I love Nagrand - it’s a place I could (and have) happily spent hours grinding in.  When I was working on my next post (it’s a big one, hence the dearth of other posts this week) I took this screenie and I kinda like it - the beautiful hills and waterfalls of Nagrand slowly being eaten into by the Forge Camps!

Seems ah’m hangin’ up mah boots fer a while and going back tae Ironforge tae dae some er ’secretarial’ work.  You know, stuff tae dae wi’ documents and ‘filin’ them right’ and stuff. *Ahem*

I blame The Bloggers.  I really do.  It’s all their fault.  All those resto druids and shamans, holy paladins and priests. They’ve changed me.

Chain-Healing
What am I talking about?  About a week or so ago, now, I changed my main to my shaman.  I had been getting tired and bored of stabbing things from behind - I don’t know why as I’ve always loved melee.  A couple of times, however, we were short on healers for Mount Hyjal and I offered my shaman - he’s decently geared with quite a few of the T6 quality badge loot and the pick of Kara epics (still no bloody shield though /bitter) - and was taken along.

Wow.  Just… WOW.  There was a thrill and of  a new sort. A few subs like this and it had gotten to the point where I was actively hoping a healer would drop out just so I could go heal.  When I realised I was doing that I figured it was time to ask for a main change.  It might seem weird so close to Wrath but the guild is currently a little short of healers and heavy on melee dps and here I was with a reasonably geared resto shammy and wanting to chain-heal!

I have to say - it really has put the thrill back in raiding for me.  If you’d told me a year ago I’d actively seek out a healer role I’d have laughed.  If you’d said I’d give up a melee dps spot to do it I’d have laughed doubly hard.  Yet here I am. What has changed? No clue.  I have just found that I really, really enjoy healing and that, in a raid, it engages me far more than roguery does.

Even if most of what I seen in an evening looks something like this:

Hyjal has come alive again for me - every boss fight is not the same old dps cycle, the same old trinket clicking, the same old… old.. *snooze*.  Now I have to pay attention to totems, mana, incoming damage.  Each time I heal the same boss different people take different damage and everything is so new and exciting.  I guess the other thing is that I actually feel like I make a difference.

Doing a fight like Kaz’rogal where you’re staving off mana-reducing deuffs and still having to heal your little heart out is amazingly fun.  Every boss fight feels like a small triumph - more so than whittling away at a ginormous health pool over the course of five to ten minutes.

So, what now?

Of course, that doesn’t change stuff around here.  Aurik is and will remain ‘me’.  He is the personification of my real life self - short, dumpy, scottish, hyperactive and, of course, huggable! *ahem* This has never been a rogue blog nor one which shies from posting about alts so all you might find is that any ‘I went to BT and saw this boss, wow’, posts will be shamany rather than roguey.

Durid is for haelz!

But, that’s not the only healing I’ve been up to…

Yes, the tree is yours truly.  Embracing my new-found enthusiasm for the healy side I grabbed a respec to go heal for the budding young paladin tonk you see here.  I could have healed normal ramparts as feral but I really wanted to try things tree-style with all of the available bells and whistles.  It was a blast but perhaps a bit too easy an instance to judge if I’ve been tempted away from my feral side…  I had to respec the next day to tank some instances but my respec cost at the moment is very low so I might jump the fence a few more times!

I’ve managed to pic up some pretty nice epics just from doing some heroics where noone else wanted them so I’m sitting at around 1k healing already on my druid.  My spirit is a little low, though, as is my mp5 so I’m working on that.  I’ve also not enchanted anything yet - though as I don’t expect to be healing anything difficult I think I’ll see if I can grab some more healy gear whilst tanking before I start grinding out those primal lives.

Oh and I started playing my paladin again a little bit…

a third healer in the making?

7 comments

Through the hard times and the good.

I have to celebrate you baby…

- Fatboy Slim, Praise You

Wow, just wow.  Wow.  Did I say WOW yet?

WOW.

Welcome to your 100th post edition of /hug!

I can’t believe I’m at 100 posts and I can only offer immense thanks to those who drop by, read and comment once in a while!

I started this blog back on the 5th of February.  I had no real goals regarding writing about a particular aspect of wow but simply said: “This is a blog about me, WoW and what I like about it.” I wanted to share, I wanted to become a better writer and I wanted to play with making pretty pictures.  It took me a little while to get into my stride, to be able to write posts shorter than a small novella and to figure out how to make those shiny images sit correctly on the page, though.

Blogging about wow has increased my love of the game - I investigate things more now, I get linked to things concerning aspects of the game I never realised.  I’ve made some new friends via blogging and learned an awful lot.  I can’t thank the Blog Azeroth community enough - not only for bringing me to all of those bloggers, but also for giving me awesome post fodder.

So, what are you getting for this special (to me, anyway) post? This is a post about growth, about goals and personal achievements and the biggest ‘growth’ factor in WoW is our characters.  Whether we have one or five we have all made that journey from level one up.  Thus, I went searching through my archives and dug up some old-school screenshots of my characters when they started their journeys.

I hope a few others will do this too -  find the earliest possible screenshots of your now super-cool 70’s! Kind of like your mother embarassing you in front of your friends with your baby photos, mwuhahaha!  So, 100th post and Sunday Screenies all in one.  /score

Oh and I forgot in my last post (I pre-write them) to say a big HELLO to Leafy! He’s taken refuge from G-Drama to come visit Softi and I on Bloodhoof.  /hugs  I think Softi and I both scared our guildies with all the squeeing…

Seems like only yesterday she wis runnin’ aboot Azuremyst playin’ wi’ moths and jumpin’ off cliffs.  Then she got herself intae Outlands and finished her Druid trainin‘ an’ started tae learn how tae tank wi’ her face… Noo the wee scamp has been makin’ friends and got herself all sorts o’ new shinies.

It’s been a busy week for druidlet Jhai - since the all-druid Kara romp.  I’m working on a whole lot of things in order to get her a little more ‘ready’ for Wrath.  She won’t have the time to gear-up as substantially as my Rogue and Shaman have so I just want to make sure she has what she needs to start out fresh with on the next levelling push.

It’s important to me, personally, that I ‘vindicate’ my druidness.  I am a druid at heart, I love druids and I talk about them a lot bot here and in guild.  I sometimes get the feeling the ‘real’ druids (those with a druid as their main’ see me as somewhat of a nublet annoyance and that I need to prove myself to them.  It doesn’t help I’m totally under confidant about my abilites (this is not constrained to my druid, though) so I always shy away from pushing myself towards doing groups.

I had dreams and hopes on my old druid.  I had wanted Earthwarden, and I had wanted the Gilded Thoriumweave Cloak before I moved and started playing with Aurik.  It’s become a somewhat happy/peaceful thing for me to get these things on Jhai as it’s like fulfillment of old dreams.

Anyway, enough of my cheesy soppiness.

Factions

• Cenarion Expedition - Exalted! I got my [Earthwarden].  2H Maces > Staves. Tabard, too!
• Kurenai - Exalted! [Cobalt Riding Talbuk] I really like the white armored one but Mharai has that.
• Shattered Sun Offensive - Exalted! Almost every neck (except the boomie one) to play with.
• Aldor - Exalted! Well, once I had my necks I had to be able to use the fun procs, right? Access to the shoulder enchants is nice, too.
• Keepers of Time - Revered.  Well, at least I can get to Tanaris easily now?

So, via factions, I’ve gained a few nice upgrades.  These are all the really easy ones, though - I wouldn’t mind grabbing Lower City, The Sha’tar and Honor Hold revered / exalted just so I have access to some recipes, glyphs, tabards and nice items for both main and off sets.  Although Wrath is coming soon-ish the beta has shown that a lot of the really nice TBC items won’t be replaced for at least a little while and I’d like to be able to comfortably instance on my way up!  Oh and  I wouldn’t mind Sporeggar / Ogri’la rep for the pet…

Skills

• Cooking - 330 and on its way up.  I need to go around and get myself recipes so I can cook all of the meat I have kicking about in various toons bags.
• Fishing - Ugh, I think I’m sitting about at 245 or so? I always enjoyed flitting about and fishing on the druid, though, it’s a lot faster than re-mounting for all of those little pools of fishing in mountain ponds.

What Next?

So… what else do I want to work towards my ‘druid v2′?  First of all I could do with boosting my dps gear.  Oddly enough, lately I’ve been asked to dps rather than tank a few times and I feel more than a little sub-par as I’ve gotten most of my dps from quest /crafted gear.   I have a few nice pieces, no doubt, but other bits are a little lacking - I need to get my fuzzy butt into Black Morass and see if I can get my trinket, for instance.

Epic flying form I could get… but I’d like to actually have some gold so  I can buy, you know, repairs?! Hehe.  Maybe if I spend a little more time on dailies and less time putting about trying to avoid them now I’m exalted.  I could also finish all the quests I have in SMV or do the Ogri dailies instead to avoid boredom.  As soon as I have a decent cushion I’ll see about getting myself epic pidgeon form.

Oh, and I need to go PvP and get myself some s2 gloves.  /sigh

Ok ok, I know.  Beta stuff.  I’m not meant to be posting much about it! The rest of my posts are pretty beta free, though, and I really wanted to show off parts of the two of the cool new druid abilities - Feral Charge (Cat) and Berserk (Bear).

If you are a wee bit curious then see after the cut!

(Won’t subject those to it as don’t want to see it /hugs)

Can’t get it to cut in a feed reader - apologies.  Can anyone tell me how to do it for next time?

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Silithus is a creepy lookin’ place - all them beasties! But ah took mah self over there in search o’ somethin’ fer a friend…

A guildy posted a quiz this week asking people to ‘find the tree’ - posting various screenshots of his leafy-druid self all around the world and asking people to name the zone and sub-zone.  Some of them I knew vaguely where they might be but was at a  loss to the sub-zone name.  One such was Silithus - I’ve not done many quests there on any char so I toddled over and found myself at Ahn’Qiraj - somewhere I’ve never been - and promptly fell in love with how it looks.

Tonight I went to Mount Hyjal on my shaman (more about that in another post) but when I came out I decided to go chill on my druid and grind some more Kurenai rep.  I bumped into some goblin commoners which, at first,  I assumed were for the Darkmoon Faire (which on the EU servers is in Terrokkar at the moment).  However, they looked a bit different…

I stopped, conversed and found out that something new was afoot!  Spirit of competition you say?  Tabard, you say!? Aha! I couldn’t find anything about it after a quick search but the instructions were simple:

Go compete and we’ll send you a tabard, win or lose.  If you win, though, we might send you a shiny medallion…

Cool, thinks I, I need honor on the druid anyways.  One fast, successful AV later and I visits my mailbox to find:

So what’s this spirit of competition?  Why, a Chinese dragon!  Nice one,  Blizz! What a pleasant and random surprise.

Ah know when ah’m no wanted, all them druids rompin’ their way through Karazhan and nary a dwarf nor a rogue in sight.  *Grumble*

Lightwalker’s furriest, featheriest and..barkiest? stepped into Karazhan with one aim - trash the place, druid style! I had been hoping to do this for a long time - especially after seeing Anna’s all-Pally Kara run - if those pretty-in-pink boys can do it why can’t we druids!?  We had some troubles getting things off the ground last week but this week things came together and we rampaged through the place.

There is little in Karazhan that is truly difficult for an all druid team - Aran and Romulo & Julianne require interrupts and Maiden reqires a dispell.  I managed to fraps most of it but, unfortunately, didn’t get any footage of moroes as I forgot to turn fraps on.  /crai

Please forgive the terrible youtube-quality and quickly-put-together video - I’m a newbie when it comes to recording and editing and compressing and and… yeah.  I kinda enjoyed it, though, so I’ma try to do some more and hopefully get better!

The Setup:

• 5 Ferlols
• 2 Boomkeks
• 2 Trees
• 1 HT Druid

Problems:

• No dispell
• No real interrupt
• No salvation!

Bonuses:

• 5 innervates
• 5 combat res’
• Pure, Distilled Awesome

Our guildies were mostly amused and seemed to think we’d lack dps or not be able to overcome the need for dispells / interrupts but I think, after thoroughly trashing the place, we can safely say we proved ‘em wrong.

Some notes:

Maiden we simply outhealed for the most part and combat res’d when there was just a bit too much damage going on.  Not really much trouble and in a pinch the melee could have all healed the tank (though it totally wasn’t needed with the number of hots flying).

Romulo and Julianne are actually pretty easy to interrupt - the Eternal Affection heal is a looooong cast and two feral druids can take turns standing out and waiting for it to be cast then feral charge interrupting it.

Aran is a pain in the big bear butt - we found that using the same technique as R&J meant losing far too much dps so eventually we just took the option of taking the poly.  As the video shows - druids can easily overcome this with a few tranquilities blasting!

Illoof isn’t actually too bad  You will end up with a lot of imps but we found that having a couple of swiping bears was enough to keep most of their attention and the relatively high health pool mitigated well (as well as some pretty awesome healing).

Plate will drop on every boss.  Whats not plate will usually be mail.  I think we ended up with 6 items actually going to people max… /facepalm

Dps is a bit slower than a mixed group and we weren’t setting any records but we finished in ~3 hours or so - not bad, really!

Screenies

(Oh and my little Jhai was the lootwhore of the evening, soaking up [Signet of Unshakable Faith], [Emberspur Talisman], [Aran's Soothing Sapphire], and squeefully [Gilded Thorium Cloak] (replaced my resto offhand twice in one run hehe).  I hate feeling like such a lootwh0re but, damnit, I hate seeing things sharded!)  The cloak was a really nice upgrade for me as was my new [Violet Signet] (dinged honored after downing Maiden!).

Go team druid!

The first screenie is one I took a month or so back (whilst still levelling Jhai) - I’d completely forgotten it and only found it when I was poking through my screenshot folder today - an oddly pretty picture of Burning Steppes as I was flying over it.

The other two?  Some silly shots of my playing with my new toy - the [Orb of the Sin'dorei] in Mount Hyjal. *grin*