely an amazing night. Now we have Malygos out of the way to start right with Sartharion plus two drakes tonight.