Due to drama and such in the real world, ABT is being taken down. It’s been a fun ride. See you on the flip side.

Yup, with 3.3 on the PTR, and Icecrown Citadel yummies sitting off in the horizon (not to mention a change to how Emblems of Triumph are gotten that is in line with the recent change to Emblems of Conquest), Blizzard has released the new set-bonuses for the last tier set of W0tLK!

Of course, playing a Priest and Druid, you know where this post will be focusing.

So, let’s look at Balance Druid’s bonuses first!

2 Pieces (Balance): When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 15% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 seconds.
4 Pieces (Balance): Your critical strikes from Starfire and Wrath cause the target languish for an additional 5% of your spell’s damage over 4 seconds.

The Clearcasting proc buff is kind of neat, though technically it *shouldn’t* be a Balance bonus- Omen of Clarity is actually in the Restoration talent tree. Granted, many a moonkin will snag the talent (myself included), because hey, mana-free casts are made of win! Still though, I don’t really keep track of my OoC procs, and it seems most of the time it procs when I don’t need to cast anything again (usually when I’m buffing with Mark/Gift of the Wild or Thorns). Or at least, I only notice the procs when I don’t need to cast anything else. Is it going to be as strong as a bonus as T8/8.5’s 2-piece is/was? Not sure, I’m sure testing on the PTR will give us a better idea, though.

As for the 4 piece bonus. I’m kind of meh about it, honestly. So after critting for say, 12000 damage with a Starfire that means that the target will take and extra 600 damage on top of that over 4 seconds? Meh. It might bump you on the meters a little (I know during Lunar Eclipse I put out ridiculous numbers with Starfire crits), but I have a feeling it’s only going to be a marginal increase. We’ll see I guess.

They did post the druid models though for the gear. While I am *so* not feeling the headpiece (I also have a certain affinity for my Sailor Moon crown), the shoulders are pretty freaking bad ass. Which of course is going to mean they’re going to be damn near impossible for a fairly casual raider to get, knowing Blizzard.

Druid Tier 10 graphics

Onto Priest bonuses! We’ll look at Shadow first.

2 Pieces (Damage): The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.
4 Pieces (Damage): Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 0.5 seconds.

Okay. Wow? VT and DP crit a lot to begin with (VT crits a crapload for me, actually), so this is going to be a nice DPS increase. Although, even being marginally geared for ToC25, I still put out pretty pathetic numbers (I don’t like being 11 and lower on the meters ). Anything that bumps Shadow DPS is welcome though, and since Tier 9’s bonuses were, in my opinion, pretty lame, this is a pretty nice change.

4 piece? Oh wow. While half a second isn’t a lot, it will be enough for me to sneak Shadow Word: Death back into my rotation. Assuming, as stated above, I don’t have to jump through ridiculous hoops to snag the 4 piece bonus (I really like how they set-up distribution for Tier 9 actually. Even if I barely have enough emblems to get my 2 piece). The only thing I can see being a little bit of annoyance here is with a Heroism/Bloodlust pop. Although, it might mean being able to add in an extra MF anyway, which is going to mean a sizable DPS increase, honestly.

Okay. Yummy healing bonuses now!

2 Pieces (Heal): After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
4 Pieces (Heal): Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

2 piece is nice, especially for Holy priests who have GS glyphed. This is going to mean I’ll need to make a macro for PS for raid purposes (time to learn how to tie a macro with Clique -.o). In a situation where you’re popping wither of those two cooldowns, you’re anticipating your target (usually a tank) taking a HOLYCRAP lot of damage (initial Auriaya pull, anyone?), so that bonus healing after the effect wears is going to be really nice.

4 piece… oh god. Oh. God. Anything that lowers Penance’s cooldown for me is welcome. And lord knows I’m usually spamming Flash Heals when Penance is on cooldown. So yeah, kind of in love with this.

I’ve noticed though, that a lot of the priest bloggers I’ve read are kind of meh about these. Honestly, I think these bonuses are worlds beyond the kind of crappy tier 9 bonuses (especially when someone ran the math to find the bonus to Divine Aegis on the 4 piece was a laughable increase at best). Maybe I’m just a little less experienced (and a little more idealistic?) than some of them though. We’ll find out the average rate of refreshing the cooldown though, once testing on these sets opens up on the PTR. I’m still feeling positive, though. Just hoping now that the graphics of this set are prettier than Tier 9 was. That shit (for Alliance, anyway) is fugly as hell.

Sorry for the lack of posting, things in the real world have been a bit hairy, and I honestly haven’t gotten to play much WoW outside of the weekend the last two weeks.

One thing I have been doing though, is making some money. And wow. Really, it is so retardedly easy to make money in WoW vs. FFXI. I’m just talking about crafting here btw- we already know dailies make making money into easy-mode.

I’ve been putting Esa to hard work the last week- farming herbs like crazy (Sholazaar to get Adder’s Tongue, which Binya uses for Inscription, and Storm Peaks for alchemic purposes). Of course, the mass amount of herbs I get for Inscription seem to disappear way too quickly, and the last 4/5 Darkmoon Card of the North attempts have been fail (1 Nobles Card- which is good, the 1 Chaos and *3* Undeath. Blargh). Been making circles around Storm Peaks though, and I seem to have found a fairly reliable way to make money.

Yup, I changed Esa’s Alchemy spec to Elixirs (again) and have been cranking out Flask of the Frost Wyrm’s. Once- sometimes twice- a day, I’ll throw up 5 at a time on the Auction House. I keep the buyout the same as whatever’s on the top of the list (organized by price, least->most expensive) and will list the opening bid as 1 copper less than whatever’s on top. I’d like to throw up more than 5, but I don’t want to flood the AH and ask for some jerk to undercut me, so 5’s been a pretty workable number. Plus, they sell for between 29-35 gold a pop on Ner’zhul-A, so I am making an easy 150-300~ish gold a day doing this. I’ve got about 1500 gold across all my toons again (after cleaning them all out to purchase Esa’s epic flight) and that’s without doing any dailies regularly. If I can suck it up this weekend and do dailies on both girls, I’ll have a nice chunk of change.

I have to admit- not wanting for money in WoW has definitely made it more enjoyable than FFXI. For me, anyway. I can spend an hour here or there, and make enough gold to get me through a weak of raiding repairs (since I don’t need to purchase any consumables- I can make them all myself). It definitely means there’s more time to play the game and do random stuff than to have to spend hours and hours farming to be able to afford say, a stack of shihei (I think I spelled that wrong).

Anyway. Moving on~

Last weekend I got asked while on Binya if I wanted to run ToC10 with the guild one of our officers has an alt in. I said sure, since I didn’t have that achievement on Binya yet, and emblems and possible gear upgrades are always a good thing. Well, there were a few bumps in the road (and wow, I don’t like Anub’s p3 as a healer- not being able to heal people kind of sucks) but ultimately we were successful. After that, we went along to Onyxia10, which I have yet to do successfully on *either* toon.

After 2 wipes, what happened is, once again, why I will always be asked to be a healer. -.o Basically, once her p3 hit, everyone died except for 4 of us- the Warrior tank, myself, a resto shammy, and a hunter. We 4-manned her, but the Hunter died (I have no idea how- he just… died). We managed to 3-man her to the end after that, with me keeping SW:P and Devouring Plague up (lol) and I think the shammy was DPS’ing too. There was a snide comment over vent about me having full mana (Hi, I have 25k mana UNBUFFED as Disc. I know how to make my mana pool last a loooong time) and that was why people people died. -_- However, I shut them up once I got under 50%, popped Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope and was back up to full again. ~.^ We won, it was crazy and stressful and fun, and I’d forgotten what that was like.

No fab drops for me (I got a neckpiece in ToC10 which was a decent upgrade for my Disc set), but I got invited back again for the two raids tomorrow, so I’m glad.

Normally, I’d save Binya from getting saved to stuff like that, because the guild will usually run it. However, the GM has been kind of MIA the last week or so, and we’ve lost pretty much all our tanks as a result of not raiding. >_< We *do* have pallys we could use, but we’d be a losing well-geared Hunter and Mage as a result (the pallys are their alts). We lost our 2nd Pally who served as off-tank to lack of raiding (his Warrior is also my Arena partner), and two other tanks we’d invited a few weeks ago left this week too. Kad will be back online in about two weeks, but he’s said he wants to focus on his Hunter when he comes back, since he has the most fun playing her.

So… I do have two options on what I can do to help the guild. Both involve Esa, and both involve re-spec’ing.

Option 1 – Esa becomes Arena-capable as well as a raid healer.
Yep. I’ve been planning to spec her feral tree to resto once I’d built a PvP set of gear anyway, but this would give the guild another option as a clutch healer (and would make it worthwhile for m to keep bringing Esa for gear upgrades, since they technically wouldn’t be losing a healer) when we’re in a pinch. I’m sort of not so thrilled about playing a healer on *2* toons though, and it would require me to build up another gearset form scratch, since hit doesn’t help heals, and most of my boomkin stuff lacks a bit of spirit.

Option 2 – Esa’s Feral-hybrid build becomes a straight bear build as another tank.
I’m actually kind of leaning toward this. My cat set is decent (I could probably do okay in Ulduar10 with my current build and gear), and I have a slightly better than okay bear set. I’ve done a little bit of tanking, and honestly BadKitty makes it kind of idiot-proof in which debuffs and buffs I need to keep up. At this point it would a matter of slightly upgrading my gear a bit more (I currently do have the BiS neck, though, for bear at least XD) and getting a little more experience. I need more Stam though, that’s for sure- I only *just* pass the 30k mark with self-buffs. It’s a good start though.

Or I can just leave her as she is- a Feral-DPS/Balance-DPS character. I put out solid numbers as Balance, but the guild is in a bit of a pickle and I’d like to see us get back into the swing of things.

Besides, I’d like to see at least *one* of my toons clear Ulduar JUST ONCE. I’ve gotten as far as Mimiron. I’d really like to see at the very least Vezax and Yogg and maybe someday… Algalon.

I held off on posting this week, because I wanted to post my epic achieves. And they are epic. But first!

Yes, that is Onyxia. Last night we grabbed 10 bodies and went in to give her a try (now that the servers are more stable than they were on Tuesday). Fun fight, but tough! Especially if you never did it before. ¬_¬; We had trouble, not because of the fight, but because of the changes nerfs to pallys that came with 3.2.2. All the same, we got her down to phase 3 twice out of 5 attempts. I’m sure once our pallys get a handle on things we’ll be able to handle her no problem!

Anyway, onto my achievements!

It started with this:

Aside from working my butt off to get 4000 gold together (half of it was easily raised by selling 2 Argent Tournament pets on the neutral AH, btw), I was going quest and daily crazy to hit exalted with Valiance Expedition so it would only cost me 4000 gold. I’ve now unlocked those dailies in Icecrown on Esa, btw. :3

It also meant that I could *finally* use my Bronze Drake (which me winning and not having epic flight made some drama on a random CoS run. Because doing the timed run is HARD! /sarcasm).

Nifty flavor screenie:

So one that was finished, I went off on my ultimate goal: the Swift Flight Form quest chain. I’d decided a long time ago that I wanted to do the quest instead of just buying the training from the trainer. Mostly for the Feat of Strength, partly just to do it that way, but more so because I’d really like to farm Heroic: Sethekk Halls for the [Reins of the Raven Lord]. That, plus my eventual Guardian of Cenarius title (my next undertaking!), and purchasing a [Cenarion War Hippogryph] would, in my opinion, make my Druid as much a complete Druid as she could be.

So on Tuesday, despite the amazing server lagginess, I started the chain. Got about 2/3 of the way through it before I lost steam- and not because of the chain (though the travelling all over the place is the most annoying, time consuming part). No, it was because I was Neutral with Lower City on Esa. Why is this a problem, you wonder? Because in order to enter Heroic: Sethekk Halls for the final part of the chain, you need to have a key. The only way to buy the key is to be Honored with Lower City.

So off I went, running regular Sethekk Halls a bunch. The last few times I went, a fellow guildy came through on his Hunter, then swapped to his Warrior for the last boss so he could have a shot at the axe Talon King Ikiss drops. Thankfull, it didn’t take many runs to hit Honored, and last night I went off to finish the chain.

After some confusion with my friends and the rep their toons had, we went in with me as a Feral Druid (Bear tank ftw!), a Priest, and a Mage. We got to Anzu pretty quickly and cleared the room. Once I popped him, I attempted doing it the “right” way- popping into caster form periodically to cast Rejuvination on the NPCs t help- but eventually gave up for the sake of annoyance.

All the same, we killed Anzu easily (no mount drop- THIS time) and off I went to turn in my quest!

Shortly after grabbing a port to Shattarath-

Feat of Strength yay! Not to mention- I snagged my permanent moonstone, so I can now summon Anzu every day! Mount farming, here I come!

Also- I am now a pretty purple birdy when I fly!

And all the time, blood, sweat and tears was well worth it- I zipped around Sholazaar Basin this morning herbing. Got 100 Adder’s Tongue and enough Eternal Lives to make a Darkmoon card in under 25 minutes- and promptly made a Nobles Card! 8 more to go, and then Esa gets a shiny new trinket ([Darkmoon Card: Greatness])!

So last night I got dragged into a ToC run with a friend of mine. We were going to do 1 heroic run and at least 2 regulars (we were going to do more and farm, but I was tired and people were dragging their feet getting started).

Heroic went fine, as did the first regular run. I managed to get uncontested (finally) The Black Heart, which now gives me a full tanking set (and 30,000 HP when fully buffed)! Not that I intend to do any tanking, any time soon.

Or so I thought…

The 2nd regular ToC run went less than stellar, as our healer DC’d, and shortly after that our Shadow Priest had to bounce (it was him and his girlfriend’s anniversary). So it left myself (on my Druid, obviously), a Prot/Holy Pally, and a Holy Pally who swapped over to his Hunter. We decided to let the Prot/Holy Pally heal, and I’d attempt to tank it and we’d 3-man it. So, we did.

3-manning it, we did okay (it was Paletress, btw, who we were stuck on. Eadric is easy as hell compared to her). Got the image down to 30k before we wiped. The Hunter called in another guildie, who hopped on his Warrior. The extra DPS made a big difference- we 4-manned her np. Even better- she dropped the Banner of Victory, which I was hoping to snag for my kitty set (my Feral set is kitty-focused, with some tanking talents for the sake of soloing/emergencies). The Warrior and I both needed… and I won! (If you check my armory I’m in my Feral kitty set atm.)

So we continued with that set-up and I tanked the Black Knight and it was… easy. Even the 2nd phase, with all the stupid adds- no problem. Maybe our Pally healer was just that good, I don’t know. But tanking was kind of fun, and I think I’d like to try again sometime…