My Class Imbalance

So. . .

I'm still plodding along with my druid and warrior. I finally got the [Essence of Gossamer] from heroic Azjol-Nerub last night and replaced my [Sonic Booster]. This puts me up to a solid 27111 health unbuffed, while keeping ~37% dodge+parry (before diminishing returns) and 20ish% block. All of the drops in Naxx-10 are either side-grades, or minor upgrades, except for tier pants and shoulders and a pair of boots.

My poor, poor druid on the other hand can't seem to get any gear to save his life. I still have a half dozen or so relatively significant upgrades from heroics that I can get, and of course everything in Naxx-10 is zomg good compared to what I'm wearing. I did manage to get my enchanting up to 440 though, so I can do all of the enchants from the shard vendor. But my pitiful 1550ish healing when specced resto, and 1660ish damage when specced balance are churning out numbers that I would yell at anyone else for having. But I can't get any upgrades from normal instances (except for a couple wonky trinkets that are too good for where they drop), so I feel sort of stuck.

I was amazed at Northrend when I leveled through it with both of my characters. It felt very natural to progress, and I never felt like I had "strayed" into a high-level zone that I shouldn't have been in. My warrior continued this progression all the way through Naxx. I've never felt like I wasn't geared enough to tank something on him. But my druid makes me feel like I missed a step somewhere. I keep looking at gems and enchants thinking that I missed a +150 spellpower upgrade. My glyphs are for resto, but I don't believe that swapping them to balance ones would increase my dps by the 500 or more that I need. All of the gear from normal instances are downgrades, but the heroic instances kill my tanks when I'm healing, or just leave me sputtering at 1500 dps. Maybe I just need more practice like my holy pally brother keeps telling me.

In any case, druid gear is what I'll be doing this week. I think another 2-3 solid upgrades, and I'll be set for Naxx.

On Being 80, Heroics, and Death Knight Professions

I'm back!

Well, I never really left. I just didn't have anything worth saying for a while. WoW has been exciting and fun, but there's nothing new to say that wasn't said a million times during the beta. But in an effort to combat blog silence, I decided to make a post about my progress anyway.

I've been doing a lot of heroics (as many as I can) on my warrior. He's got a decent set of gear now, and I'm looking to try to get him in Naxx. As soon as I get the 140 Emblems I need (of which I'm at ~50), I'll get my T7 gloves and chestpiece. Somehow the defense trinket from normal HoL has eluded me so far, and I still go in there when I'm not getting Emblems, but I think it might just be one of those pieces I miss.

My druid has sort of been shelved for now. I'm not sure whether it's the fact that he's resto, so can't kill anything without a lot of work, or that I've got a good rhythm down with my brother and girlfriend for knocking out heroics on my warrior. I still try to get him out to do the cooking daily quest and mine up more saronite (BOO to the last 5 points of engineering), but there's not a whole lot that I really want to do with him right now. I think once we get more 80s in the guild he'll become more useful, but with only one heroic "group" (6 80s in guild, I think - 7 if you count me for both of mine) we only need one healer. And my brother's paladin is way better at that than my druid.

I still have a couple zones to do quest-wise on my characters. My druid is pretty much done with everything except the faction quests in Sholazar for either the Frenzyheart or Oracles and still needs to do some quests in Icecrown. My warrior needs about the same Icecrown quests, but hasn't done more in Sholazar than getting the flight point set up. To be honest, I'm not in that much of a hurry to get them done, either. I'm sure I'll have some time to burn once I finish getting my heroic gear worked out and I can putz around questing then.

Oh, I do have a death knight. Just like everyone else. Mine is only 58 though, and I haven't even decided on professions. I mostly just wanted to do the questline in the starting zone and be ready to pick him up at some point in the future. Although with the appearance of the Darkmoon Faire and the Northrend deck trinkets, I might just take him herbalism/alchemy to get the eternal life that's required for inscriptors (scribes?) to make the cards. Oh, and to transmute my meta gems so I can get my jewelcrafting leveled. But I really don't want to level through Outlands again right now. I spent way too much time there in the last year. So that might be a while coming.

So that's a snapshot of my WoW status. Hopefully it will change rapidly so that I have something interesting to post here soon. :)

The Secret of Not Wiping

Going through heroics this last week (and possibly the week before) with my warrior tanking has given me huge amounts of perspective on the game in general. Last time I leveled through heroics it was on my druid tank, and I thought that they were incredibly difficult at that level of gear. I felt that I was stuck between Kara and heroics, and neither one was really doable with the gear I had.

Looking back, though, I realize that I was fine gear-wise. It's very possible that I could have been so horrible that I just didn't have the skill to do things without being overgeared for them, or I could have just been running with completely hopeless groups. I prefer to think that it's the latter, just because I would hate to have been that bad.

I think the big motivator in the change has been my brother, a holy pally, who is more than willing to try anything, regardless of level. Of course now he has 2000 or so healing, so it makes it much easier for me to survive where I'm not supposed to be. :P

Just tonight I got my [Sun Eater] from heroic Mech to replace my [Inuuro's Blade], and we breezed through the instance -- even the fire lady boss we normally have a 50ish% success rate with. Now, my warrior is decked out in mostly blues so I'm not going to say that my tanking made all the difference, but at the same level of gear with my druid I was struggling to find decent tanking leather and running the same normal instance over and over for the one drop from the final boss that was a slight upgrade. Heroics were out of the question.

So either my skills have become so great that I should just start tanking Sunwell on my druid, or I've started running with better groups. We'll see what turns up from here.