First Impression of the PTR

So, last night I log in and boot up the PTR for the first time.

Woo!  My main and a fully decked out premade are there waiting for me.  And the gear on the pre-made made me drool.  (Although, my main has a better PvP set.)  Gem, enchant, fly around a bit was all I was able to do, but today I’m on the case to make the PTR, playable.

See, I didn’t think of the fact that, well, I had no addons, all my macros were gone, etc.  Basically the PTR is a clean copy of the game and while the game is technically playable that way, I miss my stuff, especially my zoom out macro, I forgot how close to your toon the base game keeps the camera.

I may take advantage of the PTR to overhaul my UI.  I attempted to do so once upon a time and well, it didn’t go so well.  It ended up choking my computer heavily and my numbers dropped like a rock due to the extreme lag.  This time, I’m going to try and see what I can mod, while hopefully keeping the changes as low impact on my memory footprint as possible, because it’s honestly time for a change.  I feel cluttered and could use some more macros.

And this time I also have the advantage of Addon Control Panel, hopefully that will help as I play with things.

Back in the Saddle…er Flight Form?

Lets start with, “I love my freaking work ‘net connection!”  Less than an hour and a half to download the entire PTR.

Needless to say I’m back.  After all the work insanity and a period of time where I was pretty darn sick (including an ER visit and nearly a week in bed), I’m ready to bring back the kitty love!

First of all, I have a confession to make, I have begun to stray from the righteous path of feral/feral specs.  After reading Allison’s post on some of the challenges of former trees lately, I have begun to put together a…resto set.  That’s not to say I plan on abandoning either bear or my one true love of kitty.  I guess I may just be going through that awkward experimentation phase and the talent resetter may be making some cash off of me.   WTB Moar Specs!  Granted, I haven’t played a healer since I was a cleric in EQ.  I stare at the spell book during combat to regain mana faster, right?  I’m sure I’ll figure it out.  I’m doing some scouring of the web for information already.

So, as I mentioned, the PTR is now happily installed on my laptop and I’m ready to jump in and see what I can see that’s new and exciting and will probably change the moment I make a post on in.

Arena’s been going ok.  Been popping up and down from about a 1350 – 1450 in 2s, can’t ever seem to pass that 1500 hump.  My partners for my 3s team stopped playing WoW, so I may wait until next season to try it again.  And then in 5s, I think we ran two weeks in a row and I haven’t heard anything about it since.  Again, maybe a dedicated, core group next season, it’s always best in the beginning before everyone gears up.

Due to all the craziness with the work and sickness, I haven’t raided in a while.  I left my team in capable hands and they definitely got some bosses down.  I may rejoin in the next couple of weeks, I’m itching to shred some boss face.

Achievements, I gots some!  Granted, I also got passed for 1st in the guild in achievements.  I have work to do.

But I’m back, watch this space for posts hopefully much more informative than this.

 

~grumble grumble grumble~

So, crafted epics got gem slots, woot!

So, lesee what we got…

Blacksmiths: Except for the shields, we got gem slots on our purps!

Tailors: Us too, woot!

Leatherworkers: So what do you need?

Me: Assassin’s Chestplate!

Leatherworker: Ain’t no gem slot there.

Me: WTF?!?!?

~checks my Belt of Nefarious Whispers~

Leatherworker: You won’t find one there without a belt buckle either.

Me: ~grumbles~

Leatherworker: It seems that AGI is SoL.  Those hunters and Enhance Shammys got not sockets either.  Now if you want some casty leather or mail, I can hook you up!

Me: ~grumbles more and walks away~

A Question for the Arena Veterans…

Not that addons are make or break in most content.  One of the best healers I know uses only the default Blizz raid frames for healing.  (DBM and other addons yes, but no grid or the like.)  So what addons do you find have the biggest impact in arena?

Musings on My Feral Druid PvP Spec

Fallenleaves provided me a link yesterday about running feral in arenas, which I haven’t had a chance to review yet, but I’ve been rolling my approach around in my head.

My original approach to arenas was to play like a rogue and stun lock the kill target.  Pounce, mangle, ravage, maim, generate a couple cp, get the dots ticking, shift, bash, and hope to finish them off shortly after.  And that might still be a good idea on healers.  However, on my twos team, I noticed how quickly that would go to the wayside.

While stuns are still part of the picture, looking at the overall picture, dots and survivability go hand in hand.  The longer I can keep myself up, obviously, the longer my dots have to work.

So I’m taking a good hard look at my talent tree.  Currently I’m running with this talent tree for arena.

To me, the notable items missed are:

Primal Madness: Without 4pc T10 for bears, this is a fairly useless PvE talent.  If you play smart in PvE, you’re in little danger of capping energy and the extra 20 energy just isn’t worth it on a long fight.  In Arenas however, with stuns and roots and etc, energy capping is a very real possibility and that extra energy over a two minute fight could prove invaluable.

Natural Reaction: If I’m at a point where I’m going bear in the arena, that means I definitely need some survivability at that point and 12% less damage taken seems very appealing to that concept.  (Usually means I’m popping frenzied regeneration to up my health as well.)  With the exception of two melee on me, in that scenario, I go bear to pop berzerk and watch them drop.  (Going one on one with a rogue who had more heath than me at the end of a 2s match and winning by going bear before popping back to kitty is suh-weet!)

Perseverance: I’m currently running 1/3 in this talent, but damn those extra two points seem appealing especially after writing “The longer I can keep myself up, obviously, the longer my dots have to work.”  This is the talent I think is bugging me the most to not have 3/3 I just don’t know where the hell to pull the points from.

Thoughts?  Opinions?  See something I missed?

A Feral Cat Loose in the Arena

So, I’m pretty bad at this point, but I hope to get better and see what my furry butt can do in the land of Arenas.  I hear over and over that the arenas are not the place for ferals and maybe they’re right.  But that doesn’t mean I still won’t give it a go.

My first week started off rather unceremoniously.  1-10 in matches in 3v3.  Our win was our first game, the doors opened and there was no one there. But with some tinkering, we’ve decided to go 2 boom and 1 feral and are gearing the booms up.  I’m excited about this week and know we can beat the 1-10 this time around.

My twos on the other hand, was an exciting start.  We’re going feral and spriest with the appropriate name, “Moar Dots!”  We walked into the arena and got our asses handed to us our first game.  I could hear the frustration in my fiancée’s voice.  She was frustrated and this may not go for long.  But then, the amazing thing happened, we won the next game.  And that followed by a few very close games in a row.  Our hands were shaking, our hearts were pounding, what a rush.  My sweetie (a tailor) whipped herself up a set of crafted resilience gear and we were at it again!  12 matches in and we were 5-7.  Not outstanding, but it was a lot of fun and we were, ya’ know, not losing them all!  There was I think 3 matches out of the 12 that weren’t close, including our first one ever.

We decided to go for one or two more Monday night right before bed.  That was a bad idea.  As the beds waited us, our minds were not as sharp as the afternoon matches we had done before.  The first was close, the second we were destroyed.  So, my first piece of arena advice is, don’t do it when you’re tired.  If slow reaction time is rough on everyone in pve, it’s doubly so in pvp, when you don’t know the what is coming.

The nice thing, to me, about pvp lately is the time commitment.  (I’ve been running a lot of bgs too.)  I can generally know approximately how long it’s going to run.  When I’m facing a heroic, I know I could be facing anywhere from 1 to 4 hours.  Arenas are super quick and I know in most cases BGs are going to run me less than a half hour.

Anyway, time for me to go farm up some leather for my Boomkin 3s.  Although as a side note, I almost wish we could change our team name on that.  ”Boom Chicka Boom” or “Cat in the Henhouse” seems more appropriate.

Rawr! Heroic Cata Dungeon FTW

Big in game news coming out soon(tm) for me.  Have to wait for the official announcement thought.

Due to kids and real life responsibilities etc, I was a slacker and didn’t hit 85 until Sat evening.  Worked my way through a few regular dungeons Sunday and Monday, which went relatively painlessly.

And then last night, I gathered some guildies together for a heroic run.  We were only able to get 4 of us, but we queued up for a random with a dungeon finder dps and away we went.

Vortex Pinnacle, hmmm, I haven’t done this on regular, this could be interesting.

Trash goes fairly smooth.  In discussion we find out this is the first heroic for every person in the group.  I’m not real clear on remembering the first boss in there.   This ended up being a 3.5 hour run.  We either 1 or 2 shot him, although, IIRC the tank went down and I was tanking by the end of the fight.

Then we get to the second boss, Altairus.  This was our bottleneck for the evening.  Wipe after wipe after wipe.  After a few wipes in, we invited the pug to join us on vent to see if discussion there helps.  For a couple of us, including myself, we had never been there before, even on regular.  It was a process, figuring out how to avoid the whirlwinds and keep “upwind” of the boss.  This was by far the longest part of the evening.  It felt like we were wiping on a raid boss.  Finally we decided to give it another try or two then call it.  That’s when we get him down.  It wasn’t a work of art by any stretch of the imagination.  Hell, I think every boss kill in there, healer would oom and I would end up tanking the end of the fight blowing all my cooldowns, but that said, we are only barely geared enough for Heroics as well and *we did it*.  We got through it all, and a definite shout out to Nebuchadnezr from Sisters of Elune.  How many random pugs do you know who will stick with a Heroic for over 3 hours with wipe after wipe on bosses as you learn it all together?  Wish Blizz would give me a way to group with you again on purpose.

I’m looking forward to seeing how my second heroic goes tonight.

Cataclysm for the Feral Druid, What Now?

I know a lot of what I’ve been posting lately has been fluff; however, I haven’t had much time for theorycrafting and the like.  So I thought I would do for Cata, what I did for 4.0.1 and give you a roundup of information.

Well, Allison Robert, over at WoW Insider, beat me to it.

Go bookmark it to help tear face through the levels.

—–

No word yet on how the Undying works post patch to get the meta Glory of the Raider, I keep looking.

I keep hoping that they’ll give us a Feat for the Keymaster, but no word on that either.

—-

The first night in a week I take a laid back approach and don’t earn any achievement points and the officer knocks out 40 to take a 10 point lead.  No rest for the wicked I suppose.

—-

And I think I need to do some research into the ICC 10 Heroics this week.  We’re getting further and further in and I want to be prepared.

Ding-Dong the Lich is Dead!

I’ve been wanting to use that title for a long, long time now.

Needless to say, last night I finished the Argent Tournament dailies for 50 achievement points!

Oh wait, that’s silly and not while I’m grinning this morning.

—-

Last night, my Monday night raid team downed the Lich King.

It was our 5th week of grinding on him.  And at 10:57, we decided to give it one more go, despite our 11pm end time.  I was hoping folks still wanted to go after that, but at the same time, was absolutely dying for a smoke.  Just about then, our bear tank’s vent went all sorts of wonky.  While he was trying to fix it, we went ahead and called 5.  We never quite could get it working right.  So, we just decided to do it with him not on vent.

It was going like normal.  Phase 1 and transition, no problems.  Phase 2, valks went down, no one stood in the defile.  Holy cow this is going pretty good.  Transition 2, no mess ups here…you mean we actually have all 10 of us going into Phase 3!  Woohoo!  Hmm, there goes one healer, that could be trouble.  Burn baby burn.  Down to 15% My focus totally on my rotation, the LK and his health %.  If I had defile in that moment, I would have been in big big trouble.  His health was dropping and I was going to see that bastard go down.

9%, he wipes us.  My co-raid leader, one of our healers, goes “What the hell!”  I laugh.

“We did it!  Don’t release!”  (I know it’s not supposed to let you, but I don’t want to take chances.)

Laughter over vent, disbelief, etc.

And then as we get rezzed, my game stops responding.  O.O

“You have been Disconnected from the server.”

Noooooo!

I’m still on vent.

Did I get credit?  Did that count?

Password.  Authenticator.  Connecting.

Panicked…I get all the way into the game.  Press Y.  And there stand at the top of my recent achievements:

Fall of the Lich King (10 player) and The Frozen Throne (10 player).

I sigh with relief.  I think I need another smoke after that.

OMG, I was still grinning when I woke up exhausted this morning.  It’s been amazing to watch this team grow and develop together.  And we did it.  We may not be the best players in the world and on the cutting edge of progression.  But every night we went out there and laughed and joked and had fun.  And we did it, before the level cap was raised.  Thanks to all my teammates, it was a hell of a ride.

And now I need to go find a copy of that cinematic I missed.

Monday Morning Miscellanea

Oh, I needed a 4 day weekend.  But coming back to work Mon, I think I need another one.

—-

First of all, the great achievement race:

FI: 7460 (Up 90 from start and up 110 post 4.0.3a)

Officer: 7515 (Up 120 from start and up 40 post 4.0.3a)

#1 Guildie: 7760 (Down 70 from start and up 40 post 4.0.3a)

We’re gaining on #1.  And tonight, I finally re-finish the AT, for plus 50 DKP achievement points!

—

Rep week was good to me.  I managed to get exalted with:

Shattered Sun Offensive

Netherwing

Violet Eye

Thorium Brotherhood

Along with major gains with Ogri’la and the Puppymen.  I’m so glad to be done with Netherwing, by the time I was done there were 9 dailies out there!

—–

Speaking of rep, they buffed the hell out of Thorium Brotherhood rep.  Turn ins are as follows:

10 Dark Iron Ore: 300 Rep

2 Core Leather: 1400 Rep

Blood of the Mountain, Fiery Core & Lava Core: 2,000 Rep

—–

I’m kinda irked that I didn’t get at least a FoS for Keymaster.

—-

I think that’s it for now folks.  Will have more kitty and maybe bear stuff soon(tm).