Another Thursday (Sorta)

Last night was a disappointment in that two mages failed to show and we were stuck doing BT. And we did it pretty poorly, imo. We only made it through Gertie Bloodboil (with numerous wipes on him) before calling it and heading off to bed.

One of our paladins continues to have internet issues, of which England seems to be notorious for. We interviewed a paladin applicant last night. Her guild is the same as us progression-wise but apparently disorganized. They have to cancel raids and start later than expected due to people not showing up on time. She interviewed well I think so we extended her an offer. She has other guilds to interview with, so we'll see how it goes.

I've made some slow progress on revamping our guild website. Right now it's a Black Temple kind of theme with purples and oranges. I'd like to go with a Sunwell look but I'm struggling to nail down exactly what that means. Originally I was thinking a red stone background, white forums and gold accents with maybe a little green leafy things thrown around to spice it up. I got as far as the red stone background and stopped. It seems both too busy (text on stone = can't read) and not busy enough (pattern too large around the edges). So it's back to the drawing board.

I don't typically share rl things, but this is too strange to pass up. Over the past couple of weeks someone kept text messaging me. Now, I don't do text messaging. If you need to talk to me right then, just call. Otherwise, email me and I'll get back to you. Plus my phone is old school Nokia, so it takes about a year to type out my name. The first couple of messages sort of sounded like spam so I just deleted them and moved on. But then every few days I'd get another from the same number. Finally I took 10 min and replied with "u have the wrong no.". Not 30 sec later I get "haha funny" or some nonesense like that. I was busy trying to get some stuff done so I just hit delete and hoped they'd figure it out.

Well, this morning I get a long text message from the same number, describing some sort of fight the girl had with her mother. Apparently both wished the other would die and go to hell, etc. I'm having a good morning. The sun is out, I managed to put together a cute outfit, cheese sammich is cruising on the plate beside me, and the song selection on xmradio was quality. And now I'm having to read about people hating each other. I snapped.

I called the number and was greeted with "Yo yo yo! Speak!" like I was some sort of canine companion trained to immediately spit out what I had to say. Moar snappage and the following was conveyed. "Hello, this is Marcie. You keep sending me text messages even though I'm pretty sure I told you that you had the wrong number. My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx and who you're texting isn't who you think it is. Check your number." and I hung up. Now, this isn't the most badass convo you've ever read I'm sure, but imagine it delivered in a rather nasty, you've-ruined-my-morning-with-your-stupidity tone of voice. About 15 min later I get another text message about how they had accidentally switched the 6 and 8, and they were sorry. Oh Em Gee stop texting me! I know that you messed up. I freaking told you that twice! What part of leave me the f alone didn't you understand?

Kalecgos, You Must Die

So tonight we'll hopefully be back in the Sunwell, assuming we have the right balance of people. Wednesday's are usually pretty good for us, so I have high hopes. The downside is we'll continue to be short healers for the near future. One of our resto shaman is on vacation and a priest has just disappeared for reasons unknown. Last I checked, one of our paladins couldn't stay connected, either.

So there's a search going on for some more healers. What we need the most are resto shaman and druid but it may come down to less than ideal composition just to get 8 healers in the raid.

In other news, I'm about half way to SSO exalted. The anvil was at 60% last night, so a couple more days and we'll probably have it. Doing our dailies last night, Fozec was distracted with some whispers so I set out to solo the mobs. It didn't go well, especially on the creepy dudes under the trees. It appears that they have a chance on hit to drain mana, plus an out-right mana drain spell. I'm a shockadin when dps'ing, so this wasn't a good combination. At one point I aggro'd three on me. I bubbled to heal back up (high mana regen ftw) but basically had to melee them to death. This took forever, to the point some random Hordies stopped by to whack them a couple of times to help me out.

Up until last night I thought the dailies were really easy, but now I know I'm pretty much just there to provide healing and the occasional imp one-shot. If I had to solo them everyday, I doubt I'd still be doing them. Everything takes too long to kill and consecration isn't the best idea around a bunch of flagged punks.

Busy Weekend

I think I've played more WoW this weekend than I have in a long time. Where to begin...

I'll start with the boring stuff. I got my hunter to level 30. Like BRK has posted on his blog, there's definitely been a change to Battlepigs of Doom and how hunter mana regen works. Neither change was for the better, imo. Eddie now generates significantly less damage after charging. I also regen mana a lot slower. This means between the two of us, it takes about half again as much time to kill things. It also makes killing mobs that are 5 levels above me near impossible, where as before I could pull it off. If they were trying to make leveling a hunter less fun and more on par with other classes, they've taken a solid step in that direction.

In the land of healadins, I managed to heal through both a regular and heroic MT over the weekend. I've also been doing the dailies with my husband so I'm part way through honored with SO. I need revered to pick up the JC recipies and exalted to get the helm enchant options. The other two JC'ers in the guild are already at revered, so it's another instance where I'm lagging behind profession-wise.

Heroic MT was rough, but I managed to keep it together long enough to help the group win. We had a warrior, lock, ret pally, and hunter. The first 3 are raiding mains, so they're in a mix of T5/T6. The hunter is an alt sporting Kara/T4. That gave us 3 CC's since the ret has imp hammer that lasts something like 15 sec (don't quote me on that). I even helped with CC by fearing the demon on the 5 pull boss fight.

The important lesson I learned was I needed salv. Otherwise I would spend every pull tanking the casters. I started to have holy priest flashbacks because I was dying every other pull there for a bit. At one point the tank asked if everything was alright back there. I meekly replied "Uh, no." and then croaked again. Good times.

None of us seemed to be on our A-game, either. I backed into a pack of mobs and wiped us. The tank ran off to pull the next pack, not realizing we still had one trapped in the back. On one fight attempt, hammer, trap, and fear all resisted.

Later last night we spent 4 hours wiping to SP trash and Kalecgos. There seemed to be a higher than normal amount of QQ'ing going on, and irritation levels were kind of high because we were wiping on things we had done a number of times before. For example, we wiped like 5 times on 1 trash pull because the bird thing kept pathing too close to the Giant Green Robot of Doom, activating him and pwn'ing the raid. We've done this pull at least 5 times.

It didn't help that mid-way through a former guildie whispered me, trying to convince me to invite him into the guild. In the 40-man raiding guild before this one, he was a raider who was dropped to the "Friends and Family" rank because of low attendance. Honestly, though, he wasn't a good warrior imo. Plus, that rank was nothing but a thorn in the officers' side. It got to the point that you couldn't even ask for help in a 5-man over guild chat because you didn't want to play with half of the people in that rank. They weren't good players and a chunk of them believed that being in that rank was equivalent to being on the farm team. And they wanted to know when they'd be able to raid with us.

When we decided to start a new guild for 25-man raiding, the officers were unanimous in voting the F&F rank off the island. The benefit wasn't even remotely in the same ball park as the hassle. Instead we created a Veteran rank for raiders that could no longer meet our attendance. So these are good players that had already raided with us. Well, former guildie wants to be in the guild as a Veteran. He promised me everything from not talking on guild chat to rubbing my back and bringing me coffee if I let him in. Um, no. As soon as we open that can of worms, we're right back where we were before. If I let the warrior friend in, we either have to start bringing in everyone else's friends or we get slammed for favortism.

When he saw that bribery wasn't working, he switched to emo with "I just wanted it to be like old times. :(" I am cold and ruthless. Your QQ'ing has no affect, sorry. Plus I was a bit busy healing a raid that was getting hit with 4k chain lightning.

Tried Sunwell Plateau

So we went into the Sunwell Plateau last night and spent the first hour clearing trash. These packs of mobs aren't your typical tank, spank, and AoE. We had to understand what they were doing, why the one was running over to tag the nearest robot, and wtf we could do to reduce the amount of raid damage.

If this is the face of raiding now, I need to really rethink how I play. We went in with 8 healers, 2 of each class. It didn't take me too long to figure out that I needed to be using at least rank 9 Lights, if not max rank in some cases. This type of healing is painfully slow after months of Flash spam. In an interview of one of Nhilium's resto shammies over on WI, he made a comment about how haste gear made a significant difference in PTR healing. After healing last night, I'm starting to lean that way myself. I need to sit down and re-evaluate my gear wish list.

I'm also a bit worried about how my guild's progression through the SW will affect how people veiw me on WI. When I first started writing for them, we were only a couple of bosses from Illidan. Within a couple of weeks, we had beaten the game. Now we're at the bottom again, and while I think our guild is excellent and has high-quality players, we're not out to win the "I beat it first!" gold star. This means tons of guilds will finish the game (again) while we're still working on it. And I need to still seem like an authority on raid healing when I haven't seen all of the content. Paranoia ftl.

I have a WI post going out today at 1:30pm on what raiding is like post-Patch 2.4, plus my insights into the SW and what we saw there.

Sunwell, I has it!

So I took my pally out to visit the newly added belf island, along with 20k of my favorite server friends. The frame rates were pretty bad and there were bodies covering nearly every inch of ground. We did the normal 5-man and it was pretty fun, although the Kael fight at the end didn't seem to last very long.

At this point in my gaming career, 5-mans seem much harder to heal than any 25-man. This is because I'm the only healer and when you're used to relying on 7 other people, it feels awfully stressful. I found myself getting pretty irritated when someone would die, and it took a couple of pulls before I caught on that max and max-2 rank Lights were probably my best option. The damage was just too high and too spread out across the group to do otherwise. This is radically different from raid healing, to be sure.

After that first normal run, my husband asked if anyone else still needed to get in on the action so they could unlock heroic mode. Both a resto shaman and a holy pally wanted to go, so I bowed out and logged onto my hunter. My husband ended up doing 2 more normal runs to get people their heroic status. We also had a group running in heroic mode and besides linking lewts, they reported that the bosses were no joke.

The biggest issue of the evening was Omen screwing up. For one mage, every time he crit, Omen would error. In the end he just had to disable it. Also, if the window isn't big enough, it won't show any data. For some reason, while I was grouped, I could only see the aggro of the hotile mobs and not my own party mates. My group could see me, though, and that's all that mattered. Later when it was just me and Battlepig oDaRS, it worked just fine. We're going to need to get this resolved for the raid tonight.

I also updated Grid, Scrolling Combat Text, and Pallypower since the first 2 use the combat log. I was behind the times on PP, unrelated to Patch 2.4, so I just grabbed a copy. When you update SCT, your settings get reset to default. And for some reason, I couldn't get the menu to work (kept erroring when I tried to bring it up), so I was stuck like that with all these icons flying around my screen.

And the Ruckus Begins!

So, as you probably know, Patch 2.4 hit today. It's going to be a mad house out on belf island tonight, and I plan to be in the thick of it. :D

Along those lines, I asked WI for an extension on my Raid Rx article. I'd prefer to write it on Thursday, after I've tried out most of the content. From what I've seen, the actual patch notes are different than what had last been seen on the PTR. I'd rather have what I write be from personal knowledge, anyways. Besides that, I'm swamped at work and allergies are kicking my arse. I just don't have time to write something quality right now.

Last night I played my hunter for a level, effectively finishing all of the Splintertree Post quests, including a red one that Foz helped me with. By that point I was feeling so tired and miserable (darn you blooming trees!), I grabbed the livingroom comforter and faceplanted on the couch. About 30 min later, I hear a plea for my healing assistance coming from the computer room. So I burritoed myself up in the blanket and provided some healorz for a couple of 5-mans. We were trying to get our guild alch a recipe but it wouldn't drop. Afterwards I hearthed and crawled back to the couch.

One Last Hurrah!

So the common consensus is tomorrow is Patch 2.4 day. Tonight is the last evening you can enjoy all that Patch 2.3 brought you before a whole host of belfs fall on your head. Good luck!

In other news, I got my hunter to level 26 last night. Fozec has decided that leveling an alt, be it pally or otherwise, just isn't for him. So I'm going it alone with the exception that he'll run me through any 5-mans I need. Last night we did 1.5 runs of Blackfathom Deeps. I snagged around 5-6 gear upgrades so it was definitely worth it. We also discovered a boss under the temple that we didn't know about before. lol

I'm working on finishing up the quests in Splintertree Post right now. I should be able to clear the satyrs I need for the last 3 quests out there. Then I'll be done and head back to Tarren Mill to finish up things with them.

Almost the Weekend

Last night was a bit unusual for us. We only had 6 healers at raid invite time, so we asked our ret pally to respec holy. He was a raiding holy priest pre-BC so he understands the basics plus he knows all the fights. The downside was only 2 pally buffs total. The few times we've had to do this sort of thing during our raiding career, we always get the same result: the person that respecs will heal for about half of our normal healers.

And last night was no exception. Luckily one of our resto shamans logged in after the 2nd boss, so we were running at 7.5 healers until Council. By then, one of our regular healadins had logged on so we grabbed him and the ret went back to ret.

The outcome of the evening was I actually healed more than normal. There were a number of times I had to sit down and drink after a trash pull. I also tended to use up my entire mana bar on boss fights. It makes me wonder if we're bringing a little more healing to raids than is really needed. We wiped a couple of times on Bloodboil but I don't feel like that was a healing issue. The problem is and always has been having the wrong people taking the dot, and it usually defaults to stacking on a healer.

I'm itching to play my alt horde hunter, but my husband doesn't seem to be feeling his pally. Right now he would prefer to watch the last season of BSG I think. He told me this morning that he needs to decide whether he's going to commit to leveling his pally up to 70 or not. If he is, then we should play those chars more. And if he isn't, I need to know so I can work on my hunter solo.

My hunters are really, really fun to level up and I've enjoyed having a pet far more than I expected. Just like any alt, I've thought about what it would be like to switch to a hunter main when WotLK comes out. It seems like we always have a shortage of high attendance hunters anymore. My main concern is a hunter wouldn't be as fun to play in a raid setting. I also really enjoy healing, but you need a group to do that. I'm also not sure I'm cut out for the dps rat race where I'm constantly watching my progress on the meters and trying not to pull aggro.

It would also mean I'd eventually need to swap out Eddie, BPoDaRS, for a real dps pet like a cat or ravager. On the bright side, I'd want to be a ranged dps'er over melee any day of the week. I also think I could learn the class enough to be good at it. I just worry about going back to dps after hating it so much as a rogue to begin with. The main thing I hated was the extreme selfishness of that class, which isn't the case for hunters, but would I got bored out of my mind spamming a shot rotation macro 24/7? At least with Flash I get to change up my targets constantly. I'd also be leaving behind all my healer friends for basically a non-group of 2-3 people.

Right now my plan is to stay a healadin. All of this stuff about hunters is just theory and conjecture.

Tuesday, No Patch

Apparently the buzz in the WoW community has been that Patch 2.4 would come out today. To my knowledge, it hasn't. So I have at least 1 more week of minimal raiding. The break has been fun and I'm looking forward to having progression fights again. The fun in raiding is learning new fights and downing new bosses. And this is the first time in my history of playing the game that I can say that from experience. Farming is boring.

Battle Pig of Doom and Random Ground Sniffing completely pwned the 5-man boss last night, despite the fact that neither of us remembered to use the special weapons that do extra damage to the guy. My husband did some key healing and I managed to pew pew my heart out ftw.

Deatholme, aka Baby Strat, also got nuked in the process. Half the time BPoDoRGS was under the influence of a poison that made him less than knee high to a belf. Now that's one small pig, so it was pretty hilarous watching him charge and tank things. He's also so bright and sunny looking with his yellow hair against the Ghostlands backdrop. I smile just looking at him.

We ended the night at level 21 and I picked up ice trap. :D

Hello Again

It's another week and with my husband's obcession with Lost on hold until the new BSG season comes out tomorrow, I'm hopeful I'll get some WoW'ing in this week.

Over the weekend there isn't much to report. We finished off Illidan last night on the 2nd try. Afterwards one of our resto druids told us in O chat that he's basically burned out on that char and would prefer to play his rogue. Sadly, we already have too many rogues (which he knows), so I think the plan is for him to switch mains when the next expansion comes out. Yeah, that's prolly months away but it was the best we could do. We really do have a ton of rogues atm.

In alt news, we got almost 2 levels on our Horde hunter/pally. I corpse jumped out to Westfall and got Eddie the Battleboar all trained up with the latest in pig skillz. He's pretty awesome and his aggro generation is amazing with Charge. Eddie's turned out way better than I had even hoped for. He's also hilarious with his bright yellow hair and the way he wiggle-runs. The true test will be if he can tank a quest mob designed for 5 people. muhahaha

Yay for Condensation

So i've been enjoying the benefits of a condensed raid week a bit too much. Clearing all weekly farm content in 2 evenings is 100% the way to go. If we don't manage to pull it off again this week, I'll be pretty sad.

So I essentially took the weekend off from WoW. I didn't even log in once. This was partly due to my sis being in town and my husband's new found craze for Lost. This also means I haven't kept up with WI. Looking through my tip-filled email this morning, apparently one of the top whatever guilds have announced they're going casual until WotLK. Maybe WI has covered this, I don't know.

Either way, their tip came across as pretty QQ. They blamed Blizzard, saying that they hate raiders and pvp'ers because... They never do explain why. Why don't guilds like that just write the honest truth: they got bored farming MH/BT for 8 months and want to take a break for a bit. Maybe they should have thought of the consequences before they decided to race to the finish line. It's not like Blizz doesn't have a long history of rather spaced out content. But rather than just chilling out, they try the blame game and attempt to stir up drama.

Get over yourselves. No one really cares, tbh.

Friday! W00t!

So I've managed to narrowly survive another week. There was no post yesterday due to an extreme amount of stuff I had to get done at work combined with yet another migraine. /sigh

In other news, I had planned on spending last night's raid sleeping on the couch but we were short healers so I logged in. I was promised "only the first couple of bosses" lol Yeah, right. I helped the group from Teron through Illidan. I'm pretty sure that's 6 out of 9 bosses, kk. On the bright side, I picked up a new ring, [Blessed Band of Karabor], which was one of only 2 drops that people paid DKP for. It was a solid upgrade from a +healing perspective and I only gave up a small amount of mp5. So last night with normal raid buffs but no consumables, I was at +2200-ish healing. I'm also pushing the 13l mana mark with something like 12,888 mana. Rediculous.

Since January 7th, the first time we downed Mother Shahraz, we have seen 3 conquorer shoulders drop but TONS of double protectors. Those shaman blah blah items have dropped so many times that people are now rolling on the tokens for S2 stuff that doesn't even come out until Patch 2.4. So right now, the chance we have of seeing my shoulders is 17%, or 1 every 6 clears. /cry

The irony here is the conquorer pants drop pretty much every single time off Council, but then it's more protector off Illidan. It's getting really frustrating by this point.

Long Tuesday

I've been having a really hard time remembering what day it is lately. I got up this morning and my first thought was "Man, I'm so tired and we have a raid tonight." Did I think it was Wedesday? Yep. But it's a semi-glorious Tuesday. I'm happy because we can goof off all evening, but have a touch of sadness because I have class until 6:30pm to endure first.

I think the reason I thought it was Wed is because last night while we were pwn'ing RFC with our lowbie alts AND our rl friends, said drood commented that we should be able to meet up for instance fun every Tuesday. Yes, my brain will latch onto random remarks like that rather than actually remembering that it was Sunday just the day before.

We first attempted lowbie WC as level 17's. Trying to 4-man level 19 elites wasn't a good idea apparently. After some touch-and-go pulls and a wipe, we retreated to the lava hole under Ogrimmar. The Burning Blade will be recounting our exploits for years to come, at least the few left will. We got a couple of upgrades, so it was worth the bloodshed imo. I also got to play with my pig in an OT capacity and he did really well for only having level 4 abilities. >.< I need to sneak some time in to get him trained up.

Speaking of which, when I found out we were going to do a 5-man, I instantly started to go into raid prep mode. I stocked up on the good drinks, grabbed some pet food, bought arrows until my quiver was full, and repaired. I also noted how many pots I had (healing and mana). Then I grabbed enchanting and the next tier of First Aid, though the +40 bandages I already had were probably fine. All of this was for RFC. lol I'm a crazy person.

In Soviet Russia...

The bosses beat you. :(

We had a rather disheartening Council/Illidan raid evening last night. What's supposed to take maybe 30min-40min took over 2.5hrs due to repeated wipeage. I brought 10 stix and 5 elixirs for 2 boss fights and they were long gone before Illidan finally hit pavement.

For the last attempt on Illidan, I made a healer swap. Basically one priest was scraping the bottom of the total healing meter. Pulling up her healing breakdown, she was using Flash 50% of the time. That's pretty much the opposite of what she should have been doing. So we're clearing the game and one priest still has no idea what the right spell selection is. Likewise, many of the wipes were because her target was dying. Yes, there are 4 of us total assigned to heal that tank, but a priest's job is to handle the big heals. Flash is not a big heal.

The most irritating thing of all is I've already talked to her countless times about priest spell selection. I've been beating my head against this brick wall since Kael at least. How many different ways can you tell someone to use greater heals and regular heals?

The underlying issue is I feel that healers who have downed Illidan should be self-sufficient and able to research their class on their own. I shouldn't have to do equipment analysis, spell selection breakdowns, or question their gem choices. They should be as dedicated to being the best they can be. I'm not asking that they repeat Elitist Jerks word for word, but at least understand the basic concepts.

/sigh

I have Survived

Whelp, I managed to make it to the end of another week. Last night was the first raid in a long while that everyone seemed to be in a good mood. It doesn't really make sense after the fubar that was Wednesday night's raid, but there it is. We only wiped once the entire evening, and it was to a pack of about 40 half-nekkid belf chicks on the way to Mother. Of all the ways to go, that has to be one of the funniest. I wish I had remembered to bring the screenies with me this morning so I could post what it looks like to have that many mobs beating on my bubble. lol

I also expected some drama since I had the pleasure of sending out a "You suck and here are the details that support this..." message to one of our pallies yesterday. Apparently he did reply with outrage (which I haven't read yet), but caught up with me in-game to appologize. And at the end of the day, his healing has really improved by just changing around his spell selection, which was my ultimate goal.

While I was comparing my equipment to his, I realized I forgot to get the helm inscription thing from my orc buddies. Doh! Nothing makes me feel dumber than picking out issues with someone else only to find I'm not exactly optimal, either. So before the raid I made a qick visit to Thrallmar. This has kind of got me thinking about the minimum requirements healers should have before they expect to enter 25-man raids. Maybe that's what I'll cover next for WI...

Sad But True

So we spent a couple of hours last night on Archimonde, wipe after wipe after wipe. It actually got to the point where we had to swap out the repeat offenders. I went through 10 healing elixirs and the same number of fish stix. People were getting grumpy with each other and the outraged whispers were flying all over the place.

I wish I knew the secret to why sometimes raids fail like that. We had one-shotted everything up to Archi, and then just stalled out. A lot of the wipes were due to people getting in the fires, which is pretty easy to do. Is it people thinking the boss is easy and thus not concentrating? Are they just tired and getting sloppy? Do they really just not understand the concept of fire = bad? Even when we won, it was dispite one death. Luckily it was a paladin, so the damage to the raid wasn't bad at all.

If you look back, I've had my fair share of wipe initiation, but I figured out what I was doing wrong and haven't had an issue since. There is also a noticable random element to this fight. For example, I got surrounded on all sides by fire then got cursed. I couldn't move and was out of range of the mages, so I died. But by that point we'd lost 2-3 people, so it was already a wipe. I've also gotten fire's DoT plus air burst at the same time. Bubble to the rescue, though.

By the time we finally beat Archi, we only had about 45min left of raid time. I petitioned fairly hard for us to quit and pick up things tonight at BT. I have this theory that by just taking a break, we'll come back strong and plow through content. I guess this means I just think people are tired and need some rest. There's like a 50% chance we'll see improvement the next raid, though. Maybe I should start plotting raid performance against the moon's phases or something.

Random Thoughts

There isn't much to follow up concerning the pw issue I had on Sun. My best guess is that there was just an internal glitch that resetting it fixed. I change my pw's periodically and I've very careful about downloading addons (meaning I only DL those that have a community presence).

With my WI email thing, I am getting a ton of spam now, but I really only check that email on my work computer. A few weeks ago I got an "Account Suspended" email saying I needed to click their link and log in to reactivate my account. Um... Yeah... Nice try. I'm pretty sure that I don't play on an EU server and it was pretty obvious I wasn't directed to an actual WoW site.

I expect some controversy surrounding my WI article today, especially if people only read half way through before freaking out and posting a comment. Mainly I just want people to think about healing and all the little tricks people will use to feel better about themselves. It's a weird situation.

Weekend Review

This was the first weekend in a while that I've been able to really play WoW, meaning at least +10 hrs of running around Azeroth. We mainly played our hunter/pally rerolls. I ran clear out to the level 3-4 Tauren starting area to pick up a Battleboar, which is pretty much the best pig name ever. He's a golden yellow with brown pinstripes and bright yellow hair. He comes with rank 1 charge and gore, making him a pretty great package all around. I think it only took about 1 of my levels to get him from level 4 to level 13. He's also got a loyalty level of 3 I think.

Yesterday, though, we had about 30 min before we had to go to a family lunch, and I couldn't get my password to work. At all. I started freaking out. That account shares space with my main, who has officer access to the guild bank. My husband logged on and checked the bank. Everything was there and the guild roster said my main hadn't been logged on for over 24 hrs, which was the last time I played her. I checked my email to see if I got a notification that my PW had been changed. Nothing. But it still wouldn't work. I could log into our other accounts just fine.

I ended up changing my password and running Spybot. It only picked up some cookies and a registry change I think I made. I have no explaination why one day my pw worked and the next it didn't.

Last night we downed Illidan after a few tries and then headed to Gruul's Lair. Apparently there's some melee dps trinket that'll still be best in game after the Sunwell comes out, so some people wanted to take a shot at getting one. Naturally none dropped. From a healing persepctive, it was pretty boring. My husband, an OT on Gruul, would stand in cave-ins to build rage but there was nothing left for me to heal once the HoT's got through with him. We also downed Gruul at size 6, rather than the 10-12's we used to do.

I need to do a WI article for tomorrow and I'm kinda stuck on a topic. I saw the addon people are working on Healbot, and I should give them a token of thanks. Geeze I hated trying to use that addon after running with Grid for so long. One idea I had was doing a raid addon compilation article that covered PallyPower, MendWatch, and the like. I also considered doing a funny article about how to lead on the healing meters. There used to be a now-outdated post on the WoW Forums about that and it was good stuff. Hopefully I'll come up with something. :)

Of Hunters and Druids

So we rolled a belf hunter and pally last night and made it to level 4 before we had to switch to raiding. Well, Foz had to switch. I got to warm the bench since the other 2 pallies needed things out of MH. The downside is they forgot about me when they went to BT and my boots dropped. Oops! It's ok, though, since I'm trying to save my DKP for the shoulders. Plus, who doesn't want to wear fluffy purple things up to their knees? Srsly.

The hunter is already tons of fun. I really like standing back and shooting. My dps is fairly high with that class because the ranged attacks make up for my inherently "zomg, wait up for me!" cronic condition I have. No matter where we're going, I'll be the last one to arrive. But with a hunter, I can just start shooting before most people would be in range. muhahaha

So since I had about 4 hrs to kill and my hunter only likes playing with a pally, I decided to fire up my husband's old druid. He's level 60 in full T2 and epic healing gear. I decided I wanted to play him as feral, so that's how I spec'd him. So now I'm a kitty in healing gear, heading off to Outlands. And once I figured out that half my cat abilities weren't on my quickbars, I didn't do half bad. My plan is to have my rich pally belly up to the AH and pick him out some basic starter gear.

Alts, Alts Everywhere

Over the last week or so, we've been experimenting with a couple of Horde alts. I've been playing a Tauren shaman and my husband has been running around as a belf hunter. This is my 2nd attempt on shaman, and leveling her up in belf land isn't doing me any favors. While Druids seem to get a trainer in Silvermoon for no apparent reason, I still have to trudge back to Orgimmar and run clear to Thrall before anyone will teach me to throw down flaming sticks. This means I train in bursts, with the last one covering 8 levels worth of abilities.

Right now the biggest issue with leveling a Shaman is that the totems are pretty pointless. I have all these cool, shammy-only things and they're just a waste of mana to cast. I just cast lightning bolts and a fire dmg/dot thing and call it a day. The fun part is playing with my husband, and not really the class/char.

I also find myself kind of feeling bad for Cat, his no named orange furry pet. He's kind of an after thought with me around, although he's getting in on the action more since we set up the pet attack/hunter's mark macro. On the bright side, we basically mow everything down, even the uber level stuff we've accidentally run into. And since I learned to rez, we haven't needed it. ;)

Last night we were talking about the balance between warriors, feral druids, and prot pallies. The end result was I think my husband wants to level up a pally for the expansion in the off-chance they become the uberest tanking class (if they're not already). Obviously this would be a belf pally. So we've been talking about ditching our latest lvl 16 alts and rerolling different classes. He would do a paladin and I would probably create a belf hunter.

The more I play my draenei hunter, the more I wish she was Horde. The Alliance seem nice enough but I think I really prefer Horde. The flow of the areas is familiar and easy to follow. Every FP has an inn for the most part. And the majority of my frends play that faction.

So after thinking about it for a bit, I think I'd like to trade in my shammy for another hunter. But this time I'm gonna make us some real bags, kk? The 4-slotters are killing me!