Hitting goals

Lately my characters have been hitting or quickly approaching the numbers goals I've set for them.

Alazais, my fire mage, just reached over 1000 fire damage last night. She's sitting pretty at 1050 +fire self-buffed :) Pretty snazzy! My shadow priest has also just reached over 1000 +shadow unbuffed.

My biggest goal right now is to hit 2000 healing on my resto druid. She's at 1778 at the moment. I need new boots (from SSC or from Doom Lord Kazzak), the badge mace, ZA timed event belt, PvP season 4 neck, badge gloves, and badge pants to hit over 2k I think. My guild isn't in SSC yet, but hopefully soon!

Hitting goals really makes me feel good about the game though :) Otherwise it just feels like an endless grind...

DPS and the old raider

I wish I knew what my DPS was like when I used to raid at level 60. Back when you could still weave Aimed Shot in between attacks. I was normally in the top 5 of our 40-man raids... anywhere from #2 to #6 probably, depending on who was there. The only people who could regularly top my damage were a couple of the rogues, one of the mages, one of the warlocks, one other hunter, and our fury warrior. I still felt damn proud though since through it all I was still the only hunter sporting a piece of Tier 1 still (stupid shoulders) and the only items outside of Tier1/2 content that I got were the polearm from AQ-40 and the AQ-40 rep ring.

I do still get a bit scared that I'll enter a level 60 instance and see some noob in Outland greens out-dps me... quite possible since I took a break from my hunter for about a year. But that hasn't happened yet. Last night I did 44% of the damage in my Ramparts group... T_T #2 was the tank, and no, he wasn't a paladin.

I was also happy to see myself break 400 dps on the first boss fight and 500 dps on the last one (I missed Omor's reading). Of course, that figures in The Beast Within, but still pretty neat considering I'm level 61 and able to put out damage that equals my personal minimum requirements for Karazhan. I'm guessing that will fall a bit as the crit rating on my Dragonstalker yields less and less crit % as I level up, though.

Really looking forward to seeing how Steady Shot changes things though. It's fun being a hunter - taking on 4 mobs my level easily as opposed to my warrior when she was leveling, who would cry if she came across any more than 2 (and sometimes 2 was difficult to deal with).

Paladin tanking: A first look!

I tanked an instance for the first time since switching to Protection spec and it was... incredible! The last time I tanked an instance was Zul'farrak, and back then I was Retribution. Granted, I had some things to help me generate threat that I don't have now (Sanctity Aura and actually Vengeance helped too... haha) but the better Righteous Fury was really helpful.

Paladins are just... wow. I think I had the hunter trap twice, and only in Blood Furnace (we did Ramparts followed by Blood Furnace since Ramparts only lasted about 40 minutes). The only time I did have her trap was on some of those nasty felguard annihilator pulls at the end since I couldn't really tank them.

My pally is still a bit undergeared (a bit? I just replaced Triune Amulet with a BoE green that dropped in the instance last night) so I think I may have given our healer a run for her money sometimes, aoe tanking everything... it was great though. In both instances we only had 1 wipe (accidentally got two groups somehow) and only a couple of deaths. The only frustrating thing is if I went OOM during a pull, it became very difficult to get threat back, and of course Reckoning was no help at all with Seal/Judgment of Wisdom because I wasn't being hit anymore T_T Gotta learn to carry mana potions!

Looking forward to getting more tanking gear so I feel like a bit less of a mana hog on the healer... and definitely looking forward to tanking more instances. Maybe this is one character I can feel comfortable tanking with pugs in the group! I didn't even have to use salvation last night either so that was a huge help. People pulled aggro sometimes but it was usually in a big group where I have having some trouble targetting... I'll get used to it!

Warrior tanking

One of the things I really strive to do in WoW is play multiple classes and play them well. I don't want to be "that guy" who had one of each class but couldn't play their way out of a cardboard box with any of them.

So maybe not surprisingly, I've spent a lot of times on the forums and on elitist jerks learning about various classes. So far my greatest weakness is warrior tanking - I think I do really well in other situations (dps as various specs and classes is very easy for me, and tanking on my paladin is easy - I haven't tried to tank on my druid when it wasn't Black Morass so I can't really speak for my druid tanking skills XD, and healing is also something that comes pretty naturally to me).

I think part of my problem is I tend to group with people nowadays who outgear me. I am wearing mostly greens and blues when it comes to tanking (and the two worst trinkets IN THE WORLD). But I also hate to use that as an excuse, so I'm thinking that my next project will be to respec Shaeldre to protection and give some 5-mans a shot. Just need to pick my group members carefully (or make them be careful >:)) so I don't frustrate myself right back to Fury spec again.

I don't think Protection will ever be Shaeldre's main spec, but I still want to be in a position where I feel confident that I can handle tanking a 5-man instance so I can take pressure off my sister (the guild's main tank) and not feel like 1/3 of a warrior noob ;)

Shiawase, Blood Elf Paladin

Shiawase is my first horde character to reach 40 and my first to hit 60. (Previously I'd also had a tauren druid that I leveled up to 29, but I found myself wanting something different.) That also makes her my 7th character to hit 60 overall (after a hunter, mage, two priests, a warrior, and a druid).

At the time of writing this, Shiawase is currently level 61 and Protection spec. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay Protection at 70 - Paladin tanking is a blast and, to me at least, much less stressful than warrior tanking.

I was Retribution with Shiawase up until level 50 - then Crusader Strike felt more like a mana hog and a Bad Thing rather than something good. I'm sure it's great if you really know how to use it, but I just felt my mana going down the drain and my downtime skyrocketing, and I was having a hard time resisting the temptation to use it - I mean, I spent a damn talent point on it after all. So I went to Protection and since then have been having a lot of fun (except for one of those scarlet camps in the Plaguelands... damn casters and healers).

Looking forward to tanking my first Outland instance soon! I always heard about how boring leveling a paladin was, but I haven't been bored since level 35. The worst part for me was about 30-34, and my gear was horribly outdated back then. I haven't found that is a trend though, because I also leveled another paladin to 35 in the past (Asuka, a holy paladin on Mannoroth). I leveled her as Holy and had fun the whole way, but also have kept fairly updated gear - at least a good weapon.

Ceres, Draenei Priest

My plan at first with Ceres was to level her to 70 and heal in raids on Mannoroth - her name back then was Voice. I leveled her with a friend of mine, Tendertotems (a Draenei shaman) but as I got higher level (between leveling her and Shaeldre on Bronzebeard) I was hearing more and more discontent amongst my guildies at level 70. I slowed down leveling and around when she was level 65 or so, my guild disbanded.

Rather than find a new home on Mannoroth, I decided to go ahead and transfer her to Bronzebeard. I'm not really 100% sure why I decided to go through with this since I already had a priest there, but it has allowed me to have one shadow priest and one holy priest on the same realm, which is kind of fun.

Last night, patch 2.4 came out. I did a run of Magister's Terrace where I got 2 DPS upgrades (sigh :P) but I also went around and bought the 5-pc blue pvp set from the reputation vendors. I'm looking forward to giving PvP a shot with some resilience.

I think I prefer Ceres as a 5-man healer, but my druid as a raid healer. I haven't completely decided yet, though. Ceres has been in Karazhan and various heroic instances and 5-mans at this point - probably more heroics than my druid. I really enjoy the ability to fade to discourage enemies, rather than just.. Barkskin and hope for the best. As far as PvP healing goes though, both characters are a total blast.

I'm really interested in going back to a PvP build (heavy disc) and trying out arena again. Last time I did 3v3 with her, it was with 2 hunters, I wasn't disc, and it was just impossible to stay alive... hoping for better next time, especially now that I have resilience! Sitting at about 171 resilience now.

Alaphrei, Night Elf Druid

Alaphrei was my fifth character to 60 and my second to 70. I have explored pretty much every spec with her - started leveling restoration (back when feral... really sucked - I basically solo'd as restoration but wearing feral gear, in feral forms).

Around 35 or so, the feral tree was reworked so I went to feral. I still ended up healing most instances, but I love healing so I didn't mind it too much. My most challenging instance to heal was Uldaman - I was level 48 but most of the group was 40, and this is back when the last boss was level 46. It was very tough going because our DPS was all missing / glancing blows / etc and frustrating, and after a few 1-2% wipes, our paladin got on his 60 hunter and got him. (Which was funny - it wasn't that much easier because he was forced into melee pretty often... but we got the boss!) I stayed feral until the Scourge Invasion (a server-wide event before Naxx came out) where I went resto to level while healing some AoEing mage friends. I gained a couple of levels like that and then went back to feral to hit 60. I was a mix of feral or restoration at 60, but went with a healing build for MC, ZG, AQ-20 and Onyxia (which I did a few times, but nothing really beyond that - this was mostly just alt/weekend runs).

2.0 came out and introduced a happily not-sucking Balance tree, so I decided to try that out and stayed that way after Burning Crusade came out, up to level 70. Nowadays I carry multiple sets of gear with me (my restoration gear is the best, followed by my balance gear, then bear gear, then cat gear - and of course I have some extra PvP or high stam pieces that I carry with me too) - most of it is in the bank at any given moment, though.

Alaphrei was transferred over to Bronzebeard around level 64 or so, and now at 70 she has become my primary raiding character since my warrior, as a not-tank and as melee dps, isn't really needed that much. Yes, I'm a lifebloom-stacking tree and proud of it ;) Alaphrei is also my only character to really explore arena, but my team was only just beginning to start to learn how to get past 1500 rating when my two team members quit the game. Arena is definitely fun though and I'm looking forward to giving it a try again in the future.