The Holiday Lull (or Lulz)

Haven’t updated in what seems like a while…I’ve been busy with all this crazy holiday stuff going on. A wonderful week off from work last week (which only seemed like 1 day off) had me out and about, but when I wasn’t, I was busy burning away time in-game.

Wabbit Season! Duck Season! Alt Season! FIRE!!!

Alt-itis has picked up since 3.3 released with 3 new heroic 5 man dungeons along with heroics new and old throwing triumph badges at adventurers. With lots of folks being out and unavailable to raid, alt season has been in full swing, and will continue to be until next week, when the holidays are over and the next wing of ICC is unlocked for our raiding pleasure.

I’ve been hard at work on my alts, namely my warrior, which I’ve decked out with every useful badge upgrade available, and will be “complete” with 2 BOE acquisitions as far as DPS gear goes, although the expertise ring from heroic HoR would be nice if I wanted to run an Incite build again. His PVP set is also fully kitted out, and awaits the release of Arena Season 8 before any more upgrades become available (I don’t do arena seriously, if at all). Tank set netted 2 upgrades from ToC 10 last night, including a chestplate that replaces the one I got on him in Naxx almost a year ago, heh.

My paladin has come along well, too, although he now has the ugly problem of having waaaaaay too much hit rating; at one point, I believe I was at 457 hit. A huge majority of that is from the polearm “upgrade” I obtained on him from heroic HoR; the axe from heroic PoS would be much better (although I would much rather have the OEB from Ony…mmm). Tanking gear is pretty well rounded out, although I’m going to snag the armor trinket and hopefully also the trinket from heroic PoS. I’m fortunate that my paladin’s tanking gear is well off enough to allow him to tank ICC (10 at least), unlike my warrior…despite our best efforts, my warrior requires WAY too much healing to be in there (although we did get 3/4…my gimp tank + subpar/alt dps = Saurfang wins).

My new favorite alt at this time would be my warlock. I joined 2 guildies leveling druid alts (one a tank, the other healing) via dungeon farming (only doing quests that pertained to the dungeons) over the weekend and managed to gain 3-almost-4 levels, even having had rest xp run out. I also respecced him from Affliction to Destruction for the dungeon running…holy hell, the damage is INSANE. As I’ve gotten a firmer grasp of the rotation/priority of destro casting (plus gear), dps went from 800ish to consistently around 1k…and this is at level 65. It doesn’t hurt I also leveled tailoring and enchanting on him to where he has ring enchants and cheap yet epic leg enchants…a gain of ~100 spell power. Oh, and he has full heirlooms, too. Chaos Bolt crits (upwards of 5.5k) are virtually guaranteed to pull aggro, and sucessive crits of Conflag and/or Incinerates will do the same.

Raiding…oh wait

Last week consisted of nothing but ICC; 1 25 man, and 3 different 10 mans, one of which was last night. Sadly, as previously mention when blabbering about my pally, my warrior was pretty much carried through as a tank, and it eventually bit us on Saurfang. This week may only be 10 mans; attendance is hampered being that we’re in the heart of the holiday season now. Next week should be interesting, though; hopefully folks will show up energized and ready to rock, especially being that a new wing of ICC will be available.

Having to cut this off here due to work…and lack of idea. More later on!

OM NOM NOM INC GNOME ENGINEER

Profession-wise, I’ve been a bit of a slacker this expansion. I have 450 Leatherworking, which has it’s perks, plus I’ve become the go-to guy for the guild as far as leatherworking goes (I have all but one of the raid patterns from this expansion). The fur lining “enchant” is on par with Blacksmithing (save for the fact BS gives you more versatility, ie you can go with 40 haste on a resto set) and is only a smidge behind JC for raw stat increases.

So how am I a slacker? Simple: Skinning. Hooray for 40 more crit rating!

I’ve been considering dropping skinning on-and-off for a while now, but I’ve never been keen on losing a gathering profession. However, I’ve made little money off of skinning, and leather stacks go for less than what a daily makes now (and I suspect this will happen in Cataclysm, too). That said, I have several options open as far as replacing skinning goes:

• Engineering, BS, and JC: I have 2 toons with 450 mining, so gathering ore wouldn’t be a problem. I already have BS on my paladin and Gobling Engineering on my warrior, so the former two would be redundant. JC is in the same boat, because literally half my guild has JC as one of their professions.
• Inscription and Alchemy: I have Herbing on my 71 druid and my 64 priest. The former has Inscription at 410 already, while the priest is closing in on 350 alchemy.
• Tailoring and Enchanting: Once again, redundant, for I have a 60 lock with 375 tailoring and 385 enchanting, lol. We have a designated go-to guy for all guild tailoring and enchanting needs, anyhow (similar position I have with LW).

Long ago, I was leaning towards picking up JC, but that was back when the Dragon’s Eye gems were overpower-I mean prismatic and you could use +32 spell power gems in blue sockets to gain shit tons of SP over any non-JC. So what am I favoring now?

Gnomish Engineering.

It’s not that I have some fetish for gnomes (I’ve never played one in 5 years of playing WoW), but it would give me access to any and all Engineering plans/schematics/items/etc. Also, with the release of ICC, the epic arrow patterns from the Ashen Verdict require an engineer to be of the Gnomish flavor. With 2 Primordial Saronite, I could take care of our hunter’s ammo needs. This would work really well, for both of our current raiding hunters have skinning as a profession, so in exchange for providing them with ammo, they could supply me with leather if I were in need of it.

Having Engineering on my warrior, I’ve come to love all the versatility it provides with the different “enchants” that are available. Being that I’m an avid PVPer (at least in BGs and Wintergrasp, where it’s no holds barred aka all Eng items are available for use), the profession would be of much more value in comparison to 40 crit rating.

What I would gain in exchange for dropping that 40 crit:

• EXPLOSIVES…Boom boom BOOM! Seriously, though, the frag belt tinker would give me unlimited grenades that cause a 3 second aoe incapacitate. That’s if I run out of regular bombs, which are dirt cheap to make. My warrior can make the new goblin sapper charges, which will be baller for Strand and (to a lesser extent) WG.
• Better cloak enchant: I would drop 23 haste for 27 spell power, which also comes with a parachute feature on a 1 minute cooldown. No more fall damage for me. Losing the haste sucks, but with all the new gear we’ll be getting, I expect the 27 sp to become more valuable as we approach the soft cap for haste (where LB is at 1 second casts during BL).
• The best hand enchants: 340 haste for 12 seconds in PVE, and a fucking hand mounted rocket launcher for PVP. Both are off of the GCD, although I am trying to find out if EM and the haste tinker/enchant can be used simultaneously. Rocket + Lava Burst is the definition of burst damage, heh. Supposedly the rocket goes off of spell crit, too…hmm…
• Jeeves: I have yet to farm this bugger up on my warrior, but it’s an invaluable utility for any raid, and as guild leader, anything I can do to help folks out like that would be dandy. Now to farm gold for a Traveler’s Mammoth…wait, I can farm mats to level Eng for cheaper and still have the repair options.[/li]
  [li]Rocket Boots: If you’ve seen them in action, you know you want them. Best escape mechanism ever, and no, I have not been killed by Icehowl in heroic ToC, so I don’t need them for that, thank you very much.
• Mote/eternal gathering: I could snag extra eternals once I can make the mote extractor.
• Roflcopterz: 2 more mounts available that would get me closer to that blasted 100 mount achievement…and let’s face it: The damn roflcopter looks funny as shit flying around. Too bad it’s only 280% speed instead of 310% like my rusted proto…

I’m probably forgetting some other cool stuff, but all the utility Engineering provides is just so damn awesome in Wrath. In BC, it was all about the goggles: They did something, and that something was kick serious ass (BiS for many classes well into T6, then you got upgrades for them if you raided SWP). Back in vanilla WoW, the utility was there, but it usually blew up in your face (anyone remember the old Goblin Jumper Cables? Did they EVER work? ).

I wonder how quickly I’d be able to level engineering now…I managed 1-350 in a span of 24 hours when I switched my warrior from BS to Engineering right before WOTLK came out. I expect it to be a bit slower for my shaman, mainly because I’m broke and don’t have a lot of old mats stowed away. I’m off work next week though, so I should have it done by then.

Patch 3.3 – The Holy Grail of WoW Patches?

I’ve been holding out high hopes for patch 3.3 for a good month or two now. In that time frame, I’ve ascended from long-time raider through loot council member and now GM of our guild. I’ve watched as people have come and go, either from RL issues (notably a couple of folks being extremely ill/sick; here’s wishing them good luck on recovery) or from burnout due to the bore-fest that is ToC.

I logged on Tuesday evening fully expecting not to raid at all that night, due to lag (where there was a good amount of, especially in Dalaran), instances not loading (which did occur), or the server not being up at all (which was the case when I logged on, but it was up within 5 minutes). Instead, we managed to clear 2 of the 4 available bosses and got in a try or two on the gunship battle before calling it for a night. Wednesday we returned to ICC and finished off the last 2 available bosses, with Deathbringer Saurfang being a bit of a cockblock, but we figured it out (lol sacrifice low armor folks that get marked ). As a whole, the fights weren’t too difficult; should go smoother next week now that we have a better idea of how the fights work. Our 2 10 man groups made quick work of the dungeon, but were pleased by some of the upgrades that dropped (I passed on a really nice resto belt to one of our resto shaman mains, even though I was healing at the time).

Before our raids last night, I decided to try the new LFG out for the first time. Of course, with my ever-so wonderful luck, the first dungeon I got put in was Occulus. It turned out to not be a big deal, because the group I got steamrolled the whole thing in 20 minutes…heh, I remember running it a year ago and steamrolling it then with guildies, and back then it was nowhere near as nerfed. Other runs I got (HoS, Gundrak) went as smooth as you could hope for from a PUG. I was queuing as dps, and the wait time was no more than 2-3 minutes; for a tank or a healer, I suspect it’s nearly instant. The bonus badges you receive will make the random dungeon feature wildly popular; I’m still farming up the last bit of badges needed to round out my lolFurious PVP set (since I’m not hardcore about running arena, but enjoy WG/BG pvp).

The next wing of ICC won’t be open until January 5th, so until then, all we have to play with in ICC is just the first 4 bosses we’ve already downed. Some folks are going to be disappointed about that, but I view it as Blizzard’s way of saying “Hey, the holidays are almost here…chill out and do other stuff or just take it easy on WoW for now”, heh.

Despite the gating, I believe 3.3 is shaping up to be one of the better patch releases we’ve had in WoW, which is a wonderful thing considering how meh 3.2/ToC was. Hard to say if this patch will be considered the best that Blizzard has put out, because right now it’s a pair of rose-tinted glasses after putting up with ToC for 3+ months. Even though I’m dragging ToC through the mud, we did a farm run of it last night and scored another Death’s Choice along with a Reign of The Dead…exactly the items I was hoping would drop.

ICC isn’t without it’s bugs, though. Last night, the 10 man group I was in had our airship get stuck in mid air way far away from the landing platform after defeating the gunship encounter, so we had to hop off the ship and go splat in order to take the teleporter. Also, don’t let someone teleport to the rampart between Deathwhisper and the gunship battle; we had someone do that and they ran back and fell down the elevator, only to bug up the place and cause people entering the dungeon to get warped up to the rampart and get gibbed. This also occured when anyone would take the elevator up; get in combat halfway up and you end up warping the raid up one by one, usually to their deaths. Very annoying.

Icewell Radiance hasn’t rendered our tanks as squishy as I had expected. I can see that so far, Blizz has accomplished what they set out to do: Smooth out the damage tanks were taking to make healing more strategic rather than “OMG SPAM NUKE HEELZ 4 TANK PLZ”. I’ve been resto for most all of our ICC excursions, and I’ll say that healing the boss fights here is much easier than healing that asshat in ToC known as Gormok. If this is the direction they want to take healing in Cataclysm, then I give my approval. Tanks are going to QQ over the changes since they won’t avoid 50%+ of attacks directed their way, but healers will be thanking Blizzard for making their lives a LOT easier.

Aside from the lore and bits of humor, I wasn’t particularly impressed by the new 5 mans. They are fun, though, and provide some more places to go for folks that have beaten previous heroics into the dirt. Items from these new heroics will complement triumph badge gear well, making the process of gearing alts/new mains even easier than ever. Ulduar and Naxx are nothing more than badge/shard pinatas at this point due to the combination of new drops from the IC heroics + triumph badge loot. I’m not complaining one bit, though; this will let me round out my paladin’s gear (namely his ret set) and I’ll be able to catch my warrior up, too, especially since I’ll be able to dps for groups on him now rather than feel forced to need prot as a second spec. I can play prot and do ok at it, but I’m much more in my element on a warrior as dps.

Harkening back to my last post here…we’ve gone from barely having 20 folks online for raids to having damn near 30 now, between folks coming back and new recruits pouring in this week. Obviously, I suspect the patch as being the major catalyst for that. I wonder how many of the returnees will be around come March/April when Arthas takes a dirt nap and we start working on heroic modes…

Long story short: So far, so good regarding 3.3. Here’s hoping that trend continues.

From Bi-Polar Raid to Bi-Polar Guild, Patch 3.3, and The Difference a Good Raid Night Makes

During the course of this weekend, things were looking grim as to the future of our guild. Recent departures, coupled with folks being locked down with RL obligations have led to us being short of people quite often. I had to entertain the idea of having to downsize the guild to 10 mans only, which I believe could be disastrous for our guild. Not an offense to anyone that only does 10 man content, of course; it’s that most of our members joined with the idea they would be in a guild that progresses through 25 man content as it’s priority, with 10 man stuff being icing on the cake. Downsizing our guild would most likely lead to a lot of departures…or at least that’s my gut feeling on the idea.

Despite the massive amount of negativity I had swirling around my mind, we managed to have a plethora of folks online last night, so we were able to head back into TOGC to pick up where we left off last week with Faction Champs. Took us a few tries and some strategy tweaks, but we managed to pull it off and finally put those guys down for the count. Even though I sounded rather monotone about the whole thing, I am ecstatic about getting that fight out of the way before today, since 3.3 is going live. It’s the morale boost I think we needed after the past week’s goings-on. It’s a great feeling to enter new content on a high note like that.

Patch 3.3 goes live today, and with it we’ll most likely experience our server being unplayable until tomorrow or even Thursday (we couldn’t do anything in Ulduar for 2 days when 3.1 came out due to lag and whatnot). I did not get to try out the PTR, so I’m eager to play with Fire Nova and see how I can make it work. I’m also eager to check out the new 5 mans, especially on my alts, since there are a plethora of upgrades available for them. I’ll clear them all on my shaman for acheesements, of course. That, plus I’ll be able to farm the last bit of triumph badges needed to round out my pvp gear…rawr!

Here’s hoping today’s patch won’t be as much of a clusterfuck waiting to happen as previous patches. I’m sure that’s asking a lot, but I don’t see the harm in thinking optimistically.

BRS (Bi-Polar Raid Syndrome, not Blackrock Spire :-P)

Funny how things work sometimes. Tuesday rolls arounds, raids reset, and come 8:15, we start invites and for the first time in what seems like forever, we manage a full 25 by 8:30. We start with a “warm up” raid on Onyxia, which wasn’t exactly smooth (and people still got hit by the damn deep breath, but it’s almost usually a disconnect). Afterwards, we proceeded to TOGC 25, where we got cockblocked by one thing after another, mostly with phase 2. It was the first time we had set foot in TOGC in about a month, so I was expecting some rustiness, but not to this degree. DPS was anemic, which really concerned me. Healing was solid as was tanking, from what I could tell.

Fast forward to last night. Confidence was shaken due to the previous night’s disaster. We had won VoA just before raid invites, so we went there for some faceroll content, and yours truly lucked out with a clutch roll to win a Grand Black War Mammoth (which dropped from Archavon, of all bosses). Being loot master, I waited for all rolls to come in, then rolled a 93 to beat the previous high of 92. If I ever get around to doing my tourney dailies again (which having to manage stuff after I log on becomes nigh impossible), this puts me that much closer to the 100 mount achievement.

Anyhow, back to the real topic. We finished up VoA, then went over to Sarth to pick up another mount (which we did with ridiculous ease…man, I remember when that fight was a solid challenge). Then it was decision time; we had 25 folks on, but due to lack of confidence, the votes were going between 2 x 10 mans, or nothing at all. I was vehemently opposed to doing nothing at all in order to save 10 mans for today or Monday. Instead, I just said to hell with it, set the diff to 25 man Heroic, then we proceeded to ToC.

I have no idea how or why, but it’s like all our dps hit a turbo button on their PC or something, because the dps was leaps and bounds better last night than the night before. I started off last night as resto, but upon realizing my contributions to the healing wouldn’t be necessary, I decided to take the aggressor route by switching back to dps and having us run with 5 healers…excellent choice, I’ll say. We went from killing Gormok and the second worm right as the following boss would come out to killing them with easily 15-20 seconds to spare. Sadly, we had folks get squashed by the yeti on some attempts, unlike Tuesday night (the not getting squashed thing was the highlight of Tuesday) and after 3-4 more tries, we finally downed the beasts (again). After that, I figured we would probably wipe on Jarraxus until our last attempt (which we generally pull a rabbit out of our hat and own face on), only to freaking one shot the bastard.

Sadly, we got to Faction Champs and got roflstomped for the most part, but we have had little time to work on that fight, so hopefully either tonight or Monday we can put in some quality time and get that encounter down before we go barging into ICC. Would be a nice note to enter ICC on, especially with having shed so many folks this week, including one of our officers. The loss of said officer has caused a lot of nervousness amongst many members of the guild, but I believe last night success will help lessen nerves. I know it did for me.

LE is recruiting!

Being that this is my blog, coupled with the fact we’re going into the holidays that generally lead to folks being unavailable to raid, I’ve decided to toss together a recruitment page. You’ll find it listed up above as My Guild. That way, I don’t have to make a giant post here about it each time I want to get the word out…figure I should keep things clean and tidy as much as I can with my posts.

Initial Tier 10 Stats

The initial stats for Tier 10 sets are out now, and looking at the stats for the Elemental set…not too bad. It’s awful crit heavy, though, similar to Tier 8, only the set bonus this time isn’t as “omgwtfwtbasapplox”.

Comparison of ilvl 245 T9 base stats (found here) vs ilvl 261 T10 (found here; had to do the following math myself…adding is hard, right?):

Spell Power: T9 629, T10 767. Nice gain here. 3k spell power completely unbuffed will easily be attainable.
Crit: T9 213, T10 396. Almost double the crit rating, which is the lesser of our dps stats…a gain is a gain, but still.
Haste: T9 292, T10 256. Boo for haste loss, but the stupid huge amount of crit gain *should* offset that.
Hit: T9 239, T10 164. Looks like the whining about the ungodly amounts of hit on the previous 2 tiers has been noted. I don’t see this being a big deal, though. The rep ring from Ashen Verdict will have hit, and it should be easily accessible for anyone that will assemble 5/5 T10.

If I could reallocate stats on the T10 set, I would opt to swap the crit on the gloves for haste. This would make T10 a stat gain to every dps stat we have. It’s PTR, so changes can happen, but even if my idea falls on deaf ears (which I expect it will, honestly), I won’t lose any sleep over it.

The Honeymoon is over

Roughly a week or two ago (time’s flying by these days), I became GM of my guild, completing a process of going from long time member to being part of our loot council (which I always pretended to be in my own mind; I probably had a 85% correct guess rate at who got what, heh) that took place in the past 2ish months.

One concern I have: My availability. I work 8-5 Monday through Friday; when I get home, I take a bit to unwind, do some excercise, chores, etc. I’m usually doing good to be in game by 7PM, which is just over a hour before raid invites go out. I’m expecting that hour to become hell between trying to juggle between guild management (aka tells coming from every which way), my own raid prep (which generally consists of doing dailies to acquire gold for consumables and repairs), plus whatever else may be going on. Initially I wasn’t too concerned about availability, because one of our officers used to be online during a good portion of the weekdays while I was at work, so we had coverage for that. His work schedule has changed, though, so that amount of time he was available will be all but gone. Another long-time officer is calling it quits for now; being he’s occupied with his work and study, it’s totally cool. Good to see priorities take precedence over this silly (but oh so fun and addictive) timesink we call WoW.

Another concern: My knowledge of ALL game mechanics. I feel fairly well versed with most all the finer points of raiding, but I’ve been prone to miss/forget things (Hey our hunters can misdirect those loose mobs that gibbed the healer that last attempt). This brings me to a conflict in leadership styles; my initial reaction to the made up scenario I described would be that our hunters know well enough when and how to use misdirect that I shouldn’t have to tell them when. On the flip side, maybe I should be, so that what’s going on is clear. I’ve got a guild full of solid players, though, so any gaps in my knowledge of classes/mechanics should be easily covered. I simply hope that if such gaps are exposed that folks aren’t like “Wow, for a GM you’re a dumbass”.

I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a degree of nervousness at this point. I can’t honestly remember the last time I was in a position where I was asked to lead a group of folks. I think we just need to get after some content today and that should help clear up the nerves some.

The goal I have in mind for the guild at this time is to work on and (hopefully) complete heroic ToC 25. The burning question as of late, though, is what to do when we don’t have enough folks to work on it. I place part of the blame on ToC itself: At this point, our guild can clear 25 normal ToC in a hour. Heroic 10 man takes about a hour, while regular 10 man…heh, our record so far is 18 minutes, based on my flask timer. As burned out as I was getting with Ulduar…I miss having a “real” raid instance. I hope like hell Blizzard takes note of the general disdain most of us have for the ToC design; sure, on paper, a raid with NO TRASH sounds like nirvana to some (one loot pinata boss after another), but having seen it in execution…no thanks. Easy for me to say, being I don’t need a single drop from anything at this point save for heroic ToC 25.

Easy to pin the tail on the donkey known as ToC, though. Looking forward to ICC, though…we’re going to need more folks. Simple as that. Night after night of only having 20-22 folks on come raid time just won’t cut it anymore. Folks are tiring of having to wait for us (officers) to figure out what we’re going to do (rather than what’s posted on the calendar) due to lack of able bodies (raiders). I enjoy challenging raids, so I want to pursue progression over faceroll farm content where the difficulty lies in staying awake the entire raid. Reminds me of T7 content…although we fortunately had Sarth 3D, which was tough at the time but manageable (and a neatly designed encounter, imo).

All the rambling aside, this looks to be trying (but interesting) times for the guild. With the holiday season upon us, folks are taking interest in new games, and I’m down with that. You’ve also got holiday travel and college/HS finals coming up, so I don’t expect some miraculous attendance turnaround in the near future. Despite this bit of doom-and-gloom, I’m feeling somewhat optimistic that come 3.3, ICC *should* revitalize a lot of folks for raiding. I know it will for me (doesn’t hurt that our T10 is pretty cool looking ).

WTB [Moar Optimism], plus patch 3.3. PST.

Nothing Runs Like A Shoveltusk: Shaman Tier 10 Preview

Without further ado, the shaman Tier 10 has finally arrived!

Looks to me that shaman are 10 for 10 as far as reasonably decent looking tier sets go. The only class I can think of that’s close to that would be warriors. This set bears a lot of resemblance to The Ten Storms, aka shaman Tier 2. Not that such a resemblance is a bad thing, mind you; it’s a good thing, although many of us may wonder why we are being a adorned with shoveltusks all over us. I tend to run without my helm or cloak shown, so I think with the helm hidden on this set, it would just about be identical to Ten Storms, save for the shoveltusk spirits jumping out of the shoulders (which I think is a really neat detail, by the way).

So…why Shaman?

When I started playing WoW, I didn’t even look at the shaman class. My friends had created paladins, so to hang out with them, I had to make an alliance character also. First character I created in WoW was a human warlock. Played him up to level 20 or so, decided I didn’t like the class (warlocks were weaksauce when WoW was new), so I joined the masses playing a NE hunter. Not a good idea, looking back, because literally half our server was NE hunters. Another friend of mine started playing horde on a different server, so my friends went over to that server to join him; I went to a different server to join an online friend, where I made my first paladin, who was also my first 60. It was just my online friend and I for the most part on there, though, so we eventually got bored and decided to reroll Horde with my other friends.

My online friend rerolling with me decided to level a warrior, while my other friends that had already rerolled consisted of warriors and hunters. Noting this, I figured “you know, having someone that could heal would be a good idea”. Seeing that shaman had healing spells, plus they could hurl lightning at foes. I also liked the class from Warcraft 3, especially with that silly Bloodlust spell that made whatever it was cast on bigger and badder…not to mention the hilarious sound effect. Much to my dismay, shaman did not have Bloodlust as a spell at the time, but I was quite content chucking lightning bolts around. I recall leveling up as elemental, which at the time was a bad idea, because there was zero gear itemized well for any caster, let alone a shaman.

I eventually decided to respec, and started using an enhance/resto hybrid that gave me some semi-decent healing capability while letting me kill things within a reasonable time frame. I recall stacking gear with loads of intellect (not a bad idea then since that meant more heals) and spirit (because that would let me regenerate mana faster when not fighting…lol). I also stuck with a 1h/shield combo over using a 2h, although I had spent the talent point to use 2h weapons (Oh, and if you respecced after leveling 2h weapons…grats, you get to do it AGAIN!). Windfury was king at the time (2 bonus attacks with 800 or so extra AP), Flametongue only did extra fire damage on hit (no spell power bonus), and Rockbiter was around to do more threat (rofl shaman tank).

Eventually, all my friends decided to quit playing WoW, since as a small guild comprised of RL friends only, we had no way of doing any major content back then (at this point, people were just starting to farm MC). Around this time, I ended up on a warrior binge, with one finally sticking and becoming the main I did most of my progress on (although most of that was the old PVP grind). I sorta wished I had went back to my shaman instead of sticking it out on my warrior; I miss my old school pvp title (was only Legionnaire, but still). Warriors at that time were a dime a dozen, too; everyone wanted to be “that guy” in a video online running around with 3 healers on his hip smashing through entire groups of the opposition, although the shaman class had a few of it’s own that were just mind blowing (Unbreakable and Ioneye come to mind due to the retarded damage they showed the shaman class capable of). Such videos resulted in nerfs to each class, if you ask me.

Anywho, back on topic. I ended up quitting almost a year before TBC came out, and when it did (and I was lured into playing again by a former coworker), I started anew on warrior (Nobz), but had a shaman alt (Kaz). From there, their history is detailed in the About link.

The whole use of the elements, lightning, fire, ice, all that fun stuff…that’s part of the appeal of shaman. In layman terms, I just wanted to electrocute/fry/ice folks to bits. This also would explain why I was lured to elemental, even though it was rubbish when the game was new. I briefly played enhance, but that was for leveling, and when I hit Outland for the first time on Kaz way back when, I decided that since there was so much caster gear available, I would go elemental and give that a try. Haven’t looked back since, save for that one time I tried enhance out 8 or so months ago for a Naxx 10 (in which my dps was so fail I immediately went back to elemental).

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.