Posts Tagged ‘Amradorn’

I’ve purposely kept myself out of the normal raiding activities of the guild for a couple of months now. The state of Restoration Druids in my opinion has just become worse and worse with each successive patch which made me loose a lot of interest. I can’t deny however that I’ve missed it to some degree and thus I’ve slowly started to make my way back into it.

The difference this time is that I am primarily specced as Moonkin. I do still have a Resto spec set up as my secondary, but unless major changes are made to bring back the ability of Druids to roll Lifebloom stacks I just can’t see myself embracing Restoration as a main spec.

My first run back into raiding and the guild puts me up against Thorim, a boss that had not yet been killed by Foederati. I managed to squeak out just over 1500 DPS which isn’t overly exciting compared to the more than 3700 the other raiding moonkin in the raid did but I was happy with the initial outcome. My gear is still primarily set up for being a raiding Resto, so that does hamper my DPS some, and the fact that I have virtually no experience raiding or even instancing as a moonkin, emphasizes that I have a lot to learn to get up to that 3700 mark.

I did some tweaks after that run and I’m looking forward to giving it another go. I dropped some Resto talents that didn’t really add anything to my DPS and picked up Furor, Natural Shapeshifter and the Master Shapeshifter talents. I also trimmed some talents in balance to streamline things a bit, dropping Owlkin Frenzy and Typhoon. So basically right now I need to working on setting up a good base spell rotation and work on improving my gear.

Oh, and we killed Thorim for the first time that night, which reminds me I need to get the Screenshots caught up on the Guild Home Page.

Due to RL changes in my employment, I have been playing a lot less during the week lately. I have pretty much stopped raiding all together and have even switched Amradorn from resto to Moonkin.

While I’m still getting used to the idea that I’m dps and not healing, I am finding the role fairly fun. In fact I’m finding it more fun than healing. With the Lunar festival currently running in game I took the opportunity last weekend to jump into some groups in the dps role. While occasionally I found myself popping out of Moonkin and tossing a heal out of habbit and making my group mates chuckle, I had a blast. I normally shy away from instances becuase I find healing them too much of a chore.

It’s far too early to tell if I’m going to be drifting to a more permanent dps role or not. I suspect that when 3.1 comes out I will dual spec healing/Moonkin which will give me the best of both worlds.

Amradorn is my main character in World of Warcraft. He is currently a level 80 Druid. My main spec is generally resto. I am currently speced Balance however.

Armory

I hit level 80 over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and since then I have hit a couple of Heroics. I have yet to successfully complete one and this is starting to become seriously discouraging. I feel like I’m letting my groups down and becoming reluctant to offer myself up as a healer.

I haven’t really changed out a lot of gear in the leveling process, mainly rings and trinkets, and of course the Chilly Slobberknocker.

I’ve been trying to maintain a normal Lifebloom, rejuve, regrowth rotation for tank healing, while using lifebloom and regrowth to HoT up group members. Last night before going to Violet Hold and the Old Kingdom, I did respec and pick up Wild Growth, even though I hate that spell with a crazed passion.

A couple things I’m running into… I feel mana starved most of the time, even on trash. When I start getting into trouble, I find myself resorting to spaming Nourish which eats up mana but feels as if it’s the only thing I can cast that even comes close to keeping up, regrowth just feels too slow now.

I can’t keep up with the damage out put. I don’t know if it’s my spell rotation or if its just me panicing and going off rotation, but the damage out put I’m seeing makes me feel as if I’m totally undergeared. Of course I could simply be undergeared as well.

I’m currently working on getting the mats together for the Earthliving Boots and legs (the frozen orbs were expensive as hell). Looking at loot rank through (prioritizing using the order given in this post on EJ forums), it looks almost looks like I need to work on creating the blue pvp set in order to have a decent PvE set, at least until I can start actually succeeding at heroics and get better gear. Which has me totally confused now.

I’ll try to get some combat logs the next few runs I can get into.

I’m looking for any suggestions that will make it so I’m not a burden to the groups I get into. I’m honestly tempted to go Moonkin just to get into heroics and earn the healing gear I need.

Amradorn hit level 75 last night while doing a few lower 70′s quests in Howling Fjord. I have from time to time gone back to lower Northrend zones to do a few quests when wanting to take it a little easier after work some nights. I think my next goal is to finish as many of the Grizzly Hills and Dragonblight quests that I can so that I can hit level 76 by the weekend. That will give me all weekend to hit 77 which will finially allow me to start flying again.

At that point I’ll be heading farther north to see what quests I can get in Storm Peaks and Ice Crown. Level 80 doesn’t feel that far off.

Over the weekend I took advantage of the down time and worked on leveling Amradorn. I did all of the non-instance based quests in Borean Tundra and then headed over to Dragonblight where I finished off the quests leading up to the Wrathgate achievement, that has to be the most awesome cut scene I have ever seen in an MMO, and ended the weekend about 40% past level 73 heading to level 74.

I’m working in the Grizzley Hills now. I really love the violin music that plays through out much of this area. It kind of gives and old west feel when for entertainment at the end of a hard days work people might gather around a camp fire, pulling out a violin, a harmonica, or some other musical instrument and play what ever came to mind.

With a little work I should be level 74 by the time I call it a night. I’m well behind some of the speed levelers of Foederati, but I am sure enjoying the journey.

When I got home last night from work, I was very excited and ready to really dive into Wrath. I had installed the game while I was at home for lunch and upgraded the secondary account. My Collector’s Edition copy for my main account should be here today.

I turned on my computer and…. my internet was out. Apperently Mediacom had a major internet service outage in central Iowa sometime between when I went back to work from lunch and when I returned home at the end of the day. I can’t begin to descibe how upset and frustrated I was.

It was just after 9pm when my internet finially came on. Despite the fact that I had to get up at 5am this morning to get ready for work, I loged in, sat through an all most 1000 person que, finnially getting online just before 10pm.

I recreated Norikor, my Tauren Death Knight that I had first played in the beta, and started doing some of the quests in Ebon Hold. Since it was late I didn’t get very far, logging off around 11:30pm.

While I wanted to make sure I got Norikor made, I am most excited about being able to start leveling Amradorn tonight once I get home and have that account upgraded.

More to come after tonight.

Echoes of Doom seems to be a fairly appropriate name for patch 3.0.2, not because of the impending release of Wrath of the Lich King, or because of the massive changes to game play, but more due to the massive cries of “foul” from the player base that I saw in General chat as I logged on for the first time after the servers came up.

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Amradorn copied over to the beta server yesterday just before our Black Temple raid. I was scheduled to rotate out of the non-healer intensive fights so I spent a little bit of last night getting my first taste of Warsong Hold in Borean Tundra.

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ROFL… I sent in a some pics to WoW Insider the other day and they picked the one of me on the Zhevra and posted it in there Arround Azeroth series. Thank you to the folks at WoW Insider.