I shall call him Muckbreath and he shall be my Muckbreath

The fishing daily yesterday was Crocolisks in the City. Kam's reward: a fillet knife, Elixir of Water Walking (really useful for a Shaman, thanks for that Old Man Barlo) and most awesome of all Kam's very own Muckbreath's Bucket containing one little cute Muckbreath!


Fishing rocks.

Looking forward to dual specs

I'm quite excited by the recent mentions of dual talent specs made by Blizzard, more so because they promise some information at Blizzcon on Friday and Saturday. I feel a hybrid class should be able to embrace every aspect of their abilities and talents, doing damage when called for, healing when needed, tanking when they fancy it. I'm realistic that doing all of these at once would be unbalanced and result in most people rolling with the same class, but the ability to respec and go from a healer to a solid damage class is lovely. However the respec process uses precious time; travelling to a capital city in Azeroth, unlearning talents, then painstakingly selecting each talent point from a spec you may or may not have written down. I find a respec is best done with some advanced notice.


Last night there was a sudden gap in the upper Karazhan raid, a warlock had gotten the 'flu (surprising because they should just drain life till they feel better or take a health stone), so there was a DPS slot to fill. I had effectively no time at all to prepare; a summon was available but that was it. Kam is currently Resto, so is unable to fill a DPS slot, so I took my hunter along instead. The time it would take to respec would be time spent holding up the other 9 people on the raid, I wouldn't do it.


With the ability to switch talents from Resto to a pre-canned Elemental build, Kam could have logged on, be summoned, switched spec, geared up and be ready to rock the Prince. In a montage with rock music, if you prefer. I know I do.


The benefits for healing classes if they could solo and quest using their DPS spec is also very high. So I will be keeping a keen eye on any announcements from Blizzcon regarding plans for easier talent spec switching. It's very exciting.

Why Other MMOs Don't Threaten My WoW

This week on the Blog Azeroth shared topic, Skaarjonic asks if other MMOs threaten WoW. Firstly I don't play all that much, maybe 8 hours a week, so there is still plenty to do in the game even now. For another game to take me away from WoW it would have to be more fun, simple as that.


For me, the fun factors in WoW are the abundance of quests for levelling, the interesting little touches such as easter eggs, the long quest chains with an epic feel, the list goes on. Making gold by messing with the auction house or getting a valuable rare drop is a fun sub game in its own right. All of these would have to be present in some way or another in a new game, or things which are even more fun, to make me want to switch.


Friends and cohorts also keep me stuck to WoW - the crazy vent chat during raids, the rich and amusing characters in the guild. They would have to move across to any new game for me to consider moving, or at least the ones I liked ;)


I used to play Starwars Galaxies which had a woeful questing system and had little to do beyond grinding in caves. My friends also played, so we stuck with it, until the WoW open beta came out. Suddenly the urge to log into Galaxies was replaced with a compulsion to explore this strange new place called Azeroth and, when the game was launched, we all ditched Galaxies and moved over.


So while I'm still having fun in WoW with friends, I can't be tempted anywhere else. If it stops being fun, or much more fun can be had elsewhere, we may all leave. With an expansion due soon and thus lots more fun to be had, I can't see that happening any time soon.

They made me heal middle Karazhan!

What a bunch of ... anyway due to there only being 2 healers signed, Kam was set up to be healer for more Karazhan chaos. Under strict instructions not to skip Aran for Chess, we went into see Medivh's father.

• The Shade of Aran. The trash between the Menagerie and Aran's room hit really hard, particularly the Arcane Protectors, so much so that Kam was spamming lesser healing wave onto the tank and using his entire mana pool for each pull. I was totally not expecting that and got caught out on the first pull. Dead tank oops.
  
  The Aran fight itself was chaos; whoever was targeted by arcane missiles would take damage so quickly that only a lesser healing wave could save them. Often I would try to use a chain heal, but the cast time seemed too slow. After both us healers died, the time came for the DPS to step up and kill the old codger. Which they duly did.
  
• Chess. Without specific instructions not to do Chess, we did. Healing was erm... someone else took control of the healing piece so I had to DPS. The chest contained a nice pair of leggings which are a great upgrade over the PvP healing legs.
  

Rant on.
During all of the trash pulls and probably boss fights, the rogue would insist on standing right in front of the mob, swinging away at its face. Now enough people have already posted that this is a really bad thing, honestly everyone knows rogues do it from behind. Not only does standing in front affect your personal DPS, but the resulting parries make the mob hit faster. Hit the tank faster. The tank who I am trying to keep alive. So please for the sake of the Earthmother, DPS behind the mob.
Rant off.


Perhaps I've discovered why the tank was taking so much damage from Arcane Protectors?

Healing in lower Karazhan

With jagerbombz and Anna's sage words of wisdom ringing in my ears, Kam stepped into Karazhan as healer for the first time. Oh gods.


Luckily Kam was paired with a fairly uber resto druid and had at least seen the fights before, so I knew what to expect. Still, it was a nerve-racking experience.

• Attumen. The approach to Attumen was fine and the fight itself was very straightforward. Kam was assigned to heal the Off Tank and during the mounted phase did pretty much nothing except cancel heals.
  
• Moroes. The trash before Moroes was interesting; the packs required spotting which AOE-capable DPSer would be pulling the threat and tanking (hint: Boomkin), then earthshielding them and keeping up a mixture of healing wave, lesser healing wave when they took lots of damage, and chain heal when others needed a top up. Crazy boomkins.
  
  
  The Moroes fight itself was the stuff of my nightmares - the garrottes do 360 damage per second so frantic chain healing and lesser healing wave was needed to keep everyone alive. The off tank was garrotted but didn't call it out, so he suddenly died. Luckily Moroes was almost dead and was swiftly killed.
  
• Opera: Big Bad Wolf. The trash up to Opera was again fine, the Boomkin had an earth shield and Kam's full attention for the packs. The Wolf fight itself was fairly straightforward - following the guides above Little Red Riding Hood got an earth shield and lesser healing wave spammed onto them. Generally they survived too, which is always nice (sorry Honeydew).
  
• Curator. The approach to Curator was not smooth, more like mildly lumpy. The raid was unable to cope with 3 of the Ghastly Haunts by the back door - a single Haunt does a load of damage, never mind 3. We were also unable to cope with 2 packs of arcane creatures in the Menagerie at once. As you can tell, there was much ninja pulling.
  
  
  The ninja pulling included the Curator himself, who attacked a player who strayed too close, causing us to hastily form a U shape and Ablaze the mage to sling on what arcane resistance gear he could to soak. Healing on the Curator was very mana intensive - DPSers were taking damage from sparks and the melee who were chasing them took the brunt of it. Luckily chain heal is an awesome spell and with druid HoTs on everyone we managed to kill Curator.
  
• Maiden. After the heart-attack that was Curator, the raid moved onto an easier target, most illegally it turns out. Somewhere in our long forgotten raid forum lies a post describing how Maiden is to be left for the second or third raid night, but we erm forgot about that.
  
  
  The trash up to Maiden only became tricky when the Phantom Guardsmen summoned two Phantom Hounds which promptly attacked the healers. Kam still uses a shield so he has a decent amount of armour and can tank a hound for a while, our resto tree druid isn't so lucky and is quite squishie; I had to be alert for her taking damage and be ready with the lesser healing wave to help out.
  
  
  The Maiden fight itself proved tricky; during the Repentance stun we had an earth shield and druid HoT on the tank, but it was not enough to keep him alive, so a few wipes resulted. Eventually we got the tank to drag maiden over to us to break us out of repentance so we could carry on healing and the Maiden was killed.
  

The loots were the Dragon-Quake Shoulderguards, an improvement over Kam's old PvP shoulders, plus some loot no one wanted for off spec. Healing Karazhan is scary!

Brewfest Ram raiding

After hanging around until the Tuesday raid finished, Kam managed to scam a group together to go try Coren Direbrew again. This time we had a druid tank, hunter, melee combat specialist and feral druid. The fight went far quicker than before and Kam only died once, right at the end when he got swamped by adds. The melee DPS were dodging the whirlwind well, so they didn't require a lot of healing.


Coren dropped his lucky coin and, as the only shield user in the party, Kam got it... for off, off really off-spec. The kodo didn't make an appearance but but the Swift Brewfest Ram did drop and Kam won the roll, hurrah!


With the ram safely in the bag, as it were, all that remains for this year's beer fest is to grind more tokens for clothing, given Kam became a member of the Brew of the Month club. Then hopefully next year the title can be secured.


The ram still doesn't fit under the bleeding elevator door in the Undercity however.

Healing through Coren Direbrew

Finally on Sunday Kam managed to get into a group to go do the new Brewfest boss in the Blackrock Depths bar. The group consisted of a Warrior tank with a Mage, Rogue and Warlock for DPS. Kam had the quest to save brewfest and after insulting Coren Direbrew, the fight started.


Initially Coren starts with 3 non elite friends, he summons more throughout the fight who appear in mole machines which will do a knock back if you are standing on the spot; cancelling a heal. He also does a whirlwind attack which hits people in melee range. He then summons a barmaid at 66% and 33% health, who sometimes throw kegs into the inventory of random players; if the kegs aren't drunk then the player is stunned for 5 seconds. The barmaids will also CC a player for 6 seconds!


I knew none of this, so was quite unprepared for the chaos that followed as the DPS tried to keep the adds down, kill the barmaids and kill off Coren. However I spend most of my time watching the Grid UI anyway. Things I learnt:

• The whirlwind does a load of damage. At several points, the rogue would lose around 75% of his health from a whirlwind, requiring an emergency heal. From what I've read, this is avoidable, so please avoid!
  
• There is a lot of group damage. This required pretty much back-to-back chain heals, putting a serious strain on Kam's mana.
  
• Mana Pot and Mana Tide early. Due to the heavy casting of spells, Kam needed loads of mana and so I had to use a mana potion very early so a second one would be available toward the end of the fight. Mana tide totem was also needed.
  
• Keep an eye on Water Shield. Again the mole machines or dark iron adds would sometimes get a hit or two on Kam - resulting in Water Shield charges being used. I had to keep a close eye on Water Shield as it kept on disappearing.
  
• Use Mana Spring Totem. I tried one fight using Healing Stream Totem. It did not go well; mana usage is high as everyone is taking damage and Healing Stream just can't keep up. I stuck with Mana Spring after that and things went a lot better.
  

The results of this little foray into BRD were a nice Beer maiden, a tasty Melee DPS trinket for off-spec, plus the healing trinket which I had hoped to get. The Brewfest Kodo also dropped, but Kam lost the roll. There is always another day though. The fight itself was pretty neat and it was really good to see the inside of Blackrock Depths again after so much time.