Throne of the Four Winds (Picture by MMO Champion)

I hopped onto WoW last Friday night expecting to do some BC raids in preparation of the next patch and transmogrification.  Instead I found myself heading back into the raiding game thanks to an old raiding buddy, Dopz, who was determined to help me get some gear and up my average item level (post Friday it was sitting at 330 which I believe is one step above abysmal). Unfortunately we didn’t have any tanks online who were willing to help so we had to PUG them + 1 extra DPS.  And that’s how I found myself sitting in front of some genie dudes in Throne of the Four Winds ready to heal some big baddy bosses in my extra fail gear.

What I discovered pretty quickly was that gear or no, healing is like riding a bicycle – it doesn’t matter what the blizzard developers change once you’ve done it long enough it’s all muscle memory.  After healing for what feels like forever, I was back to my old ways in no time.  Even after 9 months I could still remember all my click casts in Vuhdo (well except for dispelling but that’s another story!) and it became clear to me that I still love raiding and drove home how much I miss it.

We started the first boss which is 3 (I only ever saw 2 but I’ve been assured there were 3) little genie/efrit things and we wiped.  This was sad, but the good news was that I wasn’t the cause hooray! We subsequently came back (after I accidentally flew to The Vortex Pinnacle) wiped again, and I was probably part of the cause this time.  We had changed platforms and I was now on the dude that does steady AOE damage.  This was much harder for me to keep up purely because my gear was well below optimal and I ran out of mana!  Our raid was not going smoothly so far and I could feel impatience from the PUGs – we were at our limit of issues before we lost someone.  And typically that’s when the baby woke up and needed a feed.

Roughly the same time Caitlin woke up, Angelya from Revive & Rejuvenate’s little Sproutling woke as well.  I think the two of them had planned it in advance it was that well timed! I felt terrible but I had to AFK – babies and their tummies come first.  My partner knowing how much I had been enjoying myself, wipes and all played as me just to keep things going and while Caitlin had a marathon 30+ minute feed I discovered on Twitter that they did kill the boss and the 2nd one without us nursing mums. I even got a nifty new belt – Gale Rouser Belt of the Wavecrest and a Spiritcaller Cloak which I think the guild “donated” to me or was a gift from Goodiemania?  I’m not quite sure it was getting late by that stage and I’d just been in a dark room for the last 30 odd minutes so was half asleep myself but either way I was grateful for it!

As we got ready to do a heroic dungeon, we were all set and Caitlin woke again this time needing a nappy change and full bedtime routine to calm her down again.  And that was the end of my night.  I felt really bad – I had managed to pick up loot without actually doing anything other than make people wait around for me.  I had become that player.  Every guild/PUG has one and in my past life as a heroic level raider I couldn’t stand them.  In fact players like these were exactly why I joined a raiding guild in the first place – who wants to PUG a raid just to stand around waiting for that tank to get the phone, or that healer to brb?

Now I don’t have one of those dream babies that go to bed at 7pm and wake up again at 7am in the morning.  I don’t have a bub that is remotely like that and most of the time I and quite ok with it – I know it won’t last forever.  Occasionally though it would be nice to know that I could definitely play for a 3 hour period straight without having to worry about getting up to give her a feed.  I know there are a lot of WoW players with babies that managed to keep up raiding while looking after their young ones and I am in awe, unfortunately I am just not one of them.  So I’m not quite sure where that leaves me.  I got a taste for raiding and its going to be hard to go back to farming old school raids/dungeons now, but I can’t commit to any type of raiding schedule without being the player that makes everyone sigh in frustration.

I guess its back to leveling and solo play for Lath again.

Caitlin has also been participating in some baby boss fights as part of Nymphy’s Cutest Little Babies in the World of Warcraft series.  Anyone wanting a few moments of pure squee should check out their adventures here:

The Cutest Little Babies in the World (of Warcraft)

The Cutest Little Babies in the World (of Warcraft) – Part II

And because I’m a proud mum and its been about 8 months since I posted a photo – here is my little girl @ 9 months.

Caitlin rocking the 80s vibe (photo taken by Instagram)

I would like to introduced our new littlies:

Deva (Cass) Looking like a proper paladin

And Myself, Avenai.... Looking like a Axe Weilding Mage

During our 2 hours playtime our little paladins are questing and gathering (I’m mining and Cass is skinning so there is no squabbling over resources!) around the old world checking out how different some of the quests are and how some things just haven’t changed at all.  While we haven’t done any dungeons Cass is planning on tanking with her paladin and I will most likely be healing considering Avenai is wearing cloth BOA gear in order to get the extra xp (no, I sadly do not have any justice points available to buy new BOA chest or shoulders!).

So far we’ve completed Westfall, part of Redridge and part of Duskwood.  Sadly because the XP gains are so fast when you add up BOA helms, cloaks, shoulders, chest plus the guild bonuses and rested bonus, we keeping running into grey quests before we get a chance to finish things off!

I think we’ve decided to head over to Stranglethorn Vale next to see if the area, now altered, can redeem itself (anyone who has leveled in STV on a PVP server will understand this sentiment!). I would be interested to know from readers who have gone through all the revamped zones,  which ones are really worth completing  as we’d hate to miss some really epic quest chains!

While we are running around questing we get on vent to chat and generally some guildy will join our channel and give us the gossip on whats happening in the guild.  It seems like Cass and I aren’t the only guildies who have had changes to their game play. Vitare has gone through a complete revamp.  All the officers I played with previously have moved on for one reason or another and a  completely new set of players are now running the show.  One of these I’m proud to say is a recruit I found from Twitter! Goodiemania (also known as @Velidra on Twitter or for his blog) has been suckered into officership hahaha you have my condolences.  I’m trying very hard to get him to do a guest post on here based on the experience of going from raider to officer – its a big change for anyone and think its a great topic for discussion!

Its good to see though that the guild is still going strong and while I don’t feel I really know anyone in game anymore I still have Goodie to keep me apprised!

Aside from my 2 hours of WoW time a week I am (obviously) spending heaps of time with my baby daughter who is growing up so fast!  While I’m itching to link pictures galore on here I’m refraining, but will instead direct you to a baby blog that I am sporadically updating for any readers interested in how that’s going.  Feel free to check it out: My Little Sapling, I promise there are heaps of cute pictures and more squee will be added with time!

Now that Caitlin is getting a bit older I’m finding that I have a spare hour generally at some stage in the afternoon where I can log into WoW.  When I first realized this I was really quite excited I’ve missed having some “me” time and I’ve really missed my guild and friends online.  This excitement unfortunately didn’t last very long when I realised that:

1. I have no idea how to play a resto druid anymore
2. None of my online friends appear to play in the middle of the day
3. My entire guild seems to have turned over since Cataclysm came out and I feel like a complete stranger

Overwhelmed

I was lucky enough that I leveled to 85 and had the chance to run a few normal dungeons before I went into labor.  This wasn’t enough however to ingrain in me the new way of healing pre baby break.  Since I leveled Lath I played her in order to raid as a healer.  Shes always been raid ready and spent all of Wrath running the latest content on heroic level.  To now find myself coming back into the game at the end of the first tier of raiding content in leveling blues and greens, no spec (they must have all reset since boxing day) and no clue what I’m doing… its all been very daunting.

How Am I Getting Back Into The Swing of Druiding

I’ve decided I’m not logging back in until I’ve had a chance to do some research.

I’m not too worried about relearning specs and spells as I’m sure that reading through theses blogger guides will get me off the ground.

I do need a game plan on how to get the best possible gear I can through quests, rep and normal dungeons as heroics through the LFD tool may be a bit longer than I’ve got time for. Just thinking about aiming for gear at that level hurts me a little bit, I’m so used to aiming at the top of end of gear rewards its really quite a big adjustment moving back down the spectrum aimed at casual play.

Or Not….

In the end trying to read guides off my iPhone while breastfeeding was getting a little too much.  I’m shelving Lath for the time being and have decided to level my priest from 80 – 85.  Questing is something I can do for 5 mins or 1 hour so I don’t have to worry about neglecting Caitlin should see wake or need a feed etc.

Guild Stuff

The priest leveling idea is also helping me with my main dilemma – the part that has probably kept me not interested in WoW the most over the last 9 weeks.  My guild.  I’ve been in Vitare for just under 2 years and have had a blast with a splash of drama added into the mix.  The problem is that I’m no longer a raider which is what the guild revolves around, and I’m no longer really free to play at night time (hoping this will eventually change!) and I’m feeling pretty much like an outsider.  So many new raiders have joined and so many of the players I journeyed through Wrath with have left, that I almost feel like I’m in a new guild.

Part of me is wondering whether I would be better off moving away from an Oceanic server and joining a US timezone server where my daytime play is evening time for most players.  If I want to get back into raiding it would also give me more opportunity to find a family friendly guild that has short raid times but still maintains quality and progression – this just doesn’t seem to exist on the Oceanic servers.

Suggestions/Ideas Are Welcome!

For those mothers who breastfeed and managed to play shortly after birth how did you manage it?  I know some people have said breastfeed at the computer…. I just don’t think I have a set up that will work with that not to mention that Caitlin is a squirmer, I think she would bump her head a million times if I even tried.

Do you think its worth considering a move or should I wait it out for when night time feeds are less frequent and her sleep patterns more regular?

Lath (Still here albeit in a much less regular capacity!)

xoxox

PS – This post ended up taking me 4 days to write /sigh.

PPS – Cass still has no study from the floods!

Introducing Caitlin Elisabeth

So the Hots & Dots blog has been very quiet of late!  For those of you who have been following us over the last few months, you would most likely know that I have been getting more and more heavily pregnant and my playtime slowed down this year considerably. On top of this, Cass posted about a week ago that our home town of Brisbane, Australia had been declared a Natural Disaster Zone leaving me without power and Cass’s place flooded out.  In amongst the Christmas and New Year festivities and flooding mayhem my beautiful baby girl decided to make an early entrance into the world!

I believe I’m very lucky – the entire labor was relatively stress and trauma free (aside from being 8cm dilated by the time I got to the hospital – just a tad further along than I wanted to be!) and lasted about 6.5 hours in total.  My partner and I named our little girl Caitlin Elisabeth, and she was born on the 5th January 2011 at 11:11pm.  She weighed in at 3350 grams (7.2 pounds for those of you not using the metric system) and was 50cm long with a 34cm head circumference which is nice and healthy for a bubby born a teeny bit early.

So far motherhood has been a truly wonderful experience, she is a happy baby who sleeps and feeds beautifully and while bringing her home from hospital a day before our city flooded and going without power for 5 days was a challenge (think cold showers, nappy changes by torchlight, working out breastfeeding in the dark etc etc) it made both myself and my partner confident that if we could handle that, we could handle anything.  While parenting has been a life changing experience, it has been nowhere near as stressful, sleep depriving or exhausting as I had built it up to be and here’s hoping it continues that way!

Now that we’re back with power and she’s starting to get into a little bit more of a feeding/sleeping routine, I’m hoping to  be back online and in WoW shortly, albeit in a very casual fashion.  I have vaguely heard that resto druids got buffed (I guess I really should read up on that at some point) and I’m sure there are many other things to catch up on too.  Here’s hoping all your entertaining blog articles accumulating in my feed reader will have me back up to speed in no time!

A quick update on Cass: Cass will hopefully be back at her place and with power in about a fortnight – until then her internet access is limited so probably no posts from either of us for a while!

Caitlin Cradled in Daddy's Hands

Afraid to leave Nordrassil?

It appears everyone around me has been mad keen for the Cataclysm release. Guildies are trying to level to 85 as quickly as possible, workmates took time off for the launch, my other half was determined to get realm first herbalist (which he did by the way) and my brother is aiming to make as much cash as he possibly could off the auction house.

And then there is Cass and I. Cass didn’t even bother to get a copy of Cataclysm on launch day and I only got it because my other half picked it up and installed it for me on his lunch break.

When Wrath of the Lich King was launched we did things very differently. We lined up at the midnight launch at EB Games, installed the game and started questing that very night. We took time off work, had our talent trees worked out; gear sorted and a loose plan of how we were handling the leveling process. When we woke up after a couple of hours sleep the next morning we were already past the main leveling pack (after a dangerous trek north of Howling Fjord, cutting across Grizzly Hills and into Dragonblight) and a group of us were both questing and dungeon-ing the entire way to 80.

Even if I had planned things in a similar fashion for Cataclysm I think I would have been thwarted for a number of reasons. First off, this expansion was released at 6pm AEST right when workers were coming home and peak playtime for Oceanic servers. Secondly, the expansion came out a little later in the calendar year meaning the teenagers were running amok – damn those school holidays – with literally nothing better to do than fill up the servers and cause havoc.

When WoTLK was released if you weren’t at work you could easily get on with perhaps a 2 minute wait time during the day. The real queues started approximately 3:30pm when the school kids were arriving home. Cataclysm is released and when I get home at 6:30pm, I’m in for a good 2 hour wait for server access. Apparently the queues are no better during the day this time round with at least a queue of 2000 waiting to get in.

Since I know that I won’t be able to raid, at least until I’ve settled into a routine with bub, I was very keen to level at my own pace and relax. I have been in a questing mood and was looking forward to doing all the quests in the new areas, actually taking the time to read the quest information and seeing exactly Blizzard had designed for us. This didn’t really go to plan when I quickly realised after arriving at Mt Hyjal that for every 1 Alliance player questing, there were 100 Horde. Quests that took me 5 minutes on the Beta… I couldn’t even find a spawned mob for to kill! I gave up and walked away to make some dinner hoping it would quiet down after an hour break.

I came back and while still busy I could go through the quests with less hassles. I did occasional get ganked for absolutely no reason other than I happened to be on my own: a poor lonely Alliance player in the middle of a Horde playground. The biggest problem being: if one Horde decided to go you, another 10 within the vicinity would decide to lend a helping hand as well. 277 gear and healing spec still just doesn’t cut it against that many opposing players.

All in all things was going well until it was time for me to go Into the Maw. There were no more than 10 alliance players in here and the second last quest objective, Cindermaul, was being camped out by at least 200 Horde players. I tried being patient. The Alliance tried sticking together but it was all for naught. At a 2 minute res timer I gave up and hearthed to Nordrassil ready to call it quits for the night. I was only about 60% into level 80 and my mood was not improved when I turned around and found out that my other half was only just trailing behind me in XP from doing Archaeology and hadn’t experienced a single run in with my mortal enemy: the Horde teenager.

Things got better at Nordrassil where I picked up a quest that took me straight to the final leveling hub for the Hyjal area. While there were still quite a few players around, I had made it past the main leveling pack and did this zone without any problems at all. I even ended the night on a high note by getting a neat little vanity pet from the flying jousting quests. I will happily admit I really sucked at flying and jousting all in one!

I’ve decided based on my experiences that doing leveling the casual way is just like raiding the casual way – horribly inefficient and for the main part much more frustrating. I’m starting to think that if raiding is going to be out of the question for me in this expansion, that a move to a PVE server is looking more and more likely. Or alternatively I might just give in and go Horde and join the teenage crowd. You all know the saying, if you can’t beat em, join em!

Lil Ragnaros, Singing Sunflower, Moonkin Hatchling and Mr Grubb

I had pretty much decided to completely close the doors on WoW. I hadn’t logged in for over a month, strange pregnancy hormones have me thinking about babies and nurseries  pretty much every waking second of my day and I had no idea how far off the Cataclysm launch was let alone bothering to pre order a copy.

Yesterday this changed.

My new cubicle neighbor at work is a WoW player. I know this because I overheard him begging to have time off work for the Cataclysm launch (his boss has just started playing the game as well so he clearly felt quite comfortable telling her his reasons for wanting time off).  After chatting to him for a bit about his WoW history and healing priest, I was inspired to have a look at my reader and see if anything exciting had happened in Azeroth over the last 5 weeks.

And that’s when it happened. I discovered the Moonkin Hatchling had been released in the Blizzard store. 

I wanted it… I wanted it bad. The thing is, I couldn’t very well justify purchasing a pet (even if half the money was going to a great cause) if I had no intention of opening up WoW ever again.

I then discovered that there were other vanity pets now available through quests: the Singing Sunflower looked particularly cool and Mr Grubbs… well let’s just say I’ve always had a fondness for mini ugly things, to me they are nothing short of adorable.

I had to log in… the lure of the vanity pet was just too strong.

Sadly I didn’t get my Sunflower last night. Between being constantly ganked by idiot horde teenagers who have most likely just finished school and clearly had way too much time on their hands, and a server shutdown I didn’t quite finish the final phase which rewards the pet.  I’m sure tonight this can be remedied and I’ll move onto Mr Grubbs.

On the personal front for those who have been asking and are interested.

Pregnancy. I really don’t particularly like it and can’t say I’m someone who has “blossomed” while with child. In fact I would say that I pretty much feel like a beached whale or perhaps a hippopotamus depending on if I’m waddling around or lying down.

I am also unfortunately one of 8% of pregnant women who have gestational diabetes for their final trimester. This is incredibly annoying seeing I’ve never craved chocolate or fruit juice so much in my life. Thankfully I ate fairly well to begin with and have been able to manage things without really changing my diet at all (sans the fruit juice and chocolate obviously). I am also anemic, another fairly common third trimester symptom simply rectified with a daily iron supplement. This all means that I’ve been moved into a “high risk” category of pregnancy and now see both my normal obstetrician and an endocrinologist fortnightly on alternating weeks.

Because I’m managing it well I get to deal with all the unpleasant parts like the fortnightly blood tests, the 4 times a day finger pricking but I sadly don’t get to have a 3^rd trimester ultrasound to see my little girl again. Talk about unfair!

I’ve also discovered that somewhere around week 28, some hormone must have been released that now makes me find pastel pink adorable and cry at everything from TV commercials as well as episodes of Glee and The Zoo.

In any case, sometime within the next 5 – 6 weeks (dependent on if I’m induced because of the diabetes) my little girl will arrive and I’m sure it will all be worth it!

The winning screenshot entry

Approximately a month ago, our guild entered the Oceanic Guild Screenshot Beta Contest and in the final week of the draw we were lucky enough to be chosen as a winner!  Only 25 Oceanic guilds were picked in total so this was a really lovely surprise for our guild, and a great way to reward and re-motivate members this close to the end of expansion.

The contest awards 10 beta keys and as a 25 man raiding guild, I certainly didn’t envy the officers having to choose which 9 other players (GM automatically gets 1) would be selected to form a 10 man raid group ready to test the first tier of raiding content released with Cataclysm.  In the end the players were chosen not on what is considered perhaps the best group make up, but on their longevity, attendance, performance, attitude etc.  We’ll find out first hand if Blizzard’s moto of “Bring the Player, Not the Class” still holds true in the next expansion.

Our Beta raid make up will be:

Tanks:
Warrior
Death Knight

Healers:
Priest
Paladin
Druid (Me!)

Melee DPS:
Paladin
Death Knight

Ranged DPS:
Priest (Cass!)
Mage

Hybrid (DPS/Heals):
Shaman

We also have a Fury Warrior and Shadow Priest with Beta Keys from the guild giving us a 12 member roster for testing over the next 8 weeks.  We’ll be raiding on Gilneas (US) PvP Server so if there are any readers on there currently testing out the content make sure you say hello.

Thursday nights are now officially back on the raiding roster and I can’t wait to keep you all posted on what it’s like raiding as resto!

Welcome to the Halls of Origination ... you're healing.

I finally got my Cataclysm Beta working again after downloading an extra 2GBs of content.

It was time to take the plunge and try my hand at healing a dungeon. I found myself quite apprehensive. As much as I’m confident healing on my Restoration Druid I very rarely heal random PUGs on live. I usually prefer to heal for my friends and guildies. So it took a bit of courage to branch out and heal a PUG with a completely new – and untested – talent build and a shaky knowledge of my (now much changed) healing spells.

I hadn’t played this Druid from 80 to 85. I had a premade level 85 Druid in a peppering of greens with a couple of blues that I had taken for a quick tour of Deepholm and Uldum to unlock the dungeons in those zones. I queued up and within a couple of minutes (before I had a chance to chicken out and Leave Queue) I found myself standing in Halls of Origination (Level 84-85).

Halls of Origination

After a brief moment of panic I reminded myself of Blizzard’s propaganda: Restoration Druids who already use more spells than Wild Growth and Rejuvenation won’t find the new style of healing difficult. Since I still use Regrowth, Lifebloom and Nourish quite frequently I figured I might be one of the lucky ones. How hard could this possibly be?

Before I could think any further into it the tank had pulled and we were off!

Within 2 trash packs I was completely out of mana. I started out healing in a similar fashion to what I would do in a dungeon today. Full HoTs on the tank with a smattering of Rejuvenations and Wild Growth for the party. I quickly discovered this was simply not feasible unless you have a patient tank who is willing to let you drink between trash pulls, and even with a patient tank you couldn’t pull this type of healing off on a lengthy boss fight. The Druid tanking my run was an efficient type, and was steadily moving forward as he pulled trash groups.

After realizing I was completely out of mana I reached for my Innervate and sprinted off to catch up to the tank. As he pulled the next batch of mobs I got a large shock: the effects of Innervate were barely noticeable to look at my mana bar. I actually thought for a few seconds that I might not have actually used the spell. I was forced to heal lean and mean. The DPS were left to fend for themselves, the tank only got Lifebloom and Rejuvenation. To my surprise this was fine for trash. Blizzard really did follow through on their promise that tanks would be taking steady damage.

As we continued on I experimented with my arsenal of level 85 Restoration spells to get a gut feel for numbers and what was working vs what wasn’t useful. These are mainly gut feelings that I had based on just one dungeon run and then reviewing the combat parse I logged.

Mana

I had a mana pool of approximately 68 000. I thought this was quite large but I chewed through it incredibly quickly. Gone are the days of spamming/pre hotting targets unless it’s really, really necessary.

Innervate is either broken or needs some tweaking. I really didn’t notice any mana returns and found it pretty worthless. This is quite sad considering how much more useful it could now be that we actually have mana issues.

Lifebloom

It’s going to take me a while to remember that Lifebloom can only be cast on one target.

In the heat of AOE damage I often found myself casting Lifebloom on DPS which meant that the tank automatically lost his stack. This was really frustrating because I had just wasted some of my precious mana and now had to recast it on the feral druid.

As much as I like the new addition to Tree of Life – you can cast Lifebloom on multiple target while Tree of Life is active – I also am worried about how I’ll adapt to that. I think it might take me awhile to get a handle on the single target vs multiple target thing especially considering what a short period Tree of Life is active for.

Nourish and Healing Touch

Just didn’t cut it. Really didn’t cut it.

I had read a post from Restokin (prior to the Nourish nerf mind you) where approximately 27% of her overall heals were Nourish based. I was expecting to cast this a lot and while I did try it out I found myself cancel casting more often than not because it was both too slow and too weak to spend any mana on.

My average Nourish hit for 5993 health. The single time it crit, it hit for 10262 health. When your average DPS has over 70 000 health and your tank as 110 000 health this just pathetic. Add to this a slow cast time and I panicked often that my target was going to die mid-cast.

Healing Touch wasn’t much better. The cast time felt even slower again (it isn’t but it sure felt like it!) and it hit for an average of 11 892 health. I was really disappointed, I thought they wanted to make Healing Touch useful for Resto Druids? Perhaps in a raid situation where I can spam direct heals on a single target this may be useful however I’m quite skeptical.

Rejuvenation

I ran with this build. I think in a raid situation, I would change the top tier talent to Naturalist instead of Blessing of the Grove, but I wanted to try out the increased Rejuvenation healing talent while in a 5 man group.

Rejuvenation did the majority of my healing overall coming in at 30%. Based on the number of casts, Rejuvenation healed more with less over healing than the same number of Lifebloom x 3 stacks. I think in its current form I will still be relying on Rejuvenation quite a bit during AOE damage.

AOE Healing/Tank Healing

For the first time in my healing life I felt quite weak when there was AOE damage hitting the entire group.

Don’t get me wrong, Restoration Druids have an arsenal of spells that are designed to handle incoming AOE damage. I just didn’t have the mana to really use it. I learned quite quickly to stop trying to keep everyone at 100% health. Instead I was simply grateful to keep the party at about 50% health and have no one die.

The AOE intensive fights left me completely and utterly out of mana. Each time I thought “that’s it we’re going to wipe because I have no more mana” the boss would die and I would sigh in relief. I alternated between Rejuvenation and Wild Growth HoTing and when off cool down, jumped for the new Tree of Life for these moments.

Tank healing was much easier. In Wrath of the Lich King tanks get hit hard and in level 80 dungeons I often find myself rolling full HoTs on the tank and then jumping back in with a Nourish during large damage spikes. In Halls of Origination, a Regrowth, Rejuvenation and Lifebloom stack was ample at keeping the tank steady and often at full health.

Efflorescence

Efflorescence seemed pretty neat, except for one teeny, tiny problem: the final spell animation isn’t currently implemented in Cataclysm Beta. Instead Efflorescence appears as a big green blob on the ground. My party members kept running out of it thus totally defeating the purpose. But I can understand why they ran. I have to admit even I ran out of it first it popped up. I wasn’t until I started noticing the Efflorescence ticks on my screen that my brain linked the cause and effect correctly – then I ran into every Efflorescence I could!

Sadly World of Logs didn’t record data for Efflorescence so I couldn’t tell how effective it was however I’m quite excited by it and am glad that the radius has been increased to 8 yards and we have a little bit more control over its placement with the change to Swiftmend proccing it.

The New Tree of Life

Well we still have the same Tree Form model for Tree of Life. So much for looking like one of the cool Argent Defender trees in Darnassus.

The Tree of Life buff was actually very useful especially for oh shit, I don’t know how much incoming damage is going to come in… everyone is getting low on health moments.  Having instant Regrowths were especially cool even with a very reduced HoT timer. My major problem with Tree Form is that it made me OOM so quickly that I then had to really pay attention for the remainder of the fight.

I am still concerned that Tree Form will just not be used once you get a bit of gear and that still makes me quite sad.

Healing Summary

Overall, even though I struggled and had some minor freak outs moment, doing this dungeon was good for me.

Even with the nerfs and mana issues I still really enjoyed the feel of Druid healing even if I’m no longer a dorky, adorable, tree. I was also really happy that with all the complaints about dungeon difficulty (too hard!) on the beta forums, my group got through the entire instance with no deaths and no wipes. Perhaps I was really lucky and got 4 quite experienced people or just maybe healing has been tuned to work quite well for each level of difficulty.

Leveling up I would expect to have mainly greens with a few blues mixed into the pile, so I think my premade Druid was a pretty good representation of how most healers will be geared when they enter Halls of Origination.

While I juggled and ended most boss fights without any mana left, part of me thinks isn’t that a job well done? I used all the abilities I have as a Druid and got through it without any deaths with the mana I had available to me. What more can you really ask from an encounter or a healer?

One of my favourite things...

I think this has been the longest we’ve gone since first starting our blog over a year ago without posting. I’m still raiding and getting back into the groove but it’s hard to post when I feel that my last post on guild apathy is pretty much still front and centre of my thoughts. (Yes, even all these weeks later)

I read Pugging Pally’s A Few of my Favorite Things post and thought I would also participate in the weekly Blog Azeroth shared topic. This week’s topic was suggested by Relevart at Relevart’s Druid Reliquary and I think it’s very timely considering most people seem to be well and truly unwinding from Wrath and looking towards the new expansion.

Relevart asked the question: What was your favourite ______ in Wrath of the Lich King?

He purposefully left it to us bloggers to fill in the blank and like Vidalya I decided to look at a few of the more meaningful “moments” this expansion brought me!

Favourite Achievement

Higher Learning
Read the volumes of “The Schools of Arcane Magic” found in Dalaran listed below.
Completed: 02/08/2010

So many people got this quite quickly in the expansion. I on the other hand did this in a roundabout old fashioned way by just whimsically wandering up to potential spawn points and sitting around chatting in /gchat hoping it would magically appear before I needed to fly off to the latest raid instance/dungeon etc.

I’m pretty sure I got my first book within a week or so of the expansion launching however I only got the very last one in August this year. That pesky book evaded me for a very long time! I sat for many a session at the bookshelf in the top of the stairs of Violet Citadel patiently waiting. And the night I finally got that last book and the achievement gave me a great satisfaction, not to mention a wonderful new pet!

I’m sure many readers would probably be a bit surprised at my choice: what about getting your ICC drake? or one of the many group related achievements that you have spent so much time doing? While those achievements have been incredibly rewarding the Higher Learning achievement was something simple, and completely frivolous, that I did without feeling external pressure to get done. And I didn’t need to approach it methodically to conquer it.

It was sheer fun – grounding me – because Higher Learning was an important reminder to me that WoW is just a game and having fun is what games are all about.

Favourite Raid Instance

Ulduar

I simply loved this instance. I loved Druid Tier 8, I liked the lore and I still think going into Yoggy’s brain room to heal all our melee was great fun. Ulduar saw Cass and I move up to a more serious guild and experience progression raiding for the first time. We were both so apprehensive about doing this as we saw ourselves as casual raiders but we simply loved it and this is partly why I will always look at Ulduar with fond memories.

I’m still sad that I have never gotten Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25 player) as I found out I was pregnant and quit playing a week or 2 before my guild finally went back and finished this off. If I could only accomplish one more thing this expansion it would be to finish this. I enjoyed raiding so much in Ulduar that this achievement would have so much more meaning to me than killing Heroic Lich King ever would.

Cass and I are currently running Ulduar 10 again and trying for Herald of the Titans and I love wandering around Dalaran and Ironforge in my Tier 8 sparkles again. It’s been wonderful fun reliving these fights and Algalon in 219/226 gear is tough work to heal! Sadly we didn’t get this on our first hour of attempts but I feel positive that we will conquer this over the next couple of weeks.

If there are any readers out there that missed this raid because the gear is no longer valuable, I would strongly suggest a jaunt through before the expansion ends just to experience the fights, lore and beautiful game design.

Favourite Accomplishment

A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity
Meet the criteria for A Tribute to Insanity without any raid member having used an item only obtainable from 25-player Coliseum, or any more powerful item.
Completed: 09/10/2009

It’s the first and probably only time I will take part in server first achievement and after going back and reading my post about it, I can still remember how exhilarating it was getting it. I also realized that I am still wearing today the cloak I wore from that run… yes sad as this sounds, I am yet to see Deathbringer Saurfang drop a cloak since I started running ICC back last December.

Ironically we went back into TOGC 10 a week or 2 ago and tried to get A Tribute to Insanity only to wipe on Anub’arak. In 264/277 gear we couldn’t do what we had done 12 months ago in 10 man gear!

It still feels incredibly epic that I am one of only a handful of people on Barthilas with the Argent Defender title. I wear it proudly.

Oh no! Shadow Trap!

From the brief time I’ve had on the Beta, I doubt that Cataclysm will be launched before mid December. Even though that’s still 2 and a half months away I very much doubt my guild will keep raiding that long. In fact I’m getting that sneaky feeling that things will wrap up probably within the month.

It’s easy for me to be worried and upset about this because I’ve just come back from a 14 week break from WoW with no raiding. Many of our raiders have been slogging it out 4 nights a week for the entire patch and entire expansion without a break. Each time we’ve gone into a guild crushing fight or brick wall, there has always been another raid instance coming out on the horizon to look forward too.

Nothing refreshes a group of raiders like new content to experience, strategies to debate and loot to theory craft. Unfortunately this time there isn’t anything until the expansion and its becoming increasingly tough getting people to show up for our Heroic Lich King attempts.

Barthilas is an incredibly competitive server with over 50 guilds working on 25 man hard modes and it’s ranked as the 4th server overall on progress. No, not Oceanic progress or even US progress. We’re talking every single Blizzard server you can possibly play on. On many servers progressing to 11/12 hard modes is considered a big deal, on Barthilas that’s nothing to write home about.

We’ve had a really tough Icecrown Citadel raid patch. Its stuff that all guilds have experienced before. And it’s the kind of thing that a lot of guilds are experiencing right now here at the end of the expansion. Some guilds hold it together. Others call it quits.

Each time our raid group gets geared and shows some good progression and unification, we seem to lose some of our geared players to other guilds, real life or burn out. Even though there are many players out there with the experience and drive to join us and keep it all going, recruitment for skilled players is fierce. There is always a guild out there ranked better than you. Guilds like mine often have to take a chance on players who haven’t got any hard mode experience (forget the gear!) to fill the loss of our best players. It’s a buyer’s market.

Gear isn’t everything. But working with the same group of 25 people day in day out, week in week out, and knowing each others strengths and weaknesses is simply priceless. No matter how good the replacement is even in shitty gear they still need most of their trial period to catch up on the lingo, rhythms and strats that your guild uses.

We’ve been pretty lackadaisical about completing Glory of the Icecrown Raider however this is the week that officers have scheduled in time to complete the last couple of achievements. I expect that at least 15 of our raiders will earn their Icebound Frostbrood Vanquishers and the cynical part of me wonders how many of those players will bother to turn up again next week. Some might: perhaps just those who haven’t completed their full 277 BiS sets. The real raiding die-hards can always be counted on (every guild has them – they simply thrive on raiding just for the social factor, challenge whatever, raiding just does it for them).

Many raiders have been burning through their DKP over the last couple of raid lock outs to finish their sets. And I can’t help but expect those players to go casual or simply stop turning up once they’ve got everything they want out of Icecrown Citadel.

The solution can’t be to just keep recruiting new players. Every single player that leaves now is leaving with a full 277 set that can’t be replaced so easily.

I’ve been back to full time raiding for a couple weeks now. When Greatcloak of the Turned Champion finally dropped I was baffled to find that I was bidding my DKP against two other healers. Surely it had dropped before? I looked back through the DKP logs to find that, yes, it had dropped several times. And each time it had gone to a player who has since either given up raiding, gquit or simply hadn’t shown up for raid.

Cass likes to count back the number of times that Dislodged Foreign Object has dropped (at least five times I think). And point to the sole raider in the group who currently has it equipped.

To make matters worse every single player that leaves muddles our raid composition. If you’re attempting Heroic Lich King with two Hunters and only one shows up (and has to leave early at that!) for the night then it’s very difficult to adjust and see any progress.

Why do players give up and stop raiding now? Perhaps the end of an expansion is a good time to reevaluate your RL vs WoW priorities, yes. But I think at its heart there are two big problems: loss of meaning and the do-hardmodes-really-count? dilemma.

If you’ve only seen the first four bosses in Icecrown Citadel I can see how killing just one or two more bosses could help you see something new, something awesome. Something epic. But if you’ve seen all the bosses in Icecrown Citadel and experienced all the small changes to mechanics that come with hard modes is there really anything new or thrilling to experience?

And what does it matter if you really finish Icecrown Citadel anyway? We already know newer, bigger stories and challenges are waiting for us in Cataclysm. If you want to save Azeroth and be a hero do you really need to kill the Lich King again? How about Illidan? I don’t think so.

So how do you incentify and keep your geared players motivated? I wanted to write this post and offer a whole bunch of solutions and suggestions.

But I have none.

Do you remove a raid night to try and curb burn out and guild expectations? Or do you come down harsh and really penalise people who don’t turn up?

Do you remove the pressure and call off guild raids? And if you do that are you simply admitting defeat? Because surely those who still want to raid will go looking for other guilds now. Which means you have to start from scratch when the new expansion launches.

I don’t think there is a magic solution to this out there, but if you know it please feel free to share it with the rest of us!