Alts, Alts, Everywhere

Jah and I are going a little alt-crazy at the moment. The ease of acquiring heirloom gear and the ease with which one can level up have contributed, as well as getting a tad tired of our mains.

For myself, there's:
-Jabberwocky, my 80 resto/feral druid. She's pretty decked out from heroics and pickup Naxx10 runs, and I just recently shelled out the 1,000 gold to get her dual-spec in Feral for grinding out Northrend Loremaster.
-Rinhoel, the Obligatory Death Knight. Nearly 61. Thinking of powering her up to be another tanking toon. I <3 Blood spec.
-Einmal and Rhetannie, also known as "The Girls". Respectively a 59 mage and a 59 rogue, and the fruits of my foray into RAF dual-boxing.
-Happybubbles, the level 7 bouncing priest of *doom*. Eventually she'll be a BG twink.

Jah has his own little stable going:
-Kante, his 71 DPS warrior. Not sure if he's Arms or Fury at the moment - they keep swapping the talent trees around so much x.x
-Hoyvakt, the 69 Deathmoo (Tauren death knight). Currently taking Howling Fjord by storm.
-Jahow, 61 hunter and his original toon on the server before transferring Kante and rerolling to Soleine.
-Jandi, 61 mage - one of his RAF experiments. (Looks almost exactly like Einmal.)
-A multitude of sub-50 things he thinks are not worth mentioning. He says he's not sure what, precisely, he wants as his next alt...so he's just slowly leveling one of everything up to 60.

I sort of have a plan. Most of mine have gathering professions, with vague plans for level 80 specs and production profession choices to mesh with their intended roles nicely. Rinhoel, for example, is probably going to end up as either a Blood-spec tank or DPS and will thus have Mining/Blacksmithing instead of her current Mining/Skinning. Jabs (Jabberwocky) is a maxed-out Mining/Jewelcrafter, mainly specializing in tank and healer cuts. Ein will probably end up with tailoring and skinning, and Rhe will probably end up with skinning and leatherworking. I think Bubbles is already an engineer, for PVP fun and rockets.

I think the next one I level will be Rinhoel - after I'm done amusing myself with two dual-specced 80s who have access to a ridiculous number of dailies, funding the next alt's epic flying mount, re-gemming and re-enchanting Besh's tanking gear to within an inch of its life...

Non-alt news: Versus the World completed Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar in one night, starting with a one-shot first kill of Kologarn (if you don't count the two hours we spent on him last week >_>) and ending with a stress-soaked, eight-attempt kill of Auriaya at EXACTLY 11:00 PM, our scheduled raid end time. Hopefully, later today will see us down Ignis on heroic for the first time and then waltz into the Keepers of Ulduar section for some fun with Thorim and Hodir. To keep the QQ to a minimum, I'm just going to say that I'm not happy at all with how warrior class mechanics are going, and it's ever so tempting to main-swap to one of the other plate-tank classes.

Cooking, cleaning, and robot-face-smashing.

I've lost my springform pan. You can't make cheesecake without a springform pan! *freakout*

I'm cleaning our office. Jah's back has been giving him troubles, so anything that needs bending/lifting/etc is up to me. The only problem is I hate housecleaning, since I essentially do it for a living - albeit on a ginormous-department-store scale.

XT-002 Deconstructor is kicking our collective butts, but it's just so fun to have actual HARD trash and HARD encounters again that I'm willing to let it slide. :) We've moved from two add tanks and a bosstank to one add tank and one bosstank, with our protadin hitting his holy dual-spec button to fill in on raid heals. Over on the forums, our wonderful and longsuffering raid leader has stepped off his soapbox temporarily to calmly discuss numbers with people and figure out exactly how many DPSers we *really* need to win this fight, and how to balance that against the healing requirement presented by Tympanic Tantrum.

I am again reminded of the irony in being both the tank officer, assistant raid coordinator, and the worst-geared active tank in the entire guild. I'm thinking of resocketing all my expertise/stam gems to straight stamina, or over to def/stam for an avoidance boost. It'd un-dodge-cap me, but it might help me survive boss fights >< Deconstructor can and will kill me in three hits if I don't have immediate stacking and spamming heals, so I've relegated myself to add-tanking and put our blood tank DK on the boss for that fight. On Razorscale (or Razorsnatch, as he's termed on OutofMana) I'm the whirlwinder tank - I taunt the giant vrykul that kill all our melee DPS if we don't keep them the hell out of the two main AOE camps, and the real reason I'm first on the rotation for Razorscale post 50% is I've got the best up-front threat gen of anyone. I really just set the stage for the DK and paladin to continue the fight.

I guess the point is that I'm really unhappy with where both my gear and my class abilities stand, but I don't know if my random boss-induced death is from personal fail or healer fail. Other guilds are using warriors as progression MTs, but we've GOT to have a DK because he's got the most HP and doesn't eat dirt before someone can patch him up!

Argh. I need chocolate.

Edit: Holy run-on sentences, Batman! *grabs a box of punctuation marks, gets to work*

Begin Experiment: Regular posting!

Hello, theoretically-existent readers!

I'm in the process of setting up my Linux laptop with widgets and gizmos and doodads to do things I didn't know I could do, such as update Blogger from a Firefox addon...

I'm going to grab ScribeFire and set a goal to update weekly until the end of the semester, then hopefully move to biweekly during the summer.

Also: WTB [Patch 3.1], PST.

Some non-WoW news.

The wedding planning is going well - just need to narrow down the guest list and finalize invitation design. Right now it's a pencil rough in my sketchpad and needs work.

I'm going to retrieve my SLR camera, umpteen specialized lenses, and old notes on photography and work on expanding my portfolio while I'm living in what is essentially rural farm country. (Local college and associated urban mini-sprawl nonwithstanding.) Looking forward to maybe posting up some pictures here!

(And some WoW news - my druid is nearly 77 and I've just enough money for her epic flight training, I successfully had my guild rank changed to "Cat Herder" a couple weeks ago, and I'm now somewhat in charge of recruiting...healers! As the tank coordinator. The first person I found was immediately rejected because my quick glance at their gear and talents didn't notice a bad spec choice and six pieces of badly enchanted DPS gear. GO ME!)

Huh.

IRL I'm fairly shy, quiet (unless I've gotten into the rum again), and horridly bad at being assertive.

I realized today - well, over the course of the last several days - that I am driven by competition and the desire to be best. Doesn't matter what I'm best at. Just need to be given recognition for exceeding expectations.

I'm leveling my hunter as heavy Survival (which is not a leveling spec, it's a raid DPS spec) and pugging instances constantly as a change of pace to kiting mobs to death. Every time someone asks me if I'm looking for a raiding guild because I've impressed them with my play, it's a badge of honor. (Or ego, but you know.)

When I started tanking on Besh, I dove into theorycrafting and gear planning in order to be the easiest healing target possible. I still do it - and ever time a healer laughs in Vent and says "Yeah, one of these days she might actually take damage!" it's a badge.

Back pre-BC, I made my name Alliance-side on Emerald Dream as a stamina-stacking, AP-lovin', sword-swingin' combat rogue who 'wasted' points in Improved Sap and still set up camp on top of the damage meters no matter where I went. Then I leveled a druid, and exceeded general pickup expectations by being able to tank, heal, or DPS any given level 60 instance by level 58. I was a Good Hybrid, and I built my druid's raiding career around being a Good Hybrid. At the end of one Live Strat (5-man, thank you) our tank /blinked at me. "Dar, I didn't realize you weren't 60 yet. Damn."

But there's a definite price to this - I'm the warrior class lead of VTW, the unofficial-official tank coordinator, and there's all of three or four drops left in the entire game that I'm even vaguely interested in. I'm slowly losing the drive to play Besh, to excel at being a warrior, because at this stage of the expansion there's nothing further up for me to aim towards.

It's weird.

Blink-blink-GASP

I'm the warrior class lead now. I'm absolutely gob-smacked. With happy, though.

More later when I'm coherent. Nine-hour shift at the service counter makes brain cells go splat.

YESYESYES MWAHAHAAAAA!

I got to tank a real 25man boss! And I got my Sunguard Legplates (100-badge tanking pants) to boot! (Which incidentally will last me until level 77, when I can have the Tempered Saronite Legplates crafted.)

We downed High King Maulgar after three real tries (and one accidental facepull), and Jah outbid me for the t4 shoulder token. The good news is he's no longer wearing rogue leather.

Then, on to Gruul. Our pally MT stepped down for the fight because he was worried about being able to keep up max threat gen throughout the encounter. I was silently fuming and glaring at the tank channel when Dak whispers me asking for my mitigation numbers...

"k then, looks like you're MTing gruul :)"
"MEEEP. Okay."

Craziest thing about it was I was getting rage-starved! You'd think with something that hits that hard that often, rage generation would be absolutely through the roof...but apparently not. So instead of keeping a steady ~1,000 TPS average like I've been trying to learn to do, my threat spiked between 800 TPS and 1,300 TPS. Our OT (feral druid) had trouble staying second on the threat meters, which led to Gruul hauling off and bitch-slapping lots of rogues. We had him to grow 11 and I think mid-50s percent of his health on our best attempt before we called it due to lack of DPS. (But for a 23-man raid with a mixed bag of gear and several brand new 70s along, we did AWESOME. And I had loads of fun.)

With the new pants, my tanking stats are now:
14127 HP
14510 armor
20.34% dodge
17.99% parry
25.76% block
367 block value

Plus chump change for +hit and expertise, which is going to be my next gearing project. I figure the Girdle of the Fearless, Dawnforged Defender, and (ideally) Furies Deck card will be a good start and a huge boost to my sustained TPS.