Two Captured Flames - I have them

Or for those of you who like lolcats, 2 Captured Flames - I haz dem. But enough of that. I did in fact spend all my play time this weekend flying around honouring and desecrating flames, so much so that Kam is now the proud owner of a Captured Flame and is several hundred gold better off. My hunter alt also has a Captured Flame because, well the gold is really easy.

Why the pet and not the Brazier? Some one had put a Brazier out in Shattrath, so I got to try out the /dance emote on it myself. It *is* quite neat to be turned into a burning, dancing Draenei, I must admit, however after a minute's dancing I got bored and moved off to do some quests. Which is what I suspect will be the case if I got one myself. So a pet it is, to follow me through whatever instance I am in, into all the dark places, in and out of danger. Or maybe not quite yet because lots of other people will surely have them now, so maybe it's time for the Winter's Veil robot to come out.

New Shaman spells in Wrath

As the beans have been spilled according to this Wow Insider blog from the WWI dev panel, time to talk new shaman spells.

Hex, 1.5 sec cast, turn an enemy into a frog for 8-10 seconds, 1 min cooldown. This looks similar to druid Hibernate, a short duration CC. I expect this to be used at the start of a pull to CC an add for enough time to DPS down another one, similar how we use Hibernate today (when the druid in question has trained it). It will also be really good for controlling unexpected adds, either to give time to kill the original target, or to leg it. Always welcome since my only escape option is Earthstomp followed by Ghost Wolf. I'd really prefer a better, more reliable CC like Polymorph or even Freezing Trap, but this reasonable if the cooldown stays short enough for it to be useful for every pull.

Combining totems, eg Strength of Earth and Grace of Air on the same totem. Interesting, this will lead to less spamming totems if we can put 2 down to cover what 4 did, but how will they explain putting an Earth and Air element effect onto the same totem exactly? Can you say Retcon?

Totems will affect the whole raid. This is awesome, along with news that windfury will affect druids in beast forms. It will help our raid leader figure out a good group setup, and probably make Shamans even more in demand in our 10 man raids.

Weapon enchants revamped, Rockbiter is replaced by Earthliving, which gives a +Healing buff. Yes please is all I can say, extra +Healing is always welcome, especially as I shouldn't be meleeing when in healbot mode.

So far so good!

Desecrating bonfires

As I've previously mentioned it's midsummer season in Azeroth and Outlands, so rather than grind Shattered Sun Offensive reputation, PvP Honour or anything else, I've been flying around Outlands and Azeroth. The reason, other than trying to collect a big stack of 350 Burning Blossoms, is gold.

There are two quests of note here, Honor the Flame which pays 5g 95s and 5 blossoms, and Desecrating the Flames, paying 11g 99s and 10 blossoms. The Wowhead entry for Honor the Flame has a big list of the locations of all the various bonfires, in the comments. I also used Kaliope’s cheat sheet from Kaliope’s WoW Crafting Blog.

There are 25 horde fires, 27 alliance fires and 5 neutral towns with both. This means from honouring flames a level 70 can make 178g 5s and 150 blossoms. For getting a bit nasty and doing some desecrating, a level 70 can make 383g 68s and 320 blossoms. Kerching! Of course the honouring can be done safely in small play time chunks; flying around Azeroth on bats or windriders takes a fair amount of time, so I can watch TV, read the web, etc while doing it.

I was also spotted last night Stealing Darnassus' flame. These are the most fun of the quests, involving infiltrating enemy territory and stealing their flame. Well, clicking on their bonfire, getting a fire explosion back and a quest item appear in your bag. Note nothing else seems to happen; I clicked on the fire a number of times before I noticed the item in my inventory. Luckily there were only lowbies hanging around, none of which attacked. The reward is 25 blossoms and more gold. I'm planning a early Sunday morning raid into Stormwind and Ironforge, hoping the alliance will all be sleeping...

Thanks to WoW Insider's guide

10 Unforgettable WoW moments, causing irreversible reputation damage

Cheers to Cathmor from Eye for an Eye for this BA Shared Topic idea.

For me its the people who make the most memorable moments in WoW, so here are the top 10 silly things my friends have done in WoW.

From the WoW Dungeon Tips page: "If you pick up an item by mistake, you can cause irreversible damage to your reputation as other players might not believe it was an error."

1. Scarlet Monastery Cathedral - the Case of the Healing Mace. In the days before need and greed rolls - there was just roll or pass, so our usual loot rules were to pass then /roll. Mograine is killed by a party of priest W, resto druid L, resto druid M, feral druid D (me). The Mograine's Might drops. A roll proceeds. Feral druid D wins. The next loot item is Hand of Righteousness from Sally Whitemane, a very nice healing mace our priest would just love to have, and makes it clear in chat with a "NEED". Having lost pretty much every roll of the evening to me, resto druid M just rolls on the mace straight away, thus ninja looting it from our priest. The next thing I see in party chat is another "NEED" from the priest followed him logging off. He later claims it was network issues and he wasn't really annoyed, I'm not so sure. Resto druid M had to use that healing mace for quite a few levels afterward. We still tease him about it today. Irreversible damage you see.
   
2. Blackfathom Deeps - the infamous Blue Cloth Trousers. Twilight Lord Kelris drops his Gaze Dreamer Pants. Same party as for SM. Quite a lot drunk, resto druid L proceeds to roll and ninjas these blue cloth trousers right from under the nose of our priest W, who had expressed a strong desire to get them. We still tease druid L about this even today, all blue cloth trousers are now "clearly druid loot". Yet more irreversible damage. Priest W surprisingly gave up healing and rolled a mage when we switched to Horde.
   
3. The long lived Staff of Westfall. This was a quest reward on the Alliance at level 22. Just look at it, nice for a resto druid. Unfortunately the druid in question (resto druid L) was still using it at level 40 or so. He claimed he couldn't find anything better, but of course he didn't check the Auction House or look at quest rewards. Now any gear kept for too long is referred to as a "Staff of Westfall".
   
4. Upper Blackrock Spire - The Mysterious Way Of The Druid. The 15 man raid faces off against General Drakkisath and his two dragonkin guards, druid D (myself) and druid L are present. Spotting there are two druids, the cunning raid leader calls for both guards to be kept hibernated while Drakk is dealt with. Druid L announces that he cannot hibernate. Confused, the raid leader assures Druid L that Hibernate will be somewhere in his spell book, please could he find it and put it onto a task bar. Druid L proceed to announce that he can't Hibernate because he never learnt it from his trainer; it was too expensive to learn all the druid spells. The raid leader, a little bemused, proceeds to get Druid D to hibernate one guard and the raid to nuke down the other guard instead. Later when challenged, Druid L claims conserving gold is The Way of the Druid.
   
5. Karazhan - The Return of the Way of the Druid. Much later after the previous incident, in Karazhan Druid B (a reroll of Druid L) is asked to use tranquility to assist with healing. Druid B confesses not to have trained Tranquility once again due to the cost. Despite already having been caught not training Hibernate. The Way of the Druid is strong with this one.
   
6. Area 52 - the case of the Atal'ai Spaulders. The Atal'ai Spaulders, a very nice pair of shoulders for a feral druid from the Sunken Temple. A level 60 feral druid that is. While walking through Area 52, Druid B receives a whisper from a random passer by who has recognised the Atal'ai Spaulders model and can't believe Druid B is still wearing them. At level 70. Druid B once again claims he hasn't found better, which is partly believable because shoulders are hard to come by as quest rewards. However The Way of the Druid dictates living off the land, thus using the Auction House for upgrades is a big no-no.
   
7. The Case of the Impossible Combat Res. Karazhan - a wipe is incoming on Moroes so the raid leader calls out for Druid H to perform a combat resurrection. Druid H claims she can't combat res. Later on we have several attempts at convincing Druid H that her Rebirth spell works in combat. She flatly denies having a resurrection spell which works in combat. Finally many weeks later, after being persuaded to try it in combat, she relents. We now haz combat res hurrah.
   
8. Murder in the Ungoro Crater. Late at night, Druid M is following Druid L in Tanaris, heading for the new and strange land of Ungoro. Having never been there before, Druid L reasons that a Crater is a hole in the ground, he can see the edge of the Ungoro crater on his map, therefore the quickest and easiest way to enter the crater is to head for the nearest edge. Which he proceeds to do. With full optimism that his cat form will save him in the event of a small drop, Druid L hurls himself off the side of the Ungoro crater to discover that it is... quite deep. Druid M, following manually, foolishly trusts Druid L and also leaps off the side of the crater. Two druid-shaped holes in the bottom of Ungoro are later discovered. This episode begs the question "Who is more the fool: The fool or the fool who follows him?". In this case I think they are equal.
   
9. Hit Gems in the Slots. Warlock C decided to get his hit rating up, so he gemmed pretty much all of his gear with rare hit rating gems. Hold on, did I get that link wrong, isn't that a melee hit rating gem instead of a Spell Hit Rating Gem? No, Warlock C got it wrong and had to later regem all his gear again with spell hit. Still, melee hit is good for grinding staff skill...
   
10. The underwhelming Pom-Pyro. Maraudon, the Princess boss. Mage A has a tasty Pom-Pyro talent spec, he is geared out in +fire damage items from the Auction House and can destroy elites with a couple of fireballs. Because he needs 6 seconds to cast an amplified fireball and is sure he can take her down quickly, Mage A insists on pulling the Princess. He pops trinkets, charges up a fireball and unleashes hell upon the Princess, a POM Pyroblast follows for maximum damage. Her health bar moved downward by the tinyest of chinks and she becomes rather annoyed by Mage A. He starts running but it is too late, our mad fire mage is squashed instantly. The next pull we decide to let the druid tank have a go...
    

Hopefully from this you can see that some of my compatriots are a little interesting and they certainly make WoW a whole lot more fun. I'm also not trying to make druids look bad, I have one, but our druids are certainly a unique breed.

Midsummer's questing and Ice Lording

Today the Midsummer event starts, so lured in with the promise of free epics I went along with a guild group to see Lord Ahune. The rest of this post contains spoilers so beware!

Firstly I picked up a quest from Orgrimmar outside Thrall's hall - apparently the Twilight Hammer are up to no good again so off to the Zoram Strand to investigate some Unusual Activity I went.

When I got there the missive I looted from a corpse indicated something was up, so I has to go spy on some mysterious guests using an Innocent Disguise - the disguise is awesome because you turn into a Crab!

As a crab I pottered up the beach to discover that the Twilight Hammer is plotting to release a Frost Lord to fight the Fire Lord and take over in the resulting chaos. Back to Orgrimmar to report my findings, the elder I spoke to there was shocked and I was immediately dispatched to Coilfang Slave Pens to report for duty.

My group in Slave Pens was a Hunter, 2 Feral Druids, 1 Tankadin and myself. We were charged with summoning the Ice Lord Ahune ourselves and killing him. After thawing the big ice cube Lord Ahune appears in a spectacular style and proceeds to send waves of ice elemental at us.

This fight was not easy at all, certainly far harder than the Headless Horseman from Halloween. The waves of adds came with an elite ice elemental which had to be tanked and did a stacking debuff on the druid tank which made him harder to heal. The small non-elite ice elemental adds were rounded up by the paladin and DPSed down by the feral druid, while the hunter DPSed the elite. Periodically frost crystals would form at my feet and seconds later turn into a giant spike of ice which sent me shooting up into the air, interrupting heals. The non-elites also randomly frostbolted party members, so the damage taken was all over the party. I kept Earth Shield up on the tankadin and healed the druid tank and everyone else with a mix of Chain Heal and Healing Wave. Worse the frostbolts kept on removing my Water Shield so I had to keep an eye on that.

With the first phase over the Ice Lord's crystal became attackable so 25% of its health was taken down before the waves of adds started all over again. During this time I had ran out of mana, so received Innervates, potted or dropped a Mana Tide Totem. Frost resistance totem and/or Paladin frost resistance aura would help immensely during this fight, if only either of us had remembered to use them.

Finally after a couple of wipes we got him down (on phase 5 I kid you not), and a chest spawned with a quest item and 1 epic cloak. It was a fun fight and quite hard for our group which lacked AOE damage. Definitely not wellfare epics for us.

Unfortunately the healing cloak didn't drop but I did get a DPS caster cloak, the Cloak of Frigid Winds. Definitely the most challenging healing of my career thus far.

Shattered Halls solo healing

Our main tankadin is currently grinding Thrallmar reputation with a view to getting the subtlety cloak enchant. So last night I went on a Shattered Halls normal run as main healer; our group was Tankadin, Enhancement Shaman, Warlock, Holy Priest dpsing and me. Very little crowd control but who needs it with a tankadin?

Generally things went well; I put Earth Shield on the tankadin before a pull, kept an eye on the shaman and only needed to heal the tank when ES wore off. Again Chain heal came in very useful - when the shaman took damage I could CH him and it would bounce to the tankadin and heal her up too. A couple of times we managed to pull an extra group of 6; once we died when we pulled yet another group of 6, once we survived when we kept them under control and burned them down. Mana Tide totem certainly came in handy there. Again the emergency healing macro I got from Elitist Jerks came in useful to save the lunatic enhancement shaman - you're not a tank you know!

Bosses:

• Grand Warlock Nethekurse. Pretty easy, he deathcoiled me twice but I was keeping Earth Shield up on the tank so no healing was lost. Probably best to have a Tremor Totem down for this one. At 20% he goes nuts and starts shadowbolting and does big damage to the melee, so I had to start chain casting chain heals onto the tank until they got out of his range, then quickly Lesser Healing Waved anyone who took damage. I put a Searing Totem down to do a bit of DPS.
  
• Warbringer O'mrogg. He does an AOE fear so I had a Tremor Totem down to catch it. Again I kept Earth Shield on the tank - because the healing from ES is attributed to the healee, the tank actually gets more threat from ES, so when O'mrogg does his aggro reset he generally tended to stick on the tank. Again a Searing Totem was my guilty contribution to DPS.
  
• Warchief Kargath Bladefist. Amusingly because we had a tankadin she tanked both Kargath and his adds, so I kept ES up on her all the time, stuck down a Fire Elemental and went to hide in a corner. The melee needed healing because of the adds; Chain Heal is great for this. When he did his blade dance most party members took damage so needed a heal or two. This time the enhancement shaman and I coordinated our bloodlusts so we had around 60 seconds of it before Kargath died. One tip I learnt is to recall any totems before running up the steps to start the encounter; if there are totems in the corridor they will aggro the assassins who spawn at the bottom of the stairs. Not good.
  

A pretty good run, only one death and one wipe, I completed The Will of the Warchief and got a very nice cloak upgrade as a reward. Plus yet more Enhancement gear no one else wanted.

Crazy shoulders from the Old Hillsbrad Foothills

I was in Nagrand making progress on the Greatmother Chain when a guild run to Old Hillsbrad Foothills started to form. I keenly signed up because one has to complete OHF before one can get into Black Morass so it is indirectly on the Karazhan keying chain. Our intrepid group consisted of a Druid tank, holy priest, shadow priest, mage and resto shaman (me). So again I got some healing practise but I've not yet been allowed sole responsibility for a group.

Mostly the run went well; I've coded those /stopcasting macros onto my heals now so I don't need to twitch around. This makes it a little easier to keep a heal in flight then cancel it at the last moment. I can also switch who I'm healing by selecting them and casting the heal I want, the one in flight is now cancelled and the new heal starts.

So some tips from my experience:

• The guards down in the internment camp AOE fear, so a Tremor Totem is good to have down.
  
• The archers in Tarren Mill (or something) does a lot of poisons. After trying to manually remove poison a few times I stuck a Poison Cleansing Totem down.
  
• When you follow the big green guy Mr Thrall, he can and should be healed. Unfortunately he does not come up in the party or in Grid, so I set Thrall as my focus using the in-game "set focus" key binding, which I have set to Alt-F. I run the FocusFrame mod which shows your focus as another target frame, exactly like a targetted mob, so I could see when Thrall was taking damage. Clicking on the focus frame then targeted Thrall so I could easily heal him while healing the group. Boy does he have a lot of health - a max rank Healing Wave was restoring a sliver of his health.
  

The highlight of the run was when I got the Ravenwing Pauldrons from Lieutenant Drake in the internment camp. Now although not strictly Shaman items, they were better than my previous green shoulders so I nabbed them. Plus they look really quite silly, with giant feathers almost half my height sticking out of my shoulders. Unfortunately I later handed in a quest on the Greatmother chain, received 250 Sha'tar rep, dinged honoured and bought the Seer's Ringmail Shoulderpads which beats the Ravenwing Pauldrons in all but appearance.

Now I am honoured with Sha'tar, only Lower City and Keeper of Time are left. The OHF run got me to half way through friendly with KoT, so once Black Morass is complete I should be honoured and can get the Seer's Ringmail Headpiece.