February 9, 2010

I had to cut short yesterday's post because too much was going on at work. Things are a little less crazy today (or is it that I'm just blowing off the tasks on my to-do list?)

Love is in the Air
So, I was saying that I'm working on the Love is in the Air meta achievement. As of last night, I only have one achievement left: I Pitied the Fool. It's going to take a couple days, since the Love Fools cost 10 Love Tokens each. But, I should be done before the end of the week, if not sooner.

I was going to say that I found the perfect spot to grind out the Lovely Charms. But yesterday I found an even better one. There's a quest I have not completed that requires me to go to a specific location and destroy some portals or something. At that spot mobs are on a constant respawn cycle. I sat there for only about 30-45 minutes and walked away with over 100 lovely charms. That's 10 bracelets.

But then...I went to Culling of Stratholme as a random heroic late last night and found another way to quickly grind charms - kill all the zombies. I got kind of annoyed because this system definitely favors the non-healers in the group. I had to use Holy Nova in order to get my fair share of charms. :\ So, I supposed DPS will be the ones who have the most goodies from the event, since they have the most opportunities to get charms. When in a group, the charms should be distributed equally, not just to the person who made the kill. But, Blizzard didn't ask for my opinion.

Icecrown Citadel 25 (Priest)
Another 20 attempts on Professor wasted. Though we came very very close to killing him a few times. I think part of the problem is me. I excel at healing during phases 1 and 2. But phase 3 is a different matter. I suck at tank healing while moving.

Heroic modes unlock this week for several guilds, so the limited number of attempts goes away for normal mode. I don't know how our officers will approach this. Will we do Professor until we finally get him? Or will we limit ourselves to a number of attempts?

Shaman Leveling
My Shaman is now level 70. The xp gain since hitting 70 has seemed very slow compared to pre-70. I'm not complaining, as I remember it took even longer back in the Burning Crusade days. It's just that it was a noticeable slowing down of progress.

I've been finding healing to be rather difficult on some occasions. I'm spoiled on my priest by having lots of instants. The shaman only has one instant (Riptide) and it has 6 second cooldown, which is an eternity compared to Renew, whose cooldown is simply the global cooldown. Also the multi-target heal Chain Heal has a long casting time compared to the instant Circle of Healing.

Lack of instants is not the only problem. I think everyone is also spoiled by how easy heroics are with high level gear. So, when they're running alts through lvl 70 dungeons they forget that we're not really overpowered for them. They try running through them, AoEing everything, as if we're in a heroic. Tanks aren't getting time to gain aggro, DPS is getting focused and one-shotted. It's a mess.

I do remember finding it challenging to heal these instances when I was leveling my priest. But back then people were a little more cautious.

To avoid the stress of healing, I've been DPSing as much as possible. I've reached over 1k DPS on occasion. That's fun! :-)

Boomkin Fun
My boomkin finally gained enough Emblems of Frost to buy the Belt of Petrified Ivy. It was a huge upgrade over the item I had previously, so I'm excited. I hope this excitement lasts because it's going to be a long time before I can afford another frost item on her.