So last week, if you follow my twitter/facebook or just paid attention here, I got to do something I’ve been *itching* to do since Icecrown Citadel went live.

Last Wednesday was a particularly painful raid night. All sorts of things were messy/sloppy, I was annoyed we were carrying people (I was also PMSing, which may have made me way more irritable than I’d normally be). Fast forward to Thursday night, I was invited along to fill a spot in a 25-man Icecrown Citadel raid with US Horder Patrol. They only had 3 bosses left, but I didn’t mind because one of those 3 was the (dun dun duuuuuun!) Lich King!

Prior to the big bad fight though, we did hard-mode Rotface, which while it was hectic because I’d never done it before, wasn’t too bad, honestly. Anyway. We downed Rotface, then Professor Putricide (on normal mode) and then it was off to the Frozen Thone!

Learning the fight, for me, was rough. There is a LOT going on and to keep track of. However, a few attempts (and thankfully no royal eff-ups from me) we killed him! I’m now the proud owner of a shiny Kingslayer title (which is not so special, since everyone and their brother has it these days)! I was on a crazy high after that, and I totally want a chance to do the fight again.

Friday I got totally shocked though… Shadow Prophecy’s core group was all online! So what did we do? Something we don’t do normally… PROGRESSION! We killed Valithria (we’d had problems with her on Wednesday, due to sleepy healers) and moved onward to Sindragosa.

Now, you may wonder why we’re rounding out the ice wing before even touching the blood wing. The reason is simple- the mechanics of the Sindragosa fight are easier for us to work with than the Blood Princes right now. Anyway, we got a few really solid attempts in, and got her down to 24% (this is a huge improvement for us, as we were previously wiping during phases 1/2). It was incredible, actually. No one even remotely screwed up the initial ground and air phases. We’re still working the kinks out of the 3rd phase, but we can get there pretty consistently now, and I have confidence that if we go right to the frost wing tomorrow after Saurfang (instead of going to clear Fester/Rot/Putricide like normal) we can totally get her down this week. Which if it happens, will be amazingly awesome.

In other news, yesterday brought the start of the Midsummer Fire Festival. There have been a bunch of changes, which if you follow my twitter you’ll see I am totally. not. thrilled. but anyway. I’ve had 2 goals for this holiday: 1- get the scorchling pet on Binya (now impossible, thanks Blizzard!) 2- get the Frostcythe of Ahune for my mage, Étain. Of course, while the minimum level for the Brewfest boss (and I’ll guess the Valentine’s guys) was 75, Ahune’s minimum level to engage is 78. Urgh.

So while my plan had been get Étain 4 levels (from 71 to 75) and farm away, it’s not get to 78 as fast as humanly possible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a lot of fun playing her (who wouldn’t love playing a pink, puffball- haired gnome?!) my brain is starting to stall on going quest crazy. I’d queue for random dungeons back to back, but then I’ll burn through all my rest exp faster than I want to, and this whole process will take longer.’

Anyway, been grinding her since Saturday, and she’s now 74, with 25% more to go til 75. I figure if I can keep my momentum going, I can probably get her to 78 by sometime this weekend. Which will give me roughly 5-7 attempts on Ahune for the scythe. Which kind of sucks. Oh well. Once she hits 78, she’s going on a nice, long break for awhile.

In non-WoW news, I managed to get a Frigost beta key for Dofus this past weekend. Of course, this is pretty silly since I’m pretty sure the content of the next expansion is for 100+, and I am but a lowly little 48 Enutrof. I’ve been playing intermittenly with WoW, as kind of a break. The play styles are completely different, so it can be kind of a nice vacation for my brain. The only goal I have in that game is getting my Enu to 100 so she can basically be a lootwhore (you get a spell at 100 that gives you a summon that lets you get 2x the loot from monsters, basically). That’s a loong way to go, though.

Waiting for my financial situation to… make more sense (cents?), and then I’ll probably reactivate FFXI for a bit. The future for me with FFXIV is unsure, since I can’t get the benchmark to run (and I’m terrified to run a manual driver update… mostly because the last time I did it ended with my video card exploding. Literally). We’ll have to hold out and see what the future holds for me there.

Hey, this place looks familiar!

Hello again. It’s been awhile, much of the personal drama that was the reasoning behind the extended-hiatus here has subsided, and life is finally starting to settle into some sort of familiar routine-ness.

On the gaming front, I’ve been spending my time playing WoW, of course. Aside from Esa being fully kitted out in ICC-10 gear (and a few ICC-25 pieces) and Binya on her way to the same, I now have a third 80 thrown into the mix. Yup, my Death Knight, Brieanne, has hit 80 and is working on an ICC-ready DPS set, as well as putting together a tank set.

In the off time on WoW, I’ve been levelling a Mage, and you know what? I am having a BLAST. So much fun! My ‘lil gnome, Étain, is currently 69 at the writing of this post, and working her way in Northrend.

On the non-WoW front, I’ve been playing Dofus again as well. I now have my highest character ever, a level 46 Enutrof named Missesquan. I’m pretty sure level 100 (level cap is 200) is a long way away from me, but I’ve been having fun with it and it’s a nice distraction when I want to play an MMO but don’t want to play WoW.

While I do get pangs every now and again for FFXI (moreso to play Etain’s THF more than anything), I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I’m done with that game. In the almost a year I’ve been gone, too many things have been added, improved, or changed for me to even consider putting the time into now. Add to that the incoming level cap increase and, yeah. Like an old ex-boyfriend, these days I look back at FFXI with fond memories, but that’s all.

Looking ahead, I am currently planning to give FFXIV a whirl when it’s released. I’ve really been hoping to get into the Alpha or the Beta (so I can make up my mind without having to drop the cash on the game, heh), but I have this feeling that’s not going to happen. So, we’ll see.

On the blogging end here, I am planning on a site revamp and/or tweakage next weekend. Will I return to blogging weekly? Hard to say. Things in WoW are fairly stagnant (I’ve re-undertaken my achievement goals. Currently working on a few that shouldn’t be too difficult for me to bang out this weekend) and will probably remain that way the next few months until the Cataclysm info starts flooding in. Completely legitimately, of course. Even FFXI/XIV-wise I’ve been way on the outside of the loop. My job finally got around to blocking the bunch of sites I relied on for information there and since work is the place where I have the most downtime, yeah. I am waaaay out of the loop.

So that’s where I’m at. Like I said, I’ll be doing a revamp of the blog next weekend, and am going to try to blog semi-regularly…ish again. I will definitely try to keep it game related, with 2 MMO’s being played currently and a potential third, I think I can drag some sort of content together from somewhere.

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.