No, not really. This is some kind of non-meme (OR IS IT DUNDUN) I'm doing so I don't have to type a proper post.
What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Togtok, restoration shaman.
What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
I tend to jump in the occasional guild ten man raid every now and then. I also run VoA from time to time.
What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Riptide - it's instant, it's a HoT, and it triggers Tidal waves which is something I simply want to have up at all times. If I'm not rolling on the tank, I'm using it to snipe heal the raid. Yes, when I see incoming Prayers of Healing too. Just to smack some overhealing on that pesky Holy priest who thinks he's all that.
What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Used to be Healing wave tied with Chain heal but has probably been turned into Chain heal. I KNOW, it's the signature spell and everything, but I only ever use it on the likes of fights like Kologarn and Loatheb, cause people will be sufficiently grouped up for it to be really awesome. Raid healing is better done with Lesser Healing wave (boosted by Tidal waves of course) cause you have a chance to reevaluate the raid after each cast to see if something else has happened. 2.5 seconds minus haste is a long time to wait for a heal that may or may not be completely wasted or bounce the wrong way or be overwritten by those pesky Holy priests and their Prayers of Healing. Coupled with Nature's swiftness on fights with heavy, randomly incoming damage it makes for a good emergency heal for people in the danger zone.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Totems, Tidal waves and Bloodlust. We have similar throughput and longetivity compared to other classes, and we are versatile enough to work raid or tank healing as well as a druid or priest - we all need to spec differently to fully fill the two roles, but we can if we want to and have tools to do it with. What sets us apart is the totems that can be used to boost whatever setup, changed on the fly combined with the flexibility of Tidal Wave charges, and the overall überness of being able to give everyone a shitload of haste for 40 seconds.
What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
I'd say more healing tools, but the only one I can think of that I miss is a healing version of the mana tide totem. The normal one, even glyphed, is a bit weak to really make a difference, but a big AoE pulsing heal every two minutes or something would be awesome for XT style fights or to get the raid up to full while letting the rest of the healers relax.
That being said, having an array of a few more abilities that are marginally or situationally useful would be more fun, but we have all the tools we need to do the job well.
In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
Out of pure habit I will answer main tank healing. I know, take me out behind the chemical sheds and shoot me. It's dead boring, but man, do we do an awesome job of it. Our on-crit effect, Earth shield (which adds oomph to glyphed LHW's), critting Lessers and hasted Healings waves respectively from Tidal waves which is triggered by Riptide all make us really good tank healers - damage reduction, a HoT that heals when it's needed, a HoT that smooths damage, good mana preservation by using the different heals depending on what happens - normal damage, use Tidal waves charges for critting LHW's, spikey damage, use the charges for hasted, big healing bombs. The Riptide consumption aspect of Chain heal serves well in some fights as well, with the raid close to the tank. You basically refresh it on the tank most cooldowns anyway so it will always be there for you, replacing a normal tank heal with a critting CH with the benefit of added raid healing. Shammies have been pigeon holed into raid healing for too long. Half our arsenal isn't used while raid healing damnit!
What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
A healing druid really shines with a shaman. I don't have to waste a Lesser wave on people who are only marginally hurt, and I can bring low raid members up with hasted Healing waves while a druid is off HoT:ing everyone up.
What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
I reckon Holy priests, because they are so like us, with big vs small heals, a damage-smoothing HoT and damage reduction. We simply don't complete each other in the same way, but rather fill a lot of the same utility and versatility.
What is your worst habit as a healer?
I snipe heals. I'm horrible, I know, but I tend to be one of those healers that is the third or sixth healer (not necessarily in order) and watching five people doing the job you're supposed to help with just as well without you just isn't fun (not cause I'm not needed, but becuase I don't like standing around), so I snipe heals to keep myself interested.
What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
People who snipe heals, I mean seriously.
No, okay, I really don't know. People who stand in the fire piss me off regardless, but that's the closest I get as far as healing habits go.
Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yeah. We may lack a huge toolbox, bubble damage mitigation, everlasting mana or massive throughput, but we can do any healing job without trouble. If someone dies, in our most die-hard raid healing spec we still have powerful abilities to keep the tank up.
What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
I flip Skada over to healing done (to roughly monitor the other healer's performance) and when the fight is over, I check overhealing, compare my ratio to the others (I usually rank high, very rarely highest, on healing done and very low, often lowest, on overhealing done) and feel smugly superior.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That we are to be pigeonholed into healing the raid. Knee jerk reaction pigeonholing is disc priests and holydins for tank healing, holy priests, druids and shamans for raid healing, but I do not hesitate to stick a shaman on tank healing.
What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
Shamans are not only about Chain Heal. This in itself has a few implications, such as using Tidal Wave charges, when and where to use Riptide and the everlasting dilemma of using big or small heals. Keeping track of Tidal wave charges, Riptide tick time, Water and Earth shield charges and totem timers can be daunting but they're all alleviated through use of properly configured addons.
If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
I sort of answered this already. I generally have a good throughput in healing done (I'm an old DPS:er, if I finish a fight with more than 0 mana I have not used all my resources - I've had raid leaders ask if I'm DPS or healer after fights cause I'll be cruising at some 1.2-1.5k DPS from shooting lightning while bored) coupled with low overhealing.
Haste or Crit and why?
I prefer haste while raid healing and crit for tank healing, but I maintain a healthy mix in my "standard" gearset.
What healing class do you feel you understand least?
I think I have a fairly good grasp of all the healers, and if someone would lend me a healer of any class and point to all the important buttons I'd probably do a pretty good job with either of them, but I tend to raid lead and that takes understanding of all aspects of the game and good knowledge of what abilities each class has.
What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
I have Healing wave and Chain heal macroed with Nature's swiftness for oshit-style healing moments, and I have a Earth shield refresh macro, but some patch broke one of my addons and I haven't been arsed to fix it yet so for now, I'm refreshing manually. Pretty easy still seeing as I keep Riptides on the tank even while raid healing.
I use Grid for raid frames, and mainly look there while raid healing. While tank healing I use my large target frames but keep an eye on the raid every now and then (when I'm bored) and snipe heals. I use Satrina's buff frames to keep track of my Water shield and use my unit frame addon for tracking Earth shield on my focus target.
Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I'm not spoilt with many gear choices but I do have a few replacements pieces I can switch in if I want extra MP5, crit or haste depending on the fight or healing assignment. My overall set is pretty well balanced as regards to throughput and longetivity, however.
Showing posts with label shaman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shaman. Show all posts
Monday, November 2, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Blizzard giveth, Blizzard taketh away
The posts about 3.2 have been around for some time now, and being a casual blogger, I never hoped to compete with the likes of WoW.com or MMO Champ for news. Instead, I'll try and offer a few insights and analyses to the mage and shaman changes respectively.
The general changes are pretty interesting - although my kneejerk reaction to Emblems of Conquest dropping in friggin heroics was "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'VE WORKED HARD AND LONG TO EARN ENOUGH TO SOON BUY MY FIRST TIER 8 PIECE, AND NOW ANY FRESH LEVEL 80 CAN WALTZ INTO THE HEROIC GRIND AND BUY ILVL 232 STUFF A WEEK LATER Q_Q!", I think I can appreciate the slack Blizzard are cutting people who are gearing their third or fourth alt (such as myself, in a distant future - I'll not be fucked over when the next expansion comes, but rather have some 4-5 level 80's to grind to max level for some added fun). At the same time, why T8? Why not bump heroics/Naxx-10 to Walrus and Naxx-10 end bosses/25 normal bosses to Conquest Badgers? It's gonna be slightly longer before we have people in full ilvl 232 gear destroying Ulduar PuG's at least. And yes, I think a time will come when the average gear and fight awareness level allows most of Ulduar to be PuG:ed.
I don't really care though, cause deep inside, I'll know that I earned my badges when it was still hard, and that I am better than everyone else, so I'll be fine, and it'll be an overall gain. Mount changes look good, and again, while giving a free ride to new players, it offers well needed speed boost to levelling alts. The new raid instance seems rather lackluster and is not consistent with old dungeon design, and frankly, I've never been that psyched about "tournament" or "gladiator arena" type of gameplay. While I'm sure Blizzard will stick some nice and interesting mechanics in there, the idea of "let's have them fight wave after wave of adds" is a bit overdone and lazy. Mount Hyjal comes to mind, and I remember how frustrating it was to wipe on the last wave before the boss and have to do them all over again.
As far as mages are concerned, we are still getting shafted. We are decent for damage, it's only we have to work 36%* harder to get the same results that are facerolled by other classes. We only show up high on the meters when RNG permits. We are, for almost all intents and purposes, the only class that ever runs out of our chief resource. We've not seen any significant quality of life changes for a long time, and they look to be sparse in the future.
And as much as I would like to pretend that showing up high on meters is all that matters, this isn't true. We have quality of life issues that makes the game less fun to play, and they aren't being adressed. They are tossing us a small bone - they are making the invisibility fade timer noninterruptible. We still have to wait 3 seconds for the threat to drop, and it's still something we need to put effort into clearing off (when it's used as a threat dump we want to keep DPS:ing as soon as it has had effect, just like Feign Death for hunters - it's useless for solo play anyway cause you can't see any mobs when it's up...) with right clicking or keeping a macro. I cannot begin to explain how miniscule this is, especially compared to how they are, and have been, basically nerfing everything regarding our mana the last couple patches, and are continuing to do so because of replenishment. They've band-aided Evocation from once being a talent to having two minutes cooldown for arcane mages who like to eat through their mana. But it still requires us to do 0 DPS, it has a fairly unforgiving cooldown, we have to stand still, any damage, movement or pushback will severely diminish the gains since a tick is worth 3.5-4k mana, and with some bad luck that you totally can't compensate for, you'll have to move out of a Kel'Thuzad void zone the exact second you start the cast, quite possibly gaining 0 mana and being forced to wand the next two or four minutes. Game design that prevents the player from playing the game (i.e., keeping up some DPS in the case of mages) is inherently bad game design. They are nerfing replenishment and are tacking mana returns onto ignite at the same time they are lowering the mana cost of Arcane blast, but that does not solve the root problem. I even saw convincing maths showing that you need to take these new changes a lot further than Blizzard is doing for it to not be a very obvious nerf. I'm not begging for buffs (well, to our mana managment, I am), but at least do not nerf anything. Replenishment really screws with the games mechanics - Blizz does not want DPS:ers running out of mana, and they want healers to do it. Giving them all the same mana buff is not gonna help achieve that.
The Q&A brought some great questions and actually some good answers too, in the cesspool that is the official forums. The mana gem/health stone shared CD is being removed. The fights where me being able to eat a health stone would have saved the raid from wiping is probably not more than one, but at least the squishiest class around will be able to cut the healers -some- slack by gaining some much needed self-heal capabilities.
The T9 bonuses look weird, and while datamining is unreliable and we are in for some fixes, it shows some very boring thinking from Blizzards side. The two-piece is basically a free armor glyph. That's nice since it frees up a spot for Impr.... argh, no, sorry, I can't bear to type that. Improved Scorch is crap and needs to be fixed and homogenized with Winters chill and Improved Shadow Bolt to be a shared caster debuff. Anyway, it gives more armor to Ice armor, more regen to Mage armor and more Spirit->Crit rating for Molten armor. Pretty boring, to be honest, since Warlocks and Shamans have similar armor-type mechanics. It would be nice if it affected the way we play and help distinguish us as mages. The four-piece is a straight 5% crit bonus. The T8 four-piece, while heavily increasing our dependence on RNG, was fun, flavouristic and very much inline with how we play the game. Getting straight damage upgrades is boring, this is true for any magical weapon in a roleplaying setting, and our tier bonuses are the closest we get to a "magical weapon" as they come in pen and paper roleplaying. Most of them look rather lackluster, and some even make no sense (datamining issues no doubt), so I hope we get to see a lot of changes to these.
My mage is looking less and less appealing, and levelling my alts in those boring areas where I'v already levelled six alts seems like the reasonable thing to do. And I seriously do not belong with the crowd who reroll the Flavor of the Month. Maybe I'm tired of DPS all over. Maybe I want to heal more or tank instead. I dunno, but I intend to find out by getting my alts in shape.
For shaman, especially resto, it looks promising. Numeric buffs across the board - base health %, totem drops, CH jump distance - it's all good. However, what's really nice is what's been done to the way resto heals. Tidal waves no longer brings LHW haste but crit, NS is now up every 2 minutes, Healing Way is a straight HW buff (combined with Tidal waves haste we'll see some more use of HW than "OSHIT" every three minutes), Ancestral healing goes from armor bonus to physical damage decrease (should be straight damage decrease but it feels as if I'm asking for too much here...), homogenization when Cure Poison and Cure Disease gets slapped together and a big ole buff to Water Shield should make any healing shaman happy. Enhancement will benefit indirectly when rogues get axes, but since we still want slow ones and rogues fast ones I doubt it will be that big of a deal. Shamanistic rage gets a nice fix and makes shamans more like arcane mages (more total mana spent, less mana wasted, shorter cool down on active mana regen), and since I don't play elemental I won't delve into that.
I guess that concludes it - some mage QQ, some shaman happiness, and some general stuff. Here's to hoping that 3.2 is a long way into the future still (despite being up on the PTR already) so we can enjoy the current content when it actually is endgame.
* I made these statistics up.
The general changes are pretty interesting - although my kneejerk reaction to Emblems of Conquest dropping in friggin heroics was "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'VE WORKED HARD AND LONG TO EARN ENOUGH TO SOON BUY MY FIRST TIER 8 PIECE, AND NOW ANY FRESH LEVEL 80 CAN WALTZ INTO THE HEROIC GRIND AND BUY ILVL 232 STUFF A WEEK LATER Q_Q!", I think I can appreciate the slack Blizzard are cutting people who are gearing their third or fourth alt (such as myself, in a distant future - I'll not be fucked over when the next expansion comes, but rather have some 4-5 level 80's to grind to max level for some added fun). At the same time, why T8? Why not bump heroics/Naxx-10 to Walrus and Naxx-10 end bosses/25 normal bosses to Conquest Badgers? It's gonna be slightly longer before we have people in full ilvl 232 gear destroying Ulduar PuG's at least. And yes, I think a time will come when the average gear and fight awareness level allows most of Ulduar to be PuG:ed.
I don't really care though, cause deep inside, I'll know that I earned my badges when it was still hard, and that I am better than everyone else, so I'll be fine, and it'll be an overall gain. Mount changes look good, and again, while giving a free ride to new players, it offers well needed speed boost to levelling alts. The new raid instance seems rather lackluster and is not consistent with old dungeon design, and frankly, I've never been that psyched about "tournament" or "gladiator arena" type of gameplay. While I'm sure Blizzard will stick some nice and interesting mechanics in there, the idea of "let's have them fight wave after wave of adds" is a bit overdone and lazy. Mount Hyjal comes to mind, and I remember how frustrating it was to wipe on the last wave before the boss and have to do them all over again.
As far as mages are concerned, we are still getting shafted. We are decent for damage, it's only we have to work 36%* harder to get the same results that are facerolled by other classes. We only show up high on the meters when RNG permits. We are, for almost all intents and purposes, the only class that ever runs out of our chief resource. We've not seen any significant quality of life changes for a long time, and they look to be sparse in the future.
And as much as I would like to pretend that showing up high on meters is all that matters, this isn't true. We have quality of life issues that makes the game less fun to play, and they aren't being adressed. They are tossing us a small bone - they are making the invisibility fade timer noninterruptible. We still have to wait 3 seconds for the threat to drop, and it's still something we need to put effort into clearing off (when it's used as a threat dump we want to keep DPS:ing as soon as it has had effect, just like Feign Death for hunters - it's useless for solo play anyway cause you can't see any mobs when it's up...) with right clicking or keeping a macro. I cannot begin to explain how miniscule this is, especially compared to how they are, and have been, basically nerfing everything regarding our mana the last couple patches, and are continuing to do so because of replenishment. They've band-aided Evocation from once being a talent to having two minutes cooldown for arcane mages who like to eat through their mana. But it still requires us to do 0 DPS, it has a fairly unforgiving cooldown, we have to stand still, any damage, movement or pushback will severely diminish the gains since a tick is worth 3.5-4k mana, and with some bad luck that you totally can't compensate for, you'll have to move out of a Kel'Thuzad void zone the exact second you start the cast, quite possibly gaining 0 mana and being forced to wand the next two or four minutes. Game design that prevents the player from playing the game (i.e., keeping up some DPS in the case of mages) is inherently bad game design. They are nerfing replenishment and are tacking mana returns onto ignite at the same time they are lowering the mana cost of Arcane blast, but that does not solve the root problem. I even saw convincing maths showing that you need to take these new changes a lot further than Blizzard is doing for it to not be a very obvious nerf. I'm not begging for buffs (well, to our mana managment, I am), but at least do not nerf anything. Replenishment really screws with the games mechanics - Blizz does not want DPS:ers running out of mana, and they want healers to do it. Giving them all the same mana buff is not gonna help achieve that.
The Q&A brought some great questions and actually some good answers too, in the cesspool that is the official forums. The mana gem/health stone shared CD is being removed. The fights where me being able to eat a health stone would have saved the raid from wiping is probably not more than one, but at least the squishiest class around will be able to cut the healers -some- slack by gaining some much needed self-heal capabilities.
The T9 bonuses look weird, and while datamining is unreliable and we are in for some fixes, it shows some very boring thinking from Blizzards side. The two-piece is basically a free armor glyph. That's nice since it frees up a spot for Impr.... argh, no, sorry, I can't bear to type that. Improved Scorch is crap and needs to be fixed and homogenized with Winters chill and Improved Shadow Bolt to be a shared caster debuff. Anyway, it gives more armor to Ice armor, more regen to Mage armor and more Spirit->Crit rating for Molten armor. Pretty boring, to be honest, since Warlocks and Shamans have similar armor-type mechanics. It would be nice if it affected the way we play and help distinguish us as mages. The four-piece is a straight 5% crit bonus. The T8 four-piece, while heavily increasing our dependence on RNG, was fun, flavouristic and very much inline with how we play the game. Getting straight damage upgrades is boring, this is true for any magical weapon in a roleplaying setting, and our tier bonuses are the closest we get to a "magical weapon" as they come in pen and paper roleplaying. Most of them look rather lackluster, and some even make no sense (datamining issues no doubt), so I hope we get to see a lot of changes to these.
My mage is looking less and less appealing, and levelling my alts in those boring areas where I'v already levelled six alts seems like the reasonable thing to do. And I seriously do not belong with the crowd who reroll the Flavor of the Month. Maybe I'm tired of DPS all over. Maybe I want to heal more or tank instead. I dunno, but I intend to find out by getting my alts in shape.
For shaman, especially resto, it looks promising. Numeric buffs across the board - base health %, totem drops, CH jump distance - it's all good. However, what's really nice is what's been done to the way resto heals. Tidal waves no longer brings LHW haste but crit, NS is now up every 2 minutes, Healing Way is a straight HW buff (combined with Tidal waves haste we'll see some more use of HW than "OSHIT" every three minutes), Ancestral healing goes from armor bonus to physical damage decrease (should be straight damage decrease but it feels as if I'm asking for too much here...), homogenization when Cure Poison and Cure Disease gets slapped together and a big ole buff to Water Shield should make any healing shaman happy. Enhancement will benefit indirectly when rogues get axes, but since we still want slow ones and rogues fast ones I doubt it will be that big of a deal. Shamanistic rage gets a nice fix and makes shamans more like arcane mages (more total mana spent, less mana wasted, shorter cool down on active mana regen), and since I don't play elemental I won't delve into that.
I guess that concludes it - some mage QQ, some shaman happiness, and some general stuff. Here's to hoping that 3.2 is a long way into the future still (despite being up on the PTR already) so we can enjoy the current content when it actually is endgame.
* I made these statistics up.
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Echo Isles - introduction
ow hai 2 u.
Ever since my good friend Ercles started his WoW blog I've kinda wanted to get back into teh blawgingz. I'll try and get a few subjects that's been brewing out of the way fairly soon and then update with more experiences and news as I gear my shaman and pewpew with my mage.
The name of the blog comes from my favorite race of the Warcraft universe, the trolls. The Darkspear tribe was saved from murlocs by Thrall and his orc companions, and has ever since been a part of the new Horde. In an act of severe cultural imperalism, the Darkspear were forced to stop cannibalizing each other, to become more 'civilized'. Anyway, they are supposed to live on the Echo Isles, off the cost of Durotar. However, in game, you kill the trolls on those islands and the only real Horde troll presence is in Sen'Jin village. The Darkspear are supposed to be rare and they remain fairly so (the least played race together with dwarfs*, coincidently the coolest race of the Alliance), however I don't understand how people can resist the male troll model or the patios accent.
Thus, when I started the game, it was obvious which race I would choose. Since I love hybrids and was told shammies were, and I also love shammies and the head hunters from lore and Warcraft 3, that was no hard choice either, and Togtok saw the light of day. I figured I wanted a character that could do a little bit of everything to try out what I would want in a pure, although I thought about creating an orc warrior too, cause grunts are cool. Apperantly, shaman is the least played class also, and I always love feeling like I'm a unique snowflake.
I embraced WoW fairly late, mainly because I didn't have anyone to play with, but when some peeps from a pen and paper roleplaying forum decided to start, I went with them and my account was created in the autumn of 2006, i.e., before The Burning Crusade. I never got to level 60 before it's release however, and never really saw any of the vanilla content on my own.
I wanted an alt to play while Togtok was gaining rested status, and I figured that mages are also cool. Forsaken or Darkspear Trolls (remember when we didn't have belfs? Glory days...)? Easy choice since I don't particularly fancy the whole gloomy-emo theme of the undead. Thus Vorla saw the light of day. Back then arcane wasn't a "real" spec, and flinging fire balls is boring, so I opted for the more control related AoE build and Vorla stayed frost and kept up with the rogues well into Naxx-10 content before respeccing arcane.
When Burning Crusade hit, the people I originally started playing with kicked off a belf group. I thought this sounded fun enough, and for quite some time we played every wednesday night. We made it to somewhere around 35 together before it sort of fell apart due to various reasons, but my belf hunter (all the other classes except rogue were taken) is currently 43 and the others have taken up the wednesday night gaming and are currently somewhere around 72-73. The reason I write about this is that the guild never really was up to par with fielding Karazhan runs in the day, and I wanted to raid and see content. So, I raided with Vorla in another guild and kept doing that until summer struck. Steamwheedle Cartel being a low-pop server really died. To make matters worse, the guild I was raiding with had some minor drama and simply wasn't working that well. No guild on the server matched us either, people were doing T5/T6 content, struggling in Kara or were simply full on mages. So, I decided to migrate.
The highest populated RP server was Argent Dawn, so that's where my hunt started. I applied for Absolution, which seemed like a guild that would fit me, and three days later I was accepted (the guild masters first comment was "Nice kit :)" which made me fairly confident) and paid for a character transfer.
Today, I remain in Absolution and has done so for 11 days short of a year. I was recently appointed officer together with a warlock (Brr! Mage's sworn enemies!) to deal with the ranged department, and I do the occasional raid leading. I won't be musing much about that though, since there's usually nothing fun to write about anyway. A few weeks back I transferred Togtok to Argent Dawn with the intent to level him to 80 and start gearing him as a healer alt. A few days back he dinged for the last time and the Heroic grind started. I got the healy mace off of Nexus yesterday and also managed to heal my first Naxx-10 run, all in all fun and something I look forward to doing again.
The main characters that this blog will be about is thus Vorla, level 80 arcane/FFB mage, and Togtok, level 80 restoration/enhancement shaman. Sometimes I'll write about my alts (I've been wanting a tanking alt and will probably level a paladin. Slowly.) but I am by no means an altoholic.
Welcome to da Echo Isles, mon!
* http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php
Ever since my good friend Ercles started his WoW blog I've kinda wanted to get back into teh blawgingz. I'll try and get a few subjects that's been brewing out of the way fairly soon and then update with more experiences and news as I gear my shaman and pewpew with my mage.
The name of the blog comes from my favorite race of the Warcraft universe, the trolls. The Darkspear tribe was saved from murlocs by Thrall and his orc companions, and has ever since been a part of the new Horde. In an act of severe cultural imperalism, the Darkspear were forced to stop cannibalizing each other, to become more 'civilized'. Anyway, they are supposed to live on the Echo Isles, off the cost of Durotar. However, in game, you kill the trolls on those islands and the only real Horde troll presence is in Sen'Jin village. The Darkspear are supposed to be rare and they remain fairly so (the least played race together with dwarfs*, coincidently the coolest race of the Alliance), however I don't understand how people can resist the male troll model or the patios accent.
Thus, when I started the game, it was obvious which race I would choose. Since I love hybrids and was told shammies were, and I also love shammies and the head hunters from lore and Warcraft 3, that was no hard choice either, and Togtok saw the light of day. I figured I wanted a character that could do a little bit of everything to try out what I would want in a pure, although I thought about creating an orc warrior too, cause grunts are cool. Apperantly, shaman is the least played class also, and I always love feeling like I'm a unique snowflake.
I embraced WoW fairly late, mainly because I didn't have anyone to play with, but when some peeps from a pen and paper roleplaying forum decided to start, I went with them and my account was created in the autumn of 2006, i.e., before The Burning Crusade. I never got to level 60 before it's release however, and never really saw any of the vanilla content on my own.
I wanted an alt to play while Togtok was gaining rested status, and I figured that mages are also cool. Forsaken or Darkspear Trolls (remember when we didn't have belfs? Glory days...)? Easy choice since I don't particularly fancy the whole gloomy-emo theme of the undead. Thus Vorla saw the light of day. Back then arcane wasn't a "real" spec, and flinging fire balls is boring, so I opted for the more control related AoE build and Vorla stayed frost and kept up with the rogues well into Naxx-10 content before respeccing arcane.
When Burning Crusade hit, the people I originally started playing with kicked off a belf group. I thought this sounded fun enough, and for quite some time we played every wednesday night. We made it to somewhere around 35 together before it sort of fell apart due to various reasons, but my belf hunter (all the other classes except rogue were taken) is currently 43 and the others have taken up the wednesday night gaming and are currently somewhere around 72-73. The reason I write about this is that the guild never really was up to par with fielding Karazhan runs in the day, and I wanted to raid and see content. So, I raided with Vorla in another guild and kept doing that until summer struck. Steamwheedle Cartel being a low-pop server really died. To make matters worse, the guild I was raiding with had some minor drama and simply wasn't working that well. No guild on the server matched us either, people were doing T5/T6 content, struggling in Kara or were simply full on mages. So, I decided to migrate.
The highest populated RP server was Argent Dawn, so that's where my hunt started. I applied for Absolution, which seemed like a guild that would fit me, and three days later I was accepted (the guild masters first comment was "Nice kit :)" which made me fairly confident) and paid for a character transfer.
Today, I remain in Absolution and has done so for 11 days short of a year. I was recently appointed officer together with a warlock (Brr! Mage's sworn enemies!) to deal with the ranged department, and I do the occasional raid leading. I won't be musing much about that though, since there's usually nothing fun to write about anyway. A few weeks back I transferred Togtok to Argent Dawn with the intent to level him to 80 and start gearing him as a healer alt. A few days back he dinged for the last time and the Heroic grind started. I got the healy mace off of Nexus yesterday and also managed to heal my first Naxx-10 run, all in all fun and something I look forward to doing again.
The main characters that this blog will be about is thus Vorla, level 80 arcane/FFB mage, and Togtok, level 80 restoration/enhancement shaman. Sometimes I'll write about my alts (I've been wanting a tanking alt and will probably level a paladin. Slowly.) but I am by no means an altoholic.
Welcome to da Echo Isles, mon!
* http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
