Rotface has left the building!

Yes we finally killed this guy. And yes I finally got Shadow's Edge. 1000 creatures to kill, plus a bunch of bosses, and 60 shardes and Shadowmourn will be mine!

Druid level 5-10

Druid leveling from 5-10 will take you from Red Cloud Mesa to Bloodhoof village, just down the road. It’s also amazingly like 1-5 except there’s a great deal more travel involved as the various quests ask you to roam the environs surrounding the village. Still, the quests are very easy and unlike those found in Ellwyn forest, or not hidden in out of the way corners that you wouldn’t know about unless you happened to stumble across them at some point.

As you level from 5 to 10 you will gain a few new skills, like Thorns and Mark of the Wild, but nothing new in the way of combat abilities. What you do get are an update or two – namely to Wrath. Fighting mobs will feel largely the same to you in this level bracket as the last, except you can actually probably cast a couple Wraths at a mob and finish them off with melee when they get to you. My Wraths were hitting in the neighborhood of 30-35ish and I would use only about 15% of my mana casting 2 or 3 of them. By the time I killed the creature after a couple whacks with my dredger I was already back at 100% mana. Occasionally I’d have to throw up a Rejuv if I pulled more than one mob at a time, but other than that I never worried about healing and never had any down time to regen health or mana.

I find the story that unfolds in Mulgore a very telling story as Blizzard obviously paid great attention to the postural culture and influence of the race. And despite the roaming required from all the quests wasn’t overly burdensome. If you don’t have the option to use the heirloom items it might take longer, but I was able to level from 5 to 10 in a little more than an hour and still have a handful of quests to complete before I finish the zone. You will most likely find yourself leaving the zone at level 10 or 11, but it’s looking for me that I’ll be closer to 13 than 11 when I leave.

At level 10 you’re sent to Thunder bluff to learn the ways of the Druid. The elder sends you on your first trip to Moonglade where you complete a quick and easy quest, and back to Thunder bluff where you obtain another quests to defeat the dreaded Lunaclaw! Bear form is your reward but quite honestly, doesn’t mean a great deal to you at this point unless you intend to tank instances. If you are just intent on leveling, you should continue casting Wrath on mobs and finishing them off with melee until you eventually get cat form at level 20.

Stat changes revealed

They've been talking about them since Blizzcon, and have been promising recently to put up a full disclosure. Today they finally did and WoWInsider has the full post.

In short:

• Stamina -- Non-plate wearers will have a lot more.
• Spirit -- Only found on healing gear.
• Intellect -- Grants spell power.
• MP5 -- Gone completely.
• Spell power -- Only on weapons, and just to make them clearly a caster item.
• Attack power -- Gone on most items.
• Parrry -- No longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attack.
• Resilience -- Only affects player damage and player crit damage, no impact on crit chance, mana drains, etc...
• Block Value -- Gone, 30% passive block value now when wearing a shield.
• Weapon Skill -- Gone completely.
• Gem Color -- Few stats changing. Hit will likely become a blue gem (it's yellow now).
• Defense -- Gone, becomes dodge, parry, or block rating.
• Reforging -- You'll be able to reforge gear to customize your stats -- 50% of stat X can become stat Y. Restrictions apply (no Stamina->Strength, for instance).

I'm very happy that weapon skill is being done away with as it was incredibly painful to level. In fact it was so painful that anyone trying to level it would look for any way possible to cheat the system. Many of those have been "fixed", but the underlying point is that the players hated it and Blizzard finally saw the light. Thank you!

The Defense removal is largely moot for me as I only tank on my Druid, who didn't have to worry about it thanks to Survival of the Fittest anyway. And since Druids don't get Parry or Block this is largely unimportant for us. However, notice how many fewer Druid tanks there are now than there were in BC? I see one only once in a great while, which is a crying shame. Fix it Blizzard!

Although it's not spoken to directly by what I quoted above, but Balance Druids will derive hit from Spirit. It says Spirit will only be found on healing gear, except for Balance gear, which will continue to be shared by Resto Druids. There is some level of cross over now, but not a spectacularly great deal as Balance gear has lots of crit on it and resto gear doesn't. Blizzard is going to simply make all the stats correct themselves behind the scenes which is fine with me as long as it works out properly. However I don't want to have to break out a calculator whenever I'm looking at a piece of gear and seeing if it's going to be an upgrade for me or not. I want the stats to be apparent and easily measurable against other stats.

And lastly reforging. Perhaps the most anxiously awaited change. I can not tell you how many times I've wanted to change stats on various pieces I've had! I'd love to change stats so I can reduce haste and increase crit, lets say. And although they haven't really told us how it's going to work yet, it sounds like we will be able to do just that. I imagine Blizzard will be dealing with reforging over the Summer when I expect the Beta will have started.

So far everything looks good.

Resto Druid raid healing reflections

Even though I had already dipped into some raid healing in last weeks VOA-10 I don’t really consider that true raid healing. However I was able to do some real Resto Druid raid healing yesterday, in an ICC-10. It was just me and a Resto Shaman, and a Holy Priest who switched over to Shadow after the first fight. I still topped the healing meters, but I wasn’t far and away from the Shaman as he was a pretty effective raid healer himself. There really isn’t much to raid healing other than throwing out Rejuvs and Wild Growths for area healing, and keeping the tanks Rejuved and Regrowthed. What I did notice, despite the fact that I have very high Spirit, is that I still have considerable mana issues. I have to use my Innervate whenever it’s up and still ended up using a mana pot on each fight. In looking over my gear I think I probably need to replace my trinkets with MP5 trinkets so I’m going to make it a point to run TOC-25 and 10 every week to grab those two.

I’ve healed ICC-10 on my Holy Paladin many times and never once did I have even a single instance where I had to worry about mana. I’ve mentioned before how out of whack I thought the issue was but the point was driven home during Sunday’s raid. Even with the mana return meta gem in my helm there simply is no comparison between the mana regen of Holy Paladins and that of Resto Druids and I was thinking they should probably give Innervate a 2 minute cool down instead of it’s current 3, but leave the mana return as is.

Outside of that tiny little problem with having to be uber-disciplined with my mana pool, I find Resto Druid raid healing as pleasurable as I do Holy Paladin raid healing. Outside of Wild Growth it’s not all that different from my raid healing days back in BC so I think I’ll continue on with it. It’s truly the beauty of a hybrid class where you can be Caster DPS for 25-man raiding, then healer for 10-man raid the next day and all the while still have a Feral spec for miscellaneous solo dungeons runs.

Druid 1-5

What can I say? I love the Druid class, and because I've wanted to play on the horde side for some time I finally got around to creating a Horde Druid. There truly isn't a great deal to say about the Druid class for levels 1 to 5 other than to say "be prepared for utter boredom". In fact, if you will be leveling using the available items through the quests and off the mobs you're going to be killing, be prepared to take drugs before hand. You essentially have two means of killing mobs -- either Wrath or by auto-attacking with the level 1 staff you get when you create the character. Killing is faster by casting Wrath but you'll find yourself running out of mana rather quickly. And my guess is that you'll end up casting a Wrath or two and then auto attacking. But even with that you might run yourself out of mana after a few mobs depending on how fast you kill things. The more auto attacking you do the more you will want to bang your head against the keyboard because there simply is nothing glamorous about Druid melee attacking at this stage.

However there is a way out. Heirloom items! If you have a high level character that can get the items, I suggest you do it. Not only because it will free you from the need to constantly upgrade three items, but those heirloom items will make your journey from level 1 to 5 a breeze. Almost "OP" in fact. Do yourself a favor and pick up the Repurposed Lavadredger, Stained Shadowcraft Tunic, and the Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders. The Chest and Shoulders will give you a 10% xp gain bonus (works on creatures AND quests), and all three items will grow as you level.

If you take the advice, you simply need to cast a moonfire or a Wrath on a target and auto attack your mobs as your work through the quests out of Red Cloud Mesa. It takes all of two or three hits to kill mobs so you can expect to be through all the starter quests in 20 to 25 minutes and on your way to Bloodhoof Village.

At level five you will have Wrath, Moonfire, Healing Touch and Rejuvenation to add a little extra oomph to your attacks and to keep yourself healed as you level. You shouldn't need to cast more than a Rejuv on yourself once you start on the Bloodhoof quests though, and should expect no downtime while doing it.

Authenticators hacked?

No, but you wouldn't know that from the bro ha ha on the forum today as many uneducated people discuss the subject. WoWInsider has a fairly well written description of the new attack that is just now being seen in the wild, but it's essentially what has been said was possible since we all first started talking about authenticators. That anyone becomes, or remains susceptible to this type of attack is the same issue with those who do not use authenticators -- system security. If people would exercise proper security on their computers by keeping their virus and malware apps up to date (including updating definitions) on a routine basis most of this would blow away with the wind. If people would also look at things with a more cynical eye and not fall prey to phishing attacks that are always easy to discern, the same would be true.

They are getting this dumb

Do I need to say anything about this other than to just look at the screen shot?

Blizzchat 2/26

Blizzard held their latest Blizzchat on Twitter yesterday. There are a few tidbits in there that were worth the viewing, or at least the reading today if you missed it yesterday.

Like:

Q. Are there any plans for more weekly quests (not raid but general) for the weekend only players?
A. I like weekly quests, because they get you to come back to WoW without making you feel like you have to log in every single night. Sometimes Ghostcrawler likes to go to the bar instead.

Q. Are there any plans to implement cross-faction/cross-realm mail(for BoA gear and such)?
A. We have cross-faction mail for BoA items now; cross-realm is a work in progress, but we hope to have it done “soon."

Now this would be totally awesome. Being able to mail items (not just BOA) between your characters on different realms. I hope they were not just talking about BOA items though....

Q. Has there been any thought of changing Eclipse to charges so that Moonkin dps doesn't suffer so much from moving?
A. Yes. Expect a major overhaul in Cataclysm that keeps the same basic idea (alternating from Arcane to Nature) but in a way that is more core to the class. Like everything though, there is the risk that we may decide this idea sucks once we see it in action.

I was just blogging about Eclipse a couple weeks ago. I'm not sold on charges for Eclipse, but I'm very happy to hear they definitely have plans to change the current implementation.

Q. Where is my moose? Did you see that Ghostcrawler?
A. That was so epic. I was sure the screenshot was shopped until we saw the actual video. I guess we're going to have to do a moose now...

One more day for the Olympics.... and never did get the mini-event like they did for the Chinese Summer Olympics.

Festergut is finally dead x2

I've been raiding with a friends guild on my Druid the past few weeks, but we've generally only done the first four bosses in ICC. The guild can't field a full 25-man raid on it's own so they've been relying on friends and a few pugs. Much was the case last night with a little more than half the raid being guild members and the rest being friends. We killed Festergut on the first night he was attempted. It took us eight attempts, but we got it done, but what really twirked a nerve with me was that we got him to 10% on the very first attempt. We had a few attempts where he was at 1% or less, and one attempt where he had 1800 life before we all died. We smelled blood and went for the kill on the next attempt after that 1800 health debacle. And boy did it feel good!

That just goes to show how important being able to execute is on these fights. My main guild has the same DPS we were running in last nights raid, so as I had believed, the difference came down to people not being able to handle the spores correctly. Pretty sad, but at least I've killed him on both characters now on 25-man.

The bugmobile

I decided to go back and have some fun this afternoon. To quote an old humorous phrase, I chewed bubblegum and kicked butt. Now why can't these be ridden anywhere else?