Weekend

Friday night started a naxx10 run. Not many online and had to pug a healer, tank and dps. Other than myself and another guild healer pretty much everyone is on alts and gear isn't the best.

The raid goes ok, we cleared 2.5 wings with a few deaths but no wipes as far as I can remember. We stopped after Grobbulus as a few had to leave and will hopefully finish it up tonight if enough online.

After recently giving healbot a go again I was annoyed at it the other night as there was a few things such as ready checks and I couldn't configure range indicators and opacity as I required.

I spent most of Saturday morning changing to grid and clique and configuring them both to my liking. Took a break in the evening to go play poker (lost).

Sunday we did ZA to boost some friends and I got the raid done for the achievement, was fun. For the evening we finished on construct and saph for our naxx25 group but struggled on KT for various reasons.

Was hoping my 7.5 trousers would drop off thad but they didn't so blew my 75 emblems on them. Got 3 of hte Valorous set now, really want helm next.

Hopefully tonight we will either finish our naxx10 run or maybe have another pop at KT on naxx25.

brief update

Still mainly playing my priest.

For about 1 month now the guild has been doing naxx25 runs and picking up the pugs. I'm probably now a 50/50 mix of heroic/naxx & naxx25 gear. I've got my 4 piece set bonus which is nice and about to upgrade my legs so I'll have 3 of my valorous set.

I got into alts and heirloom items for a while. I've got cloth, mail and plate heirloom shoulders, a heirloom caster trinket, and a heirloom melee sword. New beneficiary's of those have been a now 22 lock, a lowbie mage, at teenage shaman, a lowbie pally and my transferred warrior.

The main reason behind that rush was I ran out of things to spend my heroic currency on. I got the achievement the other day for 1000 Stone Keeper Shards (all sourced from instance boss drops) and I just ran out of gear to buy. I have now have all the holy and shadow and pvp gear I can get with emblems and shards.

My latest thinking is I want a tank. I like being in demand and finding groups easy and it's once in a blue moon a group is struggling for dps. I've sent him a tone of northrend ore and done a few outland runs. My warrior is currently 53 but being the profession junkie I am I tend to concentrate on professions over levelling. Once that's sorted I can level self sufficiently and make some gold at the same time. The profession in question is blacksmithing - it's a pain to level (at least to outland - can't speak for rest of it yet).

Writing this at work and off home now. Leading a Naxx 10 group tonight just for shits and giggles.

I suck at blogs

This wasn't my first attempt to blog stuff, it probably won't be my last either.

I suck at it and I know I do.

Things I suck at:

• Making the effort to actually create a post.
• Noting things down I want to blog about so that I remember them when I actually get to creating a post.
• Capturing in game pics to make posts more interesting.
• Creating links to items and other sources of information inside of a blog entry.

All these things I wish I took the time to do. I tell myself if you know what's wrong just fix it.

I'd love to be one of those who took the time to blog every few days and say this is what I've been up to. Here's my new gear, new achievements new alt levels etc.

I blame this mainly on laziness but then I look at things like twitter. I'm on twitter purely for wow reasons (http://twitter.com/solveronwow). It's one of the simplest and easiest things to update but I don't even make the time for that.

The main thing that distracts me from blogging about these things though is actually playing the game. I'm out of the house for work and commute on average 10 hours of the day. If I then cook food, do a little house work and get online I'm at that point in time where I need to sleep ready for more of the same the next day.

I've got a itouch. I think I'll start try and find a twitter app for that and start by doing a few more twitter updates. If nothing else it will prompt me with stuff I want to blog about.

Weekend of respecs

I went a bit respec mad this weekend.

Started out very early Saturday morning when I wanted some money for something or other (can't remember what) and respec'd shadow for the weekend.

Went well, with my dps gear on I was getting about 1700 dps in an heroic which is more than a lot of dps pug people I pick up.

I know I've had higher before so jigged some points about to go deeper into shadow and I was back up about the 2k dps which I was happy with.

That when well. Did loads of quests in Grizzly Hills and sold a load of stuff I'd disenchanted with an alt (my ex main rogue) and was up about 1k. Happy days.

During a break watching some naxx videos on youtube (some of the high def vids on there are ace - love anything by tankspot) watch some discs priests and thought why not :).

Respec number 3, purchased a bunch of healing glyphs again and sorted out a disc set. This was just a case of swapping some of my spirit gear for crit gear and changing a few gems. There are lots of things I love about disc, I spent most of my TBC days as disc. The huge mana pool and the sheer varietly of options make it fun.

But that was the issue. I could keep a tank and group up for an age if the group was performing well and mana was never going to be an issue. What I was missing though is those reactions that come with playing a spec for a long while. When things go wrong there is that initial panic. Questions wiz though my head like is penance, PwS, PoM on cooldown, do I have time to cast a PoH. My flash heals are healing for less and I feel I'm reliant on these cooldowns.

So back to holy I went. Disc is what they say, an excellent tank healing spec. But if things are going wrong the AoE healing and availability of PoM, CoH and Holy nova along with the SoL procs and haste boost from Improved Concentration always save the day.

On the down side I forgot to change my gems back so back on the case for that tonight.

Solver

Keybinds vs Clicks.

I started out like most people as a clicker. Once I got into heavy PVP with my rogue this was no longer good enough and I swapped to keybinds.

I now use my mouse for 100% of my movement and I've got memorised all the different abilities on my numerous characters. I tend to keep similar actions in the same places and somehow it just works.

My hands rest in the same place the always have (around aswd).

Technically in not active state and natural rest positions I've got the following.

From left to right (little finger to thumb)

Shift - Modifier
'q' - flash heal
'w' - greater heal
'e' - prayer of mending
spacebar - jump

For movement I've got middle mouse button set to auto run and the default of both mouse buttons for move. For backwards movement I'm using the mouse side button 2 which his where my thumb naturally rests.

Here is the rest of the setup - in order of what else probably get used most often.

F1-F4 - target the other members of my party (normally tank is leading and on F1 but I'll request it if not and cope with it when that's not the case)

'alt' - self cast modify
'r' - renew
't' - macro to target main tank if his not in my party
'a' - dispel
ctrl 'a' cure disease
'c' - circle of healing
shift 'q' - binding heal
shift 's' - Prayer of Healing
'x' - fade
's' - Holy Nova
'd' - Guardian Spirit
'f' - power word shield
shift 'd' - Inner Fire
'z' - fear
ctrl 'c' - shadowfiend
shift 'w' - Desperate Prayer

mouse side button 1 - trinket 1 use
mouse side button 2 - trinket 2 use
alt side button 1 - use mana potion
shift spacebar - self cast Levitate

tab - select next enemy
''' - voice comms - push to talk
'1' - Shadow Word Pain
'2' - Mind Blast
'3' - Smite
'4' - Holy Fire
'5' - Mind Sear
'v' - Power Word Death
shift 'a' - Group Dispel
'7' - Shackle undead
'8' - Mind Control

shift 'f' - shoot wand

Anything else tends to be mouse clicked. But mainly mouse is just used for looking around, movement or targeting a specific member of another party in raid frames when required.

I find with this setup I can target who-ever is required and cast the relevant spell without a seconds thought.

I may have an advantage of having worked with PC's all my life so I'm a touch typist and don't have a any requirements for looking at the keyboard.

Solver

Back to raiding.

Decided to go back to raiding with my priest. This week we did OS25 pugging the gaps and then we did a guild run of OS10 with 1 drake up. OS25 was of course silly easy and I'm glad to report OS10 with 1 drake was relatively painless as well. Took as maybe 5 attempts but we got there. Keeping aggro on and downing adds seemed to be the biggest issue.

Now for my whinge. I hate DKP. I've always argued against it. I was so glad when I first started doing Naxx with guild and we was /rolling on items. Now we have DKP and all the politics that go with it.

Here is a typical situation and the politics surrounding it (any resemblance to a real life situation is purely co-incidental)

Situation: A tank 1 runs naxx for 12 weeks looking for a lets say a 1H tanking axe. Tank 2 comes along on the 13th week. The axe drops and they both want it.

With /roll lets say tank 2 wins the roll. Tank 1 is now upset because he feels he has earned this due to the amount of effort he has put in previously trying to get it.

With DKP tank 1 is getting this axe. Tank 2 is upset because he has no chance of getting this because he has not had the previous chance to build up any DKP. This may not even be by choice, maybe the group has just always been full of tanks and his never got invited.

Now DPK is designed for this very situation to reward effor rather than luck.

My argument is that tank 1 has already been rewarded for his effort. His reward for his previous effort was 12 previous chances for the axe to drop and for him to roll on it.

By this I mean after 13 weeks or raiding tank 1 is more likely to have the axe than tank 2 because he has had 12 more attempts at potentially getting this axe.

In other news I've dropped leatherworking on my Hunter (who is now 70 and happily questing in northrend). It was good and I made some good money from but I fed up with lack of mana pots for my priest. So I've dropped it in favour of herbalism and I'm back in azeroth gathering herbs at the moment. I've got few guildy alchemists and letherworkers who I now plan to take advantage of.

Solver

Viabality of Hybrid specs

Been a while since I last blogged anything. I've been pretty busy in WoW.

My priest has been progressing a lot. His gear is pretty good now and I'm looking at 2.2k self buffed spell power and a bucket load of regen from spirit.

I spent a bunch of Stone Keepers shards from my priest on one of those bind on account +xp items for my hunter. I then had a levelling spurt with the hunter and his now level 62 in Hellfire. Things are just as easy as ever with him and by the time I've cleared the hellfire quests I can see him being well into level 63 maybe even hitting 64.

Since my priests holy gear is pretty uber now and I've been slowly building up offspec gear. By offspec I mean I was building up +crit gear for going disc. In addition to this I started to get a few +hit items for as and when duel specs get here and I go shadow as alt spec.

Now today when my bags were getting full I decided to use some of my mats to make myself a JC trinket for pve grinding. Basically it's +hit with a couple of gem slots and on use +spell power usage.

Then looking at my crit gear I figured I might as well get itemrack or similar and start to carry around a set for quest grinding. I've still got zul'drak to finish up and I've not even done a single quest in gizzly hills, sholazar basin, storm peaks or ice crown. Now so far there have been some fun quests and now I'm 80 that's a lot of gold up for grabs from quest gold and xp gold.

Now I'm getting to round to my point about viability of hybrid specs.

Here is my thinking. Looking at a recount report from naxx the other night the majority of my healing (all be it just over 50%) came from PoM. Flash heal wasn’t too far behind but renew was pretty much up there as well.

Now the great thing about Surge of Light is it’s a 50% proc chance of any spell crit. This means I was getting a lot of free instant cast flash heals from my when my PoM was critting on the jumps. At the moment I’ve got practically no crit gear so I’m at 11.52% crit at the moment but in my bank I’ve got a level 80 +crit item for pretty much every slot.

So – 31/28/12

Essential differences –

Disc:

• Divine Spirit and Improved Divine Spirit – another 80 spell power
• Focused Power – another 4% spell damage and healing
• Mental Strength – 15% more int (= more crit and bigger mana pool always good)
• Power Infusion – 20% off casting time and mana reduced by 20% for 15secs

Holy:

• Searing Light – 10% more damage on my Holy Fire and smite.

Shadow:

• Improved Spirit Tap – Mind Blast and Shadow Word Death crits give 10% more spirit and another 20% regen while casting for 8 secs.
• Improved Shadow Word Pain - Another 6% damage on SwP.
• Improved Mind Blast – 1 second off my mind blast cooldown.

I reckon I could do some ok dps with SwP, Holy Fire, Mind Blast, SwD, Mind Sear (the aoe channel spell) + then the Surge of Light procs for an instant smite or flash heal (or just plain smite spam).

This means even as dps I could still spam PoM (if nothing else for the chance to proc SoL) renew and SoL proc flash heals out whilst doing some ok'ish dps.

But at the end of the day I've always talked down hybrid specs in favour of deep builds. I'm going to do several respecs and deep builds tonight and report on the dps potentials of the different specs with the +crit verus my +spirit gear.

Solver