Gear resets

Because I got some sort of summer flu two weeks back, my Cataclysm testing so far is limited to something like 7 hours total, in which I logged Rahana and spent 10 minutes flying all over Ironforge and visited Ironforge Airport. Created a Goblin Shaman and spent few minutes waiting for Rocket Jump cooldown just tossing around. Logged my Deathknight, specced her and went into Ebon Hold to whack dummies. Without any sort of dps meter. Next log on I went again with Rahana, flying all over Azeroth to visit old and new places and got great twitch to roll new character come Cataclysm to experience the old new content. I did the “CSI: Old Blanchy” quest too. Oh and I rolled a Troll Druid with the intention to level it a bit higher to see the Bear form. He’s stuck at level 4 – but Echo Isles are by far the best (as in colourful, cutest) starting zone out there. Yesterday before raid I logged for quite some time because I was tasked with finding whether Water Elementals are still immune to Frost magic.

So I logged my frost knight, and asked humbly in trade how the hell can I get to 80+ zones. Use the teleport outside Stormwind bank they said. So I did.

Whooooom. Loading screen.

Mount Hyjaal (or how do you spell that). Beautiful zone. It has everything – druids, lore important NPCs, mining nodes, Big Tree of Importance (TM), quests and Twilight occultists (not the movie, the cult).

In my thorough search for a single water elemental (they have fire, earth and wind, but no water on Mt.H.) I picked up a few quests. The usual right-click-don’t-read-accept way as I didn’t want to spoil the lore line for Cataclysm for myself. I did those quests. Two to be precise. And seeing the quest reward shocked me a bit. Here I was, looking at a piece of mail caster gear with hit and crit on it, with about 150+ intellect on shoulder piece. I blinked. Then I blinked again. I sat there, looking at the green quest thing trying to figure what the hell is wrong with that. Then I figured. Rahana’s T10 (264) shoulder armor has about 200 armor and 60 INT less (but 1 socket more). After a while I managed to display ilevel in default Blizzard UI (if anyone knows of any working Beta addons, please let me know). i272. First rewards. Oshi.

I won’t try to hide it bugged me a little (yes, past tense) – after all replacing the set gear and nice purples with very first rewards, expecting to have pretty much 10M BiS by the time Cataclysm ships felt a bit weird for me. Second zone quest rewards, first instance blues would feel more appropriate. We are geared from the final instance for god’s sake, aren’t we? Anyways, as I said, it does not bug me anymore. We talked in guild about it, I did some thinking too and yeah, the complete reset is a great thing.

Complete gear reset is the best gear reset

It actually is. It allows people to change mains easily, it allows your raid squad to evolve and get ready and confident for Cataclysm. It was actually annoying to start doing Naxxramas in Sunwell and some other T6 gear just because the heroic / blue i200 alternatives were either pain to get or not that big upgrade to be worth trying to put together group for Oculus – and trust me, that was near to impossible at Wrath launch. If you think of it, using old expansion gear sucks out half of the fun from preparing for new content. You don’t have to run dungeons for gear, just badges. You don’t get to think about new gear set-up, whether this piece is better or not during the leveling process. You just wait for first raid drops and you perform just well in the raid. That definitely is unhealthy way to sort gear progression.

In hindsight, if we take our experience with Wrath into consideration, the QQ about TBC gear reset was stupid and pointless. Now I understand if anyone is pro raider with Naxxramas on farm, they wanted their gear to represent their feats and pride for as long as possible. Let’s as well admit that the BC visuals were far from the cool visor of grim, gothic looking Naxxramas (or vanilla in general) gear. Replacing your epic sword for some crystalish stick that looks like big dildo sure does feel humiliating, disregarding the fact that it is gear improvement. Then again, I really do think so far the TBC gear reset was the best so far and we can only hope that Cataclysm reset will be the tiny bit better. Better in what? Let’s see.

• There needs to be a lot of viable gear options in the 84-85 bracket instances. Bringing back D-sets would be just awesome, decking ourselves in blue sets before we set our feet into raids and replace them with !purplz! was probably the biggest thing I missed in Wrath.
• There must be enough viable options in quest rewards that will actually force us to break our sets early. Because let’s admit it, most of the time it’s not the raw stats, but the set value that is holding us back
• Community has to start thinking in number values, not colour values regarding gear. That means important is ilevel, not shades of blue or purple. I still recall getting a proper beating for using Spark of Life when Ulduar was out. I was supposed to go and buy Egg of Mortal Essence because it was upgrade. Well, bullshit. Same ilevel, different colour and Spark was actually priceless to me due to the mp5 proc.

Preparing for new gear

The most important task with upcoming gear reset however lies on us. At least I believe so. We need to actually prepare ourselves for the early gear switch so we can move on, not being stubborn asses that insist on keeping their heroic tagged purples no matter what. If you haven’t been to Beta, I can guarantee you will be blown away by the stat increase on the gear. I don’t know what caused it, my guess at long shot would be that the removal of ratings and some other stuff actually moved a bit the budget cost of other stats so the gear really does seem imbalanced and OP at first.

Anyways, that is just my thinking about how we should look at it. Gear reset is coming and there is nothing you can do about it. My question though is – how long do you think will the T10 set bonuses outweight the raw stats? And I am not interested in numbers, more likely the feel of it. Seeing the starter gear, I expect Rahana to be in brand new green/blue gear halfway to 83 latest.

ICC gear sets (version 1-normal) and Totem thoughts.

So, I finally got to making the ICC gearlist of well, Rahana’s BiS at the current moment. I did it using values from Shaman_HEP from our last Icecrown Citadel raid, in which I healed everything from start up to and including Festergut and few tries on Rotface. The results are a bit skimmed, as for the configuration I used some things I didn’t have at that time – especially 2T10 attained just after that run.

Thinking about what to wear is srs business!

All the gear selected for the gearlist (both BiS normal modes and BiS heroic modes) is taken from Wowhead.com. I will not, ever, suggest what trinkets you should be using. It’s mainly because I myself have about… well, many trinkets from various instances that I swap in and out if needed – although being the mana junkie I am… my mp5 trinkets and mana restore trinkets lead the way now.

The new LFG (yes, again)

So, we have patch 3.3 here for few more days and everything starts to settle down a bit and the euphoria is slowly falling off. Most of us tried all of the features or content at hand and are hungry for more. Most of us is running heroics in our spare time, because we either have nothing better to do, or because we want to gear up and gem our offspecs.

My experiences from LFG on Rahana are wide and range from “professional farming” parties, where no one says a word and you are out of the dungeon in fifteen minutes after first pull to “social” parties that chat a lot and are there rather to enjoy themselves in the instance. I must say I prefer the latter a bit more, as I am a social person and I consider at least “Hi!” and “thxbai” as common courtesy. There were hardly any cocky groups I encountered though, even if it was the “pro party” and there were some undergeared people or something, no one was being rude (well they did not say anything at all) and no one was claiming to be carrying others through. So while I was a bit worried how much this extended anonymity will destroy the community even more (although on various blogs you may find tales of how everything gets needed just because people can, hell, even I ninjaed a tank trinket) from my experience it was not as bad as I was afraid it will be.

Well met, and how I was an arse in PuG

Heyho. Well, yesterday, something interesting happened to me. And it was very pleasant thing. We assembled for some guild runs through the new places, it went all smooth and dandy apart from Tame who kept on dying (his own fault to be honest), vent was lively and jokes were many, generally great evening spent doing PvE stuff. Well, we’ve done all three in order, teleported back to Dalaran and we are thinking about PuGging some more heroics to get me enough badges to finish off my upgrade path in Triumphs. Guys went to Ironforge to enchant new gear they got and I was idling in Dalaran, repaired and ready to go. Well, standing there, it came to my mind that I maybe could be useful again, and I popped guild recruitment macro into trade and looking for guild channels. Well, an interesting whisper came back.

[Chayah]: Hello there – Blueberry Totem?

Blueberry Raiding: Tackling your first heroics, part deux

Note: I was slacking on this post and posts in general due to some shit real life has given me. 3.3 is going live for us EU people tonight, so the next part will cover this, as well as I need to test the new, nerfed Oculus for the next edition.

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Hello again. Earlier this week I posted first part of manual to handle your entry heroics that can open you the world of bigger raiding. This week, we will be following where we left, covering the rest of easy and the medium heroics, pointing out some of the speed-bumps for shaman healers that those include. By the way, stumbled upon a project I wanted to do while leveling my next shaman - Leveling with instancing by Skraps over at Sham-WoW. I am very interested if he will cover some more, as instance leveling might be new option in 3.3. But back onto our main topic.

We will assume that since last week, your gear got better with badges and drops somehow, as well as the gear of your tank and party. We will still assume that your party is not full of brainded tards, but still can give you headache by not moving out of fire fast (enough). Now, under these circumstances, you can pretty much stand in most heroics looking pretty while you heal anything and this my dear shamans, this won’t change much. The step-up in difficulty in the next “tier! of heroics comes more with the demands that it puts on your reflexes and the rest of your party, than on your gear. But now, although you may feel like grown up shammling, I suggest you go check this post at Shields Up! out and try to learn what Drug says. He’s kinda like Simon. You know the game “Simon says”, don’t you?

Blueberry Raiding: Haste is like, the best stat for us, right?

And the hell it is. I doubt you can find any bigger haste junkies than raiding restoration shamans. The key word here is – raiding. That’s right. Now, before you start bashing me, I understand what HEP values tell you. It’s like, haste is miles ahead of anything else! And it really is. But for new restoration shamans, this should be clarified, for the lack of better word. Explained.

There surely are times when haste has it’s use…

So. A restoration shaman posting against haste? Am I out of my mind and out of control? I am not. I just seen two shamans lately putting big accent on haste while they were fresh 80s and both seemed a bit confused and disappointed by their healing capabilities. It was specifically the resto approaching me in Dalaran bank (weee, I am famous! No. It really wasn’t because I was first reasonably geared resto shammy they’ve seen. Really! C’mon!) and there was this question that sparked the discussion was this sentence:

“I don’t know what I am doing wrong. I followed the information I found on Elitist Jerks, you know them? And on Shaman boards.”