Interlude: Counting to 12

This is all I do in raids on Jabberwocky. Ten Rejuvs, one Lifebloom, one Wild Growth.

Repeat.

That's the entirety of my involvement in ten-man raids. Granted, what I listed above is one of my maximum-output routines and thus isn't the sort of thing you keep up over the course of an entire encounter, BUT STILL. If you can count to twelve, you can heal a raid. (In 25s, you probably just count to 12 twice. I don't know. I've never healed a 25 on my druid, which is the subject of another rant entirely.)

Raid healing as a post-4.0, pre-Cataclysm resto druid is not hard. Stacked hots on the entire raid mean nobody else has much to do but cover spikes, which brings me to the secondary topic of this post:

Pickup raid leaders, don't you DARE send me into the portals on Valithria Dreamwalker because I'm top on the healing meters. I have CRAP for single-target healing output, and I can solo-heal the raid better than anyone else in this group. Put the holy paladin, the holy priest, the resto shaman, the discipline priest in the portals. Because if I go in there, I guaran-damn-tee the encounter will take at least a third longer than it should.

Just because you looked at healing meters instead of considering why the numbers look that way.

How to Be Prepared (tm) for an expansion: Part 1

The overall look

Are you leveling a new character once December 7th rolls around? Take stock of your heirloom gear. Log through all of your alts - yes, ALL of them - and see what they've got. Mail it all to one central character (I use a bank mule for this) and then redistribute it as needed.

Take into account how often you actually play said alts, if you're ever going to level or twink them...and if need be, delete accordingly. I went from 50 characters (the account-wide cap) to 26. Every toon I tossed was under level 30 and a duplicate of something I already had above 70.

Take stock of your higher-level characters too! Will the Cataclysm recipes make maxing their professions easier? Then you don't need to worry about getting up to 450 before then - save your gold and use it on something else.

Do you know what toon you're leveling to 85 first? If not, or if you want to level several concurrently (hi, I'm an altoholic) make sure they have what they need to make the questing and instancing process as quick as possible. Stock repair money, convenient buff food, elixirs or flasks (hey, we get new ones anyway), and anything else you consider a necessity. In my case, it's pygmy oil by the stack and cooked deviate fish.

Got a bucket list? Double-check it and make sure you're satisfied with your progress.

How are you on gold? Do you have stockpiled crafting mats sitting around that you won't use up in the next three weeks? Sell some now, or hold onto them until after Cata and sell them when people leveling worgen and goblins start powerleveling professions.

Last and most important - how are you doing? Are you interested in playing until we get new content? If not, consider taking a couple weeks off. Volunteer at your local pet shelter and hug kittens or walk dogs. Learn the basics of a new language. Walk a mile every day (climate permitting). Or pick up blogging... :)

Alright, let's try this again.

Hello, internets!

WoW is in the lame-duck session between the last patch of Wrath (4.0.1) and the release of the Cataclysm expansion, and my classes are getting close to the end. I'm in my last semester of community college for my Associate's degree, then I'll be transferring to Local Big State University to finish up my Bachelor's. Woot!

In WoW news, I'm up to six level 80 characters.

SIX.

Wow.

I'm pulling the two on Tortheldrin off, because frankly Tortheldrin is a terrible server. The shaman is probably joining Jabberwocky on Sen'jin, and the druid will be going to Turalyon with Beshara (who is now Itsie, a gnome) and Gersemi (the priest who dinged her eightieth ding yesterday morning). My hunter remains all by his lonesome on Emerald Dream, for the sake of hanging out with old friends.

To Do Before Cataclysm:

-Kill Arthas on one character. Any character. It doesn't matter.

-Write up a Cata Prep! post for the two servers' worth of toons that...um...actually matter at this point.

-Do things in the Cata Prep! posts.

-Lament and mourn that finals week is the week *after* Cata drops, instead of the week *before*.

If we weren't facing an expansion, I'd have all sorts of stuff to write up. A resource post for total noob, newly-minted 80 healing priests. A how2deeps post for fury warriors. Another rant on healing meters, which seems to be the only way people reach this blog (but I'm changing that shortly, I hope). Actually, I might do the rant on healing meters anyway. It'll be good for my blood pressure.

Until next time!

New OS! Shiny new OS!

I've just finished installing LinuxMint, updating Wine to the latest (development) version, now I'm going to see if I can get WoW running...

pewpewpew...*proc* PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW

With Hotwingz at 80 now, Jah's taken his main spec to boomkin and is blowing stuff up in feathery rage with me. It's great fun. (Hotwingz is an old friend of his, and was gracious enough to usher at our wedding. He's also a beartank. Know what this guild needs? MORE DRUIDS. CLEARLY.)

I've been putting most of my (admittedly scant) free time into leveling my draenei paladin, Spacebunny. I was considering going dedicatedly ret on her until I realized that tanks and healers spent a hell of a lot less time waiting in the dungeon queue... So from 1-30 I was ret, 30-40 I went Holy, and from 40 to 52-and-counting I've been prot. It's pretty awesome. Leveling Retribution has its advantages - I three-shot most mobs, between crusader procs and a crazy crit rate and just Being A Paladin, and I run pretty fast so non-killing time doesn't last long, but there's just something truly awesome about tanking fifty same-level undead mobs to death and coming out of the deal at full health and mana. (Felstone Field is my bitch.)

I'm thinking of fishing through plugins to find achievement/armory/whatnot things to put in the sidebar, detailing what Jah and I are up to. I may also get in on this Twitter nonsense. Playing - and blogging about it - is fun again.

I ATEN'T DEAD

Long story short, and in bullet points:

-We got married!
-This involved moving into our own apartment.
-Said apartment lacks Teh Intarwebs for a little while longer.
-Also, we're both in college. I'm taking three writing-intensive classes. Epic blogging fail inc.

Upon the release of the Cataclysm trailer, we decided to choose a new medium-pop server and transfer our level 70 druids there, in preparation for rerolling worgen at expansion release. Our original BC and vanilla mains live again! I'm leveling boomkin, something I haven't done much of, and Jah is cat-flavored feral and loving it. 78 and counting.

I need to reinstall WoW on the linux laptop. I deleted it after finding out the repair utility wasn't functioning, which happened after WoW itself developed a case of the permanent critical errors. :(

Eventual regular updating to come!

Running WoW in Ubuntu 9.04...finally!

The secret, I figured out, was to make ABSOLUTELY SURE WiNE was updated to the latest version and then copy my existing WoW folder over from my Windows desktop. No more installation errors!

Someday I'll figure out why Lapcompy hates installing games in Ubuntu. Until then...this is good enough. It's so nice to have a gaming laptop again.