See post below.

I think Nao's outline of where we are as a guild pretty much covers it. Gluth gave us a few wipes until we sorted the kiting, Thaddius screwed me up ( something to do with L2JUMP!!) but we got him down as well. Razuvius went down last night on the 3rd (4th?) attempt. Naxx is ok - I hear it gets harder from here on :)

Pilf hit exalted with Kirin Tor, Knights of the Ebon Blade, Alliance Vanguarde, Argeant Crusade, Wrymrest Accord and whoever else, so she now doesn't have to wear a tabard in the dungeons. Unfortunately her T7 robe is incredibly ugly - think musty old velvet curtains, but unfortunateky isn't much improved by tabards.

Life in Azeroth is a bit fraught at the moment and Nao and are are in serious conversations (negotiations?) about whether to take a break from the game or to quit it entirely. It would have an impact on the guild if a MT and a healer went on a break or vanished but RL has to take priority, as does sanity.

To be continued...

Small and quick update.

Right quick update. As a guild we have cleared spider, plague and construct quarters, we as of tonight we have downed the first boss of the military quarter.

Naofa has almost run out of things to get with emblems, blizz should really add more stuff - really they should.

Fiach my hunter was transfered over to our home server and is 80 and is my pew for heroics, tis fun. Fiach is BM even post nerf as I managed to get really lucky, I mean really, as I managed to tame the spirit beast. It beautiful. Really. And named to reflect that. I also tamed the queen wasp before the patch, it not really viable due to visibility in instances as it is a BIG pet, even more so with Bestial Wrath. Slowly getting better gear. Fiach is my means of earning some gold, as Nao does it really slowly.

We also have some new alts on the go, retadin for pilf, frost mage for myself, we are doing well with them I think and should continue to do so as time passes.

Right that's it mostly, more to come though.

'Dancing' with Heigan

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure go watch. It's the sort of fight that really annoys me. If you lag you're fooked. Ditto if you're fractionally behind. Ditto if you take more than one hit. It's my new Prince fight. It'll either be fine or it'll be a disaster. Someone kept count and we did it on the 5th attempt ( /gulp @ repair bills!) The 5th attempt we lost one person (a gnome ofc, have to keep them raid gods happy somehow) and everyone else was standing at the end. I have to salute druid HoTs. If we hadn't had them it would have been virtually impossible. To illustrate a little better: usually when we get a boss down there's excitement down vent. This time there was stunned silence and a few 'thank gods we haven't got to do that again' sighs. A few /cheer emotes in raid chat but aside from that nada. That fight will be painfull to me always.

But then, of course, you come to Loatheb. He's a swine isn't he? All that 'no healing for 20 seconds then a 3 second healing window' malarkey. Bah. But we one-shotted him. So Bane was pleased, the raid was pleased. The Tier 7 shoulders went to Sem so he was pleased. All in all, not bad. It resets tonight - we start again tomorrow.

Quick post

Fiatim the druid is now a moonkin or doomkin rather. A respec at Pilf's suggestion, and one I don't regret doing. Having got from 72 to 74 faster than I got from 71 to 72, I think it works. He is also had a doubling in his dps, which is fun. At 74 I have roughly 1k spellpower, which is fun and good I think. Slight change of spec to this and still going strong.

Time will tell how it works in instances and in end game if I do end up raiding with him.

/ Happy Dance

I'd managed not to blog about it, as it would have been a very boring string of emotes along the lines of:

/squee
/eek
/crai

You get the general idea - but we went to 10 man Naxx for the first time last night... After obligatory insanity "Boss? If it's set to Heroic does that mean it's setting us up for 25-man?" "Oh fuck, that's why those mobs looked numerous... right...everybody out.." Exit raid. Re-set to Normal. Re-enter. Ah, kk, now there's like 10 spiders not 30...

Both Nao and I, being the good little raiders that we are, had spent a fair degree of time reading and watching strategy, both from a healzor perspective and from a tank one. It's one of the few times that I'm glad I'd trusted my gut instinct of 'we can do this' and ignored Bane's diktat that we were going to try Anub'Rekhan and look at Grand Widow Faerlina and that was all and researched all the bosses in the Spider Quarter. Because, umm, we cleared them all. Yeah the big spider-queen Maexxna as well /happy dance (with a soupcon of /I told you so dance too). Both Anub'Rekhan and the Widow we got down on the first go, due to a positioning error, Maexxna took two goes. Doing your homework is A Good Thing, kids.

So the healing, well it wasn't much of a struggle (the raid gods will now smite me on Monday for my foolish-mortal arrogance, I know...) I think our healing set up of priest (me) on MT (Nao), resto druid (Cat) on OT (Simon) and shaman (Nip) on the raid was an excellent set-up. I'm so used to healing Nao I do it without thinking (then I looked at my /played time and realised why the other day and then had a small zomgwtfbbq /weep at the number of days) the druid HoTs are fantastic (for Maexxna's webwrap, chucking a Lifebloom on the tank as webwrap hits means that, spectacularly during the wrap, his life ticks up which is bloody epic as far as I'm concerned) and the raid heals a shaman has are also superb. We also initiated Nip into the healzor channel, one of the guild's best kept secrets /grin. Yeah I blew my Guardian Spirit cooldowns a lot, but better safe than sorry and I think Nao used his Lay of Hands once (twice maybe?). And the healing meters, terrible things that they are (and without exception, all the points made there I agree with!) but y'know, me and the overheals thing and my ongoing battle... unsuprisingly as I am a priest and was healing Nao I hit the top but my over-heal was only 41.9%, which for me, especially after not having raided for 3 months, isn't bad. I didn't go OOM which was a relief - Cat and I were talking theorycrafting the other day, well, I say 'talking' she was blinding me with science whilst I tried to keep up (I suck at math therefore theorycrafting for me is hard work) and the accepted wisdom is that your spellpower to mp5 whilst in combat should be 5:1. Now my spellpower is 2k (too high tbh) and my mana regan is... shameful. But thank goodness for the wonderousness that is buff food, buffs and flasks, which took it up to a much better 400 mp5 while casting! Plus of course, I love my pet.

Anyways, so the Spider Wing Cleared we moseyed off the the Plague Wing. Noth the Plaguebringer, well I'd love to say that I had read up on this but even my self-belief would only carry me so far and I hadn't assumed that we'd clear the first Wing so quickly. Aside from the annoying adds and the threat wipe on teleport this was a long fight but nothing particularly hard to heal though, but by then it was getting late and my concentration had wandered slightly I admit. But again, he went down on the first attempt. Then we got Heigan. Now I gather this boss is famous in raid circles for making you do the dance all over the room. Ahem. Sorry rephrase. For wiping the raid in seconds. It was such utter pwnage that the laughter down vent didn't stop until a while after we ressed everyone. Ok quick re-group, the whole explanation again and umm, well, it took a bit longer for all of us to die this time. Now I know that I need to go watch the fight a few times because the safe zones are a pattern but when I'm healing, all I do is look at health bars so my awareness of the fight is very limited. So, y'know, even though Bane has a big blue square over his head I wasn't really sure where to go, and yeah, follow the mark is a simple instruction, I know...

Bane, however, depraved man that he is, was delighted. By the wipe-age. Uh-huh. He said that finally here was a challenge (no arguments here) but at that point, as we'd been going for nearly 4 hours, he called it. We shall return on Monday... after I've spent some time here watching a lot of fights. But for a first attempt? Not too shabby at all. Mind you, it would have been interesting if we'd have left it set to Heroic mode now, wouldn't it?

Happy New Year from Blizz

So all that rep grind with The Oralces was so worth it. My first egg gave me a beautiful mount and you actually can't get luckier than that! Sem got his three days ago (ofc...) on his 3rd egg (I think) and I was incredibly jealous. But not anymore. So whatever your class, race, spec and server - have an excellent New Year and a happy 2009 /hug.

In Which Pilf Goes OOC (and remains there)

Being a rounded person (draenei?) is a good thing, they tell me. Therefore re-speccing to give Nip a taste for healing is also A Good Thing too, right? Of course it is - we want to raid and therefore we need another competent healer and the easiest way for Nip to get practice and confidence is if he heals for the usual suspects. Fine. Oh, except that will leave us a DPS slot unfilled because there's no point in having 2 healers, ok no-one should die but the fights might be a bit long... So the answer to the conundrum is whilst Nip respecs to resto I take Pilf off for a quick shadow respec. Simple as that.

You'd think wouldn't you? Except for the fact that Pilf has never, ever, ever been anything other than pure holy (except for about 20 minutes when I wanted to make levelling faster and she went shadow, then went eek, then went back to holy). So respeccing to shadow was A Big Thing for me but with my altruistic (carebear?) hat on off I went to Stormwind to do so. First problem: I know nothing, nothing about shadow specs. Ok not a problem as there is a HotGL dude who's got a shit hot spec so Nao wanders off to the The Armoury to look it up. Right respec done - now to sort out toolbars /sigh. And spells /sigh. And wait... now I have two castbars... ok... sort them out as well. And we're done. Nip meanwhile has respecced to resto and away we go. Something easy like UK would be a start so off we toodle. And aside with being unlucky with the frost tombs on the first boss it's fine. Nexus? Sure. Away we go. Again no problems at all - in fact, hang on, he makes this look easy... wtf???

The we went off to CoT -heh heh we haven't done this ever on HC this'll be harder (/smirk - see I'm not a nice person at all). But again - ez-mode. Nip is now well into the healing thing. Very happy. And me? Well herein lies a problem. I don't have DPS gear. My gear is 'chanted, gemmed and chosen for heals. Spirit, mp5, etc. DPS gear needs hit, crit, int... Oh fudge. But okay, it's good that Nip is liking the whole healing thang and I'm exalted with a few factions so I can buy more appropriate gear...and gem it with + hit, and enchant it with + hit and I can get some trinkets ... and hang on a minute... where did my gold go??? /big sigh. Oh and I forgot to mention glyphs. Yeah I needed to change them as well.

So now it's done. My gear, whilst not epic, has put my hit up to 251 (a long way off cap but still). Recount tells me that I'm hitting about 1.6k damage a second (admittedly from my uber AoE) on mobs. And yeah its ok. But I miss healing. I keep looking for buttons that just aren't there. When things get sticky I can remove shadowform and heal (using the word very loosely) with Flash Heal but it doesn't really work and my mana regen - now geared to Spirit Tap sucks. And, oh god, how precious does this sound... as DPS you're one of the crew, you don't have that special little niche that you have as a healer. And yes, I know... I did warn you - precious...

So I was feeling really, really crap and down and generally bleugh, then, and this will prove how shallow I am, Cat whispered me. She said that she'd gotten reports about my DPS from her mates (Noir and Mis) that I'd been partied with - I can't remember the exact phrasing, I now wish I'd screenshotted it, but it was along the lines of "if she pumps out that level of DPS when she's doing something she doesn't like, is new to and goes against her nature I don't want to be around when she really pulls out the stops" and I cried. See, shallow as a puddle! But you know how something can make you feel so much better - like 'ok, I'm not a complete fucktard, I could actually do this...' So I went off to teh interwebz and had a read... apparently as DPS I should have a rotation - oh ok, what's one of dem den? Hmmm... But I found one and I got better (pretty much level with Sem on DPS in the right circs) and I got better at looking around and learning fights and understanding that breaking CC is a bad thing (apparently...) and that ummm whilst this would be a good time to learn to Mind Control, staggeringly, it doesn't work when the target is freeze trapped /giggle.

And then last night Nip was feeling under the weather and there wasn't another healer around. And everyone wanted badges and shards. So I respecced back. And realised that I now defaulted to DPS and healing required thought. And respeccing costs gold. And I needed to find my healing gear... And what do I spend badges on: healing shinies or DPS shinies... And to be honest I want the dual spec thing to be here NOW. Because then, at least, the glyphs and the speccing won't be a drain on the bank. And who knows, maybe some day, switching between DPS and healing won't be something I pay much mind to - because, you know, I'll be pro at both...